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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

5% cute and 95% terrible to navigate.

Worth noting that unlike other delays, The Model 3's target date was originally December and then pushed up. July is 5 months ahead of the original schedule!

Model 3 Launch

ANNOUNCED: MAR 31, 2016

TARGET DUE DATE: DEC 31, 2017

REVISED DUE DATE: JUL 31, 2017

I'm very excited. Electric transportation is one of the most moral technologies we can work on to get out of oil's malthusian trap. I have a lot of respect for Musk pushing the envelope as much as he can.

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I would argue that building livable, walkable cities with solid public transport is a more "moral" goal. Think of megacities like Tokyo.

(but electric transport is good too) :)

That would be nice. But walkable megacities themselves do not transport food to feed ten billion people. Even in your megacity future, only oil can. The moral imperative is to move beyond that.

Exactly. Terrible city design is the underlying problem. Electric cars, nice as they are, mostly treat the symptoms.

>Electric transportation is one of the most moral technologies we can work on to get out of oil's malthusian trap

While I agree with the sentiment and can't wait for good mainstream electric vehicles, I would like to be pedantic and point out the possibility of generation of the electricity to run an electric vehicle being very dirty. As well as the (not current, but theoretical) possibility of using clean energy to synthesize combustion fuels for engines that efficiently clean all outputs.

A transport being electric does not automatically make it better.

Electricity is fungible in the sense that it can come from many sources. Oil is not-- it really only comes out of the ground. (Biofuels also have the same problem.)

You can think about making cars electric as removing a tight coupling between transportation and fuel. It creates a more generic interface, which will create more flexible implementations. For example: wind, solar, and using charged car battery fleets to balance the electric grid at peak times.

It's hard to see how combustion can ever be better than electric. Even in situations where you completely offset the carbon by synthesizing fuels with clean energy, you still have huge issues around air quality in dense urban cities.

Electric motors are also massively easier to maintain, have fewer moving parts, are quieter, etc etc.

Oil is also fungible, see e.g. biofuels made from sunlight using algae, or whale oil harvested from sperm whales.

We just don't bother with alternate sources because it's cheaper to pump it out of the ground, we wouldn't bother with alternate electricity generation either if we could just dig fully charged batteries out of the ground.

Forget air pollution the difference of noise pollution would make electric cars worth it.

The seemingly constant point of contention is the 'battery technology'.

I'm sure you have heard some form of: "Electric cars will become dominant once battery technology catches up"

I feel like we don't often consider the thought that hydrocarbons may be the best 'battery' technology.

Edit: I don't really think they can be, outside of back-up generators. Power stations supported by The Grid should be far better than gas stations supported by pipelines/trucks.

Burning hydrocarbons is damaging to the ecosystem of Earth, and for that reason it should be used as little as possible.

There have been billions of $ spent on synthetic hydrocarbons research, so I think "we" have considered it.

'We' in this context intended to mean 'people discussing alternative energy' not 'humanity overall'

I don't often see it brought up, even in discussions of energy storage support for inconsistent energy sources.

3 technologies I've seen discussed extensively in the alternative energy context:

* Methanol from food sources * Methanol from non-food sources (switchgrass) * Biofuels for aircraft (military and civilian)

I can totally believe you didn't see these talked about. But you can find articles in the New York Times on all 3 technologies in the past couple of years.

I guess we are pretty much at the peak of synthetic oil and it is a dead end in terms of energy storage.

Then maybe 'you' should look into it since you are very interested in it. Other people already have, and they are not interested in looking into it any more. You can look at NAZI coal gassification efforts, methanol from switchgrass, all the way to efficient Hydrogen generation and storage, but it usually turns out that producing a complex molecule up a large potential gradient is not power efficient (even with the best chemistry and catalysts).

You can run electric vehicles on solar, wind, hydro, natural gas, coal, nuclear, oil, jet fuel, etc. The delivery mechanism of energy for transportation is separated from production and competition in the production space will continue, despite lots of incentives distorting the marketplace.

Gas vehicles run on gas which comes from oil, or recently some combination of food, but mostly oil. I welcome the disruption of this industry.

> A transport being electric does not automatically make it better

That is true. Most people don't spare a thought for the long chain of extraction, refinement/production, transportation of our resources/fuels/energy. They see less petrol/gasoline being used in the last step of the chain and assume they have a positive impact.

However, I would argue that electric cars are still "cleaner" than gas engines, precisely because of their reliance on the power grid. Powering an electric vehicle from clean renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal) requires a big financial investment. This is a tough ask for most individuals (who can spare $10-15k for solar panels?) but a lesser ask for a power utility company.

Essentially, that's the environmental benefit of having everyone use electric vehicles. It shifts the ability to choose where we extract our energy from the individual to the municipalities. Right now we are very dependent on coal/natural gas/petrol for our energy needs. The first two can be replaced with renewable energy sources by our municipalities. If we keep driving petrol powered vehicles, we will still rely on petrol. If we switch to electric vehicles, we have a path away from the big three.

Of course, this little theory doesn't take into account the environmental effects of the lithium battery packs. I have no idea what the effects are there

I completely agree. With our current infrastructure/technology it clearly makes sense to focus on electric motors for transportation.

I just feel it's important to stay grounded in reality. Energy has to come from somewhere. We are clearly much closer to clean generation of electricity than to clean synthesis of gasoline.

I will come back with a link when I'm not mobile, but solar just hit a new low cost at 65 cents/watt in India.

EDIT: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Solar-Costs-Are...

Energy has to come from somewhere, but we are awash in clean enegy.

65 cents/watt is cheap? I'm paying about 216 times less than that for electricity from my electric company.

Install cost, not ongoing per kwh. Cost per kwh generated comes out to be between 1-2 cents.

I stand corrected. I was in fact thinking of the watt/hour price, not the install price.

At a price of 1 to 2 cents per kwh, that comes out to about 177 to 354 times cheaper than what I'm paying for electricity from my electric company.

Are you maybe think about prices per Watt hour you are paying? 65 cents/watt is a measure how much the module costs to buy per rated output power, not for an unit of energy (obviously, from the units).

>Of course, this little theory doesn't take into account the environmental effects of the lithium battery packs. I have no idea what the effects are there

Sweden has done a study on the impact of LI ion battery production on CO2 emissions. There is a discussion about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608959

getting the pollution out of the cities with electric vehicles would be a significant step and then reducing the dirty energy percentage more and more over time.

Nope. Soon you will be able to plug your electric car into a lamp-post on any street that has such things. This is already being rolled out where I live in the UK, you call the utility company and they upgrade your street just for you and a few neighbours. There is no road to dig up, the lamp post gets retro-fitted. There aren't even special electric car parking bays, you just find a parking spot (yes I know...).

Think of it as getting broadband or a sky dish but without the road having to be dug up or holes drilled through your house. And it is already happening!

So that part of the plan is coming together, you won't need to have a garage with some giant refrigerator sized charging thing.

The next bit is how that these cars don't just take power from the grid, they put it back too. So we will not need heaps of coal fired or 'natural' gas power stations to come online for the evening peak demand - the cars plugged into lamp-posts do that.

Therefore, with this giant battery spread out in many millions of cars on every street, we really can go carbon neutral and use wind/solar/geo-whatever to generate electricity.

Some people need to catch up with this, I personally do so by subscribing to 'Fully Charged' on Youtube, as presented by Robert Llewellyn of Red Dwarf fame:

https://www.youtube.com/user/fullychargedshow

I agree with everything you are saying but I think you missed the fundamental point I was trying to make: Hydrocarbon (gas) 'battery' as an alternative to lithium battery.

Because in the situation you describe, the weak point is still the means of storing energy. The big, heavy, hard to produce/recycle, limited lifespan lithium battery.

Don't take this the wrong way, I am completely against dependence on un-sustainable fossil fuels. But hydrocarbon fuel cells seem like an idea that has legs.

> you won't need to have a garage with some giant refrigerator sized charging thing.

Level 1 chargers are about the size of a loaf of bread.

Level 2 fast chargers are about the size of bread boxes.

DC Fast Chargers are about the size of a mid tower PC.

Also,

500,000 Cars a Year

ANNOUNCED: FEB 26, 2014

TARGET DUE DATE: DEC 31, 2020

REVISED DUE DATE: DEC 31, 2018

Seems like they could be hitting their stride after a rocky start but, honestly, he's doing some incredibly difficult things here.

I find the entry into streaming media to be quite interesting (yes i realize it's just music now but it would be shortsighted to not envision video (one way large), gaming/conferencing, etc.).

Tech these days seem to be about maximizing the spaces in between so there's no downtime to be had..

I'm excited too. Let's not say technology is moral though, because that backfires later when we want to make the case that "it's just technology, and can be used for bad or good."

Quite seriously, post-oil technology is a moral imperative.

Putting people on a cruise ship is not a moral action, but getting them home safely is. The discovery and initial widespread use of oil was not moral. But now that we're here, getting off of it's dependency is, because it cannot last forever at current technology levels and without it we cannot feed seven, eight, etc billion people.

If we discover no new technology, if we do not switch off of oil, it slowly gets more expensive and depleted, and then billions die because the population cannot be sustained without the intensive energy needed to produce food and transport it.

So that's what I mean: It is a moral imperative that we create tech to replace oil (or at least as a stop-gap, find more as we've been doing). We think of the future too little, but those human lives are just as real.

https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca...

(As I said elsewhere, if you say "we'll always find new and cheaper ways of extracting oil," then you already agree with me, you just picked a different technology. We still have the moral imperative to find that technology.)

We don't need new technology to alter our consumption as a civilization, though. We need to change our attitudes and habits. There's this assumption everyone needs to drive around in their own personal automobile, and EVs provide a marginal benefit over gas powered vehicles, but it's still a 3 ton hunk of metal being used to move what is usually a single occupant and does nothing to curb sprawl and the energy costs associated with that.

How about bicycles, trains, and higher density, walkable development? There's nothing fancy or high-tech about any of this, it's all waiting for us to implement it whenever we feel the moral imperative to do so. As far as I'm concerned it also leads to a higher quality of life, but many who grew up with cars and the burbs have a difficult time imagining things any other way.

Electric transportation is not just cars to get to work. If 8 billion people all rode bicycles 100% of the time, you still need oil to grow and transport the food. Without any oil, most of them would still perish. Oil gets more expensive over time without new technology.

You're trying to downscale the problem, but you do not eliminate it that way. Our population numbers are oil-supported no matter how we live. The moral imperative is to make them something more renewable-supported, before it is a crisis. Just because the crisis is many decades out does not make it less moral. We still need new technology, or else.

Getting people off meat would eliminate the lion's share of the problems with our industrial agricultural system. Again, it's not a technology problem, we could stop eating meat this afternoon if everyone was onboard, instead of waiting for some fantastic new technology to come around. I'm not against new technology, but deferring responsibility to breakthroughs that may or may not arrive in time strikes me as another form of bikeshedding. I've been hearing about the electric vehicle revolution for a quarter century, it has yet to arrive in any meaningful capacity.

Throughout our history our biggest problems have been problems related to scarcity, so we're hardwired to think in those terms. Even though our problems are now problems of abundance, the default is to think that to solve this we need more of something. More technology! Build more factories, more steel, more lithium, more cobalt, we need a whole new industrial ecosystem to replace the one we've got! We're really good at managing scarcity. We're clueless about managing abundance.

Of course, nobody likes the idea of less, it violates all our best instincts. Humans are highly adaptable, but we rarely adapt willingly if it's perceived to be a step down. That's the moral problem of our age, in my opinion.

until we then add even more people to the earth and arrive at the same problem.

all these kinds of solutions need to be coupled with population management solutions.

Can't agree more with this [1]. I think human beings, as a whole, is like a lazy teenager who would rather stretch from his chair to get the remote control from the floor, risking a fall or sprain, than actually get up and pick it...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14622156

> we can work on to get out of oil's malthusian trap.

Say all cars on earth ultimately ends up converting to electric. That is a lot of batteries, right? To produce and to dispose.

Any idea how that is going to affect the environment?

Toyota started preparing ahead of time for battery recyling years ago for the prius well before there was a need. Honda Tesla and other companies have also been proactively working on it.

Lead acid batteries can be and are recycled very well. Lithium Ion is harder but it can be done.

It is worth noting that even ignoring battery recycling, an average Li car battery is going to be about ~600lbs of material (currently, this seems to still be improving)

A gasoline powered car that does 30mpg and lasts 200k miles will burn through ~475,200lbs of material in it's life. Putting it all into the atmosphere.

I've yet to track down any real attempt at quantifying the sum total lifetime environmental costs of electric vs gas powered vehicles that wasn't clearly a hatchet job by one 'side' or the other. I'm sure some exist, maybe someone can post some good references.

Car batteries are very much recycled. Of course lead-acid is different from Li-ion, but the precedent is there.

Technologies are neutral, not moral. But most of the time they tend to be used for positive things.

Do you not think that the invention of the gas-powered automobile 100 years ago was a positive thing for society, especially at the time?

If we want to go the negative route we could also say that personal EVs are not moral, but electric public transport vehicles are, because manufacturing them and then charging their batteries is still negatively impacting out environment right now, even if it does it "less".

You are incorrect. Because of past decisions, we have a population that cannot be supported without oil. Oil that will run out or become prohibitively expensive, some day.

We have a moral imperative to find "the next technology." We may have more than a hundred years to do so, but your level of optimism in the timing does not change the morality of the imperative.

(If you say "we'll always find new and cheaper ways of extracting oil," then you already agree with me, you just picked a different technology. We still have the moral imperative to find that technology.)

User interface

It's sort of like Geocities, but with higher resolution images and better typography.

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