in case anyone is wondering - $4500-5500 13.0kW motor 9-13kWh battery mobility scooter dressed in car shaped shell with a "quality somewhere between economy car and a public bathroom".
A typical car is standing around 90% of the day, if not more. It's a waste of space that could be used for trees, walkways, cycle lanes, etc. If we pooled our resources together and made renting cars easy and accessible, we'd have more space in cities for the people living there.
Commuting nowadays is broken. People commuting by car are hauling around 4 or more empty seats at 30 km/h along a highway full of other people doing the same, going into the same cities often into the same office districs. We could get rid of a lot of cars if we didn't drive around 4 empty seats and filled just one.
Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
> Commuting nowadays is broken. People commuting by car are hauling around 4 or more empty seats at 30 km/h along a highway full of other people doing the same, going into the same cities often into the same office districs. We could get rid of a lot of cars if we didn't drive around 4 empty seats and filled just one.
Unfortunately, highways require a certain minimum vehicle size. The best you could possibly do is have a short coupe with 2 seats. It wouldn't significantly influence the size of the vehicle but waste more resources for the few times where you need a 3-4 person vehicle. The savings to be had are way too slim. However, driving a pick up truck for your commute is absolutely a waste of resources because there are smaller and more aerodynamic cars that are commute worthy.
>Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
It's the only solution. Building a von Neuman architecture style city is absolutely stupid for society since the world is inherently parallel. There is no logical reason to have massive central work place districts. Each office building is a cpu core and each residential building is a memory chip in its own right. We don't need to put all the cpu cores next to each other and put the memory somewhere else. A distributed development pattern is significantly more efficient since data and computation are next to each other.
I often wonder without having a pickup truck and a car, how do Europeans haul heavy hardware stuff like MDF boards, 3x4 wood plank, steel pipes to their place.
When I was in US I drove to nearest big box store, loaded my pickup and drove to my place. Easy, unfortunately no other country I've found such convenience and this makes me wanna go back to US.
Most things I need from the hardware/DIY store, I can bring home in my car. With the seats folded down, 8-foot lengths of timber aren't much of a problem.
For the rare occasions when that wouldn't be feasible, they'll deliver for a moderate charge. It would make no sense to pay all the costs of keeping an extra vehicle (or a much larger one than I generally need) just to avoid a couple of deliveries per year.
Station wagons are popular, as are hatchback cars where you can fold down the rear seat. That will fit a fridge or bicycle. If you really need the space you just rent a van for the day. Gas is expensive on the old continent, so people really do not like to drive huge cars.
People who need it for work have vans, which are an amazing invention with rooves and doors and which can carry pallets. Some have a trailer instead.
People who need it barely once or twice a year for home take an estate car, rent one for a taxi, borrow a trailer off a friend, or get the store to deliver - because owning your own van or pickup just for that reason would be considered completely insane.
Pickups trucks are an American phenomenon due to the Chicken Tax and how that sector of manufacturing is protected. European and Japanese manufacturers that trounce the big three in every other sector are forbidden to compete fairly in the land of the free when it comes to these bizarre pickup trucks that make little sense in normal countries.
In the UK we have the Ford Transit van and people that can do things for you. You get stuff delivered or collected. The guy with the Transit van gets a high level of utilisation out of it. People can therefore have normal cars and SUVs. Or a bicycle.
We don't have those man size trucks with dual tyres in the UK and certainly not at US prices. You can buy Ranger and Hilux size trucks and those are a bit too large for UK roads. In the US these would be toys, not man size at all.
In the UK you can play a game watching cars and counting how many have more than one person in them. In the US you can count how many trucks are hauling stuff. They ain't.
Why would I ever haul anything to my place? It's far easier to have it delivered.
A couple of years ago I did maintenance to my garden. I ordered planks and bags of cement from Amazon for next day delivery because I couldn't even be bothered to order from a specialist store.
But if I wanted to, there's a store with bulk construction supplies literally at the bottom of my road, and a more retail oriented one 20 minutes away.
But I don't even have a drivers license. Never felt worth the time.
Environmental issues. Same reasons I guess why Bitcoin is disliked. But most Bitcoin dislikers still drive a car, are careless with heating and cooling and eat steak at least once a day.
That energy could have been used to produce more steaks, cars and heating. It might be careless but at least there is a logical reason for why these activities are highly energy intensive. Bitcoin is energy intensive for a fixed gain. It's like a war where people are fighting for a farm plot. The amount of food you can farm from that plot doesn't change just because you had a bigger war. Bitcoin will only process 7 transactions per second and every holder of Bitcoin is against changing that.
A million people are killed directly every year by cars. Many more are seriously injured and disabled. Another million indirectly due to air pollution. They are also the number one cause of micro plastics around waterways. Billions are spent on hospitals, doctors, nurses, ambulances, police to support all this death.
Much more is spent covering our countryside on roads, that kill millions of animals every year.
And encouraging urban sprawl means cities take up more space, destroying wild life habitat.
This is just some of the awful things cars have bought to our world, not mentioned are wars, major spills, toppled governments, bribery, etc...
Computers themselves are a hodgepodge of resources extracted often horrendously from all over the world. Child labor for cobalt, various other rare earth products violently extracted with extreme acids scalding lands and polluting water sources, consuming vast quantities of oil to ship all these raw materials to then be assembled in massive factories with poorly paid workers, using terrible chemicals that can poison the workers and harm their babies…
The reality is almost all of modern technology, materials, tools, and life have huge externalities. Us being alive consuming resources and emitting green house gases further pushes us towards terrible climate changes, while taking away space from nature before us.
It just feels very arbitrary to stop at personal car ownership but maintain the benefits of all other externalities. Perhaps the OP also has many other resists to modern life under ethical guise. The computer is the one known exception here.
>It just feels very arbitrary to stop at personal car ownership but maintain the benefits of all other externalities.
Yes, it's incredibly arbitrary because cars don't suffer from low density development patterns. They don't cause pollution. They also don't cost a significant amount of money and this also doesn't force less well off people to get expensive leases because everyone buys low end cars. The tax burden of suburbia is absolutely insignificant. The fact that you have more roads per resident decreases the tax burden significantly. Their only fatal flaw is that new developments aren't funded by the federal government and private developers. Thanks to cars and suburbia municipalities are swimming in cash and never have to worry about their finances.
We should ban bicycles and pedestrian paths. Everyone should drive, even children. This is the future.
Pretty appropriate response to “cars are unethical” as well. For a huge number of people, especially in the United States, not having a car makes it essentially impossible to have a job.
That was not what he said. He was quite clear in making a personal decision. There was no force on anyone to make that same decision. That you are reading that into it might say more about the way you think :)
Also, making a new car, even an electric one, takes a huge amount of resources.
"Producing a medium-sized new car costing £24,000 may generate more than 17 tonnes of CO2e – almost as much as three years' worth of gas and electricity in the typical UK home."[0]
You say "even worse", I say "much better". Reaching carbon parity means any car driven more than that creates less carbon emissions. People I know run their cars until 300,000km and our power is >90% nuclear and hydro.
My reading of the comment is that the embodied carbon of a new EV is greater than that of a new ICE car. This is definitely true. Battery production uses a lot of energy.
There are no ethical reasons. Everyone who says this is just virtue signalling, by outsourcing the "car" to others (delivery drivers, grocery stores, police, hospitals, ...).
Rejecting the car for ethical reasons should be accompanied by rejecting most of the modern society & infrastructure as well.
How does not owning a car imply outsourcing those things? That's only true if you hiring a cab everywhere you go and order all your groceries to be delivered. If I bike everywhere I go, including the grocery store I'm not outsourcing cars. All the miles I would normally put on my car I put on my bike, or public transportation.
The grocery store uses cars to transport goods from farmer to the store. The whole supply chain uses cars (petrol, resources, poisoning air, causing accidents, ...), you're outsourcing to them.
You know, if you think about it for 5 minutes, your point makes absolutely no sense at all.
"Outsourcing" would be if his decision not to drive a car required him to pay people to drive cars on his behalf. That's the definition of the word "outsourcing". But you're talking about transportation that occurs whether he drives a car or not. The groceries you get at the store are driven there also. Him choosing not to drive a car literally has 0 impact on the transportation infrastructure of the supply chain. That is not outsourcing.
The grocery store uses trucks to transport goods because doing it by bicycle/foot simply does not scale.
But just because that part of the logistic chain involves ICE vehicles does not mean that every part has to involve ICE vehicles nor does it mean that people not using a car to do their shopping are "outsourcing" anything: The large-scale logistics happen regardless of how people get to the grocer, people getting there by foot/bicycle/public transport have literally zero influence on that end of the logistics.
actually big trucks carrying huge amounts of goods in a single shipment is much better for the environment than hundreds of people driving their cars to bring home a couple kgs of stuff
We have even smaller vehicles currently powered by 50ccm ICE in Germany. You only need a scooter license for them and they are being driven mostly by elderly or disabled people that either cannot get or don't want to pay about 1.500€ for a full drivers license for cars. There aren't many of them on the road, I'd say less than 0.1%, but they do exist and I see one at least once a week.
Another advantage is that they don't need to get inspected every other year by the authorities (TÜV) and due to the standard 50ccm two-stroke scooter motor they are really cheap to maintain.
Aixam is one manufacturer and based in France as I'm now finding out. The models are relatively expensive, though, because they are not produced in high numbers.
how odd, in Italy small ICE vehicles in this category (which I believe is called "Light quadricycles" or L6e) seem to be marketed mostly to kids from affluent families. .
That demographic makes for a more positive marketing campaign.
Look at ads for fashion that actually targets older people. It will also feature people in their early thirties, at most. Everybody still knows exactly what the intention is.
I wonder how much horsepower you can get out of 50cc if you max it out with all the *chargers. Sounds like a cool opportunity for regulatory arbitrage.
Unfortunately you can’t turbocharge or supercharge a two-stroke. There’s a material amount of time during the cycle where both intake and exhaust port are open at the same time. If you use any type of forced induction it would blow the fuel/air mixture straight out the cylinder before it could be ignited. You can however use a tuned pipe to cause a pressure wave to reflect back up the pipe and compress the mixture, but that’s usually limited to a pretty narrow powerband
They're also valid for 4 strokes but generally speaking 4-strokes have lower torque at high rpm and since it's hard to get much power out of 50ccm anyways, they tend to be 2-stroke.
I think he’s talking inherent technical limitations, not regulations. I wonder if it still applies if there was a pre-burning occurring in the middle of intake manifolds
You can have forced induction with two-strokes if you use direct injection. It ends up being pretty efficient because you can blow all the exhaust out of the cylinders and have clean air for the next cycle. You also don't need to add oil to the fuel because you don't use the crankcase to pressurize the air/fuel charge. This type of engine is really common in construction equipment and (older) big trucks, semis, buses, etc. Some were even supercharged and turbocharged.
In the times of 50cc road races you could get 10hp out of it, at maybe 17.000 rpm :) No idea how fast these cars would go with such an engine, they are not made to go 150km/h :) The way you tune a 2-stroke is by polishing the ports of the cylinder to have an almost perfect airflow. In the Netherlands this happened a lot in the sixties and seventies to ride at illegal speeds with your moped, it was considered a craft. In the eighties people just bought a replacement cylinder to go at illegal speeds.
10hp from a 50c two-stroke is easy. Road racers were getting 17+ with 70's technology. Those engines also had about a 100 rpm powerband, though. So you'd see 50cc bikes with as many as 14 gears.
1,500 for a drivers license?? I had no idea. It cost me about $30 USD to get my first license in Alabama. Washington state does taxation differently so I think it was about $120. You learn something new every day!
The licenses are absolutely required in the more sparsely populated areas in Europe, going without license is only possible in major metropolitan areas.
Europe just places a relatively high bar for driving skills. You do see the outcome in road safety and much more orderly driving behaviour (with the usual caveat that Europe is diverse and this applies more to some regions than some others yadda yadda).
I was hoping my caveat would cover exactly this. The parent comments were talking about Germany and Sweden, and I can promise they are not the only countries with decent driving.
Yep. The US is a much nicer place to drive than Italy, particularly Sicily. The craziest one was Azerbaijan. The drivers there are straight up murderous.
It may make collision between cars safer, but it makes collision with non-cars deadlier for the people outside the car.
The general trend for pedestrian and cycling deaths is up in the US, because increasingly popular SUVs and crossovers strike a person higher on the body, and also are more likely to push a person under the car towards the wheels or forward where they’ll be run over again, rather than over the hood.
Err in frontal collisions, maybe? But in pretty much every other case, having something with more kinetic energy will product more harm - it's physics after all. You don't see cyclists killing each others' a lot after all.
You can't compare a country the size of the US to Sweden. There are too many variations within the US, it is more like the whole of Europe and we all know driving in Sweden is not like driving in Italy. There are so many factors that can contribute, type of population, topography, weather, congestion, amount of driving in general and many others one could think about. "Ideas about safety", if they exist, is only one factor.
Having driven in both the US and Europe, I think it's also worth pointing out that it's easier to drive and understand the road system in the US. In Europe they occasionally have some bizarre rules and tourists just end up going slowly straight through and hoping for the best. In the US, pretty much any moron can get on the interstate or even drive around Atlanta or a big city like that.
Driving school wasn’t required, though you can take a “driver’s ed” class in high school to skip the exams at the DMV (you take them as part of the class). The exams are free (IIRC), you just have to pay to get the license when you pass. You only have to pass a written exam to get your “permit” (limited license). You need a certain amount of hours of driving to get a full license; but these aren’t really tracked. You just need a guardian (if you’re under 18) or a license holder to sign an affidavit saying you drove the hours. I definitely hadn’t actually driven the number of required hours when I turned 16 and my mom signed off on it.
It varies widely by state, of course; I started driving in Alabama when I was 15. I just recently had to pay WA to transfer my license from Colorado, I guess that was just administrative fees.
I think the difference might be in the difficulty of the test. Here in the UK driving lessons aren't required, but most people wouldn't pass the test without them (and most drivers wouldn't pass the test now if they had to sit it again).
which basically means those tests are not required to be sufficient at safe driving, since most drivers drive safely(enough) without being able to pass those tests.
Additionally, i would love to compare car accidents stats for countries with strict rules/very liberal rules and no rules at all(like most third world countries with high level of corruption)
Last time I checked, the US was quite far behind Germany in terms of road safety. Having driven in both (and far more dangerous ones), I'd say that there's a noticeable, but not outrageous difference. It largely depends on the state though.
AFAIK, a German drivers' license requires 5 substantial tests (4 seasons plus bad weather) ... while one in USA is little more than 10 minutes of "can you not crash into things at low speed".
When I sat for mine going on two decades ago, by far the scariest part was parallel parking. Which really says something - if you base it off of what is emphasized on the test, apparently we care more about "are you going to ding someone's car when parking" than "can you handle a motor vehicle at speed in dangerous conditions."
You can actually get a German driver's license within 2 weeks if you sign up for a crash course. You have to listen to 14 theory lessons (90 minutes each), pass a computer test about them, do at least 12 45 minute long practical lessons (5 outside the city, 4 on highways, 3 at night), and some optional lessons inside the city (which you actually need more but aren't mandatory).
In the end you have to pass a 45 minute driving test where the instructor tells you where to drive to (mostly through the city), asks you questions about car maintenance and safety, makes you parallel park, and do emergency break tests.
In the US, it's extremely common for driving lessons to be provided by secondary schools.
As somebody who missed out on that, I ended up paying around $400 as an adult for 6 hours of private lessons (yes, that was it), plus a $60 fee for the driver's license and a $9 fee for the driving test.
Is it? Where I went to High School they stopped offering drivers education in the 1980s, for budget reasons. Everyone now takes private drivers training courses, or just learns from their parents.
> As somebody who missed out on that, I ended up paying around $400 as an adult for 6 hours of private lessons (yes, that was it), plus a $60 fee for the driver's license and a $9 fee for the driving test.
Never happened for me either. A few years ago I payed a similar amount for a handful of very short courses that didn’t leave me confident enough to take the test. The consequences are big degradation of QoL. Now looking at probably 1 or 2 grand for significantly longer courses which I’m not even sure will be enough, along with the fact that these sort of places are not compatible with a working adults schedule.
When I lived there I was able to swap my home country drivers license for a German one and bypass the whole system. I will say that German’s drive very well, and the training and gatekeeping go a long way to explaining how the Autobahn’s unlimited speed limits function so well.
> Another advantage is that they don't need to get inspected every other year by the authorities (TÜV) and due to the standard 50ccm two-stroke scooter motor they are really cheap to maintain.
Ouch, these vehicles must be wrecking hell on local air quality.
if hypothetically one could ban cars from cities and only allow such low powered transport, it would be quite an efficient safe and clean form of transport
I don't know, I'm not sure they are really solving something. Local residents can probably rely on public transports/walking/cycling to move within the city. People from outside probably need a car to reach the city itself, but if you can't use those low powered cars on high speed roads then there's no point in having one. Better a "full" car that gets you to a public transports node on the edge of the city and then you switch.
"Moped cars" are a big thing in Sweden too, as 15yos can drive them just like they can drive a scooter. They are typically small diesels and currently cost about €16k+ new, though, so are in an entirely different price class (if not tech class).
There are some cheaper and some electric alternatives starting to arrive on the market. Right now, the electric alternatives don't have much range.
That shell is all most might need, to go shopping or run any errand in the city. It's much safer than a scooter and carries much more. Obviously you probably shouldn't be driving it in the highway, but how often does that happen?
13kW or 17.4 hp is anemic for a motorcycle and your moving a larger vehicle. It’s a golf cart which often use 12HP engines that’s slightly boosted to handle a windshield.
The driving experience of an ICE engine versus an electric motor of the same horsepower is not similar. They have much different acceleration curves and driving experiences.
Acceleration at low speed is one thing, but near top speed EV vs ICE makes minimal difference. An underpowered car is going to be slow either way.
What people notice about EV’s is really an artifact of being cars having extremely overpowered engines but ineffective transmissions to maximize the use of that power.
17hp is reasonable for a small motorcycle. You only need more power if you are going on highways, and this vehicle doesn't. For comparison, it's about twice as much as the Honda Grom, which is certainly beyond a scooter.
It's as much power as a Honda Rebel 250, a CBF250, an MT125, a Yamaha Vixion, an ST250, etc..., and those are gas engines that will generally only provide like 50-70% of their power.
Electric golf carts generally use 3-5hp engines. That's because for small engines, the electric advantage of always delivering the same amount of power is a huge deal.
18hp was enough for many cars. It is fine for city driving. It goes up to 100km/h, it's fine.
Also, the peak power of the motor is actually 20kW, 13kW is the sustained power, which again is more than enough for city driving.
It's certainly a new way of thinking about minimum viable cars. Nowadays you sort of expect 200hp from a normal family car, most often closer to 300hp. My car has a 4L that produces 286hp, and it's guzzling fuel. Most of the time is spent in towns and cities going slowly. I could easily move to electric, but sometimes I also need range and cruising speeds of 70-90 mph.
You are arguing past each other, hp has little bearing on the performance of a vehicle in the regimes we are talking about. Torque is what should be measured for in town performance and that is relative to weight. It only takes 10-30hp to maintain a vehicle at highway speeds.
I will thank you kindly to not speak about the Honda Rebel that I owned like that! She could hit 81 while going slightly downhill if you were in a tuck.
I believe from the factory the Rebel has like 15 or 16 hp, mine that was 12 years old at the time must have had one or two less, and it was exciting to ride around town.
I'll grant that 17 hp in a car would not be "exciting", but I bet from 0-30mph which is where this car would live would feel plenty zippy.
The lowest HP Honda Rebel right now the 300 goes for 4.5k and even that has 27HP new from factory. Back in 1985, the Rebel 250 started at 16.1 HP but that’s been discounted for a while.
IMO, anything that can’t maintain highway speed up a hill is anemic by modern standards. I get that HP has become a largely meaningless metric for daily driving, but that seems like a useful baseline.
Lol watching the video and the guy says "there isn't even a park! You get reverse, neutral and drive, that's it! Your park is the hand brake! I didn't even know that was possible!" Someone who's never even seen a standard transmission car has no business reviewing cars.
It's one of those things I picked up from when older people taught me how to drive. Presumably from when hand brakes were more likely to fail than on modern cars. Maybe if someone crashes into the car while it's parked.
Either way I still do it. And turn my wheels towards/away from the kerb on a hill as appropriate. Probably useless but if you have a fail-safe, may as well apply it.
Forgetting the handbrake is a common cause of minor accidents. Half the automotive 'fail' videos on the internet are people forgetting the handbrake. The habit of never leaving the engine on neutral greatly reduces the probability of this kind of an accident.
It is not wise to rely on handbrakes. Firstly handbrakes aren't designed to hold any significant load. Just search for an image of a handbrake cable. It is good enough most of the time, but it will bite you once you have a fully loaded car at a steep slope. Secondly it is a good habit to never leave the car on neutral unless you have a good reason because this habit will save you in the event of forgetting to pull the handbrake.
It probably has the same safety rating as a scooter. These cars aren't meant for highways, but are great for urban commutes within a few kilometers. The perfect use case is if you need it just to get groceries.
I don't dispute the use case for urban commuters and short distances, however, these things should absolutely have airbags. You can be the safest and most responsible driver, but some crazy a*hole can still slam into you head on with a SUV. Airbags should not be a cost cutting option.
The point is that Elon musk said we would have self driving robotaxis in 2020.
Every expert worth his salt says we aren't anywhere near self driving cars. Only Tesla and non-experts says otherwise. Self driving requires AI or some kind of rails. We are years from any kind of intelligence.
If they would be used for city speeds only, the risks aren't much bigger compared to scooters, in contrary.
But I have 0 doubt that being priced so aggressively, US and Europe would slap such a huge tariff to protect local markets, they would be very uncompetitive.
I wonder what’s worse: being squashed inside this car or just become airborne when scooter hits something. At least you’re required to wear a helmet when on a scooter. But as someone said here, if we only had those cars on the road(and a 30 km/h speed limit), it’d be much safer.
Seatbelts saved a bunch of lives by preventing occupants from getting flung out the car, so I’d imagine that being in the car is safer.
Current road death trends in the US indicate that people inside cars are dying less, but people outside of them are dying more, notably cyclists and pedestrians.
EuroNCAP ratings are harsher, so not really. It's mostly that the US system is based on SUVs and other behemoths. Look at the new small Toyota Yaris. That's what is required to get a good rating these days. Most newish SUVs doesn't even have the same amount of safety systems (like airbags between driver and front passenger seat).
I was speaking solely about regulatory requirements (i.e FMVSS) for selling a vehicle, not the NCAP programs. It is generally legal to sell vehicles with bad NCAP scores. For instance: the 2018 Fiat Panda met EU regulations to be sold but scored 0 stars on EuroNCAP.
I think it's not that the US is odd as much as each market is odd in a different way.
I remember one of the points of the failed trans-atlantic trade treaty was about handling where the stop lights should be on cars, because "safety" regulations differ.
Yes, the EU has high standards and differs from the US mainly on minor details.
Standards (or lack thereof) in much of Asia/Africa/S.America are on a whole different planet.
I guess my point is, not being approved for sale in the US doesn’t mean the car is shockingly different than many other cars in the rest of the world. You can find unsafe cars that would be illegal to sell in the US that say “Nissan” or “VW” on them just over the border in Mexico.
Every manufacturer builds cars to meet the specific requirements and needs for a market. In many countries, the requirements are low and the #1 priority is cheap.
back in the 1980s americans were able to buy cars cheaper because the manufacturers were not required to install all the added safety features that we have today...back then the gas mileage was better too because the cars were lighter...then some corporate lobbies got congress to force manufacturers to add safety features...the prices of cars went up...the weight of cars went up, and the gas mileage went down...
what corporate lobby did that? Oil companies, perhaps....and as a result americans are forced to spend more on cars and more on gas than citizens of free nations...
some might say we are lucky to have the government looking out for us....but I would not say that...
Probably much safer than a motorcycle though. I always found it interesting how we have such strict crash safety testing for cars, but still allow motorcycles despite them being incredibly dangerous. Maybe just because it is visually obvious that a motorcycle is dangerous? Or more likely because everyone would get mad if you tried to ban them.
* Motorcycles aren't very dangerous to bystanders.
* Approximately zero infants or toddlers are routinely transported via motorcycle.
* Motorcycles don't make up a large percentage of traffic in the U.S.
* Motorcycle deaths are more likely to leave donable organs intact, so it's a bit like the lottery, but for organs. Some people opt in to entertainment, and the rest of society benefits.
My mom who lives in Milan has had something similar for more than ten years and it works great. Cost a bit more than $4000 at the time, but not much more, and it's saved a lot of money in gas and taxes.
China's strategic planning around electric cars is really a thing of beauty.
Imagine a massive growing middle class buying gas-powered foreign produced cars instead. What would that do the Chinese economy and security with all oil imported?
The strategy of welcoming of firms such as Tesla builds up a huge ecosystem of suppliers creating possibilities for China's own car companies. Whether they target a highend international market such as with the Volvo Polestar or the small electric car market.
The small car market basically doesn't exist in the west. We don't find these cars safe or desireble enough. But safety and desirability of this category of cars will improve rapidly over time and ultimately they will become attractive enough to be sold in the west.
No, they sell the golf which is about a foot longer. I'd still call it a compact hatchback.
Chevy makes the Aveo.
You can still buy a Smart car here.
The mini is quite popular.
There is absolutely a segment for compact cars in the US, it's just nowhere near as large because most people spend time on the highway and don't feel as safe being surrounded by larger cars and OTR trucks.
However it was not the european style small cars I ment when I referred to small cars but rather the 4000 USD electric cars, the article is refering to. Those you do not see in Europe at present.
In fact, the only Chinese EVs I have seen are the MG ZS EV and Volvo Polestar - both big cars.
The small electrics are things like the VW Up electric and the Fiat 500 electric, both European.
>The US has a strange obsession with massive cars.
It's not strange... it's survival (plus federal regulations about crash safety, bumper height) require the size vehicles I'm used to here. (The SUV thing is just crazy, though)
It is not unusual in the USA on a road trip (vacation) to drive 1000 km/day (or more) at 120+ kph.
How is something smaller than a 1999 Honda Civic (1100kg) going to safely share the road with 40000 kg Tractor-Trailer rigs?
There are plenty of trucks in Europe. There's even a whole computer game series based around it.[0] Lots of Europeans go on driving holidays. They even take caravans ("travel trailers"). Caravans are so common that they're a running joke on popular car shows like Top Gear.[1]
It is true that generally people don't tend to drive as long distances in Europe as they do in the US, but it's not unheard of to drive 1000km on holiday. It's not as if everyone in Europe spends their lives pootling around cobble-stoned towns in Fiat 500s with a crusty baguette sticking out the window. There are large highways and plenty of heavy traffic.
I think the difference is that people in Europe tend not use their oversized vehicles as daily drivers. Many people don't even own a large car at all, preferring to rent or borrow one for specifically when they do go on holiday. Driving a large car seems like less of a status symbol in Europe. I don't buy that it's a safety thing for Americans, when most Americans are just driving their SUVs to the shops or to work every day.
I understand the term "car" to mean pretty much any personal/family vehicle with an engine and four wheels. I don't think that's an unusual understanding of the word. The (American) Car and Driver magazine features stories on SUVs and pickup trucks too. Most "car" dealerships in the US sell all of these vehicle types.
I'm also old (ish), and I do admit that the "American cars are bigger" argument has gotten less convincing as time has gone on. Even if we just look at cars, it seems the small/compact end has been getting larger, in Europe as well[0].
It would be interesting to see if the move toward larger cars in general has been offset by the increase of "sub-car" vehicles like electric tuk-tuks, e-bikes and so on.
Less commonly with a pickup truck but plenty of people will refer to their SUV, especially if it's a crossover as most are these days, as their "car." I suppose a large car, in the strict sense of the word, these days would be something like a Lincoln Town Car.
American here: to offer a counter perspective, I am not at all opposed to a small car. However the last time I went shopping and looked at a smaller car, they were more expensive and more gas hungry then the car I ended up getting. (This was ~8 years ago? Maybe it has changed since then). I was actually surprised to see that.
But I don't accept the smart fortwo as a typical small car.
If those are its numbers, then its a horrible car, both in terms of mpg and everyday practical use. It looks good as a quick city run around and that's it.
In Europe, a typical small car might be a Toyotal Yaris or Peugeot 208, both hitting 70-90mpg
> But I don't accept the smart fortwo as a typical small car.
Yeah that was why I had that disappointment, I was expecting gas milages closer to what you said. If I could get a car like that in the States, that would be awesome. I would love to get a car that gets 70-90 mpg.
And why is that. Small cars should be as practical in the USA as in rest of the world, and it seems it is only the mentality of the American consumer that seems to avoid them, perhaps?
I live in the USA (California) and it's almost impossible to get anywhere without getting onto a highway.
The only local roads are littered with stop signs or red lights at every goddamn intersection and then some speed bumps. It's either the highway or the obstacle course.
I do have a electric scooter (max 40 km/h, so can only stick to local roads) which I use for <5km trips and and I can definitely say those stop signs cut my battery range by a factor of 2 or 3.
Americans have this weird fascination of bigger is better mentality to the point that practicality goes out the window. The hummer is a prime example: burns a ton of gasoline with little benefit to the owner or others.
This used to be true back in the 80s and such, but with modern safety standards, you have to take extreme ends of big and small to get anywhere close to a statistically significant difference. How you drive, what kind of airbags your car has, what the general traffic culture is in your country etc are all considerably more important factors than your car size. To put it another way, you're way more likely to walk away from a crash in a modern small car than in an older large car. For all intents and purposes, size being safety is an urban myth today.
Are you sure? In a Consumer Reports article [0] from 2013, they mention in head-on crashes involving a car and SUV, the car driver was 7.6 times more likely to die than the SUV driver.
So in a world where there are SUVs driving around, buying an SUV for yourself instead of a car is a safer move.
Just think about getting t-boned in an intersection. Would you rather be in a light, low vehicle or in a heavy, tall vehicle? I'd pick the latter, especially if the vehicle t-boning me is tall and its bumper at the height of my head if I were in a small car.
> So in a world where there are SUVs driving around, buying an SUV for yourself instead of a car is a safer move.
That sounds like the same kind of circular reasoning that's often cited to oppose any gun regulation: "When everybody has a gun, you also need a gun to stay safe!".
There's a lot more space in the US. Roads are bigger. Parking spaces are more numerous, etc. Small cars are practical in the US, but big cars are not practical in Europe.
Small cars became very popular in the late 70’s and early 80’s in the US due to gas shortages. They gradually died out as gas prices came back down.
Go look at car sizes in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the US. Compare that to car sizes in Europe as it recovered from WW2. Think Cadillac boat like cars vs the Mini.
Also, cars are essential transportation in parts of the US and raising gas prices would/have result(ed) in a lot of protesting. In fact, high gas prices would be seen as regressive.
We have more space, so US auto manufacturers used the space differential to change the dynamics of the market. Small cars have been removed from the situation by the SUV Wars. They were able to shift the Overton Window so they are no longer a valid answer.
Volkswagen and the Japanese auto companies filled this role in the 60s, 70s and 80s. In the 90s foreign vehicles started on the same obesity trajectory, 2nd born generation regresses to the mean.
I'm sure a large part of it is we're more spread out. My anecdotal refute to the compact car is: when I've been in europe and have to travel from country to country, I personally saw about the same ratio of "large cars" on the highways in europe as I do in the US. Obviously the pickup truck is basically non-existent, but otherwise the mix was about the same.
Europeans don't seem anymore excited about taking what I'd call "city cars" on the highway than Americans are. That being said: I think far more Europeans can spend almost all their time in their local city and don't NEED to get on a highway with large trucks and vehicles. In the US that's basically unheard of unless you're in a large city. I'm sure during holiday the roads look quite different than a regular workday.
I'm guessing if you compared New York to most of Europe you'd see similar numbers, public transit and city layout in the rest of the US basically makes that impossible.
I think most cities and highways are designed for larger cars.
I've wondered what it would be like if there were cities with tight, maybe even exclusionary urban areas. "you must be less than this big to enter downtown"
There are some cities in Florida where retired people can drive golf carts, and it has become very popular.
For a small road trip to Chicago my family member rent a 8 person fan a huge car and off course I offered to be the driver.
Once we arrived in Chicago I kind of started to sweat because I'm used to European city parking spots. How many times will have to retry to park this huge car, but to my surprise the parking spaces are also huge.
I love the idea of a city-only electric car that is speed-capped at something reasonable.
They would be the easiest to automate fully (lower risk of damaging pedestrians or others on the road) and do not pollute inside densely populated areas.
Your average speed in a city center is pretty low anyway, so if it could be automated to avoid slow starts when lights turn green (I have to imagine that automated cars could simultaneously start, rather than having to make sure the car in front of you had committed to driving before you do) would actually improve the experience and average speed immensely.
A few years ago I drove one of these cars, which fell somewhere between a Yugo and a golf cart in terms of appearance, speed, passenger room, and (most importantly) safety.
Love the Musk army in this thread, eager to destroy any sort of competitor this brand has. You know you guys are the ones that benefit from this kind of market competition, right?
That's incredibly good value. Although I do like big cars and trucks, it would make sense to have one of those puppies in the garage too, for shopping and short errands.
Flame bait article. Tesla is a high-end/luxury brand trying to dabble in more affordable, but still luxurious vehicles. Those products are lower volume, but have higher margins. Imagine reading an article titled: China's Go-Kart is a Huge Market Volkswagen can't Reach. Ridiculous.
> An electric car that is charged from coal-generated power is basically a coal car.
It's a “coal car” that's much easier to upgrade, en masse with millions like it, to end-to-end cleaner technology than a cat with an onboard fossil fuel engine.
58% of Chinese electricity comes from fossil fuels [0], and that's dropping fast (65% in 2019). Also, the worst thing about a coal-fired car would be particulate pollution in the city where you drive it, so generating that electricity far away from the city helps a lot there.
58% of china's energy comes from coal alone (which I suspect is where you get your fossil fuel figure)
20% comes from oil and related fluids
8% natural gas
so 86% fossil fuels. Of the remaining 14%, 2% is nuclear and 11% is renewable.
> and that's dropping fast (65% in 2019)
The percentage is dropping slowly because newer forms of generation such as solar are coming online. China is using all the energy it can get from every sector, they are rapidly adding coal capacity along with everything else. China has no qualms about opening hundreds of coal plants per year, except they are also manufacturing millions of solar panels as well.
Yeah and Tesla can't tap the Boeing or Bugatti market.
Different cars for different markets and budget. $4k car is great for driving a few miles or once a week. Or within city limits. Generally, you get what you pay for so a $4k can't offer what a $80K car does. Common sense.
Tesla certainly isn't in the market of $4k cars, but it is an interesting thought that with their new casting process, they could basically cast the backbone of a small car in one piece, lowering the assembly costs drastically. So if they ever decide to make a super-affordable mini car (perhaps for the Indian market?), it could be astonishingly cheap.
This seemed like a better alternative to cheap electric cars. I don’t know how to convert Lahks to dollars, but the original article said around $5000 usd.
237 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11ExTYIEJm0
tldr: great alternative to a scooter.
That said, I personally don't own a car for ethical reasons, and I'd love this small one for shopping or just small trips on the weekends.
Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
Unfortunately, highways require a certain minimum vehicle size. The best you could possibly do is have a short coupe with 2 seats. It wouldn't significantly influence the size of the vehicle but waste more resources for the few times where you need a 3-4 person vehicle. The savings to be had are way too slim. However, driving a pick up truck for your commute is absolutely a waste of resources because there are smaller and more aerodynamic cars that are commute worthy.
>Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
It's the only solution. Building a von Neuman architecture style city is absolutely stupid for society since the world is inherently parallel. There is no logical reason to have massive central work place districts. Each office building is a cpu core and each residential building is a memory chip in its own right. We don't need to put all the cpu cores next to each other and put the memory somewhere else. A distributed development pattern is significantly more efficient since data and computation are next to each other.
When I was in US I drove to nearest big box store, loaded my pickup and drove to my place. Easy, unfortunately no other country I've found such convenience and this makes me wanna go back to US.
For the rare occasions when that wouldn't be feasible, they'll deliver for a moderate charge. It would make no sense to pay all the costs of keeping an extra vehicle (or a much larger one than I generally need) just to avoid a couple of deliveries per year.
People who need it barely once or twice a year for home take an estate car, rent one for a taxi, borrow a trailer off a friend, or get the store to deliver - because owning your own van or pickup just for that reason would be considered completely insane.
In the UK we have the Ford Transit van and people that can do things for you. You get stuff delivered or collected. The guy with the Transit van gets a high level of utilisation out of it. People can therefore have normal cars and SUVs. Or a bicycle.
We don't have those man size trucks with dual tyres in the UK and certainly not at US prices. You can buy Ranger and Hilux size trucks and those are a bit too large for UK roads. In the US these would be toys, not man size at all.
In the UK you can play a game watching cars and counting how many have more than one person in them. In the US you can count how many trucks are hauling stuff. They ain't.
OTOH, in 41 years I had exactly 0 times needed large MDF boards or wood planks or steel pipes...
You do this like once every 10 years? I wouldn't choose a car on this.
A couple of years ago I did maintenance to my garden. I ordered planks and bags of cement from Amazon for next day delivery because I couldn't even be bothered to order from a specialist store.
But if I wanted to, there's a store with bulk construction supplies literally at the bottom of my road, and a more retail oriented one 20 minutes away.
But I don't even have a drivers license. Never felt worth the time.
[looks at personally-owned half-acre of forest] [looks at car]
I own a car so I CAN own & preserve substantial undeveloped natural land. You get more city space by me not being there at all.
A million people are killed directly every year by cars. Many more are seriously injured and disabled. Another million indirectly due to air pollution. They are also the number one cause of micro plastics around waterways. Billions are spent on hospitals, doctors, nurses, ambulances, police to support all this death.
Much more is spent covering our countryside on roads, that kill millions of animals every year.
And encouraging urban sprawl means cities take up more space, destroying wild life habitat.
This is just some of the awful things cars have bought to our world, not mentioned are wars, major spills, toppled governments, bribery, etc...
What's the point in saying: "But you do some unrelated thing???"
Is the argument that there's no point in making a small difference, it's only worth it if you're 100% ideologically pure?
Because I don't see where road deaths and microplastics in local rivers come into owning a computer.
The reality is almost all of modern technology, materials, tools, and life have huge externalities. Us being alive consuming resources and emitting green house gases further pushes us towards terrible climate changes, while taking away space from nature before us.
It just feels very arbitrary to stop at personal car ownership but maintain the benefits of all other externalities. Perhaps the OP also has many other resists to modern life under ethical guise. The computer is the one known exception here.
Making a choice not to buy a car makes a measurable impact.
It's not a gotcha to say that they partake in society.
By your logic, it'd be arbitrary to safely dispose of motor oil instead of conveniently dumping it into the local park's pond.
Yes, it's incredibly arbitrary because cars don't suffer from low density development patterns. They don't cause pollution. They also don't cost a significant amount of money and this also doesn't force less well off people to get expensive leases because everyone buys low end cars. The tax burden of suburbia is absolutely insignificant. The fact that you have more roads per resident decreases the tax burden significantly. Their only fatal flaw is that new developments aren't funded by the federal government and private developers. Thanks to cars and suburbia municipalities are swimming in cash and never have to worry about their finances.
We should ban bicycles and pedestrian paths. Everyone should drive, even children. This is the future.
It stops feeling like that once you replace assumptions with numbers.
— Mister Gotcha (https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/)
That was not what he said. He was quite clear in making a personal decision. There was no force on anyone to make that same decision. That you are reading that into it might say more about the way you think :)
"Producing a medium-sized new car costing £24,000 may generate more than 17 tonnes of CO2e – almost as much as three years' worth of gas and electricity in the typical UK home."[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
This was discussed recently here on HN, I'll try to find the conversation.
Edit: here's the conversation, with link to source:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716921
It's about 50,000 to 112,00km depending on the source of electricity used to charge the electric car.
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the...
> ... compared to most gasoline-powered cars, an electric car should become carbon neutral in less than 3 years of driving.
Rejecting the car for ethical reasons should be accompanied by rejecting most of the modern society & infrastructure as well.
"Outsourcing" would be if his decision not to drive a car required him to pay people to drive cars on his behalf. That's the definition of the word "outsourcing". But you're talking about transportation that occurs whether he drives a car or not. The groceries you get at the store are driven there also. Him choosing not to drive a car literally has 0 impact on the transportation infrastructure of the supply chain. That is not outsourcing.
But just because that part of the logistic chain involves ICE vehicles does not mean that every part has to involve ICE vehicles nor does it mean that people not using a car to do their shopping are "outsourcing" anything: The large-scale logistics happen regardless of how people get to the grocer, people getting there by foot/bicycle/public transport have literally zero influence on that end of the logistics.
Another advantage is that they don't need to get inspected every other year by the authorities (TÜV) and due to the standard 50ccm two-stroke scooter motor they are really cheap to maintain.
https://www.aixam.com/
how odd, in Italy small ICE vehicles in this category (which I believe is called "Light quadricycles" or L6e) seem to be marketed mostly to kids from affluent families. .
Look at ads for fashion that actually targets older people. It will also feature people in their early thirties, at most. Everybody still knows exactly what the intention is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CB50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Super_Cub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_diesel_engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_cc_Grand_Prix_motorcycle_ra...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1KXL1vjTX4
Europe just places a relatively high bar for driving skills. You do see the outcome in road safety and much more orderly driving behaviour (with the usual caveat that Europe is diverse and this applies more to some regions than some others yadda yadda).
I've driven in many countries and Italy had more than an equal share of near death experiences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
The general trend for pedestrian and cycling deaths is up in the US, because increasingly popular SUVs and crossovers strike a person higher on the body, and also are more likely to push a person under the car towards the wheels or forward where they’ll be run over again, rather than over the hood.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...
What does that actually cover? Just the administrative things you do at the DMV or driving school / exams / etc?
Germany is probably like France, which means that the 1500 covers driving school + exam + actual licence.
You need to have a certain number of driving school hours (22 I think?) to be able to sit the practical exam.
It varies widely by state, of course; I started driving in Alabama when I was 15. I just recently had to pay WA to transfer my license from Colorado, I guess that was just administrative fees.
I think the difference might be in the difficulty of the test. Here in the UK driving lessons aren't required, but most people wouldn't pass the test without them (and most drivers wouldn't pass the test now if they had to sit it again).
Additionally, i would love to compare car accidents stats for countries with strict rules/very liberal rules and no rules at all(like most third world countries with high level of corruption)
In the end you have to pass a 45 minute driving test where the instructor tells you where to drive to (mostly through the city), asks you questions about car maintenance and safety, makes you parallel park, and do emergency break tests.
As somebody who missed out on that, I ended up paying around $400 as an adult for 6 hours of private lessons (yes, that was it), plus a $60 fee for the driver's license and a $9 fee for the driving test.
Never happened for me either. A few years ago I payed a similar amount for a handful of very short courses that didn’t leave me confident enough to take the test. The consequences are big degradation of QoL. Now looking at probably 1 or 2 grand for significantly longer courses which I’m not even sure will be enough, along with the fact that these sort of places are not compatible with a working adults schedule.
When I lived there I was able to swap my home country drivers license for a German one and bypass the whole system. I will say that German’s drive very well, and the training and gatekeeping go a long way to explaining how the Autobahn’s unlimited speed limits function so well.
Ouch, these vehicles must be wrecking hell on local air quality.
There are some cheaper and some electric alternatives starting to arrive on the market. Right now, the electric alternatives don't have much range.
It's a good alternative to a smart car, it has uses cases much beyond that of a scooter by nature of having, say, a roof.
What people notice about EV’s is really an artifact of being cars having extremely overpowered engines but ineffective transmissions to maximize the use of that power.
It's as much power as a Honda Rebel 250, a CBF250, an MT125, a Yamaha Vixion, an ST250, etc..., and those are gas engines that will generally only provide like 50-70% of their power.
Electric golf carts generally use 3-5hp engines. That's because for small engines, the electric advantage of always delivering the same amount of power is a huge deal.
18hp was enough for many cars. It is fine for city driving. It goes up to 100km/h, it's fine.
Also, the peak power of the motor is actually 20kW, 13kW is the sustained power, which again is more than enough for city driving.
I believe from the factory the Rebel has like 15 or 16 hp, mine that was 12 years old at the time must have had one or two less, and it was exciting to ride around town.
I'll grant that 17 hp in a car would not be "exciting", but I bet from 0-30mph which is where this car would live would feel plenty zippy.
IMO, anything that can’t maintain highway speed up a hill is anemic by modern standards. I get that HP has become a largely meaningless metric for daily driving, but that seems like a useful baseline.
Either way I still do it. And turn my wheels towards/away from the kerb on a hill as appropriate. Probably useless but if you have a fail-safe, may as well apply it.
And with the advent of Hyundai Ioniq 5 and other cars coming on stream in the premium space, Tesla can suck a fat one.
Why do you think Tesla won’t have self driving cars in the next 5 years?
Every expert worth his salt says we aren't anywhere near self driving cars. Only Tesla and non-experts says otherwise. Self driving requires AI or some kind of rails. We are years from any kind of intelligence.
If all cars were like that it would be fine.
But I have 0 doubt that being priced so aggressively, US and Europe would slap such a huge tariff to protect local markets, they would be very uncompetitive.
Current road death trends in the US indicate that people inside cars are dying less, but people outside of them are dying more, notably cyclists and pedestrians.
There are plenty of new cars from leading global auto manufacturers that aren’t legal for sale in the US.
But when it comes to expensive systems like crash structures, active and passive safety systems, the US requires a lot.
I remember one of the points of the failed trans-atlantic trade treaty was about handling where the stop lights should be on cars, because "safety" regulations differ.
Standards (or lack thereof) in much of Asia/Africa/S.America are on a whole different planet.
I guess my point is, not being approved for sale in the US doesn’t mean the car is shockingly different than many other cars in the rest of the world. You can find unsafe cars that would be illegal to sell in the US that say “Nissan” or “VW” on them just over the border in Mexico.
Every manufacturer builds cars to meet the specific requirements and needs for a market. In many countries, the requirements are low and the #1 priority is cheap.
what corporate lobby did that? Oil companies, perhaps....and as a result americans are forced to spend more on cars and more on gas than citizens of free nations...
some might say we are lucky to have the government looking out for us....but I would not say that...
* Motorcycles aren't very dangerous to bystanders.
* Approximately zero infants or toddlers are routinely transported via motorcycle.
* Motorcycles don't make up a large percentage of traffic in the U.S.
* Motorcycle deaths are more likely to leave donable organs intact, so it's a bit like the lottery, but for organs. Some people opt in to entertainment, and the rest of society benefits.
definitely a completely different market though. This car doesn't even have air bags
And a few months before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24601479
Imagine a massive growing middle class buying gas-powered foreign produced cars instead. What would that do the Chinese economy and security with all oil imported?
The strategy of welcoming of firms such as Tesla builds up a huge ecosystem of suppliers creating possibilities for China's own car companies. Whether they target a highend international market such as with the Volvo Polestar or the small electric car market.
The small car market basically doesn't exist in the west. We don't find these cars safe or desireble enough. But safety and desirability of this category of cars will improve rapidly over time and ultimately they will become attractive enough to be sold in the west.
There are a lot of small cars in European big cities as it is difficult to find parking space for an "american sized" car.
The sedans which Americans thinks of as "small car", we think of "too big car for the city".
Chevy makes the Aveo.
You can still buy a Smart car here.
The mini is quite popular.
There is absolutely a segment for compact cars in the US, it's just nowhere near as large because most people spend time on the highway and don't feel as safe being surrounded by larger cars and OTR trucks.
The US has a strange obsession with massive cars.
However it was not the european style small cars I ment when I referred to small cars but rather the 4000 USD electric cars, the article is refering to. Those you do not see in Europe at present.
In fact, the only Chinese EVs I have seen are the MG ZS EV and Volvo Polestar - both big cars.
The small electrics are things like the VW Up electric and the Fiat 500 electric, both European.
It's not strange... it's survival (plus federal regulations about crash safety, bumper height) require the size vehicles I'm used to here. (The SUV thing is just crazy, though)
It is not unusual in the USA on a road trip (vacation) to drive 1000 km/day (or more) at 120+ kph.
How is something smaller than a 1999 Honda Civic (1100kg) going to safely share the road with 40000 kg Tractor-Trailer rigs?
Here's the smallest car I ever owned... it was silver, with a hatchback... I loved that car, and miss it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_(sixth_generation)
It is true that generally people don't tend to drive as long distances in Europe as they do in the US, but it's not unheard of to drive 1000km on holiday. It's not as if everyone in Europe spends their lives pootling around cobble-stoned towns in Fiat 500s with a crusty baguette sticking out the window. There are large highways and plenty of heavy traffic.
I think the difference is that people in Europe tend not use their oversized vehicles as daily drivers. Many people don't even own a large car at all, preferring to rent or borrow one for specifically when they do go on holiday. Driving a large car seems like less of a status symbol in Europe. I don't buy that it's a safety thing for Americans, when most Americans are just driving their SUVs to the shops or to work every day.
[0] https://eurotrucksimulator2.com/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTnrpL1Uw0
In my mind, that conjures up a 1972 Buick Electra Station Wagon. They are 2320 Kg, more than 2 of the 1999 Honda Civic.
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/buick/full-size_buic...
SUVs in the US are out of hand, I totally agree with that. I thought you were saying that our Sedans are huge.
It would be interesting to see if the move toward larger cars in general has been offset by the increase of "sub-car" vehicles like electric tuk-tuks, e-bikes and so on.
[0] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/investigation-wh...
To Europeans used to small, cramped spaces - the great open roads and huge comfy cars of America are much appreciated.
I actively avoid driving in the UK. I adore driving in the US.
edit: Downvoting an outside perspective, how very Reddit!
If the car you ended up getting was large, as implied, I'd be interested in looking at how sh!te the small car must have been.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/167786-2014-chevrolet-cr...
Here you go. I can persoanlly attest that the diesel Chevy cruze easily gets 45-50 mpg. I also paid less for it than a smart car.
Like I said, I was not opposed to it, but I'm not spending more for a smaller car that is more fuel inefficient.
But I don't accept the smart fortwo as a typical small car.
If those are its numbers, then its a horrible car, both in terms of mpg and everyday practical use. It looks good as a quick city run around and that's it.
In Europe, a typical small car might be a Toyotal Yaris or Peugeot 208, both hitting 70-90mpg
https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/toyota/yaris/hybrid/14351...
https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/peugeot/208/owning
Yeah that was why I had that disappointment, I was expecting gas milages closer to what you said. If I could get a car like that in the States, that would be awesome. I would love to get a car that gets 70-90 mpg.
The only local roads are littered with stop signs or red lights at every goddamn intersection and then some speed bumps. It's either the highway or the obstacle course.
I do have a electric scooter (max 40 km/h, so can only stick to local roads) which I use for <5km trips and and I can definitely say those stop signs cut my battery range by a factor of 2 or 3.
So in a world where there are SUVs driving around, buying an SUV for yourself instead of a car is a safer move.
Just think about getting t-boned in an intersection. Would you rather be in a light, low vehicle or in a heavy, tall vehicle? I'd pick the latter, especially if the vehicle t-boning me is tall and its bumper at the height of my head if I were in a small car.
[0]: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/05/suvs-are-sa...
That sounds like the same kind of circular reasoning that's often cited to oppose any gun regulation: "When everybody has a gun, you also need a gun to stay safe!".
No one having a big car is an unstable equilibrium.
If you lived somewhere where all the cars were small, both vehicles would be better off, because there would be much less energy in the collision.
SUV's aren't safer, they're more dangerous to other people. and that shouldn't be OK.
Small cars became very popular in the late 70’s and early 80’s in the US due to gas shortages. They gradually died out as gas prices came back down.
Go look at car sizes in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the US. Compare that to car sizes in Europe as it recovered from WW2. Think Cadillac boat like cars vs the Mini.
Also, cars are essential transportation in parts of the US and raising gas prices would/have result(ed) in a lot of protesting. In fact, high gas prices would be seen as regressive.
Volkswagen and the Japanese auto companies filled this role in the 60s, 70s and 80s. In the 90s foreign vehicles started on the same obesity trajectory, 2nd born generation regresses to the mean.
For example, a subcompact Ford in the US might get 35mpg, vs 33mpg for the next size class up. The two cars cost about the same.
In Europe, Ford will sell the same subcompact body style with a smaller engine, and maybe a diesel, and it’ll get 50+ mpg.
No one buys the tiny gas guzzler, in the US and then Ford execs claim there’s no market for fuel efficient cars in the US.
It was this way 5-10 years ago; maybe it changed since then.
Europeans don't seem anymore excited about taking what I'd call "city cars" on the highway than Americans are. That being said: I think far more Europeans can spend almost all their time in their local city and don't NEED to get on a highway with large trucks and vehicles. In the US that's basically unheard of unless you're in a large city. I'm sure during holiday the roads look quite different than a regular workday.
I'm guessing if you compared New York to most of Europe you'd see similar numbers, public transit and city layout in the rest of the US basically makes that impossible.
I've wondered what it would be like if there were cities with tight, maybe even exclusionary urban areas. "you must be less than this big to enter downtown"
There are some cities in Florida where retired people can drive golf carts, and it has become very popular.
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/ff-ecars/
Once we arrived in Chicago I kind of started to sweat because I'm used to European city parking spots. How many times will have to retry to park this huge car, but to my surprise the parking spaces are also huge.
They would be the easiest to automate fully (lower risk of damaging pedestrians or others on the road) and do not pollute inside densely populated areas.
Your average speed in a city center is pretty low anyway, so if it could be automated to avoid slow starts when lights turn green (I have to imagine that automated cars could simultaneously start, rather than having to make sure the car in front of you had committed to driving before you do) would actually improve the experience and average speed immensely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VHstY5pKhw&ab_channel=YOUCA...
It's a “coal car” that's much easier to upgrade, en masse with millions like it, to end-to-end cleaner technology than a cat with an onboard fossil fuel engine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
58% of china's energy comes from coal alone (which I suspect is where you get your fossil fuel figure)
20% comes from oil and related fluids
8% natural gas
so 86% fossil fuels. Of the remaining 14%, 2% is nuclear and 11% is renewable.
> and that's dropping fast (65% in 2019)
The percentage is dropping slowly because newer forms of generation such as solar are coming online. China is using all the energy it can get from every sector, they are rapidly adding coal capacity along with everything else. China has no qualms about opening hundreds of coal plants per year, except they are also manufacturing millions of solar panels as well.
Different cars for different markets and budget. $4k car is great for driving a few miles or once a week. Or within city limits. Generally, you get what you pay for so a $4k can't offer what a $80K car does. Common sense.
This seemed like a better alternative to cheap electric cars. I don’t know how to convert Lahks to dollars, but the original article said around $5000 usd.