71–80 of 282 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly don't understand why electric vehicle manufacturers went direct to consumer. Fleets are the ones that are looking at pure economics and would have the most to gain by cutting down on energy consumption.
Because looking at pure economics, electrics were not competitive until recently.
So how does this work? Right now, Amazon outsources delivery. Will they be building huge garages for their fleet? Or trying to get their drivers to pay for the vans, like Uber? And like they did in 2018, when they "bought" 20,000 Mercedes vans?[1] That deal: "Amazon will not own the vans but they will be handled by fleet management companies, who will then lease them to the delivery service owners." [1] https://multi…
Considering Amazon history I would not be surprised that this leads to "Amazon Delivery" which does exactly what you think. "Amazon Delivery" would slowly be responsible for an increasing portion of "Amazon Retail" parcels then generate money by opening to a wider audience.
Warning: petty partisanship ahead. Our last Republican governor in Illinois spent some quality time trashing this company, which sure looks shortsighted in retrospect: https://www.adaptbn.com/home/2018/5/16/breaking-rauner-criti... He also made a point to trash all of Central Illinois as a place to do business, which is a heck of a strategy for business development. https://www.news-gazette.com/news/rauner-apologizes…
he just started at rivian, back in the old Mitsubishi plant.
has to be surreal
Wow, 100k is no small change. Hoping this accelerates the "tipping point" for electric vehicles - in my mind that's when the infrastructure for EVs (e.g. charging stations, or something in the future like battery swaps) actually makes it easier to own than a gas vehicle.
It's already easier with a plugin hybrid. You can drive electric for a huge amount of the typical 20 mile daily commute, and rarely having to visit the gas station, with most of your miles being powered by the grid. If you're interested in that route, there are a ton of used Chevy Volts on the market now for $15-20k. And PHEVs are great for people in areas without good public charging infra, or who can't afford the c…
And there's significant East Coast charging infrastructure. I bought a used Leaf (first gen, I needed 5 seats for my wife's car since the first gen Volt only has 4) for $10k a year or two ago and have used Chademo charging several times without problem. The low range of the Leafs is a little annoying, but the Chademo charging capability compensates fairly well. With a >200 mile range EV, I wouldn't even need the fast charging.
If you can charge at home, you realize how annoying it was to go to the gas station all the time. When I travel and rent or borrow a gas car, I always find it annoying that I have to go to the gas station regularly. It's just not convenient compared to just habitually plugging it in when I get home. It also smells.
Wow, 100k is no small change. Hoping this accelerates the "tipping point" for electric vehicles - in my mind that's when the infrastructure for EVs (e.g. charging stations, or something in the future like battery swaps) actually makes it easier to own than a gas vehicle.
It would be nice, but I doubt the chargers they install will be available to the public. R&D for installing them is good, but will probably trickle down a lot less/slower. Also those 100k will be on the road only by 2030, and 10k by 2022 according to the other tech-crunch article [0] [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/amazons-climate-pledge-com...
So how does this work? Right now, Amazon outsources delivery. Will they be building huge garages for their fleet? Or trying to get their drivers to pay for the vans, like Uber? And like they did in 2018, when they "bought" 20,000 Mercedes vans?[1] That deal: "Amazon will not own the vans but they will be handled by fleet management companies, who will then lease them to the delivery service owners." [1] https://multi…
I believe Amazon is working towards building its own shipping empire [1] [2]. [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/08/07/749163966/fedex-is-breaking-u... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/amazon-will-compete-with-fed...
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> And there's 5 trillion tons of coal in Alaska Say what? There is only 909 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves in the entire world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country
Right. Only about 1 trillion in proven reserves , a number which often increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration. I was discussing how much actual coal is there. Coal resources , which is a (relatively) fixed number. The fellow I was responding to was talking about extracting all the oil and gas from the ground (not just that which is today known with high certainty and both technically and…
I get that, but you are claiming that the unproven reserves of one portion of the US are more than five times the current proven reserves of the entire world. Where is your evidence for that?
> We cannot rely on Peak Oil (or Peak Coal for that matter) to stop our reliance on fossil fuels and the ensuing climate change.
No, we need to stop burning them. That is unrelated to extracting them except for extraction being the first step in the process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Only about 1 trillion in proven reserves , a number which often increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration. I was discussing how much actual coal is there. Coal resources , which is a (relatively) fixed number. The fellow I was responding to was talking about extracting all the oil and gas from the ground (not just that which is today known with high certainty and both technically and…
> Right. Only about 1 trillion in proven reserves, a number which often increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration. I get that, but you are claiming that the unproven reserves of one portion of the US are more than five times the current proven reserves of the entire world. Where is your evidence for that? > We cannot rely on Peak Oil (or Peak Coal for that matter) to stop our reliance on fos…
In particular, it links to this 2005 USGS study: https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-077/
> "The combined measured, indicated, inferred, and hypothetical coal resources in the three areas are estimated to be 5,526 billion short tons (5,012 billion metric tons), which constitutes about 87 percent of Alaska’s coal"
The amount of fossil fuel energy in the ground (if we're very clever about extracting it) is absolutely vast. Enough to provide current needs for hundreds or even thousands of years, but to cook the climate and chemically change the atmosphere to that of a stuffy room long before that.
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6kWh to refine a gallon of gasoline? That's not a bad conversion rate given that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is 33-34kWh.
The typical internal combustion engine is only ~30% efficient, getting only ~10 kWh of energy out of that gallon.
Technically the 6kWh of energy spent on refining (or any other work) is itself subject to inefficiencies in generation, transmission, etc. It would also suffer from inefficiencies in the electrical storage and motive portions of an electric vehicle as well. And at the end of the day even if there were perfect 100% conversion it would still only be 6kWh of energy available vs 33-34kWh.
For once, mighty Amazon comes late to the show. Germany's parcel service DHL builds up a fleet of small electric delivery vans since 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter Living in Bavaria, I see these drive around everywhere now.
Germany's parcel service DHL builds up a fleet of small electric delivery vans since 2014 In Chicago, FedEx has had electric delivery vans since at least 2005. I saw a UPS truck in Nevada last month that I thought was a regular UPS truck until it sped away almost silently. I guess UPS has been converting its fleet, but I don't know for how long..