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Comment by mrpopo | Hacker News Reader

No point gaining a few points in efficiency if the cars themselves keep getting bigger and bulkier.

For electric cars though, you make more money as a carmaker if their batteries are smaller, which happens when your consumption is lower, so it encourages slicker designs, unlike ICE cars where somehow Americans still think 20mpg is acceptable in 2021, and the carmaker makes as much money or more selling you a 20 or a 50mpg car.

Unfortunately, and also "Led by Tesla" - the EV metrics that people have been trained to look for are now: range, 0-60 times, and such.

Things like weight, battery capacity, or chemistry - all which have the largest impact on emissions - are ignored. In fact, judging by the chemistries that Tesla is now exporting from China, there will be a very serious effort to hide battery chemistry as much as possible.

The biggest emission reduction is when a person switches from using an ICE car to a EV car. Getting the price of a new EV car to be below a similar ICE car will cause that to happen very quickly. These new battery chemistries using iron instead of nickel are a key to reducing price and will lead to much quicker overall emission reductions. Also price is a close proxy for total energy. A ton of iron (~$200 a ton) surely takes a lot less energy to produce than a ton of nickel (~$20,000 a ton). I have no idea how much less but I would guess somewhere between 10 and 50 times less.

> The biggest emission reduction is when a person switches from using an ICE car to a EV car.

Not at all. The biggest emission reduction is when a person doesn't buy a new car at all. The greenest car is always the car that won't be made, regardless of propulsion system.

A Tesla Model 3 is actually a more polluting vehicle than a Toyota Corolla up until the breakeven point of 21,000 KM (and change). [1] And that's assuming a US energy grid.

If that same Tesla Model 3 is being driven in say, China, the Toyota Corolla is greener than the Model 3 until the 125,000 KM mark because the energy grid powering that Tesla is so absurdly dirty that just straight up burning fuel in an ICE is better basically for all its life.

What we really need to move away from is the "well if everyone just gets a Tesla, the ice caps will un-melt". That's a great Musk-enrichment plan, but still awful for the environment. The energy grids powering the EVs are not going to go green anywhere near as fast as if we focused our efforts on mass transit and better urban planning.

The issue with the battery chemistries is just a cherry on the fake-green sundae. You are correct in that those batteries may reduce emissions, but the trade off is increased weight (so you're just really shifting emissions around throughout the lifecycle) and a crushing loss in efficiency in cold weather climates. There is a reason why these are coming up during a time of scarcity. You don't switch back to battery technology from decades ago due to progress, you switch because key materials are not scarce and make it impossible for you to keep up the production necessary to prop your stock price.

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[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

The biggest emission reduction would be if every person committed suicide today, so you can always reduce emissions more with more radical plans until you get to that point.

Using nuclear power and wind with electric vehicles gets you pretty low environmental pollution for society's personal transportation needs. I think it would be easier to green the electric grid than to make everyone in America use mass transit and rebuild our cities.

Model 3 bodies are designed for a million mile lifespan and the batteries for around 300-500 thousand miles. 125,000km (~80,000 miles) is no where near its expected lifespan. The batteries are warranted to 120,000 miles. We'll see how they actually wear out, but I believe Elon Musk actually wants to help humans impact the environment less while still improving the human condition. Building cars to last instead of planned obsolescence would be in alignment with that goal.

People should really move to where they don't need heating if they want to reduce their carbon footprint. That would do more than any mass transit scheme.

There’s a huge, big incentive to increase Wh/kg though which will reduce EV mass significantly. Tesla’s 4680’s will make a decent step forwards there.

The cars getting bigger and bulkier are ICE SUVs and trucks largely, things like Cadillacs, Jeeps, fully loaded trucks being used as commuters, etc. Tesla actually started larger with S/X then moved downwards in size/cost towards 3/Y. Most of the other makers have moderate sized EVs, like Priuses, Volts, Bolts, Leafs (leaves?), they're all modestly sized.

EVs are still significantly heavier than the ICE equivalent though, compare models from European manufacturers that sell the same body in EV or ICE versions. The EV version is typically a few hundred kilogram heavier, or even more if you get a bigger battery.

Weight is certainly a variable one can point to, but EVs still end up VASTLY more energy efficient than ICE vehicles.

If you account for the hundreds of gallons of fuel inserted and burned by the ICE vehicle over time, much of which is then wasted as excess heat energy, the "weight" of an EV's battery starts to look pretty good.

Passenger cars have also gotten significantly larger since the 1980s/90s. I think its mostly to do with enhanced safety features.

It's the irony of the push for more efficiency. In theory you could have the equivalent of a 90's PC now with a fraction of the power consumption, but in practice any gain is used to create more powerful chips and do more calculations. There's a saying that was more about financial budgets, but tl;dr expenses will fill up the budget.

In my country there's irony as well. On the one side, power companies and the government invest a lot in green power production, offshore windmill farms and solar farms and the like. But at the same time, companies like Microsoft and Google come in and have datacenters built that use up all the energy that those 'green' alternatives produce. We would've been carbon neutral years ago if it wasn't for the increase in power consumption that follows production.

It's another face of the same effect that causes the Jevon's paradox. At some point it stops and further efficiency leads to less consumption, but there's nothing that says that point is achievable.

With computers it did. Everybody had a PC that used hundreds of watts, now much of that is running on 4 watt phones or 80 watt laptops.

The main power consumption of electronics is the embodied energy (energy used to build the device), and the number of devices per person has kept increasing worldwide (24 per household in the US! https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/02/24-electroni...)

I bet the sum of those 24 devices still uses less energy than a Pentium IV and a CRT monitor.

IoT will take off at some point, and we may see a period when the many dozens of devices it needs use more power than an early 00's PC, but those will be optimized too (if IoT isn't delayed enough that they are born optimized).

I imagine there is enough demand for computing to eventually go over the 00's level, but I can't imagine its form.

Again, in a life cycle analysis, energy use from utilisation is dwarfed by energy used during production. With IoT the number of chips will keep increasing and that's what determines the total energy (carbon) footprint, which is not the same as your electricity bill.

Can't exactly conflate energy with carbon though, because manufacturers will use green energy at various stages of the manufacturing process.

Just to put numbers on this, according to this article from 2014[0], an iPhone has an embodied energy of 278 kwh, which is about 10 days of energy usage for the average American household.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-e...

You have a point to a degree but a big PC+CRT is going to have those same costs and has a lot more mass to require energy during production, even compared to several mobile devices.

>We would've been carbon neutral years ago if it wasn't for the increase in power consumption that follows production.

What country is this? US power consumption is flat or trending down: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect.... I'd imagine that's the same for most developed countries, so your thesis would be wrong.

That's only because production has been moved to developing countries. Calculating consumption-based energy use (which includes energy "embodied" in things produced elsewhere, but consumed in the US), things look less great. See https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ p. 21 (in the context of decoupling of material use and GDP growth)

My cell phone is a perfect example of what you are saying we should have had. I can connect up a keyboard and mouse and monitor. The lcd monitor also uses vastly less power.

Same with houses, new homes have better insulation and more efficient heating but just means people build bigger houses.

The carbon neutral claim is a huge stretch, but otherwise yes.

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