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Comment by mrleiter | Hacker News Reader

The milestone of reaching faster speeds with combustion engines seems to be a wrong goal in this day and age. Climate change is a fact, and the burning of material based on oil/coal is a major driver of this. The effects have been known for decades, but only now major impacts can be seen and felt.

In German, there is this phrase, which describes the time period after a certain success/enjoyment/well-being. Literally translated it meanss the fat years are over ("Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei."). It's usually used in the context of forced savings vs voluntariy expenditure, but it fits with the current state of our environment as well. The times of making faster cars and enjoying high speeds are over, if we don't want to demise as a species. Environmentally safer beahviour should become more fun.

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I think you are missing the forest from the trees. If we want to truly reduce climate change we should start by reducing international shipping, consumerism, and non-essential air travel for both pleasure and business.

A 300MPH speed run in an ultra low production Bugatti car is more or less insignificant in the fight against climate change.

You write we should reduce: international shipping, consumerism, and non-essential air travel

Sure you can but it will be heavily inconvenient (at least for many in the west). But do you know what reduces the carbon footprint by about 75% in a country like Germany? 1.) Electric cars/trains 2.) Electricity from renewables 3.) Heating using electrical power from renewables (heat pumps)

Of the last 25%, there are 20% from industrial production and in the last 5% you could include air travel (2%) among other things.

Heating and driving and getting power from renewables makes your lifestyle about 0% different from what it is now. Buying goods that last longer even means giving life a touch of luxury. A better, more luxurious lifestyle that produces about 75% less carbon dioxide. Impossible? In a growing number of countries, this will be possible soon. Of course, not flying, not consuming gives you that "holy" feeling of "having done something". But done right, a sustainable lifestyle makes the life we have now even better. It takes a bit of political willpower, of course.

I am not disagreeing with electric cars at all, I think it is important.

But the carbon footprint created within the West is just a small amount of the carbon footprint that the West contributes to. We can't just reduce our own carbon footprint if it simply pushes that carbon footprint onto other, less developed countries.

I think it will be very unlikely that we will continue to live with the same luxuries that we enjoy today while still aggressively reducing climate change. It won't be a case of "we have electric transport, but I can still buy a new iPhone once a year". It will be a case of aggressively cutting back everywhere and and ultimately growth and our economy will suffer in the short-term for long-term sustainability.

If you freeze the economy to today‘s state and technology, there will be no growth any more, sure. But at least in our lifetime, the move to a sustainable economy will create more growth and opportunities than will be cut in unsustainable industries. I do not what happens in 150 years, but for the next 50 years I do not worry. As we need more intelligent technologies than we used to have, the value ofhe output will rise, thus economies that are able to adapt will profit.

Using solar, wind and water to create power will, by the way, not push the carbon footprint somewhere else. It will, to a great part, vanish. And those economies who, in future, produce their own energy instead of importing them, will have a higher GDP and less dependence of foreign markets.

Why international shipping specifically? It’s extremely efficient and currently accounts for only around 3% of global CO2 emissions. (Compare to roughly 50% for electricity production, 20% for manufacturing, and 20% for transportation as a whole.)

For starters, because shipping CO2 emissions are rising fast [0], and CO2 is by far not the only concern. Ships burn unrefined "bunker oil," emitting proportionally huge amounts of particulate pollution, sulphur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides, which harm people and other organisms [1, 2]. For example, back in 2009, the 15 biggest ships emitted as much SO2 and NOx as all the cars on earth: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...

[1] http://www.npi.gov.au/resource/oxides-nitrogen-0

[2] http://www.npi.gov.au/resource/sulfur-dioxide

Emissions from everything else are rising fast too. Surely curbing emissions growth from electricity generation will have a much bigger impact.

The articles about SO2 and NOx emissions are clickbait. They compare to cars, which are extremely clean in this respect. In any case, the subject here is climate change and these pollutants are irrelevant. (Strictly speaking, they slightly mitigate warning.)

I’m not saying we should ignore shipping, but I don’t see why it should be anywhere close to first on the list of things to focus on when fighting climate change.

The problem isnt the handful of hypercars but the hundreds of millions of 1.5-2 ton cars being used to ferry a single occupant from stop light to stop light. Its easy to point to these hypercars as being excessive but remember the reason we can drive a car that has the performance of a mid-80s sportscar that does 50mpg for not much money comes directly from tech trickling down from these machines.

I think the "fat years" are still in the future. Intelligent electric cars (however they may look like, think about the Renault Twizzy) and other means of transportation will make the combustion cars we have now look like dinosaurs and we will be proud of what we have then.

I recently bought a new car in Germany (combustion engine as I needed a 7-seater). People ask me why I took the base engine (140HP) while adding all other optional equipment possible. I tell them: in and around a city, even those 140HP will never get used. And the times I am on the Autobahn AND (!!) being able to actually drive more than 130km/h are so rare that I would never put my money into higher speeds/acceleration. The question of "enough power" has been solved some years ago. Now let's make this power intelligent and sustainable.

I agree and say this all the time. As someone who grew up driving in an ancient 60's Volkswagen with well less than 100 HP, I can tell you that we can make small cars with much lower horsepower that also get far better fuel economy.

People then tell me that they think that is stupid and like having the acceleration when getting on the interstate. In all those years, I never found acceleration to be a problem. We've been pitched cars that have way more power than we need and that use way more fuel than we need. Magazines like Car and Driver will write negative editorials if a car isn't "zippy". What should matter is safety, cost, and fuel economy.

In the US' South region, nearly everyone feels the need for a giant truck. It has been engrained as a lifestyle choice. You get your truck to help you haul your four-wheeler for deer hunting and your boat for fishing. However, 90% of these trucks are used by single individuals as daily drivers to office jobs which is extremely wasteful. They even live in suburbs which have to get bigger garages to compensate. Each man's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather drove one too, so it is deeply tied to one's masculinity. The south also has some of the nation's poorest citizens and Mississippi/Alabama/Louisiana/Arkansas have some of the worst elementary and highschools in the nation. It isn't uncommon for folks to get extremely in debt on a $50k lifted 4x4 deisel pickup truck.

The big issue with the small displacement turbo-charged engines is that, at normal autobahn speed, the engine is almost always on boost and therefore burning a lot of fuel to:

1. Reduce intake temperatures/prevent pre-ignition

2. Produce enough power to sustain a constant speed of 120KPH or whatever

This means that they are far less efficient than they should be, and in some cases get more or less the same efficiency as larger displacement high capacity engines.

When they are really small: yes. But most cars come with gear boxes and horse powers dimensioned so that you are almost always driving at low rpms at normal autobahn speeds (like 120/130). At least my new car with the 140HP engine rolls along at about 2500rpm at Autobahn speed.

I don't know where you live, but 140bhp is a lot for a small-ish car here in UK - it would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive to insure for a young driver for instance. My sister's first car is a VW Polo with a 1.0L 65bhp engine, and that "monster" runs at nearly 4000rpm when doing the legal 70mph(~120km/h) on the motorway. At least it's not a turbo engine so I suppose it's not that bad. It was still a small fortune to insure purely because she's under 25 and had her licence for a year.

Interesting; things are a bit different in the US. I bought my first car at 18. It was small, a Honda Civic Si, but had 198bhp. That wasn’t a slow car by any means, but wasn’t considered especially fast either.

For more perspective, that’s about what a really fast motorcycle puts out these days, e.g. H2 SX. That’s a whole different ballgame of power-to-weight. Not many are pushing 200, but there are lots in the 150 to 180 range, stock. Heck, even some of the midsize (read, small and under 450lb) are knocking on the bottom end of that range with displacements well under 1l.

200HP is considerably higher than the average power output of most European cars.

Most small hatchbacks will be producing somewhere between 90HP and 170HP. Estates and wagons from 190HP to 250HP and SUVs somewhere similar.

FWIW, I suspect it’s higher than average for North America too, for smaller cars. Higher proportion of trucks and SUVs though, and “small cars” are mostly a bit larger.

Is this a "combustion engine" achievement or a "road legal wheel-powered" achievement (i.e. not "reactive engine powered car")? In other words, are there any electric cars that are faster? Wikipedia suggests "no" [1].

If that's correct, your comment makes no sense. Many of the developments needed for combustion-powered records would apply to electricity-powered records as well, such as suspension, wheels/tires, gears, ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_speed_record

This is an extremely narrow point of view, and one that actually hinders the support of properly dealing with climate change.

Halo car engineering results in trickle down effects to all of the vehicles you and I drive on a daily basis. Tire materials and engineering, aerodynamics r&d, suspension improvements, and so forth can apply to all types of vehicles, regardless of whether or not the power comes from an ICE engine or electric motor.

So while you may see this as a needless exercise in achieving 300 mph on a combustion engine, I see this as perhaps something that could give a 1% increase in fuel economy to VAG's entire fleet. Of course it's not a given, but let's applaud and support the potential.

This reads like a challenge to produce an electric car powered by renewable energy to go past 300+ MPH. Watch FIA Formula E racing, and you'll gain confidence that 300+ MPH electric cars will happen. There will be no end to the fat times, my friend. We'll just switch it to a different power source.

Glad to see this perspective as the top comment that this community upvoted.

Our values determine where we devote our engineering resources -- time, money, attention, brilliance. If we degrade the environment to where it can't sustain our population, people will suffer. What are the relative values of millions maybe billions of climate refugees versus a fast car powered by unsustainable fossil fuels?

Imagine we devoted those resources to solving political and environmental problems.

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