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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

This is the game changer that could turn cities into EV dominated spaces. Imagine if every convenience store had a rack of these out front. It would be even faster to get a charged EV than even to gas up an ICE car at the pump.

These are the things that start becoming possible if we let our idea of an EV move beyond a 4000lb automobile to move your maybe 200lb self. You would have to use a technician to service a car sized EV and swap out the batteries even if they dropped right out easily, just due to the to weight of them. An entire infrastructure that would have to be built just to move around 3800 unnecessary lbs anytime you wanted to go anywhere at all. Meanwhile, if people were merely happy with something the size of an e scooter, converting the population to EVs starts getting a lot simpler just in terms of the physics of it all, and simple low hanging fruit innovations like this are possible.

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Unfortunately this is not it. The game changer will be when they start closing off large parts of cities to cars and limiting them to small, slow and safe golf cart/scooter/bike type vehicles. Everything else will fall into place very quickly afterwards.

We have the technology, we need the political will. These scooters are nice but few people will brave riding them in a busy American street, not to even mention a highway.

> the political will

Which is another way of saying 'willing voters.' Who all own cars already, for the most part. And rarely vote to reduce their own quality of life even if there is a possibility that in the longer run it will be higher.

and are completely oblivious to the costs of their way of life (and certainly won't listen to a politician who mentions the existence of such cost)

Or they believe the costs are worth it. Trying to convince people to support extraordinary lifestyle changes requires extraordinary evidence that the net result will be positive.

If innovation can't happen until the ignorant are enlightened we're never going to see innovation.

Innovation is all around you. It's just not the type of innovation that requires elected government officials to participate (and in a way that will frustrate some of their supporters).

You're likely reading this on a device that was invented while plenty of ignorant people were still not enlightened.

I completely agree and that's almost my entire point. Innovation that depends on the ignorant being enlightened is almost impossible to accomplish - innovation needs to work around ignorance and accomplish itself through smaller steps that provide benefits to everyone. I really wish this weren't the case as it gives immense momentum to doing things the wrong way - but it's something we need to cope with.

(I admit I may have worded my comment a bit better with a "that" - 'If innovation can't happen until the ignorant are enlightened we're never going to see that innovation.')

Yeah, let’s impose our benevolent superior ideas on the ignorant majority. I’m sure no one has tried that before and it has never lead any country into dictatorship.

Often the majority is very ignorant. You don't need to jump to dictatorships to change their mind, marketing and innovation have proved more than enough

> Or they believe the costs are worth it.

The costs are more than likely paid by others, which is why they're oblivious.

Far easier than convincing them would be to stop subsidizing them, sprawling car dependent suburbs are a giant money sink that the people living in them rarely pay for.

Well how did we convince people to stop throwing human waste out the window, pay for installing sewer pipes and using soap?

How will that ever happen when delivery, moving, construction, etc are essential parts of the economy for "large parts of cities"?

None of which requires unrestricted access for personal cars or motor vehicles.

You can totally ban individual cars while allowing delivery, moving, construction, emergencies, public transport …

A lot of city centers in Europe have been closed to cars during the last decades but special trafic is still allowed.

It just works and it’s better for everybody.

And now I hope this will be extended outside of city centers.

Sure, but how does this system work? Especially with newer services, like ride sharing, where people use personal vehicles to transport people within these areas?

It doesn't work, nobody ever thought of it.

RIP Europe, you will be sorely missed.

On a more serious note, ride sharing services are considered as taxis which are considered public transport and public transport is generally allowed at least on designated roads.

You could require them to register as commercial vehicles. You can enforce using physical barriers or punishing fines/use fees for people that don't enter the area with a fare. Taxis can only go in certain parts of airports, rideshares have designated pickup zones, it seems to work fine. Or you just say that one of the downsides of being a part time driver that isn't part of a regulated fleet is that you don't get to congest downtown areas.

In Granada Spain I noticed that certain parts of the old city had physical barriers that could only be passed by a vehicle with the right NFC pass. Generally taxis, busses, and a few private cars that seemed to belong to people with property in the area. It made it very pleasant to walk around the old streets without having to suck down exhaust fumes of idling cars.

As you noted, Uber is a newer service, plenty of people happily lived their lives before it existed.

As an example, this sign [1] is at the edge of Copenhagen's main pedestrian shopping street.

The international symbols show it's a pedestrian zone, and there's a rule of no stopping from 11-04 (no stopping meaning not even any loading/unloading, a stronger restriction than no parking.)

The text says "Residents excepted" (under the graffiti/sticker) and "Goods vehicles excepted 04-11" (so deliveries and rubbish collection in the morning) on all days including Sundays and public holidays.

50m down the cross-street on which the StreetView car is driving, there's the standard sign for no motor vehicles [2], and the text underneath says "Except for business" -- so this street can be used all day for delivery vehicles etc.

Both signs are enforced similar to parking: get caught, and you'll be fined. I'm sure you're less likely to be challenged if you're driving a van with "Plumber" written on the side, but it shouldn't matter.

No doubt it's more complicated in cities where this is enforced by cameras.

(In addition, the pedestrian streets are mostly conflicting one-way streets [3, and do a 360°]. No problem for a delivery, but useless as a shortcut.)

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6779772,12.5729422,3a,25.5y,...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6772541,12.5737765,3a,23.2y,...

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6814522,12.5751944,3a,75y,12...

> Sure, but how does this system work?

You walk or take transit within that area? In my experience European cities are super walkable within the core, never bothered with taxis or ride-sharing.

Same way you designate loading/passenger zone parking or bus/taxi only lanes for large parts of cities.

The USA already has a NEV standard (25mph top speed, some look like small cars, others more like golf carts). All it would take to make them viable is more streets with 25mph speed limits.

This makes roads safer for bikes and scooters, but the NEV gives a car-like option for someone who can't (or won't) ride a bike.

Even a NEV-plus standard that allows up to 35mph would be an improvement, that would already cover almost all of my commute.

The NEV standard would be great if people followed speed limits. Unfortunately, the fact that it is 25 mph it does not mean people will drive anywhere close to that. But it is a good start.

There's a pretty easy fix for that... speed cameras.

Even easier fix for that which is much cheaper to enforce... narrower roads, raised crosswalks, separated bike lanes. Cars will naturally drive slower on those roads and they are more friendly to other modalities.

The argument against strict traffic calming is always "How will an emergency vehicle get through?"

There are some solutions that can slow cars but still allow emergency vehicles through, but they aren't perfect, and still need sign off from the fire department. And that signoff can be hard to get, years ago, my neighborhood wanted to install speed humps to slow traffic -- the fire department vetoed it since the road was the main access from the neighhood firestation.

Anyone from NL here? How does that work there?

American fire trucks are absolutely massive compared to their European and Asian peers.

You can actually speed over speed bumps, it's just uncomfortable...

The main thing is: how bad are speed bumps for vehicle maintenance, really? Fire trucks, for example, only need to go full throttle when they leave the fire station.

When they come back they can just go over the speed bump slowly, like everyone else.

Why would going over 1 speed bump every bunch of days be such a major issue? Does that mean that a fire truck going over a pothole will do a barrel roll? :-p

I had a family member with broken ribs make a trip to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, I think it’s the medical vehicles which are most likely to have trouble on speed bumps.

Ambulances are a potential problem, true.

But even for ambulances, if you couple traffic calming measures with bike lanes, better public transport, etc, car traffic goes way down, which means that ambulances aren't stuck in traffic. So even ambulances can slow down a bit before speed bumps and they would still arrive faster than otherwise.

Another is the complexity of city traffic, the more red lights, the more people are frustrated and will try to push faster. When you ensure fluid flow, 25mph is fast enough to go where you want without noticing it, if things are smooth the driver might even enjoy the scene instead of trying to 'get before the green light is over'.

Making streets narrower, raising crosswalks and building separate bike lanes is a much larger up front expense than installing speed cameras.

This is literally the sunk cost fallacy

I don't know where I read this, but narrow streets cause people to slow down too. Nearby my home is a very roomy 30mph 5-lane road where the flow of traffic is usually 45mph. Plenty of room to speed up!

There's a solution for this, that's know to work - one way streets. Set them up in a fashion that you have no reason to enter these slow streets unless you're going to a direct destination there.

That way you can avoid passthrough traffic.

NEVs have governors that electronically limit them 25mph.

I live in a city with a 20mph speed limit in the city and for the most part it's adhered to. This sort of tech would be a game changer here.

Why can't it be both? Easy-access technology can be a first step to changing political mindsets.

Reminds me of cities where there are paths throughout the area for golf carts. Most of them are retirement villages and the like, but there are some notable "normal" cities like Peachtree City, Georgia that do this.

I can't imagine any developed city having the collective willpower to retrofit these sorts of paths into their city, though.

> These are the things that start becoming possible if we let our idea of an EV move beyond a 4000lb automobile to move your maybe 200lb self.

I see you live in an area with significantly more days of good weather than bad!

The Worldwatch Institute regularly put out 80-page studies in the 1980s. Disappointingly, they published one on The Future of the Bicycle which never once mentioned the word 'rain'.

FWIW, the Aptera three-wheel EV design gets IIRC 10X better distance/kWhr than most EVs, and has a US classification as a motorcycle.

Agreed!

It's impossible to use anything but cars in places with bad weather. Science has proved it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

This reminds me of winter biking back in university in Idaho (fairly cold winters)... with a night shift that got off at 23:00.

The path I was on wasn't really maintained with winter bikers in mind, and I never even thought of researching winter tires, and I wasn't a particularly skilled cyclist (I don't think I cleaned the chain once in several years).

So I did what any stubborn-minded fool who had to bike to their job rain or shine would do: I simply fell over repeatedly until I started getting the hang of things (pro-tip: just don't turn at all and you won't fall over)

Nowadays I'm too old to consider regularly crashing during my commute to be a particularly sane idea; though I still don't have a car and wish cycling infrastructure would get even a fraction of the attention that car infrastructure does.

Well, for this missing scenario, public transport in theory would help.

However there is a strong lack of will for it in many places.

In many others the population density doesn't really allow it.

As usual, it's a mix of things, just that the current default of "cars everywhere" should be turned on its head. It should be: "no cars everywhere, and then introduce cars where they are actually needed".

I suggest you try getting outside and traveling the world a bit, to get a better understanding of the large ranges of weather seen in different cities throughout the world. You'll definitely be surprised! There's hot, cold, wet, icy, windy, and everything in between.

For a rare few places in the world, open air transportation could work year round. For the rest, you'll need an equally sized fleet of cars for the bad days, and scooters for the good days, than can be easily swapped.

they would shovel the snow and salt the sidewalks at my uni with enclosed with hvac, basically more durable 'golf carts' with a truck bed with a salt dispenser and a snow plow in front. seems like something like that would make a decent winter grocery getter or commuter.

I imagine that, at some point, safety will become a concern when injuries start piling up [1], leading to bigger, heavier, 'golf carts', with car like safety features. I drive a Fiat 500e [2], which is basically the same size as a golf cart, but won't get me killed. I have no interest in driving anything smaller, and I doubt I'm alone!

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15389588.2020.17...

> During the observation period, a total of 875 GC-related crashes occurred, representing an average of 136 crashes, 65 hospitalizations, and 9 dead or disabled annually. Of all crashes, 48% resulted in hospitalization, severe trauma, or death. Of these, ejection occurred in 27%, hospitalization in 55%, and death or disability in 15% of crashes.

2. Random YouTube for scale: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xHh1vAGd8Uk/hqdefault.jpg

> I suggest you try getting outside and traveling the world a bit, to get a better understanding of the large ranges of weather seen in different cities throughout the world. You'll definitely be surprised! There's hot, cold, wet, icy, windy, and everything in between.

Nice personal attack.

You have 0 info about me to say anything. You know what they say: "if you have nothing to say, just shut up". Your mom should have taught you that ;-)

> For a rare few places in the world, open air transportation could work year round. For the rest, you'll need an equally sized fleet of cars for the bad days, and scooters for the good days, than can be easily swapped.

A rare few places?

Bikes are common in South East Asia (hot, wet).

Bikes are common in the Netherlands (wet, windy).

Bikes are common in Finland (icy).

Electric bikes are starting to make even hilly terrain bikeable.

Unless population density is low, bikes + scooters + public transport can cover everything.

People just don't want to do that. That's a different story to "it can't be done!!!11!!".

OK. It's a snowstorm. Would you rather spin out in something that weighs 4000lbs or something that is more like an enclosed ATV or a gator with studded tires? The physics is on your side with the smaller and lighter vehicle plus of course the efficiency gains to be had from requiring less energy overall to go the same distance since your total weight is going to be lower.

You're ignoring the vehicle has to be able to carry an HVAC system on it unless you're fine with freezing in sub zero temperatures. Like where do you think all that weight is going? Car manufacturers just arbitrarily making their own costs higher and fuel efficiency worse for nothing?

If your solution to this problem doesn't account for the disabled, elderly, physically unfit, or requires that some or all people be unable to drive in weather that personal vehicles right now handle without issue, like freezing rain, you're not gonna get much buy-in.

'Like where do you think all that weight is going?'

A vehicke that can survive a crash at 60 km/h and reach 200km/h and handle properly at that speed is going to weigh accordingly.

IMO maybe its a little absurd every minivan or whatever can go 120mph and go zero to 60 in 5 seconds. Why do you need that power? Not for legal driving sitations that's for sure since as soon as you use that power you have on tap you are basically driving recklessly by definition. Tool for the job and all. I can manage life going to the grocery store with something with the performance characteristics of a golf cart or a bird scooter. Don't need a 5 second 0-60 for that, personally.

Five seconds to get up to highway speeds isn't outrageous in many parts of the country where there are short on ramps and fast moving traffic.

And that's in ideal conditions - real world could easily have multiple passengers and a full load of luggage/cargo that'll slow things down.

Likewise with going 120mph - highway speeds are anything from 60 to 85mph. Most vehicles aren't at 100% engine load when cruising on the highway.

Even where I live there is the 110 to pasadena, one of the oldest freeways there is (if not THE oldest) and some of the shortest onramps you've ever seen. Even then, you do not need to go from 0-60 in five seconds to safely merge.

And with the 120 on the other end, sure, maybe the engines are good for that, but why even allow the car to go that fast? Why not just put in a speed limiter? Doesn't make much sense why we have all this power imo when the driving rules and laws were written around cars that probably took 20 seconds to reach 60mph and might have needed to go downhill with a tailwind to breach 75mph. And what do you know, the laws always have to account for these anemic vehicles thanks to just old vehicles and stuff like commercial equipment that is going to be heavy and slow no matter what, so you won't find yourself ever needing more performance to keep up with faster interchanges or anything like that since things are always going to built to these meager performance expectations. It's like buying a $4000 gaming PC to run microsoft word 98; wrong tool for the job.

They make enclosed golf carts/gators with hvac too.

Or we could have, you know, buses and trams and metros? Riding a scooter in a car designed city sucks :-/

Nah, you'll just get tunnels were autonomous cars can be stuck in traffic jams, instead.

not if you have a bike lane, then its amazing.

Not exactly the same, I know, but it's worth keeping in the common memory the fact that battery-swapping EVs have been around for a very long time.

See this[1]. Quote:

" the excessive noise of these vehicles annoyed residents of some of the wealthier areas of the town and so the company ordered 4 battery-powered buses, which entered service in June 1909; ... [buildings] held charging equipment, so that during the day buses could swiftly exchange spent batteries for ones that were fully charged, a change-over which took about ten minutes. "

[1] https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1...

With a car I wonder if you could have 4 or 5 of these batteries as a range extender.

So the main battery is fixed as current standard, but you can throw in a few of these to extend range or if you run out of power for a ~50km type extension.

this idea raised $850M and failed

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

Those aren't scooters, they're cars -- and they showed up before Panasonic/Tesla attacked the battery-cost problem with roughly 100x as much capital.

Tesla also tried battery swapping several years ago but seems to have given up.

Those are also cars.

That's because Tesla owners have disposable income and tend to charge in suburban or rural homes. Swapping is aimed more at lower-income segments or delivery/maintenance services in urban areas.

Edward Niedermeyer's book _Ludicrous_ spends some time on this subject. According to Musk's own statements, Tesla invited less than 200 customers to a trial, and then declared that there was insufficient demand. Niedermeyer points out that conducting even a single customer battery swap allowed Tesla to book about $100M in extra ZEV credits over the years; according to his own anecdotal observations, there was considerably more demand than Tesla claimed, but Tesla did not seem to be overly motivated to make the program work.

Sometimes yesterday's failed idea can be today's genius idea.

For example, if you tried to launch Squarespace in 1993, most people wouldn't care; they'd wonder who would want it and why. (The World Wide Web was a niche thing at that time.)

Shai Agassi was on the cover of WIRED back in 2008 and college me thought he was going to save the world. Like a proto-Musk if Elon were actually in it to save the planet.

How is this top comment? Is this a joke?

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