Heaviness of EV trucks is one of the reasons I can't actually buy one. I'm in sand pretty often and after watching videos of trucks like the Hummer (which is probably the heaviest of them all), I don't think I could safely use one without fear of getting stuck when they all weigh 7000+ pounds. I think the lightning might be the lightest but then you'll end up with 150 miles of effective range. The hummer weighs about 10,000 lbs!
RVs get stuck all the time. Sand driving isn't all down to one variable. RVs are terrible because the back wheels will just dig themselves into a hole. Check out the youtube channel "Matt's offroad recovery". There's a ton of big pickups and RVs that just get themselves in trouble and dig themselves deep. Their recovery vehicles are usually comparatively light Jeep Cherokees and a custom tow rig they built.
You need those balloon tires if you want to do that. You see a lot of them in iceland. Beach sand is a little different though because it's compacted by the water.
Using the top and bottom of the battery adds very little wear. What is bad for a battery is leaving it at high or low states of charge for an extended period. Occasionally on road trips going down to low states of charge or filling all the way before departing is fine.
Being at any low level of charge at or above indicated 0% is fine. In fact that is the longest lasting way to store the car, very low charge. What is bad is going below the minimum rating for the cell, which is a bit below when the car says 0%.
So driving down to 0% is fine, doing so and letting the car sit for a few days can be bad
You can go below 10% for as long as you want, you just can't go below 0%.
Going above 90% is also fine, there isn't any step change in harm to the pack at any given percentage, degradation over time just steadily increases the more you charge the pack. Charging to 100% for a few hours before a trip is fine. Leaving the car at 100% for a month would accelerate wear a bit.
What matters in sand isn't vehicle weight but contact pressure, which is dictated by tire pressure. That's why tanks use tracks. A giant M1 Abrams tank has a contact pressure dramatically lower than any car. Its weight is spread across the tracks. You could drive a 30,000lb vehicle on sand, so long as it has enough soft tires to keep the contact pressure down to something like 10psi. Deflate your tires before you get stuck in the sand.
Conversely, this is why road bikes are horrible on soft surfaces. With narrow tires at 100+psi a bicycle has a higher contact pressure than any car or SUV and so sinks in sand.
For sure, but you'd need big big tires to do that with a heavy truck like an EV when you can do that with a much smaller and cheaper tire with a ford maverick for instance.
I'm surprised modern cars don't have automatic tyre inflators/deflators.
That way, when going slow on the mud, you can go all the way down to 5 PSI for great traction. And on the highway you can go up to 40 PSI so you don't overheat the tyres or destroy the rims when you hit a stone.
It could auto inflate or deflate depending on speed, terrain, and tyre temperature. And obviously a manual override for those who want ultimate control.
Some specialized vehicles such as the HMMWV (Humvee) do have such systems for enhanced off road mobility. But the necessary compressor, air lines, and sensors are complex, heavy, and prone to leaks. It's just totally impractical for regular civilian vehicles. Just stick a little portable 12V air compressor in your trunk if you expect to deflate your tires for driving on soft ground.
Logging trucks have this as well in some regions. The conditions for hauling can make it a requirement to just get in and out of the bush, and save wear and tear so the roads don’t get as rutted and need less maintenance in wet seasons
Many off road enthusiasts add onboard air compressors for this exact reason. There's no way to make this push button as there's no way to connect the compressor directly to the tire all the time, at least with anything resembling normal wheels and tires.
I'm not surprised modern cars don't have them, they'd add a good bit of cost to an already crazy expensive vehicle for a feature that the vast majority of people would practically never use. The vast majority of cars never leave the pavement.
> It would probably pay for itself in reduced fuel/rolling resistance when going fast in a straight line on the highway.
Just having your tires inflated right at the start of your trip does that. TPMS systems will already tell you what your tire pressure is, and with so many cars ditching the spare and going with an inflator+tire goop kit the car already has an inflator you can use. As mentioned, the vast majority of cars aren't leaving the pavement, so as long as they keep their tires inflated properly its not an issue.
That little compressor inside the wheel is then adding unsprung weight, which is bad. You normally want to try and reduce that as much as possible for your suspension's sake. You'd then also need more complicated wheel assemblies. That area of the car also takes a lot of abuse with all kinds of nasty stuff kicked up in there, not exactly the place where you would want to keep an air compressor. You're also then putting this minature air compressor in the space that takes the most physical abuse in the car. You also then need a way more complicated hub design with gearing and clutches inside to properly drive the compressor when needed. This would be a way worse style of doing it compared to existing designs which just run air hoses to each hub with a central air compressor tucked away someplace safe and protected.
If I had a choice between a car that just had an inflator kit in the trunk versus one with four mini air compressors and tiny transmissions and clutches in the wheel hubs along with complicated non-normal wheels and was overall more expensive, I know exactly which car I'd take every time.
Hard to blame someone for not wanting huge tires on their vehicle, once you get over 33s the prices for tires seems to climb exponentially. Plus the hit you take to gas mileage (or range in this case).
If you're not in sand often enough to "get good" you're probably not in sand often enough for slight vehicle to vehicle differences to matter to you.
The difference between a Tacoma and a Ram 1500 is inconsequential and nobody is cross shopping a dually truck and a minivan. Even among comparable vehicles the performance goals they had when programming it are going to dominate over weight differences.
Source: Grew up on a glorified sandbar full of jerks
I'm in sand quite a bit. Several times a month. If your comment means getting good enough not to get stuck, my concern is more I don't want to actively fight a heavy machine. Getting stuck in the sand in a hot climate out west is a recipe for dying so I want advantages, not disadvantages and a heavier truck is a disadvantage. I can offset that with massive tires but a small truck with massive tires is even better.
I wouldn't buy one because they are such profoundly antisocial vehicles. Size, mass, and racecar like acceleration do not exist in a vacuum. They destroy pavement, they are dangerous to basically everyone around, difficult to control, and also incredibly loud at highway speeds.
They are not vehicles intended for living in a community, and it's a travesty that the government has not put regulation in place meant to protect those outside the vehicle.
At highway speeds, tire and wind noise dominate over engine noise, even for ICE cars. That "roaring" sound you hear emanate from a highway is actually due to those two factors.
Tire noise in particular is affected by vehicle weight (I suspect--don't quote me--as a square of the weight). EVs are MUCH heavier that comparable ICE cars. The hummer EV weighs 9,000 lb (!). So they are extremely loud at highway speeds.
There aren't similarly sized/weight ICE trucks, the similar trucks are lighter because gasoline is more energy-dense than lithium ion batteries.
The H2 (the big 3-row one) weighs 6,400 lbs. The H3 (the 'small' 2-row version with seating for just under 5 adults) weighs 4,600 lbs. The HEV (ostensibly "Hummer Electric Vehicle", but obviously pronounced "Heavy") weighs 9,400 lbs and only seats 5.
All three are absurd tools to select for transporting a 160 lbs human between point A and point B.
If you change the numbers from 160lbs to 300lbs and 9,400lbs to 2,000lbs does it really seem any less absurd if you're looking at it strictly from a numbers point of view?
Yes? It's a factor of 6.6 instead of a factor of almost 60.
I can understand engineering constraints that say a vehicle with an energy source and controls and comfort and so on requires some multiplier that might not be less than 1, but 58x is a lot.
A 2000 pound theoretical car is 60x more weight than a bike that can also carry you. Looking strictly at numbers, a car doesn't make sense to transport a person in most cases. I'm not advocating for less cars, just that looking at it as a weight to payload issue doesn't make sense to begin with.
TBH a 10,000 lb Hummer is probably worse for the environment than some luxury cars. The upfront carbon cost for manufacturing the thing will be enormous because its so big.
I don’t know about Hummers in particular, but most modern trucks are very quiet at highway speeds, at least with highway tires. My RAM 1500 is quieter inside on the highway than my BMW 3 series or my Ford Escape or any Tesla I’ve driven. The V8 engine is also quieter at idle and at highway speeds than either of those aforementioned cars. My very topical truck handles pretty decently too (for its size at least).
Are you sure that's not due to better sound proofing of the cabin? I'm referring to the noise outside the vehicle.
As for handling:
The hummer EV has a 0 - 65mph time of 1.4 seconds...and a stopping distance from 70mph of 200 feet.
That means if a person were to step on the gas for a second and a half, and a pedestrian happened to be crossing the street 80 yards away, that person would be dead.
Outside the vehicle, the engine and tires are pretty quiet too, not much different from any other car.
As for hummer level acceleration, I agree that’s unnecessary and would be dangerous to use in an urban area. 0-65 mph in 1.4 seconds sounds wrong though, it’s more like 4 seconds. Car and Driver measured 3.3 seconds for 0-60 excluding rollout time. Accelerating full blast in such a fast car in an urban area would be reckless on the driver’s part, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drive it safely and reasonably in urban areas.
The Hummer’s bad stopping distance is from a combination of heavy weight an off-road focused tires not optimized for dry pavement grip. With that said, its stopping distance is only around 15% worse than the average car.
As an example of stopping distances and cornering grip of a more typical pickup like my RAM 1500, on stock tires, it’s 187 ft from 70 mph, and cornering grip is 0.78 G. For comparison, a Toyota Corolla has a 174 ft stopping distance and 0.82 G grip on stock tires, so around 5% better but not drastically better than the RAM truck.
True, all vehicles (ICE or EV) are fairly noisy at highway speeds outside, though a pickup truck with highway tires isn’t much noisier than say Corolla or a Nissan Leaf moving at the same speed. Off road tires, particularly mud terrain tires, can get noisy though, as those tires were optimized for grip in mud rather than noise or highway fuel efficiency.
The reason I can't ever buy one is also weight. The hummer will very unlikely ever be sold in Europe as it weighs more than the max allowed for a regular drivers license. You will need a special license and you will also be very limited where you can drive it.
Reminds me of a story back in engineering school where a boat holding the appropriate amount of passengers at full capacity became overloaded and sank.
Turned out that the average weight of an American had increased in the decades since the Coast Guard had most recently set guidelines.
While I didn't find a link to the story, this news article [1] references a couple of boats sinking for that (assumed) reason and the Coast Guard increasing its average assumed weight per person by 25 pounds.
Makes me wonder about a lot of infrastructure for EVs. Bridges are an obvious one but I wonder about overpasses in areas that get a lot of standing traffic.
There's no incentive to spend the labor calculating what you really "need" when you can just do napkin math based on naive assumptions and be pretty sure you're within whatever safety factor the clipboard and vest types insist the thing you are dealing with be rated to.
This is all fine until the errors sync up and you get a failure where you wouldn't have gotten one if you had been spending the labor to think critically about it from the start. But hey, the safety vest people get to pat themselves on the back for the rule and implement a new one for each failure, the responsibility chain gets muddied among various parties (insurers and lawyers love that). Everybody wins! /s
Then there's the story about the man who drowned in a stream with an average depth of six inches.
-- in R. Jain, "The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling," Wiley- Interscience, New York, NY, April 1991, ISBN:0471503361.
Also reminds me of elevators and looking at the nameplates there. Number of people and then divide with weight under...
Not that I worry at all, elevators have massive safety margins and sensors to indicate when they are truly overload. And even then they should be safe enough.
Were those ever intended to "match" based on an average person? I always figured that max-occupancy was for cramming 20 kids into an elevator and they will never get to the weight limit and max-weight was more for moving heavy items and maybe a lot of very obese people.
Indeed, saw a lift in London last week that had a capacity of 13 people, but a maximum weight of 800kg. That's 61.5kg/person, or 135 lbs. Not sure that's realistic in any group of adults in the western world.
I can't think of any elevator placard I've ever seen where the rating was something you could realistically exceed. You'd need a "some tradesmen moving a big piece of equipment" or "highschool sports team sardine packing themselves in there for amusement" type of situation.
> Turned out that the average weight of an American had increased in the decades since
I suspect that part of the reason that the teenager fell out of the FreeFall drop tower ride in that horrifying video from a year or two ago was because he was too physically big to click the actual latch on the ride's locking mechanism. Who knows if the ride operator was trained on checking people or if he was scared of a confrontation or what the situation was there, but a lot of the world's engineering might not be designed for heavy people. Unfortunately people are going to suffer because of this.
This was factor in the crash of Air Midwest Flight 5481
> the plane was actually overloaded and out of balance due to the use of FAA-approved (but actually incorrect) passenger weight estimates. When checked, the NTSB found that the actual weight of an average passenger was more than 20 pounds (9 kg) greater than estimated. After checking the actual weight of baggage retrieved from the crash site and passengers (based on information from next-of-kin and the medical examiner), the aircraft was found to be actually 580 lb (264 kg) above its maximum allowable take-off weight, with its center of gravity 5% to the rear of the allowable limit.
The worst offenders are Hummer, Rolls Royce, Mercedes, Audi, Polestar/Volvo, BMW, Cadillac, and Rivian, which dominate the top-50 spots. Interestingly, the world's two best-selling EV models, Tesla's models 3 and Y, are near the bottom of the list, with weights comparable to those of much smaller cars that have modest range and a lot less space for passengers and storage. Some Hyundai, Kia, and BYD models also come out looking quite good in terms of weight.
Slightly related is road wear. According to "Pedal Fort Collins", a 8,600 pound vehicle does over 20x the damage of a 4,000 pound one[0]. More pieces throughout the past few decades have also covered this [1-2]
Then turbos came along and engines started to shrink, so tax went down.
As an answer to that CO2 taxes were introduced.
Then companies started to aim for <= 99 gram CO2 / km, with super-small diesels.
But then the report of VW's number fudging came along which caused a shift towards gas again.
I don't know now how it works today, with EVs and small gas ICEs with big turbos etc. I do know that they mandate DEF on diesel cars, and OPF on gas cars.
Maybe not in the USA but you would in the Netherlands and I bet elsewhere as well.
For example, monthly tax for a gasoline car that weighs between 1051 and 1150 kilograms is EUR 125, for cars weighing between 2151 and 2250 you would pay EUR 378.
In the U.S. the reason is the Republican party. If we pay an amount to register a vehicle based on weight due to the increased damage it does to the roads then it will be portrayed as a radical environmentalist plot to get rid of SUVs and trucks. Republicans as love the idea of pay-as-you-use government services except when it comes to infrastructure. For example, it’s OK for a $25 traffic fine to include $100 in court costs but don’t under any circumstance expect one to pay more for gasoline to pay for road maintenance.
Your average techie/doctor/lawyer/manager who thinks he needs a 4Runner for his 2-kid household is not going to be dissuaded by hundreds of dollars here or their when their mortgage is thousands a month. You need a huge tax. That huge tax would be punitive on all sorts of "legitimate" activity.
If it was a politics thing and not a "everybody who looks into it with any depth decides it's dumb" thing then some state like MD, RI, CT, or MA would have taxed it already.
Furthermore, we're talking about "damage" (in sarcasm quotes because expected and normal wear isn't damage in any normal sense of the word) power equation here[1]. So basically everything that isn't a class 6/7/8 truck is inconsequential for a road that has any portion of its traffic made up by those vehicles. Since those trucks basically run the economy someone has to pay for it. There's really little political will to engage in an obvious exercise of "picking who to screw" like that vs an imperfect but fairly fair fuel tax.
You are correct that the desire to subsidize commercial activity plays a role. Republicans may not have power in a state like CT but there is still a desire not to be beat up on an issue that will play well to the masses. For instance, Michelle Obama advocated for better nutrition for school lunch programs. No reasonable person could possibly have seen fault with this but after Fox News attacked her over this it became a dead issue.
EDIT: It is definitely not a dumb idea as you suggest. Many counties have sensible policies on this issue and yet they manage to trudge along without much trouble. As I said it is OK to advocate for pay-as-you-use government so long as people like you don’t pay for your negative externalities too often.
Various places have been doing exactly this for decades and while I'm sure there are plenty of complaints, it's not exactly something you hear about on FOX news.
Motorbike $50.52
Vehicle with curb weight of 4,500 lbs or less with a payload capacity of 2,499 lbs or less. $95.42
Vehicle with curb weight of 4,501 lbs or more with a payload capacity of 2,499 lbs or less. $151.55
Vehicle, Truck, pickup truck with ... a gross weight of 16,000 lbs or less or with a payload capacity of 2,500 lbs or more. $224.51
Truck or vehicle with a gross weight of 16,001 lbs or more with a payload capacity of 2,500 lbs or more. $505.16
Interestingly, minivans are most commonly the thing that surprise people. The lower trim levels usually qualify for the $95 annual sticker but the upper trim levels just barely cross the threshold and must pay the $151 annual sticker.
I don’t think anywhere in the U.S. taxes for registering vehicles and gas are enough to pay for roads. These charges do not pay the “true” costs of vehicles’ damage to the roads.
It's a tricky thing to implement as the road damage is typically quoted as being proportional to the fourth power of axle weight. That means that either the heaviest vehicles would become economically unviable due to the taxation (which I think should be the case) or most consumer vehicles would be too light to make a meaningful taxation contribution.
A 2000 pound vehicle driven an average of 15000 miles per year does $x of damage to the roads. X is a calculable figure. Tax the vehicle to at least pay $x. If it is in the pennies then tax that amount. That a heavier vehicle does more damage just means calculating the appropriate amount to tax it.
It could work out that it costs more to implement the smaller vehicle tax than it would recover in revenue. Also, there's a major problem with logistics companies having considerable power over politicians, so I can see problems with getting them to pay for their considerable share of the road repair costs.
This is because their campaigns are paid for in large part for by oil and gas companies. These positions they take are sadly rational given this. The solution is campaign finance reform.
As a Seattleite, I don't think it's fair to blame Republicans in this case: my city, county, and state are dominated by Democrats who promote Vision Zero[1] yet refuse to do anything about these obscenely large (and growing) vehicles.
Michigan is the home of the US auto industry and that state is filled with politicians from the Democratic party. Ford and GM are making some mighty big vehicles and I'm sure their elected representatives (Democrats) are doing their best to encourage it.
Where's the disconnect? The OP claimed it was purely a republican move. The reality is that the powerful people in Michigan are Democrats and the state's top tier companies make some of the heaviest cars on the market. If the Democrats wanted to do something about it, they could make the cars illegal and also put some of their citizens out of work.
It's safe to say that no Republican is going to win city/county/state-wide office around here, so the "attacks" are moot. For example, the state's hurtling towards passing an emergency AWB into law, all while Republicans yell and scream. So, again, the Republicans ain't the problem.
Are there any policies that Democrats could enact that would make them lose support? The answer is clearly yes. Is taxing vehicles enough to pay the true cost of road maintenance such an issue? I don’t know but it may be one that Democrats don’t want to tangle with. Such taxes are done at the state and national level and I think this is an issue they don’t want to give Republicans a win on.
Edit: The nation as a whole has shifted very much rightward the last 50 years. Instead of saying Republicans I should maybe say “right leaning politics”.
Office-chair-stealing Tim Eyman and his supporters would likely get an initiative passed that disallows any limits or weight-based fees. It's not a winning strategy, unfortunately.
But the reality is here in the States it's not the EVs that are the weight problems - it's the mega trucks and mega SUVs. The vehicles people drive today are comically large compared to those we were driving when I was a kid.
In the states, this is generally covered by fuel taxes. Older and heavier vehicles use more fuel, which generates more tax revenue. The model breaks down with EVs though, which is why some states have started to implement EV specific ad valorem taxes.
Is tire wear roughly proportional to road wear (in states where chains and studs are illegal)? Increasing tire tax would have negative effects (encouraging people to wear their tires dangerously thin, etc.) Encouraging tire manufacturers to use more durable formulations would likely increase road wear, but reduce amounts of tire dust pollution.
In any case, it's not a perfect solution, but does a tire tax more closely approximate taxing road wear vs. a fuel tax or an annual flat tax based on vehicle weight?
In this context, 20 times the damage is effectively 20 times 0. The real damage to roads comes from the big trucks like Garbage trucks and 18 wheelers.
Exactly. My contact in CalTrans tells me that because public roads are built to handle the big trucks, the wear caused by any vehicle under 10,000 lbs is effectively zero.
That cost gets wrapped up in your insurance rates. If your car actually does cost more then people with your type of car will pay higher rates. If you as a driver are more likely to hit other cars or people, then your personal rates will be higher.
That only works if you (or your insurer) are actually held responsible to injuries done to people.
In most of the US, you can pretty much kill people with impunity with a car as long as you aren't doing something grossly in violation of traffic laws. Drivers have almost completely externalized the cost of injuries caused their excessively large vehicles.
Very curious how governments will approach taxing these as gas tax revenues shrink. I know in some places your registration is higher but after talking with a coworker who pays more to register his EV, he admits it's negligible compared to the amount he'd pay in gas taxes with an ICE---just not an "invisible" tax like gas is. Doesn't seem as clean (ha) as Fed gas taxes, state, etc. Federal level car registration sounds a bit nightmarish, though I guess a registry is probably already being managed given the EV tax credits. Anyway, just thoughts.
When's the last time you saw a base model F150? Almost all F150s either have crew or extended cab, a bigger engine, bling, etc. And the OP asked about RAM, which is ~1000 pounds heavier, mostly due to its steel frame rather than the aluminum bodied F150.
About five minutes ago. I see them all the time, practically every day I go outside.
> Almost all F150s either have crew or extended cab, a bigger engine, bling, etc.
All of that still doesn't double the weight. And yeah the RAM is heavier from the start, but still its not twice as heavy even with a lot of those options. The curb weight of the heaviest RAM is < 6,000lbs, the lighest Model 3 is a bit over 3,600lbs. 3,600 * 2 = 7,200, and 7,200 > 6,000. And the heavier 3 is 4,200lbs, 4,200 * 2 = 8,400, and once again 8,400 > 6,000.
The claim here was that trucks are twice as heavy as Model 3's. An average Model 3 isn't that much lighter than most trucks. Far from half the weight.
A RAM 1500 weighs around 4900-5500 lbs depending on spec (cab size, bed size, 4x4, engine choice etc.). That’s around the same weight as lots of EV sedans like the BMW i4, Mercedes-Benz EQE, Lucid Air, Porsche Taycan. A Mercedes-Benz EQS or Tesla Model X both weigh more than my crew cab V8 pickup.
Looks like Model 3 can weigh 3,648 to 4,250 lbs depending on RWD/AWD and range (battery).
A basic F150 regular cab starts at 4,021 lbs.
But yeah, if you go quad cab, bump up from half-ton, get 4WD, etc. you can find much heavier examples. Still the heaviest is around 5,540 lbs which is about 50% heavier than the lightest Model 3, but nowhere near double.
Now a comparable car to a Model 3 (if you ignore their BMW / luxury price point) might be a Mazda 3:
Another part of infrastructure where EV could be just banned is underground parking space - just imagine EV car (or few) fire under multistory building - impossible to extinguish, high temperature fire for a long long time. Whole building structural integrity could become damaged rendering it unusable for residents for a long time - or forever.
I've seen supermarkets built on top of a parking garage every place I've been outside the U.S. ex. California. This includes the U.K., Europe, Canada (where cold and snow makes it convenient) and Brazil (where that's not a concern at all.)
In the U.S. I see structured parking is widespread in districts where the buildings are all >5 stories in places like Boston and New York but I've only seen a single-story business built on a parking garage in Southern California, and being practically an island, California barely counts as part of the U.S.
The excuse is going to be "we can't afford it" but the U.S. is richer than Europe and certainly Brazil. I see this often in neighborhoods that are somewhat high density but not Manhattan or Singapore density. From the "Strong Towns" perspective the extra cost of infrastructure required to support the Wal-Mart style of development might, if it were properly attributed, make structured parking look more economical.
And if they are old. How well have they been maintained? How much of that margin is left there? Or will cyclical loads cause any potential further damage? How often they are monitored for cracks or possible indicators of rusting for example?
Yeah, if we limit the comparison to Tesla, they work pretty hard to mitigate the weight difference, and ICE vehicles have also gotten larger and heavier. EVs are just the next little bit of mass.
It seems like we can either try to address climate change through carbon emissions by changing our relationship with cars or we can ensure nothing changes and ensure that by the time my kids are my age that the world is a fundementally worse place.
If the casualty is old parking garages, it seems like a fair deal
Edit: it's been a few years since I looked at the numbers but any conversation about ev fires is statistically FUD. Full stop
Electric cars were invented to save the motor industry, not the planet.
What we need to do is to get as many people using active travel as possible, and recognise that electric bikes and electric scooters solve almost all the issues with EVs. They're much lighter than ICE vehhicles, don't cause congestion and with removable batteries, don't have any problem with finding charging points. Also, with removable batteries, it's possible to just swap in a fully charged battery - makes sense for delivery companies that have a fleet of riders on e-scooters.
Unfortunately solving almost all of the problems isn't good enough. Electric bikes and scooters don't solve the problem of getting to work in a reasonable amount of time.
Your fallacy there is letting perfect be the enemy of good.
E-bikes and e-scooters are sufficient to transport a sizable percentage of the working population in less time that it would take a typical car, and the benefit is that every journey that they don't make in a car reduces congestion for everybody else as well as substantially less pollution.
I would consider that the main failing of the personal motor car is that people try to use it for everything and design roads/cities around it. However, that doesn't work when the population density increases as more and more roads need to be built which then separates the businesses and houses even more which then requires yet more roads. Rinse and repeat until you have people sat in traffic queues just in an attempt to commute to work.
Your fallacy is assuming that the e-bike is a "good" solution for me. I'm not even suggesting perfect, it's so far outside of realistic that it isn't a viable solution. According to Google Maps, each way of my commute is 47 minutes in car vs 4.5 hours on a bike.
It's not particularly relevant whether e-bikes are suitable for one person (i.e. you), but whether they are suitable for a lot of people in and around cities where the biggest issues with congestion and pollution are.
The problem is that if people only think in terms of the car form-factor, then congestion is not going to be improved and pollution from tyres is going to be almost as bad as the ICE vehicles that get replaced. Of course there's also the resource usage of cars in terms of building them and requiring lots more energy to shift them around due to their weight.
>recognise that electric bikes and electric scooters solve almost all the issues with EVs
and you are coming back with that it's not relevant whether they are suitable for me, but I'm saying it's quite relevant to me. I'm also not alone as everyone I know could by an e-bike, yet almost all of them still choose to buy cars. People are voting with their dollar and it seems to be a clear decision that e-bikes aren't a solution for them.
Unfortunately, people voting with their dollars is a large part of the global climate problem. However, e-bikes are certainly becoming popular, so I don't agree with your assessment.
In the U.S. (and other countries), there's the additional issue of people being stuck with how cities/suburbs have been arranged around the use of personal cars and don't have access to functional public transport or where active transport is impractical. However, there are plenty of places that haven't made that mistake to the same extent and that allows people to have flexibility in how they choose to travel.
2021, 500k e-bikes sold in the US vs 15+ million cars. That's to a population that is already saturated with cars. Even looking at 2-3x growth of e-bikes over the next decade, that still doesn't sound like your assessment is accurate. Cars are still much more popular in the US and going to be in the near term future.
You're probably correct about the U.S. but that does have built in car dependence. Worldwide, e-bikes and e-scooters are a very useful additional option for a lot of people and here in Bristol, UK, I see more and more of them everyday (assuming that's not just confirmation bias).
> Your fallacy there is letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Isn't that also approximately what you are doing? Yeah, maybe e-bikes and scooters are better for many (but certainly nowhere near all) use cases, but then regular bikes or public transportation or not needing to make a trip at all (e.g. WFH instead of RTO) are often better still. Your suggestion is clearly in the middle of the spectrum. Firing salvos to your left while ducking those from your right isn't going to be very persuasive.
Not really as I recognise that transportation involves many solutions - active transport (walking, cycling), EVs (including scooters, e-bikes and cars) and public transport. No one solution solves all the issues and journeys of different lengths will lend themselves to different solutions. Unfortunately, too many people think that only car transport is an answer and use cars for short trips when walking is likely to be quicker (certainly much healthier).
Worth Noting: The story is about 1960's-era parking structures in the UK. Which were designed & built for typical-in-the-UK-in-the-1960's-weight vehicles. Not American vehicles of either the 1960's, or of today. It mentions that the average UK car weight, back then, was "well under 3000 pounds". And that oft-neglected maintenance in the >1/2 century since construction has not improved the load-bearing capacity of many of those old parking structures.
The headline really ought to read, "heavy cars can break bad structures". The EV-ness or not is irrelevant.
Then again, I see that the Drive article is sourced from the UK Telegraph, which is generally very conservative and not accepting of the EV transition. So I would be very skeptical of the messaging here.
Again: if your parking garage is well looked after, and designed for the vehicles in your community, there is no problem, whether its a rack of gas F-150s in a lot in Dallas or a bevy of Teslas in San Jose.
I just looked it up. My new EV weighs 3680 lbs[0], or 1670 kg, which seems to be below average[1].
I still pay nothing in gas taxes, the primary funding for road maintenance. That doesn't seem quite right. I'd be happy to pay an annual fee based on miles driven and weight class.
I'd be more concerned about bridges than parking garages. With a garage it's not unreasonable to weigh vehicles as they enter and stop permitting admissions when the total load has exceeded the weight. You activate your No Vacancy sign until someone leaves. Of course that means you need to weigh cars on their way out as well.
There's not a solution like that for a bridge without seriously impacting traffic flow. Many of our bridges in the States have below a "C" rating. A couple have already collapsed, but that's still considered an irregularity. When can we expect them to start collapsing on a regular bases?
159 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadIt might surprise you what can be done with a sedan.
Sometimes it's even don't go below 20% of the battery which takes away even more.
So driving down to 0% is fine, doing so and letting the car sit for a few days can be bad
Conversely, this is why road bikes are horrible on soft surfaces. With narrow tires at 100+psi a bicycle has a higher contact pressure than any car or SUV and so sinks in sand.
That way, when going slow on the mud, you can go all the way down to 5 PSI for great traction. And on the highway you can go up to 40 PSI so you don't overheat the tyres or destroy the rims when you hit a stone.
It could auto inflate or deflate depending on speed, terrain, and tyre temperature. And obviously a manual override for those who want ultimate control.
Normal cars don't belong in the mud.
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/self-inflating-tire2.htm
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d9Ms9ia65I
The design could be as simple as a $15 compressor bolted inside each wheel, powered by either the rotation of the wheels or a slipring arrangement.
Just having your tires inflated right at the start of your trip does that. TPMS systems will already tell you what your tire pressure is, and with so many cars ditching the spare and going with an inflator+tire goop kit the car already has an inflator you can use. As mentioned, the vast majority of cars aren't leaving the pavement, so as long as they keep their tires inflated properly its not an issue.
That little compressor inside the wheel is then adding unsprung weight, which is bad. You normally want to try and reduce that as much as possible for your suspension's sake. You'd then also need more complicated wheel assemblies. That area of the car also takes a lot of abuse with all kinds of nasty stuff kicked up in there, not exactly the place where you would want to keep an air compressor. You're also then putting this minature air compressor in the space that takes the most physical abuse in the car. You also then need a way more complicated hub design with gearing and clutches inside to properly drive the compressor when needed. This would be a way worse style of doing it compared to existing designs which just run air hoses to each hub with a central air compressor tucked away someplace safe and protected.
If I had a choice between a car that just had an inflator kit in the trunk versus one with four mini air compressors and tiny transmissions and clutches in the wheel hubs along with complicated non-normal wheels and was overall more expensive, I know exactly which car I'd take every time.
I'd put money on the vast majority of people ignoring tire inflation unless they get a warning.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.138
The difference between a Tacoma and a Ram 1500 is inconsequential and nobody is cross shopping a dually truck and a minivan. Even among comparable vehicles the performance goals they had when programming it are going to dominate over weight differences.
Source: Grew up on a glorified sandbar full of jerks
They are not vehicles intended for living in a community, and it's a travesty that the government has not put regulation in place meant to protect those outside the vehicle.
(Jokes aside, most ICE trucks are not loud on the highway, unlike this one with a modified exhaust being demonstrated with wide open throttle.)
Tire noise in particular is affected by vehicle weight (I suspect--don't quote me--as a square of the weight). EVs are MUCH heavier that comparable ICE cars. The hummer EV weighs 9,000 lb (!). So they are extremely loud at highway speeds.
The H2 (the big 3-row one) weighs 6,400 lbs. The H3 (the 'small' 2-row version with seating for just under 5 adults) weighs 4,600 lbs. The HEV (ostensibly "Hummer Electric Vehicle", but obviously pronounced "Heavy") weighs 9,400 lbs and only seats 5.
All three are absurd tools to select for transporting a 160 lbs human between point A and point B.
I can understand engineering constraints that say a vehicle with an energy source and controls and comfort and so on requires some multiplier that might not be less than 1, but 58x is a lot.
Maybe its better than an F-250...
Maybe full sized SUV. But even a 5000lb Ranger Raptor is probably not a competitior.
As for handling:
The hummer EV has a 0 - 65mph time of 1.4 seconds...and a stopping distance from 70mph of 200 feet.
That means if a person were to step on the gas for a second and a half, and a pedestrian happened to be crossing the street 80 yards away, that person would be dead.
As for hummer level acceleration, I agree that’s unnecessary and would be dangerous to use in an urban area. 0-65 mph in 1.4 seconds sounds wrong though, it’s more like 4 seconds. Car and Driver measured 3.3 seconds for 0-60 excluding rollout time. Accelerating full blast in such a fast car in an urban area would be reckless on the driver’s part, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drive it safely and reasonably in urban areas.
The Hummer’s bad stopping distance is from a combination of heavy weight an off-road focused tires not optimized for dry pavement grip. With that said, its stopping distance is only around 15% worse than the average car.
As an example of stopping distances and cornering grip of a more typical pickup like my RAM 1500, on stock tires, it’s 187 ft from 70 mph, and cornering grip is 0.78 G. For comparison, a Toyota Corolla has a 174 ft stopping distance and 0.82 G grip on stock tires, so around 5% better but not drastically better than the RAM truck.
Turned out that the average weight of an American had increased in the decades since the Coast Guard had most recently set guidelines.
While I didn't find a link to the story, this news article [1] references a couple of boats sinking for that (assumed) reason and the Coast Guard increasing its average assumed weight per person by 25 pounds.
Makes me wonder about a lot of infrastructure for EVs. Bridges are an obvious one but I wonder about overpasses in areas that get a lot of standing traffic.
[1] https://eturbonews.com/overweight-americans-sink-old-boat-sa...
Using averages is scary for anything. There is always that day when the weight-loss club takes a boat trip, and suddenly the average doubles...
This is all fine until the errors sync up and you get a failure where you wouldn't have gotten one if you had been spending the labor to think critically about it from the start. But hey, the safety vest people get to pat themselves on the back for the rule and implement a new one for each failure, the responsibility chain gets muddied among various parties (insurers and lawyers love that). Everybody wins! /s
-- in R. Jain, "The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling," Wiley- Interscience, New York, NY, April 1991, ISBN:0471503361.
Not that I worry at all, elevators have massive safety margins and sensors to indicate when they are truly overload. And even then they should be safe enough.
I can't think of any elevator placard I've ever seen where the rating was something you could realistically exceed. You'd need a "some tradesmen moving a big piece of equipment" or "highschool sports team sardine packing themselves in there for amusement" type of situation.
I suspect that part of the reason that the teenager fell out of the FreeFall drop tower ride in that horrifying video from a year or two ago was because he was too physically big to click the actual latch on the ride's locking mechanism. Who knows if the ride operator was trained on checking people or if he was scared of a confrontation or what the situation was there, but a lot of the world's engineering might not be designed for heavy people. Unfortunately people are going to suffer because of this.
The safety mechanisms worked for me but not thanks to the humans operating it.
> the plane was actually overloaded and out of balance due to the use of FAA-approved (but actually incorrect) passenger weight estimates. When checked, the NTSB found that the actual weight of an average passenger was more than 20 pounds (9 kg) greater than estimated. After checking the actual weight of baggage retrieved from the crash site and passengers (based on information from next-of-kin and the medical examiner), the aircraft was found to be actually 580 lb (264 kg) above its maximum allowable take-off weight, with its center of gravity 5% to the rear of the allowable limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Midwest_Flight_5481
The worst offenders are Hummer, Rolls Royce, Mercedes, Audi, Polestar/Volvo, BMW, Cadillac, and Rivian, which dominate the top-50 spots. Interestingly, the world's two best-selling EV models, Tesla's models 3 and Y, are near the bottom of the list, with weights comparable to those of much smaller cars that have modest range and a lot less space for passengers and storage. Some Hyundai, Kia, and BYD models also come out looking quite good in terms of weight.
0: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh... (source is dead, so a blog reference is all I have)
1: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
2: https://www.gao.gov/products/109954
0: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/091116/pdfs/fhwatri-fold.pdf
Also, taxes make up about half our fuel price, so heavy vehicles tend to pay more tax.
Engine size was the number one driver of tax.
Then turbos came along and engines started to shrink, so tax went down.
As an answer to that CO2 taxes were introduced.
Then companies started to aim for <= 99 gram CO2 / km, with super-small diesels.
But then the report of VW's number fudging came along which caused a shift towards gas again.
I don't know now how it works today, with EVs and small gas ICEs with big turbos etc. I do know that they mandate DEF on diesel cars, and OPF on gas cars.
For example, monthly tax for a gasoline car that weighs between 1051 and 1150 kilograms is EUR 125, for cars weighing between 2151 and 2250 you would pay EUR 378.
If it was a politics thing and not a "everybody who looks into it with any depth decides it's dumb" thing then some state like MD, RI, CT, or MA would have taxed it already.
Furthermore, we're talking about "damage" (in sarcasm quotes because expected and normal wear isn't damage in any normal sense of the word) power equation here[1]. So basically everything that isn't a class 6/7/8 truck is inconsequential for a road that has any portion of its traffic made up by those vehicles. Since those trucks basically run the economy someone has to pay for it. There's really little political will to engage in an obvious exercise of "picking who to screw" like that vs an imperfect but fairly fair fuel tax.
[1] https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
EDIT: It is definitely not a dumb idea as you suggest. Many counties have sensible policies on this issue and yet they manage to trudge along without much trouble. As I said it is OK to advocate for pay-as-you-use government so long as people like you don’t pay for your negative externalities too often.
For example: https://ezbuy.chicityclerk.com/faq-vehicle-sticker
Interestingly, minivans are most commonly the thing that surprise people. The lower trim levels usually qualify for the $95 annual sticker but the upper trim levels just barely cross the threshold and must pay the $151 annual sticker.[1]: https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...
1. Not give an opponent an easy way to attack you that requires the masses to employ nuanced reasoning to understand why that attack is wrong.
2. Say things to your base to keep them voting for you even though you have no intention of implementing those policies.
Edit: The nation as a whole has shifted very much rightward the last 50 years. Instead of saying Republicans I should maybe say “right leaning politics”.
In any case, it's not a perfect solution, but does a tire tax more closely approximate taxing road wear vs. a fuel tax or an annual flat tax based on vehicle weight?
In most of the US, you can pretty much kill people with impunity with a car as long as you aren't doing something grossly in violation of traffic laws. Drivers have almost completely externalized the cost of injuries caused their excessively large vehicles.
Source: I spend a lot of time in NYC driving a minivan which counts as “oversized”.
:-)
In hindsight, it kind of makes sense, because all the force (weight) is applied at only four points, where the tires touch the ground.
[a] See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35525557
https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
My Model 3's roof would barely clear the headlights of one of those. And it looks like it weighs about half too, even with that large battery.
About five minutes ago. I see them all the time, practically every day I go outside.
> Almost all F150s either have crew or extended cab, a bigger engine, bling, etc.
All of that still doesn't double the weight. And yeah the RAM is heavier from the start, but still its not twice as heavy even with a lot of those options. The curb weight of the heaviest RAM is < 6,000lbs, the lighest Model 3 is a bit over 3,600lbs. 3,600 * 2 = 7,200, and 7,200 > 6,000. And the heavier 3 is 4,200lbs, 4,200 * 2 = 8,400, and once again 8,400 > 6,000.
The claim here was that trucks are twice as heavy as Model 3's. An average Model 3 isn't that much lighter than most trucks. Far from half the weight.
A basic F150 regular cab starts at 4,021 lbs.
But yeah, if you go quad cab, bump up from half-ton, get 4WD, etc. you can find much heavier examples. Still the heaviest is around 5,540 lbs which is about 50% heavier than the lightest Model 3, but nowhere near double.
Now a comparable car to a Model 3 (if you ignore their BMW / luxury price point) might be a Mazda 3:
3,088 to 3,391 lbs
https://www.thedrive.com/news/17287/massive-new-years-eve-pa...
I've seen supermarkets built on top of a parking garage every place I've been outside the U.S. ex. California. This includes the U.K., Europe, Canada (where cold and snow makes it convenient) and Brazil (where that's not a concern at all.)
In the U.S. I see structured parking is widespread in districts where the buildings are all >5 stories in places like Boston and New York but I've only seen a single-story business built on a parking garage in Southern California, and being practically an island, California barely counts as part of the U.S.
The excuse is going to be "we can't afford it" but the U.S. is richer than Europe and certainly Brazil. I see this often in neighborhoods that are somewhat high density but not Manhattan or Singapore density. From the "Strong Towns" perspective the extra cost of infrastructure required to support the Wal-Mart style of development might, if it were properly attributed, make structured parking look more economical.
Tesla Model 3: 1684 kg
That's a 10% weight penalty of EV over ICE for 2 popular comparable mid-sized sedan models
Source: https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bmw-3-2018-sedan-vs...
BMW X3: 1875 kg
Tesla Model Y: 1909 kg
That's ~2% for comparable mid-sized SUV models.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bmw-x3-2021-suv-vs-...
LGTM
It seems like we can either try to address climate change through carbon emissions by changing our relationship with cars or we can ensure nothing changes and ensure that by the time my kids are my age that the world is a fundementally worse place.
If the casualty is old parking garages, it seems like a fair deal
Edit: it's been a few years since I looked at the numbers but any conversation about ev fires is statistically FUD. Full stop
What we need to do is to get as many people using active travel as possible, and recognise that electric bikes and electric scooters solve almost all the issues with EVs. They're much lighter than ICE vehhicles, don't cause congestion and with removable batteries, don't have any problem with finding charging points. Also, with removable batteries, it's possible to just swap in a fully charged battery - makes sense for delivery companies that have a fleet of riders on e-scooters.
E-bikes and e-scooters are sufficient to transport a sizable percentage of the working population in less time that it would take a typical car, and the benefit is that every journey that they don't make in a car reduces congestion for everybody else as well as substantially less pollution.
I would consider that the main failing of the personal motor car is that people try to use it for everything and design roads/cities around it. However, that doesn't work when the population density increases as more and more roads need to be built which then separates the businesses and houses even more which then requires yet more roads. Rinse and repeat until you have people sat in traffic queues just in an attempt to commute to work.
The problem is that if people only think in terms of the car form-factor, then congestion is not going to be improved and pollution from tyres is going to be almost as bad as the ICE vehicles that get replaced. Of course there's also the resource usage of cars in terms of building them and requiring lots more energy to shift them around due to their weight.
>recognise that electric bikes and electric scooters solve almost all the issues with EVs
and you are coming back with that it's not relevant whether they are suitable for me, but I'm saying it's quite relevant to me. I'm also not alone as everyone I know could by an e-bike, yet almost all of them still choose to buy cars. People are voting with their dollar and it seems to be a clear decision that e-bikes aren't a solution for them.
In the U.S. (and other countries), there's the additional issue of people being stuck with how cities/suburbs have been arranged around the use of personal cars and don't have access to functional public transport or where active transport is impractical. However, there are plenty of places that haven't made that mistake to the same extent and that allows people to have flexibility in how they choose to travel.
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/e-bikes-are-gaining...
https://www.marklines.com/en/statistics/flash_sales/automoti...
https://www.precedenceresearch.com/e-bike-market
Isn't that also approximately what you are doing? Yeah, maybe e-bikes and scooters are better for many (but certainly nowhere near all) use cases, but then regular bikes or public transportation or not needing to make a trip at all (e.g. WFH instead of RTO) are often better still. Your suggestion is clearly in the middle of the spectrum. Firing salvos to your left while ducking those from your right isn't going to be very persuasive.
Then again, I see that the Drive article is sourced from the UK Telegraph, which is generally very conservative and not accepting of the EV transition. So I would be very skeptical of the messaging here.
Again: if your parking garage is well looked after, and designed for the vehicles in your community, there is no problem, whether its a rack of gas F-150s in a lot in Dallas or a bevy of Teslas in San Jose.
I still pay nothing in gas taxes, the primary funding for road maintenance. That doesn't seem quite right. I'd be happy to pay an annual fee based on miles driven and weight class.
0. https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/bolt-euv/specs
1. https://www.autolist.com/guides/average-weight-of-car
There's not a solution like that for a bridge without seriously impacting traffic flow. Many of our bridges in the States have below a "C" rating. A couple have already collapsed, but that's still considered an irregularity. When can we expect them to start collapsing on a regular bases?