Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says UK adviser
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm not sure an environmental conscience is the reason, rather the cost of keeping your car taxed and insured, then finding somewhere for it to stay in London, and then finding a use for it, outweighs simply using public transport.
The article doesn't talk about electric cars reliance on whatever powers the national grid of that country - and they can only be as green as the country's means of energy production[1], although that is still better than a petrol/diesel car for most countries.
Right! You'd be delusional to think that EVs are somehow solving pollution. However, they are almost like debt consolidation - each EV on the street becomes cleaner as each coal power plant is decommissioned. Burning dead dinosaurs in an engine will always be burning deal dinosaurs.
That's (part of) the reasoning behind car tax, petrol tax, etc.: to turn vague, idealistic goals (environmental concerns, efficient public transport rather than umpteem invididual cars, etc.) into concrete economic decisions.
The problem arises when these start to be abused, e.g. getting more people to drive in order to raise tax revenue ;)
I would say that the car slowed down about twice as quickly as a conventional car and I used the brakes much less than normal and unless another car was coming, the speed at the intersection was perfect for rolling through without using the brakes.
This is all anecdotal of course but interesting change nonetheless I thought.
Curb weight of a Nissan Versa is about 2400 lbs.
Curb weight of a Nissan Leaf is about 3350 lbs.I think they're part of a car, aren't they? I mean, you cannot drive a car with no tires, and it's advisable that you should also have brake disks/pads.
If you could return all of the forward momentum as energy to the battery that would remove the need for discs and pads.
One is that they can handle extremely high transient power levels. For example, maximum-effort braking at high speed can easily involve over a megawatt of power in the initial stages. Dumping that power into your brake pads and rotors as heat is fairly easy to manage. Dumping that into your battery without wrecking it is much, much harder. For comparison, a high-end Tesla can charge at up to 120kW, and can discharge around 600kW in short bursts.
The other advantage is that they're cheap, reliable, and can easily be built with redundancy. You can lose all of your car's computers and half of your brake hydraulics and still be able to stop the car.
In order to have no mechanical brakes at all, you'd need a battery that could charge fast enough to absorb the power of full braking at maximum speed, and a sufficiently redundant drivetrain that you could still make regen work even if major components failed.
I agree about your second point, mechanical brakes are very simple and reliable. I'm pretty sure we will forever have them in our cars for safety/emergency reasons.
Use capacitors?
The wear and tear on tires and bikes with a 100kg system weight is much less than car to say the least.
We could probably ban cars completely if not for social and lobby reasons. (Replace with rail and public transport.) But that is only a quarter of total pollution anyway.
The real trouble is UK either needs desert solar with huge investment, nuclear power or drastic reduction in power use.
Electric cars are not even a stopgap measure.
Now cars are driving up demand by another leap of magnitudes since each car requires magnitudes more batteries than a phone. The number of phones and cars people would like to own per capita is well within an order of magnitude though it's probably close.
Eventually this enables storage of solar derived power an again order of magnitude larger application than cars in at first niche applications then eventually it will be broad based.
Because just like the massive overprovisioning of dark fiber in the dotcom boom, one producers start competing in what is in some sense a dollar auction. The momentum of their growth and the people and processes tasked with ensuring that growth will fight to keep growing supply since it is their livelihood and perceived purpose to do so (both to grow the capacity and to justify that growth, those that don't justify won't be as likely to do the growth and will be selected against).
This will lead to a massive amount of batteries being produced since there doesn't seem to be any supply limits beyond how many mines we can make (and then ocean water than can be filtered for lithium from what I have read). I therefore think that "the cars are only 1/2 as polluting and thus pointless" statement lacks vision and an understanding of the positive externalities of growing electric cars.
The spin off tech is great. ICE cars have played that out. What was their most recent spinoffs? Tar sands / fracking? I guess we got a lot of cheap natural gas which was a step forward and what's really crushing coal. But if we get another oil spike I don't see the money flowing to oil just a much more agressive push towards EVs and battery tech.
Imagine walking through downtown midday and it sounds like 2am.
It's less noise for sure, but they're not silent.
So basically, current brown noise will be replaced with trademarked noises with recognizable frequencies.
The tube runs every few minutes on popular lines, and don't suffer from congestion (when there isn't problems on the line), so they're acceptable. Trains running on a timetable less so (they make you pay much more attention to the time, and they're frequently delayed and increasingly often cancelled), while buses just feel like a massive waste of time.
The original list was mostly shareable items, but there's a lot of non-shareable items in my trunk at the moment.
In addition to the usual stuff you'd find in a kit, I threw in a four-pack of single-serve Krazy Glue (cyanoacrylate superglue), which is useful for controlling bleeding (a spray might even be nicer). Since I live in a climate that sees actual winters, I also included a pair of mylar emergency blankets (they also make a "sleeping bag" style), and I of course keep the usual extra set of boots/gloves/hat in the trunk during winter as well (totally standard around here).
I'd be interested to hear any other "unorthodox" additions to the usual kit, if anyone has suggestions.
We don't think about handicapped people whose cars carry medication and equipment for them.
We don't think about carrying stuff like nail clippers, stain sticks tampons in the car, either. So we'll waste more money without persistent access to this infrequently-used items.
We don't think about occupational vehicles like plumbers' and electricians. With fewer ICE vehicles on the road, their vehicle maintenance will be more expensive and our maintenance and construction bills will increase.
Not that I'm arguing against car clubs, etc. I'm trying to validate your line of thought.
e-bikes are starting to get really good, much cheaper and usually don't require anything like the regulatory approvals, driver licencing or running costs cars do.
I can certainly imagine myself using a hypothetical autonomous car club augmented with an e-bike for shorter ad-hoc journeys ("crap I'm out of milk" etc) very happily.
He, like most people, would not consider himself a cyclist and as such is less willing to put up with the post exercise issues of using a bike as a primary mode of transport. I'm a keen cyclist and am happy to put up with the faff of a change of clothes etc but I can see how it's off putting for most people.
Also, rain.
If the smoke alarm goes off the car pulls over and stops at the side of the road.
The rental company will already knows who in the car at any one time (or at least who has rented it) and they can just issue a massive cleaning fine.
Like setting off an airline toilet smoke detector.
In the situation you propose, you have would-be car owners who now share a car. That eliminates the pollution involved in the manufacturing of one car from the story. And yes, if the car had to make back and forth trips from a central location, that would be inefficient. But I think the idea is to have a network of shared infrastructure (similar to uber), so that if someone needs a car, they can have access to the closest available one.
Will you agree for example to be billed more for your assurance company because one of the co-proprietaries of your car is a bad driver?
And there is also the real use time, ie: you buy a car that is crashed each month when used by other guys and must remain in boxes to be repaired four months/year.
The idea that "everybody will want to share their car with strangers" is probably just this, a marketing desire IMHO. Bad drivers will want to share the car for sure, but a lot of common people would probably frown at the idea.
Power is generated away from.l cities and it is easier to mitigate the pollution all in one place.
As other people have mentioned regenerative breaking helps too.
No reason we can't encourage people out of cars at the same time as transitioning the remaining vehicles to electric.
Automated EV cars are a necessary step! Once automated EV cars become the norm, there will be even more value placed on Public Spaces of Value. Right now, the dirt and fumes from current automotive technology -- along with the requirement for vast paved areas for parking -- make it harder to achieve the traditional urban Public Spaces of Value so common in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. (That said, not having horse excrement everywhere was an environmental boon of cars.)
Once automated EV cars become the norm, society will think about urban transport differently, and we will change the urban environment in just as drastic a fashion as we did to make way for internet combustion engine cars.
Right now, public spaces most often have to be of a large granularity. We can return to a time when urban Public Spaces of Value were ad-hoc and adjacent to residences and businesses.
And plenty of autonomous cars means traffic jams.
They can't replace public transport on that aspect as the transport density is way higher in a train or a bus than on individual autonomous vehicles.
Sure they are going to revolutionise car ownership but I don't think they will change the daily commute for the average office worker.
EDIT: >sigh< My whole point is that automated EVs will free public thinking, enabling yet further changes to the public's thinking about how urban transport works. Please provide a quote where I say that automated cars are more efficient than other forms of public transport. (I only say that they will be more efficient than current cars.) Also, please provide a quote that shows I consider automated EVs to be an endpoint in the evolution of transportation.
I'm far too often unpleasantly surprised at the level of reading comprehension here on HN.
Also, the point about parking seemed to be overlooked. Being able to eliminate almost all the parking spaces in a built-up area would be a pretty huge boon. Vehicles could simply drive out to less cramped areas during low volume times when they aren't needed, or to recharge.
Walkers, cyclists, and public transits also take up space, and there is a theoretical cap to how many a city can support. It's just that the cap is well above any reasonable expectation of demand, because those are all very efficient in terms of space. So, it's not really a difference in class, just a difference in degree. Cars don't necessarily have to be as space efficient as walking, just space efficient enough.
However, I think driverless cars are not a solution by themselves. They bring efficiency gains in the form of reducing jams because they can drive closer, communicate with city infrastructure, etc. But these gains probably wouldn't offset the number of people who will all of the sudden gain access to a more convient (and probably cheaper, without regulation) method of transit, who will thus increase total car usage.
It's going to be a challenge to reach transport homeostasis among driverless cars, driverless buses, subways, etc. Taxes or surge prices will probably need to be added to distribute people in an optimal way across multiple forms of transit so not to overload city infrastructure. I'm thinking prices are going to be driven more by physical limitations than individual operational costs (eg subway electricity usage). But this will need to be government regulated because private companies are not currently incentivized to minimze traffic (visible currently in ridesharing companies).
Most traffic jams are more a factor of human nature then anything else. Ever been in a slowdown due to drivers checking out a fender bender going in the other direction on a divided highway? Combine the lack of unneeded slow downs with closer following distances with fewer crashes and road capacity will go way up.
Even with autonomous cars, roadways still have a peak capacity. Yes, the peak capacity will probably go up if every driver is driving "perfectly", but there will still be plenty of bottlenecks, whether those are slower moving trucks, crosswalks, traffic signals, etc. I'd guess that we might even see more traffic than we currently have because if you don't have to drive yourself, people are incentivized to take their car; even if it's slower than mass transit, sitting in your own car is more pleasant for most people than a train or bus.
If autonomous vehicles reduce the per-vehicle impact of rush hours, I expect that we'll just start seeing more cars participating in rush hours via induced demand. (People will not avoid them as much; people will switch from public transport to private autonomous transport; people will be more willing to live farther from work for cheaper housing/more land/whatever.)
edit: hokkos beat me :|