81–90 of 367 posts
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So if you built your fortune on IT running in datacenters which consume magnitutes more energy to feed your customers; or else - if your business is about delivering stuff with 1000s of vehicles regularly being wasted... Tell me, at what point you start giving a damn about environment, and what pollution are we talking about at all? Sorry, but HN is full of people who made fortunes not giving major fucks about lots o…
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> Why waste R&D on a dead end? "There were an estimated 20 million horses in March 1915 in the United States" [1]. In 2023? Almost 7 million. Internal combustion engines will be around for a long time, in part because they're beautiful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States#St... [2] https://www.ppfas.com/pdf-docs/b-finance/cigar-butt.pdf
Something that surprised me: the German army in WW2 was mainly horse drawn. According to the below link, 80% of its transport was via horse. https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-wwii-german-army-was-80-ho...
From 1940 to 1943, one can readily explain Axis strategy as an insatiable quest for more oil: no barrels, no Blitz.
EDIT: Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Medicine_Crow#World_War_II
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Presumably as Porsche is not about efficient transportation; it is about emotion, driving as an experience, making a statement, etc. Chances are there will be - or, at least, Porsche appears to bet there will be - a sufficient number of well-heeled enthusiasts who prefer the sound, smell and vibration of an ICE to the quiet performance of an electric motor. I am really curious to see how this pans out in a generation…
> performance cars should have ICEs After driving a fast Tesla, stepping into an ICE performance car feels like going back to a steam engine. A very slow, unresponsive steam engine. When avid petrolheads try a fast EV and feel the instant torque it will be an epiphany for them. Only the most stubborn will stick with fossil cars.
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Electric cars still consume fossil fuels. It’s just earlier in the pipeline. People love to talk about combustion engines being pollutants but few people talk about just how damaging it is mining for rare metals to make those batteries. Nor how harmful for the environment it is disposing of old batters (we haven’t yet solved the problem of recycling them either). And that’s before you even touch on problems at the po…
Many of the myths you are posting are busted here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-21-misleading-myths-ab... The national grid in the UK was so fed up with people making claims about the grid capacity it also busted some too: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele... > The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has f…
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They’re already heavily taxed. But why vilified?
Some people think the ICE car tax(es) already in place are not sufficient compared to the damage they cause. To reduce usage, both tax and public opinion (shaming, vilifying) works great.
It’s regrettable the efforts only focus on a car motors, the most dangerous property of a car is it’s weight (and emissions depends on that weight).
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In the meantime the human population quadrupled, so the actual demand for horses is not half, but closer to 1/8 of what it was. They'll go the way of horses in the sense that you'll be hardly seeing any in cities.
You seem to be using “actual” in a way that suggests proportion to population is a key part of the definition. But although a company that served a market for 20 million might well have failed as the market shrank, it also had the opportunity to survive and continue serving an actual market with an actual demand for 7 million actual horses.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs-IKeRyRAg
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Presumably as Porsche is not about efficient transportation; it is about emotion, driving as an experience, making a statement, etc. Chances are there will be - or, at least, Porsche appears to bet there will be - a sufficient number of well-heeled enthusiasts who prefer the sound, smell and vibration of an ICE to the quiet performance of an electric motor. I am really curious to see how this pans out in a generation…
> performance cars should have ICEs After driving a fast Tesla, stepping into an ICE performance car feels like going back to a steam engine. A very slow, unresponsive steam engine. When avid petrolheads try a fast EV and feel the instant torque it will be an epiphany for them. Only the most stubborn will stick with fossil cars.
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Why is it a dead end? I agree that it should be , but it seems the entire world is walking back the commitment to a full transition to EVs.
https://www.edie.net/one-in-seven-new-cars-worldwide-is-now-... > One in seven new car sales worldwide is now electric > Year-to-date figures show that nearly 10.6 million EVs have been sold globally as of July 2024, marking a 16.3% increase compared to the same period last year. What constitutes “walking back”?
Legally+Economically. After seeing how badly their cars were doing against Chinese EVs, it seems the EV-only mandates in the EU and US are on shaky ground; only heavy tariffs on imported cars seem to be giving local producers a chance. I do not think they will figure it out by the 2030-ish targets, and bet that European and American companies will be allowed to sell combustion engine cars after that.
> marking a 16.3% increase compared to the same period last year
This is buoyed a lot by growth in China (which is not nothing, I guess), but growth in Europe and the Americas is slowing.