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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

This kind of things is what I think of when people complain about "hidden external costs of electric cars".

Yes, recycling batteries is an issue. Conditions in rare earth mines are an issue.

But when you want to "consider hidden costs" of EVs you should do the same for ICE cars. And there are lots of these, including building, maintaining and recycling supertankers, refineries, pipelines, oil wells on land and in the sea, causing oil spill every decade, keeping oil tyrannies in charge, fueling resource wars in 3rd world countries.

But it's status quo so it doesn't count.

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The hard truth is that both are unsustainable and extremely inefficient in the end.

Transporting 70kg of meat in a 2 tons metal box, which is sitting unused 95% of its life, using 10 sq meters of public space. ~25% of the materials used on a car aren't recyclable and end up in a landfill. With an average lifespan of 12 years and 1.4 billion vehicles on earth that's a lot of waste.

And that's not even talking about the current trend of ditching nuclear for intermittent energy sources while at the same time increasing our reliance on electricity

You could make similar arguments about houses, offices, etc. Humans have a desire for comfort, being protected from the elements and such, and those desires aren't invalid.

The argument of cars wasting space is a very city-centric view, in which people live in a very densely populated area. The surface area of this planet is around 500e6 km^2, of which about 1/3 is land-area (~166e6 km^2). Of course not nearly all of that is inhabitable, but if we assumed that every person owned a car, they'd all combined take 8e9 * 10 m^2 = 8e4 km^2 of space, or < 0.0005% of available land.

Very, very rough estimation, but just to poke fun at the ridiculous claim that allocating 10 m^2 for every person's transportation device is wasteful. We got enough space, it's just our way of living stacked on top of each other, which is weird.

Sure, it could be more efficient, but people's basic desires aren't numbers to do cold optimizations like that on.

If you compare everything to the surface area of the planet then sure, my 3cm brain tumor isn't that big either then... What matters is that cars are taking all the space in cities, most people do live in cities, and the rate of urbanisation is going up.

I don't think cars are a "desire" either, it's more of a need we imposed ourselves because of the way we chose to live, and we see where this is leading us: polluted, pedestrian hostile cities, the creation of large commercial centers outside of cities which in turn created a need for more cars, &c.

Visit any medium/big city and imagine it without parked cars, these small 10 sq meters quickly add up and would change the way you perceive the city. No more noise, no more danger for pedestrians, maybe more apartments, parks, trees/vegetations, terraces, bicycle lanes, community gardens, &c.

I believe the current form of EVs are the last breath of a dying beast, personal vehicles are bound to disappear of city centers. I commute by bike and I see traffic jams every single day in virtually every major streets of my city, jams made of mostly 5 seats cars being used by one person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country#/media...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS

Where I come from, there is so little urbanization that the average number of active cars is very close to the number of adults in the country.

Even within cities, the situation is pretty rough, there's just too many cars, and too little public transportation.

This creates a vicious cycle, nobody wants to move to the city because of the cars, the smog, the noise, and traffic, so everybody moves out, except that most people have to commute in the city.

I have since moved to Copenhagen, and I have not used a car in 2 years, buses are always packed but there's always another one coming in 5 minutes, and a bike is more than sufficient for my needs.

Contrasting the two was eye opening, and Copenhagen isn't even a Metropolis like NY or Tokyo.

I hope that pedestrians and cyclists reclaim cities from cars. Vastly more efficient, better for our health, the environment, noise pollution, and far safer for children.

Now re-do your math but take into account where people actually live. People aren't equally distributed across the earth, they live in majority in cities where space is a major problem. Not just "high density" cities like New York, just cities.

"It could be more efficient", it is already more efficient in a lot of part of the globe as not every countries created themselves a society that depends on every single person having a car to be able to go to work. Do you mean those people basic desires are not fulfilled?

Living in cities is already more efficient than the alternative. Having everything in close proximity to each other is huge for efficiency.

Imagine how much more efficient it could be without cars.

But yes, people living a rural life usually need cars. And their lifestyle is less efficient. Both can be true at the same time.

Cars are a comfort utility for sure, but the alternatives are not viable any more. It gets really cold here and the snow gets really deep. Walking to town is possible but transporting anything meaningful beyond what fits in a rucksack is challenging in the snow. Stores don't like people bringing in rucksacks. Most people are not fat-adapted and aren't healthy enough to make that journey on a regular basis carrying that payload. The elderly would for sure freeze to death. I could ride a horse into town but there are no longer designated hitching areas or at least not many, so I would be putting the horse at risk. Horses emit CO2 and consume fuel even when you are not riding them. Most vehicles here are trucks and half of them are diesel. I have not seen any EV's in that class of vehicle yet. The closest is the Ford Lightning which AFAIK is not available until spring 2022 and that is a light duty truck.

When will medium and heavy duty EV trucks be available? What companies are working on these? Are they all-wheel drive? How heavy of a trailer can they tow and how far? Are any of them flat-beds with a 5th-wheel hitch option?

The pendulum swung too far and now we realise that everything we got used to isn't sustainable, the alternatives aren't viable because we made cars a requirement for virtually everything. We'll have to make sacrifices, the future of humanity isn't 12B of people with Teslas

And what is the future of humanity? Living in ant hill and never going outside of the urban 10x10 mile box?

The alternative isn't walking 20 miles everyday, it's to take a bus or a train and only use the car when you need to drive far or transport something big. So like once a week or less often.

At least that's how I use my car. And it sometimes gets down to -25C here in the winter and I've seen over a meter of snow on the roads a few times. Funnily enough - when it happens usually more people use public transport cause a big bus have easier time driving over that than a small personal cars, and besides you don't have to shovel the snow for half an hour in the morning to take a bus.

40 Km around here takes about 30 minutes drive or almost 2h with public transports, due to the connections and waiting times.

Not counting the actuall walk into the nearest stop, and how much humans they might try to fit into a single bus or train wagon.

Guess which option people go to.

Guess why it takes 2 hours! If cars weren’t as accessible public transport would be better.

1 - travel to main station

2 - change transport

3 - travel to neighbouring city

4 - change transport

5 - travel to city area where customer is located

6 - change transport

7 - travel to the actual neighbourhood where customer building is located

Alternatively,

1 - travel directly to customer building

Thanks for stating the obvious. Now go and look at big cities where a car is impractical and unaffordable. Guess what! People manage by using public transport.

People survive by using public transport.

Yeah nobody wants to live in these big cities anymore, it’s far too busy!

There's certainly a crowd where "I don't have to own a car or drive" is a benefit of a dense city.

But does anyone ever think "I don't want to have access to a car at all"?

Rich people in dense cities, even ones that don't want to drive themselves, travel by car all the time - they might not be driving themselves, though. Sometimes they travel by helicopter, which has even more externalities.

You have to look at what the wealthy do in terms of understanding what people want - if someone doesn't ever have or take a car because they can't afford it, that doesn't mean they wouldn't want to.

People probably think ‘I don’t want to pay for having access to a car’ all the time.

People want to snap their fingers and be at their destination. Not surprising and not very useful to know.

There are more places to live and work on this planet than big cities.

That would work but I have never seen a city bus here. The town just isn't big enough to justify it. I've seen tour buses on the highway but they are going to Yellowstone and don't make stops.

Yeah that sucks. I don't understand why my home village of 500 people have a bus to nearest city every 30 minutes and big towns in USA don't.

Except that about 30 million people just went remote, and when I say remote I mean 20 minutes from town where there are no buses.

Yes but these are all problems caused by car-first infrastructure and we shouldn’t over-optimize for edge cases for locations where it “gets so cold the elderly would freeze to death”. I guess I’m not an old person but if you lived in a walkable town are the elderly really freezing to death walking to go get a cup of coffee?

The only reason alternatives aren’t viable is because we actively choose to make them not viable. They’re viable all over the world. Just not here because we’d rather shackle ourselves to oil and debt instead.

The elderly drive into town to go to the grocery store. Yes, back in the day everyone grew all the things they needed on their land. I wish this were still the case but with the common availability of stores people have grown accustom to driving to the store to stock up on food. For the elderly and physically disabled that have internet they could shop online if they knew this was a thing and have food delivered to them via someone elses truck. This is by no means an edge case. This is the normal life for 20% of people in the United States. Even in places that don't get cold, elderly are not going to be walking to the grocery store. I don't think we are going to dial back this reality short of a world-war that decimates society everywhere and/or some event that sends us back to the stone age.

I should add that even if we all agreed to turn back that dial and get back to self sustainability it is not something you can just turn on. This requires a few generations for this to be functional for entire families.

> The elderly drive into town to go to the grocery store. Yes, back in the day everyone grew all the things they needed on their land.

When I was a kid, and that wasn't a long time ago, we had grocery stores in every large streets, they all closed and relocated to the new commercial complex 5km outside of the city. My grandparents used to be able to literally cross the street and buy their food, now they have to rely on family member to go shopping for them.

>Even in places that don't get cold, elderly are not going to be walking to the grocery store. I don't think we are going to dial back this reality short of a world-war that decimates society everywhere and/or some event that sends us back to the stone age.

This comment is outlandish. In vast swathes of the non-American developed world (Europe, Japan, etc) walking, cycling, and public transport are perfectly normal ways of getting around that many, if not a majority, of elderly people use on a daily basis without any difficulty whatsoever. And indeed these people are widely considered to be thriving - in no small part because they remain physically active and engaged in their community, which is another convenient upside of avoiding car culture.

Not exactly the stone age, as your comment mentions. Like the parent comment says, the majority of the potential negatives associated with avoiding car culture are in themselves a consequence of car culture in the first place.

> elderly are not going to be walking to the grocery store.

This is by design. That's it. There's nothing stopping elderly people from walking to grocery stores except that we build in a way to make that impossible. They'd probably live longer and be healthier (as we all would be) if we walked a little more. It's very easy to test this - how do most people in the world including the elderly get their groceries?

> I should add that even if we all agreed to turn back that dial

I wouldn't be so quick to suggest that walking is turning back the dial anymore than stopping smoking is.

It's not that they have to grow their food, it's that they should be able to hop on a cheap bus to the nearest city. It actually makes it easier for elderly than car culture (for example my grandma doesn't drive but she can use the bus no problem).

Also most places where people live have grocery stores in walking distance here. But that's just another example of "car culture vs walking culture".

BTW another very common sight in countryside is old people biking or walking with a bike. That way they don't need to carry the stuff they bought. And if they get tired they can use the bike as a "walking help".

This is the village where my family comes from: https://goo.gl/maps/XrzEjhMF7VUmdVVRA

It's a village of under 500 people in the poorest part of the poorest region of the EU. The nearest city of about 20 000 people is 25 km away. There's 3 bus stops and 3 grocery shops in this village, as well as a primary school, public library, firestation, medical place(sorry no idea how to translate that, there's a few nurses and a doctor), post office, bank and a church.

If you notice the shop has 4 bikes and 2 cars parked. That's about normal. Most customers probably walked in.

If driving a car was required to live half of the (mostly elderly) population of this village would have to move to a retirement house somewhere cause they probably can't drive anymore (or at least not in big-road traffic which would be required to get to the city).

A bike would in theory be great for those still physically able. Maybe even an E-Bike. There is a path part of the way but it doesn't get plowed. The highway gets plowed but it isn't really safe for anyone to bike on the highway. I don't believe I have ever seen a bicycle on the highway.

As far as I know, biking on the highway is quite illegal in most states. So is walking, unless it's an emergency and you're walking to the next exit to get help because your phone and car are dead. It's been a long time since I checked, but at the time there were just under a dozen states that allow cycling and five or six states that only allow it if bicycle signage is explicitly posted.

But YMMV (literally ;) )

I wasn't sure so I looked it up. Apparently it is legal to ride a bicycle on the interstate in my state. Bikes are treated equal to cars and must follow all the same laws. That said I've not seen anyone do it. I do see dirt motorcycles, tractors... In town there was a tractor behind me in the drive-through.

Typically the elderly can walk to the store or get into a bus longer in their life than they can drive themselves to the store. Driving requires a very high amount of attention and getting older (or being too young!) are perfect examples that show that having a society optimized around car ownership is really not convenient for a lot of people.

If cities cleared snow on bike lanes as dutifully as they do on car lanes, (personal) transportation by bicycle in the winter is viable.

So is personal grocery hauling. There are trailers that can carry 50kg/100lbs of cargo that you just hitch to your bicycle.

That leaves the question of larger deliveries for stores. There are hybrid (muscle + electric) person sized vehicles (I think ups has some for example) that can deliver larger amounts of cargo with a reasonably sized vehicle.

But even then, I’d happily accept delivery trucks early in the morning or late in the evening if that was the only large and noisy vehicles using city roads. I don’t think most of the pollution (air and noise) or the danger to all other living beings in cities come from delivery trucks. No, it’s mostly personal cars.

I'm contemplating getting a small v-plow for an UTV to plow the bike path but I first need to find out if DOT are OK with me doing that. It isn't directly connected to the highway so they might not even own it.

You could also lobby your city so that the taxes you pay are also used for clearing the bike paths. Several Canadian cities do it (Montreal and Toronto). Montreal is much better at it than Toronto though.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to ask. I can always ask. :)

there's still a problem of toting around multi-ton structures which seems semi-obscene, but i a little interested in decoupling some. a car as a self contained structure, with it's own motive power system, with extensive energy reserves, seems wasteful. especially given how much cars just sit around.

i like to image the future as using things like the Citroen skate concept from a couple days ago[1], or other similar-ish strategies of using some kind of detachable tug or tractor that is summonable on demand.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745304

Yes but self driving cars, which could be a solution for this problem since we could then have cars on demand, are way harder to implement using oil than electricity.

Arguments of that form set up a dichotomy of “return to the Bronze Age, or do nothing.” They are part of why nothing has been done about climate change.

The fossil fuel industry wants you to believe that decarbonizing a modern economy is impossible. They want their product to be absolutely essential and irreplaceable.

Oil is irreplaceable (with current technology) to a very limited extent, but plastics and petrochemicals account for less than 10% of all oil consumption. Aviation is also less than 10%. Cars account for the majority of all oil use. We should be able to cut oil use to 25% of the current total with no deep changes to our standard of living.

It’s even more extreme for coal. Only a tiny percentage of coal is used for metallurgy. Almost all of it goes to electricity production.

You left off all the toxic and environment-degrading crap that the combustion (including combustion further up the supply chain) dumps into the air. Which at least has the "virtue" of spreading enough to also affect the well-to-do - not just those stuck living near the infrastructure, in the petro-kleptocracies, & such.

(My biggest issue with the electric vehicle enthusiasts I have known is that they seem to assume that EV's have zero hidden external costs. It's as if all the extra electricity needed was going to come from magic elves at the North Pole, via wires in hyperspace that no NIMBY could see or object to. (Let alone fail at scale, say, after a hurricane.) And Santa was going to bring EV's for all the human who aren't well-to-do home owners like them. Plus practical charging options, etc. for those folks - including the "living in their car" homeless working poor.)

I’m thinking about getting a plug in hybrid Jeep. There are tons of forum posts bashing them and complaining about lithium mining or what your electricity providers are using for power generation. They also complain that the diesel gets similar mileage as the 4xe. It’s missing the point entirely. Dino fuel production is a dirty dirty industry. My next car will be a hybrid and after that I expect they will be full EVs.

Aren’t most power grids still powered mostly by fossil fuels. You have to pay for the fuel one way or another - i.e. if it’s not gasoline, it’s coal or natural gas; unless you charge only at peak solar/wind power generation and there is excess power generated, your charging will increase fossil fuel usage.

ICE have <30% efficiency. Usually about 20%.

Turbines in powerplants have about 50% efficiency. Best ones up to 60%.

Even if you get all your energy from fossil fuels it's better to burn them in powerplants than in small inefficient ICEs in cars that most of the time aren't even working in optimal conditions and start/stop constantly.

Once you account for transmission, distribution, charging, and battery inefficiencies, electrics fall to the same range or below ice vehicles.

Especially using fast charging technology.

And ironically, using grid renewables decreases relative efficiency, since they require more deployed infrastructure (collection, transmission, etc) per kilowatt-hour generated, since intermittency has to be factored in, as well as the embedded cost of whatever supplies power when the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing, whether that be hydro, batteries, natural gas peakers, or nuclear.

EIA estimates 5% grid loss. Charge cycles should be >85% efficient i'd hope (battery losses & charger losses) but probably not in all vehicles. Discharge I'd expect even better. Your guestimate sounds way way off to me.

I'd also expect significant improvement over time. We're just getting good at GaN fets & SiC fets, which usually have a couple % boost to efficiencies versus classic semiconductor chemistries. Newer lower internal resistance batteries provide more power on demand and heat up less, again boosting efficiency. Where-as with cars we've had a number of historical events pushing us towards efficiency, huge incentives to make trucking or other major industries more efficienct, and yet we've seen dwindling returns on optimization investment: we're already very good at gas. Short of jumping to turbines or other radical leaps.

You also havent accounted for energy costs to store, transport/distribute gas, in spite of holding that against electric vehicles. I expect that's probably >15% efficiency loss there too for gas. We could go deeper & assess the energy inputs required to produce these units of power, a gallon of refined low sulfur highway gas versus the kWh produced by solar, nuclear, natural gas, or, heaven forbid coal at the power plant. Again i feel like gas is rapidly losing efficiency marks versus the competiton.

Off the cuff I'd expect >3x energy efficiency net.

I suppose my point is you are still burning fossil fuels - admittedly less of it - in most cases (for now) so you pay into the shipping of that stuff around too.

Well, yes, but you need half the tankers, half the pipelines, half the refineries, etc.

Indeed, but even centralised coal fired electric generation produces less carbon per mile travelled than petrol/diesel engines. We're not there yet, but proper grid management and diverse renewable sources mean that an increasing number of countries are heading towards large parts of base load being renewable. In all scenarios (apart from not travelling at all) electric cars are a carbon win, and it looks like it will only increase.

You can burn the gasoline in a central power station for electricity, feed that into the grid, charge your electric car and still go further than the same amount of gasoline in a petrol car. Without all the adverse health issues that exhaust in close vicinity to people causes.

Also the source of electricity to power the refineries. I found some figure on how much electricity is required for every litre of petrol and it wasn't insignificant - not as much as an electric car but uses but certainly not an order of magnitude less.

Unfortunately I can't remember where I found that information.

According to [1] it's 200 Wh per gallon so 52 Wh per liter.

Average car burns 10 liters per 100 km so that's 0.5 kWh per 100 km.

According to [2] best Tesla uses ~15 kWh per 100 km.

That's 30 times more.

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/do-gasoline-based-cars-really-use-m...

[2] https://driving.ca/features/feature-story/home-on-the-range-....

Thanks for digging out the links. I thought I read about it using more than that, but I've probably mis-remembered.

It's crude oil, so this topic is a bit of a tanget. EVs will reduce consumption, but not make it zero.

The problem is over consumption, and shiny, new, must-have electric cars just encourage more of it. The majority of a cars carbon footprint comes from its manufacturing, so it's actually more carbon friendly to run your old ICE car for as long as possible, rather than trade it in for a new EV.

Oil is also a hidden cost of EV's, from energy to plastics, it's still a required component

I'm unclear why this statement is unpopular, its factually correct. There is virtually no technology on the planet that can be made without oil.

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