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SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

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Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#61

Post by adrianN »

Seanambers wrote: post #41
rexpress wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than that, poor people's bus or bike journeys end up being impeded by road hogging SUV's and other single occupancy vehicles.

Isn't it a illusion that poor people bike so much? I mean one of the most efficient indicators of real estate price is travel time to and from a city center.

In Berlin at least there is a strong correlation between income and access to a car. Poor people take public transit and bike much more. They also tend to live close to major roads and suffer from noise and air pollution much more.

75% of the people with an income below 1500€/month don't have a car in Berlin. Only once you reach 3000€/month income (that's roughly the median income) the majority has access to a car.

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#62

Post by ygra »

tdrdt wrote: post #11

Meanwhile the German city Tübingen is raising the parking fee for SUVs by 6 times and other cities are thinking about this as well. They are too big for those cities. https://www.rtl.de/cms/tuebingen-parkgebuehren-fuer-suv-fahr...

Tübingen is also, due to its topography, not really suited for too many cars in the city. Little space, river, hills, old and narrow streets. There's a lot of work being done to make it more friendly to cyclists and expanding public transport. Alas, the proposed tram was something too few people wanted.

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#63

Post by adrianN »

trhway wrote: post #43
WA wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort. It is 100 % waste and you don't "save" the planet. Saving the planet = no car. Yeah, an EV is less wasteful than an ICE. Just don't think you save the planet .

that is a fallacy. Passenger vehicles are responsible for 10% of global emissions - so whether to drop it 4x (100mpg instead of 25mpg) to 2.5% or drop it to 0% wouldn't matter much. And using renewables for electricity we basically drop emissions to the rounding error around 0.

Using global emissions is a neat trick here, because globally almost everyone can't afford a car.

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#64

Post by tashbarg »

londons_explore wrote: post #32
californical wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed this recently in my driving. As an experiment, I lowered my highway speed from 75mph to 65mph for a couple weeks, and my gas mileage went from about 26mpg to 34mpg. Car is epa rated for 33. An enormous improvement in efficiency - that experiment has totally changed my driving habits. Knowing that, I can’t believe that I’m basically the slowest car on the road now (going 65, which is the speed limit!). Cr…

You can get similar fuel savings by following a big vehicle like a truck. Even at a safe following distance, the already moving air behind a truck lowers your effective speed by 20mph or so, saving 25-50% of the fuel bill. Trucks that have very little ground clearance (eg a big mudguard across the back) work best. In the extreme case, in an EV, you can end a journey with more battery than you started with if you foll…

I seriously doubt those numbers (-50% fuel, energy harvesting by driving behind a truck) AND you are giving incentive to try dangerous driving.

Please either back those numbers up with evidence or remove them for the sake of road safety.

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#65

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

WA wrote: post #12
trhway wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>New ways of wasting energy in maximum comfort, all around. "Over the course of 267 miles (430 km) and 8 hours, the car used 2.6 miles/kWh (23.7 kWh/100 km), bearing in mind that those miles were all driven in Germany and include running at the car's top speed of 140 mph (225 km) on derestricted autobahns." ie. around 100 mpg. It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

> It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort. It is 100 % waste and you don't "save" the planet. Saving the planet = no car. Yeah, an EV is less wasteful than an ICE. Just don't think you save the planet .

Plus the break-even for an EV vs ICE car is around the 100,000k mark, if I recall correctly, due to the energy required to build the battery in the EV.

So: it’s complicated. It’d take me over ten years to do 100,000 kilometres, so probably the best car is the one I already have.

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#66

Post by thow-58d4e8b »

zucker42 wrote: post #9
trhway wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>New ways of wasting energy in maximum comfort, all around. "Over the course of 267 miles (430 km) and 8 hours, the car used 2.6 miles/kWh (23.7 kWh/100 km), bearing in mind that those miles were all driven in Germany and include running at the car's top speed of 140 mph (225 km) on derestricted autobahns." ie. around 100 mpg. It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

A fairer comparison would be emissions over the car's lifetime. The electric SUV would still almost certainly come out on top, but it's probably closer than the 100 vs 15 MPG would make it seem.

> Battery manufacturing life-cycle emissions debt is quickly paid off. An electric vehicle’s higher emissions during the manufacturing stage are paid off after only 2 years compared to driving an average conventional vehicle, a time frame that drops to about one and a half years if the car is charged using renewable energy. Approximately half of a battery’s emissions come from electricity used in the manufacturing process

From https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

The important takeaway is that greener electricity grid will help both the emissions from manufacturing, as well as emissions from usage

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#67

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

k8sToGo wrote: post #31
renewiltord wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the point. It’s the point of so many things. If you can’t pay to offset the problem you impose on someone, you sometimes can’t impose on them. That’s the idea.

What I meant is, do you really think the rich people will care? Will those people really not drive their SUV to the city?

Under capitalism, any resource that has to be limited due to scarcity or the need to cut usage (in this case, parking space/car usage in cities) will be used by the rich. It's just how the system works.

Charge for parking? The rich can pay. Only allow cars with odd/even plates to enter depending on day of the week? The rich can have two cars, one even and one odd. Only allow electric cars? The rich can more easily buy one. Only allow to park at certain hours in the day? The rich can have more flexible timetables. Only allow to park for a limited time? The rich can have a chauffeur to drive their car away while they do their business. Don't allow to park at all? The rich don't even need to park, the chauffeur will drive their car away and that's it. Don't allow cars to enter at all? Rickshaws will get popular.

If you don't want to drop or radically reform capitalism, and you want to solve this kind of problems at all, it's just something you need to accept. It comes with the system that with money you have more means to adapt to any restriction.

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#68

Post by morsch »

trhway wrote: post #43
WA wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort. It is 100 % waste and you don't "save" the planet. Saving the planet = no car. Yeah, an EV is less wasteful than an ICE. Just don't think you save the planet .

that is a fallacy. Passenger vehicles are responsible for 10% of global emissions - so whether to drop it 4x (100mpg instead of 25mpg) to 2.5% or drop it to 0% wouldn't matter much. And using renewables for electricity we basically drop emissions to the rounding error around 0.

Emissions will have to be reduced across all sectors, so if you merely manage to drop it to 2.5% of current emissions, that'll be a larger percentage in 2030 and 2050. If the trend continues and more people get more cars and drive them more (saving the world all the while), the share will increase further.

Of course an infinite supply of green energy would solve everything, but unfortunately that's not available. We're not supplying enough green electricity to cover current demands, much less enough to cover the roughly doubled demand if we were to shift all transportation to EVs.

Re: SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

#69

Post by robocat »

eptcyka wrote: post #6
morsch wrote: post #2

Alternatively, the 536 hp, 5018 lbs (2276 kg) BMW i4 ("1,000 lbs (454 kg) more than most other 3 and 4 Series BMWs", not known as lightweight cars in the first place) apparently "is the electric BMW sedan you’ve been waiting for". New ways of wasting energy in maximum comfort, all around. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/10/the-2023-bmw-i4-is-the-...

Electric cars are heavier, yes. And its easier than ever to get mad power out of electric motors. And it still will be more efficient than literally all ICE powered SUVs. In fact, the power figures are irrelevant IMO, as electric motors scale with demand a lot better. It is incredibly hard to make a reliable ICE that will be incredibly efficient and also capable of big power, but with electric motors, the only downsi…

CO2 output is a fixed manufacturing output (approximately proportional to vehicle cost ignoring taxes/incentives) plus a variable output approximately proportional to distance.

If you buy an electric vehicle for short lifetime distance (say, because trip length is limited), you can easily end up producing more CO2 from an electric vehicle than a cheaper ICE vehicle (depending at your location on how a marginal extra kWh is generated due to your marginal extra load on the electricity network).

I would like to see a graph of summed CO2 generated per driver on Yaxis per annum (including annualised fixed manufacturing costs), and distance on Xaxis. Two graphs, one for electric vehicles and one for ICE vehicles. At what distance is the crossover point for the two graphs? Do people with long commutes unsuitable for cheaper electric vehicles overwhelm the CO2 production?

Personally I think our CO2 production per capita is basically proportional to income: very few changes you make actually change the amount of CO2 produced… The CO2 savings with an electric vehicle are approximately proportional to the savings in $, and you then spend those $ on something else like a plane flight! It is actually quite difficult to make a difference — not that we shouldn’t try of course. It is also very hard to get facts versus greenwashing feel good delusions and deception.

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