Electric cars neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim
economist.com
economist.com
"But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative."
So the author of the article is advocating against electric cars because 1% of trips require more range?
Has he never heard of a rental car?
Of course it might make more sense to tax the pollution than for government to try to pick the next technology. Didn't George Bush tell us it was going to be hydrogen cars? Now its supposed to be electric, but who knows what will actually happen in reality?
When you pick one technology and give it all of the advantages, it makes it all that much harder for competing technologies to succeed. A level playing field is best.
We have an entire industry of people trying to figure out what technologies will win. They compete with each other and have all kinds of different backgrounds and differing opinions. And they learn as they go, something Washington seems incapable of doing.
If there were some other promising type of alternative vehicle coming out, I'm sure there would be tax credits for them as well, but right now there aren't really any other practical alternatives to EVs.
And all policies start. After a couple of years, a tax credit is always only a couple of years old. I don't see how long a policy has been in please is relevant in deciding whether it should be.
By the way, a lot of the additional electricity required for electric vehicles will have to be generated by burning oil.
The problem with taking a hands-off approach to competing technologies is that it's not a level playing field with the entrenched technologies at all. There are subsidies and externalized costs all the way along the hydrocarbon supply chain.
Haha, that is exactly what I was thinking - we've already picked combustion engines, the infrastructure for which is now solidly entrenched. This status-quo is very unlikely to be broken without additional incentives, so subsidies seem to me a good way of getting out of a local optimum.
If we had to pay the actual costs directly, our behavior would change. I am all for ending this subsidy. We'd have higher prices at peak times and flatter demand and less need to gobble of land for highways.
But what technology people use to drive on any road is another question entirely.
But it seems government can never undo any policy. It must always layer some other policy on top of it. Until the whole structure collapses under its own weight and a younger smarter country invades.
Tell them they'll be paying $20 a week for their roads and that their taxes will be going down $30 a week, they will scream about how terrible it is.
This is one of the reasons you have for making choices and having mandated standards for interoperability. Building infrastructure is expensive and if you do it right it lasts for a long time.
From an infrastructure standpoint electric cars have some serious advantages over hydrogen, since we already have extensive experience building electrical infrastructure. And it should be possible to improve batteries without replacing entire vehicles. And electric vehicles create an opening for small entreprneurial companies to try out new devices in ways that hydrogen with it's high barriers to entry and need for a massive infrastructure upgrade do not.
electric and hydrogen are only 2 options. We should wait for one that can actually beat the gasoline engine.
all we need do is make sure that the total costs of using gasoline are paid by those choosing to use it. That means taxing emissions too.
if another technology can beat gasoline when all costs of both are considered, it should replace gasoline. And if nothing succeeds at doing that, then no big change makes ense
I'd say that motors that are far more mechanically efficient than gas engines, a fuel distribution infrastructure that's already in place (electricity mains) and in-car storage of fuel that has made enormous leaps in the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down pretty much qualifies as beating the gasoline engine.
With scale, costs will be lower; there are fewer moving parts, all elements of power distribution and use can be independently upgraded to improve the efficiency and impact of the car. Gasoline cars cannot do this.
Gasoline looks quite beat to me.
we didn't have Steve Jobs going to DC to explain how his product is better than other phones and therefore needs a subsidy.
new products should prove themselves as they always have. it should not be whichever product that has presented for it the most widely believed theory that wins
if its so great, it should be able to garner investment dollars all on its own.
Dcespite that, the cars being produced by Tesla are price competitive, and are on track to do just that, despite the subsidies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emi...
And it seems that the UK uses less coal power than the US. Thus, the emission reductions in the UK should be even better, i.e. more than 50%. But the article says the emission reductions are only 20%.
I wish they would tell us more about their calculations. With these types of estimations, one can bring about drastic changes of the conclusion with subtle changes of the assumptions in the estimate.
Doing a dust-to-road analysis of impact is very hard.
Such as...?
Second, they are not really as green as their promoters claim.
So? I care about convenience (less/no trips to the fill-up station) and overall cost.
But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative.
So rent a gas car. Plan for this when figuring the ongoing costs of your electric car.
And even the relatively short ranges that salesmen advertise may be optimistic. On a cold, wet night when lots of electrical systems are running and the vehicle is laden with passengers and luggage, a car may lose around a third of its supposed range.
So require that this be disclosed, so people know to get something with at least 1.5x the range they'll need in a day.
I guess those two things were the "distinct disadvantages" mentioned earlier. Neither is terribly convincing.
Although electric cars may not themselves produce greenhouse gases, generating the electricity they use does. How green they are depends on the fuel mix at the power plants in the country in which they are driven.
This should solve itself in a decade or two if we stop letting the NIMBYs block nuclear plants. And all the already-sold electric cars will benefit just as much as the not-yet-sold ones.
The only efficient way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions is to impose a carbon tax.
And here I suppose we have the purpose of the article. But why not just stop subsidizing it before adding a tax?
It's sort of the "I, Pencil" problem - the interactions in the economy are far too complex to manage in a centralized manner. In this case, we have individuals attempting to predict the winner based on very limited information and applying a subsidy, which may or may not be anything more than arbitrary.
The alternative is to have all the millions of decision-makers be informed and influenced by price differences emanating from the pollutants themselves, motivating them to seek more efficient solutions. The effects are far more wide-ranging and actors are guaranteed to be rewarded in proportion to their benefit to the environment. The same holds for other subsidies: for solar, for weatherizing homes &c.
It's a shame our current advocacy & media landscape leaves little room for someone like me who supports a carbon tax but not cap & trade or direct subsidies. Here's to hoping http://votereports.org/, or something like it, gets us there.
Actually, I just emailed http://www.carbontax.org/, hopefully I can get them in the system in time for the election.
That's not to say the tech isn't cool. But it's not any more sustainable than a good high-efficiency gasoline or diesel-only car.
It’s at the moment not any better or even worse than the best gas or diesel cars but I do think that it’s more sustainable. Cars with internal combustion engines will always have the same CO2 emissions. The day they leave the factory and twenty years from now. Electric cars are independent of any specific energy source and as a consequence have the CO2 emissions of the energy source they use. They are mostly coal or oil powered at the moment but it’s very much possible to turn them into nuclear powered cars in the future.
That’s why electric cars have the potential to be great.
There's still the issue with how the batteries are built, shipped and disposed of, most of which would make many green consumers turn pale with discontent.
It all comes down to efficiency numbers. Power plants and electric motors are just massively more efficient than gasoline engines, and it's much easier to scrub the emissions on one pipe than many.
Of course, they also make it easier to transition to renewable sources (replacing one power plant vs. replacing many cars), but that's just icing on the cake.
If we make the electric vehicle part work, then we can drop in whatever kind of electricity we want behind it. Which is likely to be increasingly non-coal going forwards.
[1] http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2006/NewCEO.as...
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/oil-...