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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

There is always a trade-off. Passive solar heating is a vastly better investment in terms of environmental impact. Even home solar panels is a better investment than this in terms of environmental impact.

I remember running the numbers and while I was walking to work and basically never driving keeping an ancient sub 25MPG in the city car was both much cheaper and actually better for the environment than buying a Prius. Note this was at ~1-3k miles driven per year.

So, my guess is it might have some small impact at the margins. But, mostly in convincing people to do something they where thinking of doing anyway.

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The environment is not just total carbon emissions.

It is also where you burn fossil fuels. This is why I'm so enthusiastic about Uber and Lyft in cities: The drivers have an incentive to use well-maintained vehicles instead of smoggy clunkers. If I can smell your exhaust, then you are doing something wrong.

The built environment also includes roads. Fuel-efficient cars pay less gas tax, and most are lighter than gas-guzzlers, but long-range electrics like the Teslas are monster road destroyers that pay nothing to road maintenance. I'm not arguing for fuel-wasting vehicles, though; I think people should be using cars far less. Congestion charge or something.

VA has fairly good emission tests every two years which keeps the old clunker pollution down. Without those I can see the temptation to let things slip a little.

At the time I would go weeks without driving / riding in a car. This was really for weekend trips where Uber is not really an option or once a month going for heavy things like water I did not want to carry home. I looked into car sharing services, but at the time there was no good ones in my area.

I do think there need to be significant changes to how road maintenance is subsidized, especially in the wake of more fuel efficient and even fuel-less vehicles. I think I've seen a similar concern in regards to bicyclists that I haven't seen a great solution for yet.

But I was wondering what exactly you meant by "Teslas are monster road destroyers"? This is the first I've heard this sentiment. Do you mean that they are so heavy they do more damage than most cars, or just that they are not paying towards roadwork, thereby doing more net damage than gas vehicles?

To your point, in Washington state electric car owners pay $100 a year extra tax to cover road use, since we don't buy gas, and that's how most road work is funded. $100 is actually a high bill, it worked out to about 20k miles of driving. This problem of increasing fuel efficiency is already hurting the ability of states of pay for their road work. I think the inevitable change is either paying a fee like ev do already per year, or paying based on mileage (and the usual argument of I wasn't even in the state most of the year).

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