The lost history of the electric car – and the future of transport
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
In the chapter "Draft Board Nights" his grandfather, who is a Civil War veteran, is trying to enlist in the Great War and takes his grandmother's electric car to go find General William Tecumseh Sherman. "[A] man who (or so he often told us) had driven a four-horse McCormick reaper when he was five years old did not intend to be thrown by an electric runabout."
Going forward, I image that MDS is much less of a concern than the power grid and clean energy generation
It's really frustrating that it's so common to try to shoe-horn electric cars into the old narrative, but it's just a completely different story as fossil fuels. That isn't to say you CAN'T have problems with ethical mining, or ethical anything, but it just is not anything at all like the problems associated with fossil fuels. It doesn't make sense to collapse a complete different set of issues into the existing narrative, and to do it to generate clicks is reprehensible. You would think, with a title like "lost history of the electric car," they would do a small amount of research around lithium ion chemistry and rare earth metals and actually inform the viewer instead of repeating tired misconceptions that the semi-informed have.
so electric domestic cars are not going to do a lot...
Tire dust will still be a problem.
I can hear ICE engines accelerating roaringly from miles away. I do not hear the same from electric cars.
Obviously this applies to the ~average~ car. A hellcat or sports bike tearing down the highway will be louder but the consistent drone of tire noise increases slightly for electric cars.
I think we have to make cars more efficient, make them smaller _and_ decrease their use.
By the way, it's not just cars. Basically most forms of road transport can be electrified. Everything from the largest mining trucks, long distance trucks, short distance delivery vans, garbage trucks, delivery vans, etc. Viable products already exist in each of those categories. We just need more of them. Making more will make them cheaper and even more viable. The main bottleneck here is production capacity.
This kind of gratuitous editorial speculation, based on precisely zero evidence in an otherwise factual article, is why I tend to avoid The Guardian.
There are plenty of interesting things in the article, and we should be focusing on interesting things, not maddening things.
Certain topics still seem to incite flame wars and upvote/downvote wars; I'm not even sure how to address the latter, though the HN guidelines (such as evaluating the argument rather than the speaker) seem sensible and may mitigate the former.
Neglecting that power plants can run at temperatures small car engines can't, getting better carnot efficiencies, or using non-combustion methods of generating electricity.
While cars are nice in dense 19th century cities. Not strictly needed when you had street cars and walkable neighborhoods. And delivery services. They are more useful in rural America which was 60-70% of the population. And Rural houses didn't have electricity. No electricity no way to charge a car. Even city houses had very limited service, 10-20 amp was common.
No power semiconductors which meant inefficient motors and chargers.
Lead acid batteries have a quarter the energy density and output power that modern lithium ion batteries do. Which meant range sucked. And horsepower sucked.