The electric car as a talisman of false hope • Hacker News Board

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#311

Post by WorldMaker » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

godshatter wrote: post #303

WorldMaker wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 300 mile range you start to get near the point where the average (mean and median, maybe not mode) commuter can charge once a week on an average work week at a fast charger at the local grocery store for merely an hour or two and still not worry about range. Work charging and home charging are nice to have slow and steady options that make EVs easier than gas, but it's about to the point where if you treat it…

How long does an electric car take to charge, though? That's the convenience factor of ICE vehicles that will be hard to beat, probably. I can fill up my ICE vehicle in a minute or two.

I included that information. A top level CCS or SuperCharger can often fill an electric car to 80% battery in about 30 minutes and to 100% generally somewhere between an hour and two (models will vary, as do the variety of chargers). People easily spend that much time on a grocery trip or a snack/meal (at least) once a week per my hypothetical scenario above. It's "good enough" already for a lot of people today, and again I was primarily arguing today's median/mean case.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#312

Post by cr0sh » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #175

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…

> 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, That (almost-certainly-incorrectly) assumes that conventional engines will continue to grow in use forever despite electric vehicles continuing to decrease in price and increase in performance/versatility/diversity. At some point we'll see an inflection point,…

I can't imagine the ICE ever going completely away, simply because there are certain uses of it, especially in 1st world developed countries, where electric probably won't ever be able to substitute for it.

It basically comes down to energy density. Right now, fossil fuels are the most energy dense for their weight. They are portable enough, along with the engine, to make for machines which are very powerful, yet still small enough for practical purposes.

For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system. The problem isn't the motors - it's the battery; you can't make one small enough with the same energy density as the diesel or gasoline those machines currently use.

That's merely one example, I can think of more, but I won't. The only way around any of this would be to change (fairly radically) how certain tasks are accomplished; For instance, if instead of such a machine with a single operator, you instead had a ton of smaller robotic machines digging or whatnot, all in some kind of conga line or bucket-brigade type system - and let it work overnight or be slower in some other manner - the same amount of work could potentially be done and stay all-electric. But - somebody will be losing a job in such a scenario...

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#313

Post by magduf » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

yyyk wrote: post #214

magduf wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You're cherry-picking counter-examples. No developed country, overall, has the infrastructural problems that America has. America just canceled its high-speed rail in California, yet Japan is already working on a maglev train scheduled for completion in 2027, and China already has one between Beijing and Shanghai. Japan's Shinkansen has been operating since the 1960s, has had zero accidents in all that time, and has an average delay of less than a minute. Germany and France also have very impressive high-speed train systems. Meanwhile, all the US has is the Acela, which is a joke.

You only mentioned airports in your examples. America can't even build rail lines that go to airports!

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#314

Post by WorldMaker » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

bdamm wrote: post #310

WorldMaker wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Smart Grid" utilities can even "borrow" electricity from a sitting car's battery when demand/price is high and "repay it with interest" when demand/price is low. Some CCS chargers and car models already support this idea, but it may be a while to see it in practice. You generally don't need a full charged car at all times of the day: if you and your car both know you'll be at work for the next 8 hours and most likel…

Utilities will need to formulate financial incentives to get this done. It should make sense, yet few utilities actually are doing it.

Correct. The capabilities have been added to the CCS car charging standard and some vehicle models support it, but so far as I'm aware no utility has actually yet figured out a plan to use it (much less how much it might potentially rebate/subsidize charging in cases where it would be used).

It's the usual sort of bootstrapping hurdle that a lot of the "user interface" of it probably can't be well developed until there's a general demand for it, and there won't be a general demand for it from the Utility side until there's maybe a larger installed base of vehicles with the capability.

But, the interesting part is still pointing out that plenty of people are already thinking about it, and it is a somewhat exciting part of the equation of how more electric vehicles potentially better balance the electric grid more so than "destabilize" it or hugely increase peak demand. (Because not only are they capable of smartly arranging their charge times to off-peak demand times, but also are giant roving batteries that can themselves act as temporary storage buffers for the grid.)

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#315

Post by Gibbon1 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #293

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really irritating thing about the 'solve it all at once' argument is that electric cars, in a very real way, are the keystone that lets the entire arch support itself. Renewable energy sources are already the cheapest ways of generating electricity at certain times , the trouble is that those aren't always when the electricity is needed. Energy storage makes investment in renewables much more profitable. The prob…

I think you and other commenters are responding to the "solve it all at once argument" without it being put forward by the article. The article does not claim that electric cards do not reduce emissions sufficiently to solve the problem of climate change all at once. It claims that electric cars increase emissions and that increasing emissions exacerbates the problem of climate change. It's not saying that electric c…

I read the article and felt it was kinda thin and conclusory.

I take a bit of issue at his swipe 'if you can afford them'. Since the price is falling fast enough that electric cars should be actually cheaper than gasoline ones within a few years. Which means we might end up with more electric cars than we would gasoline ones. So yeah some of the negative externalies are fixed, CO2 emissions and air pollution. But others are not, traffic fatalities and injuries, traffic congestion, industrial pollution, resource depletion. And low prices may mean more of the latter not less.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#316

Post by lucas_membrane » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

More inconvenient truth in TFA. Note that the market price of electricity hit $9.00/kwh in Texas last week. IICC, that would be maybe a couple of Benjamins to charge an electric car, suggesting that there will have to be bigger changes than electric cars if we really want to keep things the way they are.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#317

Post by yyyk » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #313

yyyk wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're cherry-picking counter-examples. No developed country, overall, has the infrastructural problems that America has. America just canceled its high-speed rail in California, yet Japan is already working on a maglev train scheduled for completion in 2027, and China already has one between Beijing and Shanghai. Japan's Shinkansen has been operating since the 1960s, has had zero accidents in all that time, and has…

I did mention UK's HS2, so not all airports.

Speaking of cherry picking, I think that referring to high-speed passenger train alone is an example thereof, especially as it ignores the large and successful American fright train infrastructure. California made the mistake of being too ambitious, a more modest plan from the start would have worked.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#318

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #245

yellowapple wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem, as the author tangentially points out, is our over-reliance on cars to move us around. And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem. Suburban areas have a disproportionate carbon footprint specifically because of ICE-powered cars being required to go anywhere; if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nucl…

> And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem ... if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nuclear/hydro/geothermal/etc., then... where, exactly, is the carbon footprint? The author very specifically points that out: > ...our cars primarily exist to connect things, things that require immense extraction and fossil fuel ener…

Okay, and those things don't go away - nor do we stop building them - if we use buses or trains or planes or boats or teleportation pads instead. What about cars, specifically, contributes to this where other modes of transportation do not?

I can almost understand this for roads (but buses still need those, too!). Literally everything else is entirely orthogonal to cars or the lack thereof; abolishing cars entirely v. switching to electric-only would have zero impact there.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#319

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #239

theworld572 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what?

Same thing yellowapple based their baseless assumption on.

Which was exactly my point. Neither of us have any way to know beyond anecdotal evidence. Your claim is exactly as baseless as mine.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#320

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #312

yellowapple wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, That (almost-certainly-incorrectly) assumes that conventional engines will continue to grow in use forever despite electric vehicles continuing to decrease in price and increase in performance/versatility/diversity. At some point we'll see an inflection point,…

I can't imagine the ICE ever going completely away, simply because there are certain uses of it, especially in 1st world developed countries, where electric probably won't ever be able to substitute for it. It basically comes down to energy density. Right now, fossil fuels are the most energy dense for their weight. They are portable enough, along with the engine, to make for machines which are very powerful, yet sti…

> For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system.

These do exist, though, albeit in smaller form factors: http://www.sherpaminiloaders.com/eng/models/sherpa-100-eco/

Industrial applications like this tend to be more amenable to electric-only vehicles (even if those vehicles ultimately get their power from ICE generators on the job site) thanks to there being far less of a need to drive long distances on a single charge (and thus never having to be very far from a charger). Electric forklifts are pretty common, on that note.

----

But yes, I fully expect ICE vehicles will continue to exist for various specialized applications (and also because there are a lot of them driving around right now). They just don't need to be anywhere near the majority of vehicles in operation.