481–490 of 557 posts
california: please stop using power or we have to rotate blackouts! also california: YOU MUST ALL BUY ELECTRIC VEHICLES!
I love EVs. That being said I wish someone would make an enclosed bicycle/motorcycle that costs less than $2000. Something like that which can go 30mph and had space for 2 days of groceries would be enough for me to eliminate my car all together. I'm cobbling something similar now with a Class 3 cargo ebike, but rain sucks =/ The idealist in me says that electric ebikes could eliminate most of Americas problems in on…
Cities like Columbus Ohio are just terrible places to live unless you live car culture.
I feel like predictions on EV adoption generally focus too much on practical benefits and cost improvements over time, but discount - or at least fail to mention - the potential impact of ICE products becoming very uncool, very quickly - at least in Western countries. Overnight, even. It’s not a big stretch to imagine that generations of younger people concerned about the climate might make product consumption choice…
So why didn't this happen with the prius?
I love EVs. That being said I wish someone would make an enclosed bicycle/motorcycle that costs less than $2000. Something like that which can go 30mph and had space for 2 days of groceries would be enough for me to eliminate my car all together. I'm cobbling something similar now with a Class 3 cargo ebike, but rain sucks =/ The idealist in me says that electric ebikes could eliminate most of Americas problems in on…
Outside if big cities this is not even a remote possibility, most people there travel big distances in various weather conditions on a daily basis.
Even in big cities this seems unrealistic. Thinking for example of NYC, many folks travel fir work from the outer boroughs to Manhattan, from areas where public transit isn't readily available, and just taking the bike is not even realistic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Toronto climate, average low, January: −6.7 °C (19.9 °F) Temperature change needed for complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: between 1 and 4 °C. (That's a change by , not a change to ). Effect of complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: 7.2 meter sea level rise.
Torono isnt really typical. It is southern canada, and a bit of a heat island. Fort Mcmurray (that had to evac a few years ago) average january low: -22.5c. Places like that have almost 90c temperature swings from low to high in a given year (-50 to +35).
Your attempt at nit picking, if it were valid, would actually makes it much worse: a temperature increase sufficient to turn "-22c" into "we don't need to worry about cold batteries" requires close to double the difference between today and the highest estimated average global temperature ever in the biological history of the planet, and that temperature happened before trees had evolved.
For example, naïvely adding 22 C (22.5 says Wiki) to the average so that the coldest was no longer below freezing, your Fort McMurray would have a new July average high of 46.2 C, which is above the current average of Death Valley 10 months of the year and pretty close the other two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An EV makes a great second car in Canada but the long distances and cold weather are problematic for current EV technology. Hopefully that improves relatively soon.
I think the solution for batteries in cold weather is to insulate the pack and heat the battery "coolant". Almost all modern EVs use liquid cooling of some kind. (Nissan Leaves are the exception; I don't know if they've added that in newer versions, but it's why Leaf battery packs were notorious for wearing out quickly.) I don't know if battery heaters are a common feature on current EVs. I'd think it would be partic…
I love the idea of an EV, but I hate how unfriendly they are towards self-repair and I don't want my car connected to the internet. Also an EV has more battery capacity than my house so it'd be pretty hard to charge a car in the winter when I can barely keep my house batteries running my house.
I just completed a ~1600km drive back from visiting family. Half way through the outbound trip, in the middle of the mountains, I had to make a 300km detour due to a massive accident (two semi trucks head-on closed a mountain highway for more than a day). The detour was through a valley with no cellphone coverage for 150+km. At a rest stop I met a tesla driver in a panic. Without internet he was unable to figure out…
I think that this is an interesting corner case, but I don’t think the solution decision tree is that complicated:
1. Every Tesla has comes with an adapter that plugs into a regular outlet. It’s very slow (maybe 3-5 miles an hour charge), but it’s enough to recharge anywhere that has electricity in an emergency. This is slow and may require an extended stay at a hotel (or sleeping in your car), but we are talking about a super rare emergency situation.
2. I would default to not taking a long detour in general in an ev unless I knew where I was going to charge. That would be like taking a detour on a back road in an isolated area on a fraction of a tank of gas without knowing how far the next gas station is or whether it would be open — just not wise.
3. If he was near a charging station in the direction he was going on the main road, I would lean towards just waiting it out. Tesla’s use very little charge when not moving. 12-24 hours would be fine (if boring).
4. If he was not near a charging station in the direction he was going, then I would recommend turning around and finding the nearest charger or find a place you can charge on a regular outlet — drastic situations call for drastic solutions.
I guess I can say that I feel sorry for EV owners who lack the ability to think logically and/or analytically, but these problems, while different than ICE problems, are not terribly difficult to figure out.
I think that I have heard of one challenging charging scenario in the US that is specific to EVs…
There is a wind corridor on some highway that spans from Texas to Colorado. Cars of any kind get reduced mileage by a lot if they are driving into heavy winds that are common on this road. Not a problem with ubiquitous gas stations, but I don’t think the charger network accommodated this wind factor as of last year, so people had to drive at unusually slow speeds in order to extend their range.
That said, I heard that Tesla was building an extra charging station or two on this route to address this issue, and it wouldn’t surprise me if other charging station operators did so as well. It’s just a super weird and rare driving and charging situation that is/was easily solved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are very very very few places without electricity in the world. In the first world. Billions live in places with no or unreliable electricity.
And that will change as renewable energy and cheap storage make micro grids economically feasible, where transmission with centralized power generation is too expensive. In these places, EVs will be far superior to gas vehicles because they will require less infrastructure and the EVs supplement the micro grid are an asset for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you understand what I was saying "fine" too. But people need to pay for the damage they inflict on the world. Nobody is so "special" or snowflake that they get exempted. Farmers are adults, they can be treated like any other adult in our society.
The point is that the farmer and miner become the saints doing penance on our behalf - we all benefit from the work they do, then insist that they handle all the costs of the negative externalities their work produces. Sure, I suppose that could be priced into what they charge for their products. That may be a nontrivial challenge to work out, though, and it's possible they'll no longer be able to make a sustainable…
Seems more like this kind of take is an attempt to canonize them.
They're economic actors. Their work is very important, but that's why they, you know, take money in exchange for their output.
Excusing externalities is how we get corporate structures where officers and shareholders are richly rewarded and tax payers get to pay for (and often live in) the SuperFund site after the company leaves.
I love EVs. That being said I wish someone would make an enclosed bicycle/motorcycle that costs less than $2000. Something like that which can go 30mph and had space for 2 days of groceries would be enough for me to eliminate my car all together. I'm cobbling something similar now with a Class 3 cargo ebike, but rain sucks =/ The idealist in me says that electric ebikes could eliminate most of Americas problems in on…
The Organic Transit ELF and the BetterBike PEBL are enclosed electric trikes (two wheels in front, one in back) but are more expensive than your wish. Both are currently out of production for engineering improvements with plans for assembly lines to reduce the cost and prices. Organic Transit channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/OTvehicles BetterBike channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC59bSWio0f0eSPd5MPpEPAg