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Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

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Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#551

Post by manmal »

mtoner23 wrote: post #277
littlecranky67 wrote: post #258

I love EVs, ever since I test drove an BMW i3 in 2012. Quiet with high drag - of course this is the future. BUT I don't think switching to EVs will help reduce CO2 in any way - not even if all the EVs are charged using 100% solar/wind. The narrative usually is "I get an EV instead of an ICE, charge it with regenerative energy and have 0 emissions, thus not burning oil and saving on CO2". But that is not how a globali…

Reduced demand for oil reduces the quantity of oil extracted and purduced. The price drops and hardwr to extract oil stops being produced

Come on, our world is running on plastics and oil as fuel for ships and aviation. EV savings will be eaten up within years by those.

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#552

Post by Loudergood »

spooky_action wrote: post #494
princevegeta89 wrote: post #3

No surprises. No matter how we look at it, EVs are much friendlier and safer to the environment. Some people argue the source of electricty can be contested against because that involves fossil fuel burning again, but in today's world we are rapidly moving away from it and towards nuclear/hydel/wind methods for generating power. I hope ICE cars completely become a thing of the past in the next couple of decades to co…

Aren't fossil fuel plants much more efficient than ICEs for emissions per unit energy extracted?

Yes, a coal powered EV will be cleaner than the same vehicle burning gasoline under the hood.

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#553

Post by BeetleB »

hvb2 wrote: post #547
BeetleB wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with young kids is they tend not to be good at timing restroom breaks with the availability of charging. By the time they tell you, you need to stop at the nearest gas station - they can't wait for you to drive 20 miles to the next charging station. > No maintenance on, spark plugs, timing belts, gearbox. No oil changes. A quieter ride, especially nice on a road trip. I'm thinking of getting an EV, so I'll…

The insurance part will settle out over time as they get more data I would imagine. 500$ a year is very little for any car, but I opened a Nissan leaf for 8 years and spent less that 2K, of which 1K was for the AC

> The insurance part will settle out over time as they get more data I would imagine.

I'm not so sure. The issue is two-fold: First, If you get into an accident and you're at fault, the average damage is a lot more than with an ICE, due to the much heavier weight. Second, compared to an ICE, just about any repair is a lot more expensive. If some of the battery gets damaged, that's crazy expensive. There's also not a good ecosystem for parts - they are more expensive and less modular than with an ICE (or so I'm told).

It apparently is a lot more common for EVs to be declared a total loss compared to an ICE just because of the expense to repair.

> 500$ a year is very little for any car

This is over 3 different cars. And all of them very old (I bought two of them when they were 8 years old, and another when it was 15 years old - still driving that last one).

About $80/year for oil changes. That's it. Then every once in a while there is an expensive repair (brakes, tires, some engine problem, etc). Doesn't happen every year - so the average comes out to $500.

I also don't go to the official dealers. Everything is more expensive with them.

And yeah, the cars are old, so few electronic parts to repair. I imagine if I get another 8 year old ICE, the annual cost to repair will be more just due to the extra safety systems that can go wrong.

> but I opened a Nissan leaf for 8 years and spent less that 2K, of which 1K was for the AC

Leafs are the best case scenario. They're small, not heavy, and thus don't have much tire wear.

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#554

Post by unglaublich »

kakacik wrote: post #541
unglaublich wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the electricity source would burn similar fuel, just the fact that you don't pullote right in the middle of population centers makes a huge difference. In reality, it's not only that, but _also_ that they use cleaner methods of energy production.

This is only the issue if you are a city dweller and want to spend your whole life there. For rural folks this is actually best possible situation. The pollution always goes somewhere, and its not like we have large swaths of useless places that we can pollute without consequences.

Huh, no. Pollution close to humans is bad for both city and rural people.

> The pollution always goes somewhere,

"The solution to pollution is dilution". We want the concentration of pollution low, so the health effects are low too, and we can give natural processes the time to decay/oxidize/etc the pollutants.

> not like we have large swaths of useless places

We do... we mostly care about the lower ~100 meters of atmosphere because that's where people live. That's less than 1% of the total atmosphere. This means we can distribute pollution over a volume a 100x larger than that that is important for us. And then I'm not even counting the vast amount of the planet that's uninhabited / non-land.

Also, smokestacks are designed to not directly pollute the air close to people, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnYdt4T76mk

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#555

Post by groundzeros2015 »

dymk wrote: post #142
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No surprises. What about all the resources and people used to develop the cars?

Six months break even and then it’s more carbon friendly than an ICE for the rest of its working lifetime

Tesla has used more than 40 billion of capital

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#556

Post by Loudergood »

magicalhippo wrote: post #220
MBCook wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they? I was under the impression most EVs cut off the connection to the high voltage battery almost all the time they’re not in use. They rely on a 12 V battery or a 48 V battery like a normal car. The only thing I’m aware of that special is that if that low voltage battery gets low enough the car will detect it and recharge it from the high voltage battery, temporarily connecting it for that purpose.

> They rely on a 12 V battery or a 48 V battery like a normal car. Which leads to "fun" situations when that battery runs out, like not being able to get into your car or start it. However not much power is needed, so a tiny portable jump pack is enough to get things going. Both me and my sister has experienced this, me a Nissan Leaf and her a VW ID.4, good times.

Both my old Bolt and Ioniq 5 had alternate key entry systems in the door handles.

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#557

Post by tpm »

spwa4 wrote: post #401
tpm wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> obvious solution Shouldn't the obvious solution be based on observable reality? Which is that there is no technology in sight that will make EVs cheaper to build than ICEs. Otherwise you are praying for a miracle, and that's not a sound policy.

Technological advance can be modeled like anything else. Everything about plug-in EVs is cheaper than ICE cars, except the battery. So you can model exactly what you need to get the same as you're currently seeing with solar panels. You can calculate at exactly what point they'll take over aviation and so on. I mean, this isn't even a very hard thing to model.

> I mean, this isn't even a very hard thing to model.

Could you please explain in more detail what exactly do you want to model here? Above, you mentioned "advancing electric car technology so they're cheaper than ICE cars". Now as we both know the issue is with the battery, do you just want cars with battery so small that the car is cheaper than an ICE but nobody wants it? Because there is no need to model that, it has been tried and failed.

If you mean modeling battery technology that's not yet available in EVs, good luck with that. There are better batteries available than in mass-market vehicles, but they are not cheaper; cheaper technologies are not as good. Sure, in 10 years the batteries will be much better overall, but we don't really have the luxury of waiting until the technology gets perfect and then scaling that, do we.

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#558

Post by dangus »

singingbard wrote: post #222
dangus wrote: post #145

Something that needs to be pointed out, especially for those who want to push back against findings like this and essentially defend ICE vehicles: Really step back and imagine a world where the modern EV [1] was first to market and a gasoline combustion engine was second . Who would actually decide to switch from a modern EV to gasoline on purpose of their own choice? The downsides of gasoline cars are actually prett…

I think the problem with this hypothetical is that technology was the main constraint back in 1900, not marketing. Battery technology was significantly much worse. Lithium batteries were only discovered in the ‘70s. Gas engines were far more polluting but way less complex in 1910.

Well, gas engines were never less complex. They were just more practical and convenient because they could go faster/further and be refueled easier.

Recall that my hypothetical is “modern EVs” not pre-lithium EVs.

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#559

Post by krferriter »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #228
MBCook wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of ICE cars I get stuck behind from time to time that just REEK is amazing. I’m in a decently well off area too. Some putting off soot clouds, white smoke, nothing visible but clearly not doing complete combustion. Sometimes I wonder if half the cylinders are even working. I’ve heard one car like that is the equivalent of a surprisingly large number of modern ICE cars is in good shape. I love EVs. I’ve had…

> get stuck behind from time to time that just REEK is amazing It’s crazy. How do we even allow selling cars without HEPA filters.

I feel like ICE cars put out such a quantity of exhaust that any HEPA filter you put on it would reach its end of life within a few hours of driving.

Re: Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

#560

Post by dyauspitr »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #248
dyauspitr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my firsthand experience, cold weather (big one) or hauling/towing significantly reduces that 400 mile range (sometimes by 50%+). Yes to comfortably get 400-500 miles per charge in the worst case scenario it needs to be atleast 2x.

No need to double twice. 250 miles (~4 hours of driving) is about what you want. Pretty much everybody needs to bathroom at least that often. And nowhere on a road in the continental US is more than 150 miles from a charger. So yes, you want 400-500 miles of range, but that's because you've doubled the 250 for weather, safety margin, etc.

I believe we need 700-800 miles of stated range which will result in 400-500 miles of actual range in the worst possible conditions. That’s about what you get from a tank of gas and what it would take to reduce range anxiety. Stopping every 2 hours for 40 minutes doesn’t make sense, stopping every 4 hours for 40 minutes is much, much better.
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