If we can properly manage the traffic, I do think that we can slowly reduce the pollution produced by cars. One of the best alternatives is to go EV, but it is not yet heavily adopted by the public; thus, we can utilize our public transportation to reduce carbon emissions.
Maybe the author resides in CA? Not sure how you could also omit the Prius or how the other automakers are addressing sourcing concerns. It is a shame because the start of the article was engrossing.
Going forward, I image that MDS is much less of a concern than the power grid and clean energy generation
Ok, but please don't cherry-pick a provocation from an article and then rush into the HN thread with it. This is how we get tedious flamewars. Indignation plus sensationalism (a.k.a. flamebait) reliably gets the most upvotes (this was the top comment before I marked it off topic); the idea of this forum is to try to dampen that if we can.
There are plenty of interesting things in the article, and we should be focusing on interesting things, not maddening things.
I think focusing on the interesting points of an article vs. maddening bits is a good approach.
Certain topics still seem to incite flame wars and upvote/downvote wars; I'm not even sure how to address the latter, though the HN guidelines (such as evaluating the argument rather than the speaker) seem sensible and may mitigate the former.
I think it's interesting and worth mentioning when an author inserts an opinion disguised as a fact. I almost read right past it myself. If I hadn't posted my comment, others might've read the same article and internalized the author's opinon as historical truth.
A friend of mine has a Henney Kilowatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henney_Kilowatt. Its neat, but that thing is a death trap. Early electric cars just had to compromise too much to even work.
The New Yorker writer James Thurber mentioned electric cars several times in his 1933 autobiography "My Life and Hard Times". (If you haven't read it, it's a real classic!)
In the chapter "Draft Board Nights" his grandfather, who is a Civil War veteran, is trying to enlist in the Great War and takes his grandmother's electric car to go find General William Tecumseh Sherman. "[A] man who (or so he often told us) had driven a four-horse McCormick reaper when he was five years old did not intend to be thrown by an electric runabout."
Thermodynamics is why electric was buried by gasoline in the 19th century. That reason hasn't changed! Only people who have zero STEM knowledge seemed to think otherwise.
My guess would be they're thinking a that running an engine to move the wheels of a car will always be more efficient than running an engine to move the wheel of a generator, transmit the electricity, charge a battery and then move the wheels of a car.
Neglecting that power plants can run at temperatures small car engines can't, getting better carnot efficiencies, or using non-combustion methods of generating electricity.
While cars are nice in dense 19th century cities. Not strictly needed when you had street cars and walkable neighborhoods. And delivery services. They are more useful in rural America which was 60-70% of the population. And Rural houses didn't have electricity. No electricity no way to charge a car. Even city houses had very limited service, 10-20 amp was common.
No power semiconductors which meant inefficient motors and chargers.
Lead acid batteries have a quarter the energy density and output power that modern lithium ion batteries do. Which meant range sucked. And horsepower sucked.
I live next to a boulevard, 5th floor. The amount of black stuff that gets onto my balcony every day is absolutely insane. And to think that we are breathing that! I would fully embrace a full conversion for electric vehicle for that alone, this isn't just CO2, this is our air quality in cities.
My VW ID.4 has two different breaking modes, one doesn’t use regenerative at all and the other is not nearly as aggressive as Teslas. Probably overall it’ll be less, but I expect variation depending on the manufacturer and consumer preference.
They are even louder than fuel burning cars over 50kph due to the extra weight. I would still rather hear loud tire noise than breathe exhaust as a pedestrian though
Obviously this applies to the ~average~ car. A hellcat or sports bike tearing down the highway will be louder but the consistent drone of tire noise increases slightly for electric cars.
They still contribute a good amount to localized air quality since there is still tire particulate at play, and these vehicles tend to weigh more than a given ice car of the same class.
I’m not sure where you got the 12% number from as I’ve seen other numbers. But regardless it’s an AND game, not OR. We should be minimizing everything simultaneously, as all those gains add up. It’s also not like all changes will be a step function either, so as things gradually change we absolutely need the addition rather than waiting for certain CO2 sources to become 0%.
So, your argument is that double digit percentages are not worth it? I'd say that's low hanging fruit. A no-brainer. Get it done and then worry about the rest separately.
By the way, it's not just cars. Basically most forms of road transport can be electrified. Everything from the largest mining trucks, long distance trucks, short distance delivery vans, garbage trucks, delivery vans, etc. Viable products already exist in each of those categories. We just need more of them. Making more will make them cheaper and even more viable. The main bottleneck here is production capacity.
The loss of horses meant immobilisation of the economy.... Really neat article about dependence on horses and their infrastructure.
Sounds familiar. Just as we were talking about emp pulses, how our economy would be destroyed, etc.
Pretty frustrating that they compare cobalt and rare earth to sustainability concerns for biomass and fossil fuels. Neither are required. To use Tesla as an example (because that's what the article used): Tesla's Model Ses originally had no rare earth magnets whatsoever in their motors, being induction motors, and Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, used for most of Tesla's cars in China (where that chemistry is more common), use zero Cobalt. Plus in both cases, the substances aren't used up and destroyed as in fossil fuels but reused again and again, hundreds or thousands of times (and at end of life can be recycled), making the problem literally orders of magnitude less dramatic than with fossil fuels.
It's really frustrating that it's so common to try to shoe-horn electric cars into the old narrative, but it's just a completely different story as fossil fuels. That isn't to say you CAN'T have problems with ethical mining, or ethical anything, but it just is not anything at all like the problems associated with fossil fuels. It doesn't make sense to collapse a complete different set of issues into the existing narrative, and to do it to generate clicks is reprehensible. You would think, with a title like "lost history of the electric car," they would do a small amount of research around lithium ion chemistry and rare earth metals and actually inform the viewer instead of repeating tired misconceptions that the semi-informed have.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 81.1 ms ] threadGoing forward, I image that MDS is much less of a concern than the power grid and clean energy generation
This kind of gratuitous editorial speculation, based on precisely zero evidence in an otherwise factual article, is why I tend to avoid The Guardian.
There are plenty of interesting things in the article, and we should be focusing on interesting things, not maddening things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Certain topics still seem to incite flame wars and upvote/downvote wars; I'm not even sure how to address the latter, though the HN guidelines (such as evaluating the argument rather than the speaker) seem sensible and may mitigate the former.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Dauphine
In the chapter "Draft Board Nights" his grandfather, who is a Civil War veteran, is trying to enlist in the Great War and takes his grandmother's electric car to go find General William Tecumseh Sherman. "[A] man who (or so he often told us) had driven a four-horse McCormick reaper when he was five years old did not intend to be thrown by an electric runabout."
Neglecting that power plants can run at temperatures small car engines can't, getting better carnot efficiencies, or using non-combustion methods of generating electricity.
While cars are nice in dense 19th century cities. Not strictly needed when you had street cars and walkable neighborhoods. And delivery services. They are more useful in rural America which was 60-70% of the population. And Rural houses didn't have electricity. No electricity no way to charge a car. Even city houses had very limited service, 10-20 amp was common.
No power semiconductors which meant inefficient motors and chargers.
Lead acid batteries have a quarter the energy density and output power that modern lithium ion batteries do. Which meant range sucked. And horsepower sucked.
so electric domestic cars are not going to do a lot...
Tire dust will still be a problem.
I can hear ICE engines accelerating roaringly from miles away. I do not hear the same from electric cars.
Obviously this applies to the ~average~ car. A hellcat or sports bike tearing down the highway will be louder but the consistent drone of tire noise increases slightly for electric cars.
I think we have to make cars more efficient, make them smaller _and_ decrease their use.
By the way, it's not just cars. Basically most forms of road transport can be electrified. Everything from the largest mining trucks, long distance trucks, short distance delivery vans, garbage trucks, delivery vans, etc. Viable products already exist in each of those categories. We just need more of them. Making more will make them cheaper and even more viable. The main bottleneck here is production capacity.
It's really frustrating that it's so common to try to shoe-horn electric cars into the old narrative, but it's just a completely different story as fossil fuels. That isn't to say you CAN'T have problems with ethical mining, or ethical anything, but it just is not anything at all like the problems associated with fossil fuels. It doesn't make sense to collapse a complete different set of issues into the existing narrative, and to do it to generate clicks is reprehensible. You would think, with a title like "lost history of the electric car," they would do a small amount of research around lithium ion chemistry and rare earth metals and actually inform the viewer instead of repeating tired misconceptions that the semi-informed have.