131–140 of 291 posts
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I'd expect EVs to be cheaper if they are actually simpler, last time I looked that wasn't really the case outside of cars produced in China that most western customers wouldn't buy.
You can get a Bolt for around $11k after incentives. OK the incentives part is a wrench in the equation to be sure, so it may be hard to answer my question… Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?
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I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration? It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideratio…
Have you ever driven a plug-in Prius (the Prius Prime here in Québec)? It's got wonderful acceleration when using the all-electric mode.
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There’s an extremely obvious difference in 0-60 times between a Prius and a Model 3, and that matters on an on-ramp. (Replace 0-60 with 5-60 or 25-60 or whatever you measure of acceleration you prefer). Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.
I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration? It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideratio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.
And, not being in the industry, I don’t quite understand why. Look at diesel electric locomotives. They run the diesel only for power and they use the electric motors for drive. Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission like a full EV does? Gas engines have an optimal RPM. Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge? Instead, they are comp…
The problem as I understand it is that California's regulations require that the range extender doesn't provide more range than the car's internal battery. How this ended up the case I have no idea.
Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here's a reason article about several attempts: https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus... Kind of frustrating the OP's article doesn't actually do any research on why it's hard to actually do this "clever" idea. There is an actual power structure that is opposed to these sorts of actions! In general in the US it's very difficult to do this on…
If you read the article carefully,
-- This is about leases. Leases come with conditions. You're not buying the land.
-- The first example is about someone who lied and made a bid that he had no intention or ability to pay. Turns out that's actually a crime. That's not "power structure opposed to these sort of actions" in a nontrivial sense.
-- There's a very good reason for much of this: Grazing, hunting, and even logging are part of maintaining the land. The owner of the land (the government) doesn't want you to stop maintaining the land and so makes sure the lease requires that you maintain it. And resource extraction comes with paying royalties to the owner, who doesn't want you cheaping out by not extracting any resources and not paying anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.
And, not being in the industry, I don’t quite understand why. Look at diesel electric locomotives. They run the diesel only for power and they use the electric motors for drive. Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission like a full EV does? Gas engines have an optimal RPM. Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge? Instead, they are comp…
To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…
Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.
On power-split device hybrids, the hybrid system outright replaces the automatic transmission which is the true "insanely complex" component.
To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…
Adding social punishments here would hurt momentum. It is far better to reward imperfect progress than to create a social environment where people feel like they'll never be good enough.
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PHEVs are more complex, but arguably not more complex than having both a BEV and an ICE vehicle. If a BEV covers 95% of my driving needs, that sounds great, but it still means I need two cars if one is a BEV.
5% of your drives sounds like a problem solved by a car rental, not by owning two vehicles.
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And having been "grad school broke" during that era, it absolutely destroyed a decade's worth of cheap "runs and drives" grade cars that I drove and most of my friends drove. $100 cars were suddenly $1000 cars in a few months, which was fine if you owned one, bad if you were looking for another backyard project you could limp home and work on for a while. "Destroying the long tail of cheap resources for political poi…
Eggs, comrade, eggs. Specifically your eggs. No, there won't be omelets. What are you, some sort of kulak?