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The electric car as a talisman of false hope

jussipasanen.com

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Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#211

Post by srfilipek »

JeffL wrote: post #162
agumonkey wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, but I'd bet a 100$ that people accelerating too fast do speed too long and brake too much..

I gun the shit out of my Tesla at a green light, but look far ahead and slowly ease to a stop using regen braking only. Regen braking and one pedal driving is a nice incentive to not waste energy with brakes, and as EV's become more popular, I bet driving habits will become more efficient generally across the board.

Just curious, do you have stats on your watts per mile efficiency you can share? How it compares to the EPA estimates?

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#212

Post by jhoechtl »

theworld572 wrote: post #124
Barrin92 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't make a real difference, and the author is correct about it. If you drive towards a wall and you're accelerating and all you're doing is slowing the rate of acceleration you're still going to run into the wall at terminal velocity. The author correctly points out that the total increase in car usage, mostly conventional engines is going to offset the small dent that electric cars make, and that cars themsel…

So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all? If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to tell them they're offering you a "false hope because you'd still have $95k left to pay"? EDIT: This is also known as the "nirvana fallacy": because the solution is not perfect - that means it is worthless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

> So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all?

Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days.

This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#213

Post by sokoloff »

siffland wrote: post #188
sokoloff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid net $22K for a new 2015 Nissan LEAF (after $10K in combined government incentives). You could have gotten the base model (with resistance heat only) for under $20K, but that’s a fairly poor choice for New England year ‘round usage.

Even at 22k, that is a lot for most people. Online it says the LEAF can go 150 miles for around $4.80. Your payment would be around $375ish a month with at least $100 for insurance (probably more). Why would most people do that when they can get a used car cheaper or keep driving what they have. It is just expensive (i am not saying i would not like a Nissian LEAF, that would be sweet). I guess i see people buying EV…

Totally agree. All our other cars have been bought used. My wife’s CR-V has been excellent and was $7500 (or maybe it was $8500) when 5-ish years old. We don’t carry collision insurance on it at this point.

I wouldn’t have bought the LEAF new either if it weren’t for the $10K in government cheese that came with it. (I can buy a $32K car; I just choose not to as it seems a waste.)

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#214

Post by yyyk »

magduf wrote: post #170
karthikb wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.…

>Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work. That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.

That's not a 'uniquely American problem' at all. e.g. Berlin's Brandenburg airport, UK's HS2, third Heathrow runway, etc. Infrasturcture projects lag in almost all developed countries for various political reasons.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#215

Post by buboard »

whenanother wrote: post #134
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #79

Seems to me a lot of people are so attached to carculture that they can't even read the article properly. The author sees all sorts of good things about electric cars. I drive them myself. I love cars. But... The points the article makes about cars being part of a larger flawed system of urban and rural development are spot on. 'Self-driving' cars will only make this worse. Even just the excessive prevalence of hard-…

urban mass transit is never used by the wealthy. the last thing people with ill gotten gains want to do is to be around others who can identify them and see with their own eyes how much they’ve stolen. and they don’t want to be around their own kind as there’s no honor amongst thieves.

They use it when it's faster

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#216

Post by buboard »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
charlesism wrote: post #10

Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children wh…

The worst part about it IMO is traffic light and stops. In a city, if you can drive around 20mph (25 maybe) uninterrupted, you get in most places very fast, very pleasantly and with fuel savings since you never slow down. Instead of a smooth flow, you get drivers that do: - high accelerations - nervous braking - idle engine running between 30 - 60 seconds (120 max?) Pure waste. Maybe I'm asking for a problem too comp…

Try roundabouts. In certain cities, they work really great.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#217

Post by beat »

magduf wrote: post #169
irq11 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that. It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws. The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consump…

>Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. But nobody wants to do that. What the heck are you talking about? Every industrialized nation now has negative population growth if you ignore immigration. People are having fewer children, and frequently, none.

It's not just the industrialized nations. It takes about two generations for a country to drop from a high birth rate to a birth rate of less than two (replacement, more or less). All but a handful of impoverished, war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East are deep into this cycle or through it already.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#218

Post by beat »

irq11 wrote: post #152
theworld572 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions. > spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have. Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total a…

Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that. It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws. The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consump…

Wrong.

The primary cause of population growth now isn't the birth rate, but rather life expectancy. People are living 20+ years longer than before.

If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, the #1 most significant thing you can do to reduce climate change is suicide. And the most significant thing a nation can do is genocide.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#219

Post by rhinoceraptor »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #186
magduf wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there is: if you get in a collision with a large vehicle in a really tiny one, you're going to die. So you need a larger vehicle that can make a crash survivable. Basically, it's an arms race.

Clearly fewer folks are buying into that. The day of the 1970's 25-foot land cruiser are waning. The Ford Focus is now king.

Ford isn't making the Focus, Fiesta or the Taurus for North America anymore. The only passenger vehicles people are buying are pickups, SUVs and crossovers.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#220

Post by beat »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #157
travisporter wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, A lot of people buy Teslas because of looks and performance, or a linen bag because of ocean pollution. It may not reflect a desire to address climate change. Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?

Because, as indicated, it 'buys absolution' for the individual. That means they don't have to do anything else to feel they are contributing. Which shoots the moonshot in the foot.

That's a lazy, cynical argument. The core of conservatism is "People are awful". What if people aren't awful?
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