Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daffodils | Hacker News Reader

TSLA is helping rich people think that they are helping combat climate change, whilst keeping their unsustainable car centric lifestyle.

View on HN

Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.

Musk has since long ago pursued a publically disclosed plan for Tesla, for the company to release progressively more affordable electric vehicles, so the current growth rate in number of vehicles sold could very well be sustained for years to come.

Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. There is no reasonable case to be made that Tesla has not had a massive impact on pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones. And most people consider that to be good for the environment, even if you now don't.

A lot of assumptions there that things will continue to get cheaper, cost in manufacturing will drop, battery range will continue to improve, charging stations continue to proliferate, the grid respond to the burden, and no missteps in captialization and expansion cause it all to collapse.

Extremely safe assumptions given the investments being made by Tesla, not to mention other carmakers. The electric grid responding to the burden is almost certain as well, given the history of the grid handling decades of rising year-over-year energy usage in most localities.

As for mistakes, the company can afford many small to intermediate missteps and still accomplish what I described, because the company's momentum is already pushing it to accomplish these achievements.

Optimistic!

The grid has not responded well, that is history. Fast Charging stations are a huge draw, and home recharging raised the bar for substations everywhere. It will take decades to respond.

Battery advances - well that's a crystal ball I don't care to gaze into.

And company momentum is a myth. Cash flow is king - the day you don't make payroll, you close. It's a markov chain with a terminating condition. Play any markov game long enough and you reach that node and its all over. So a gamble every time.

I have seen no numbers to support the claim that mass installation and employment of charging stations will have an extraordinary impact on electricity usage, beyond the normal annual increases that the grid has been able to facilitate.

As for batteries, you don't have to bet on battery advances, just the scaling up of manufacturing, which is already underway.

Apart from the last sentence, you're not really addressing the grandparent's point, and that last sentence is not a very convincing argument.

Do you have data supporting that Tesla replaced 2 million gasoline cars? Selling electric cars does not mean that the buyer has gotten rid of their gasoline-powered cars, and it's not uncommon for one person to own multiple cars.

I have no reason to assume Tesla encouraged more people to become car owners. That would be quite the expensive status symbol for a non-car owner to take up. And those who own a gasoline-powered car buying a Tesla as a second vehicle would still reduce usage of the first vehicle.

So assuming that most of those two million sales weren't in lieue of the sale, or at least use, of gasoline powered cars, doesn't seem reasonable to me.

But let's be extremely conservative in our praise of Tesla, and say that the company took one million gasoline powered cars off the road and replaced them with electric cars. That is quite the accomplishment if you accept the premise that electric vehicles are better than gasoline-powered ones for reducing the impact on climate.

If you live in an area that primarily gets electricity from coal plants, the break even point for a Model 3 to gas cars is 80,000+ miles [1]. EVs aren't some magic carbon-negative solution, and the politics Musk plays to get raw materials are a net negative for the planet as a whole.

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

> If you live in an area that primarily gets electricity from coal plants, the break even point for a Model 3 to gas cars is 80,000+ miles [1]. EVs aren't some magic carbon-negative solution, and the politics Musk plays to get raw materials are a net negative for the planet as a whole.

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

Do you have a bone to pick with EVs? This seems cherry-picked/straw man to me.

The 80k+ you refer to assumes electricity is sourced 100% from coal, which happens never in the US.

Even West Virginia, a haven for coal, it’s only 88%. Wyoming is also in the 80s. There are a few in the 50-70 range, but most states are sub-35, with many being 0.

[edit] For our most populous states, CA checks in at 0.1%, NY 0.1%, FL 7%, and TX 16%.

https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/state-electricity-g...

This article shows how US sources of electricity have changed in the past 20 years or so.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/climate/how-e...

Contrary to what you state, I would say that EVs are doing a good job at lowering overall emissions from passenger vehicles, and this will become more true as renewables increase their percentage in our electricity production mix.

Even if that 80,000+ miles point is true it’s still better than a gasoline car over its lifetime and completely dishonest because who the hell is buying a Tesla and living in an area with 100% coal fired power? Germans?

The “U.S. average energy mix” comparison of 14,800 is much more accurate.

Not to mention the equation gets more and more favourable to EVs with each passing year.

> If you live in an area that primarily gets electricity from coal plants

That's a rather extreme assumption. The article you linked to also gives the more representative figure of 14,800 miles for "U.S. average energy mix (23% coal-fired, plus other fossil fuels and renewables)".

To put things in perspective there are only 12 states that are majority coal powered (according to 2017 numbers[0]):

    1. West Virginia - 93.2%
    2. Wyoming - 85.7%
    3. Missouri - 79.8%
    4. Kentucky - 78.2%
    5. Indiana - 73.2%
    6. Utah - 70.5%
    7. North Dakota - 64.5%
    8. Nebraska - 59.8%
    9. Ohio - 57.2%
    10. Wisconsin - 55.1%
    11. New Mexico - 54.8%
    12. Colorado - 54.3%

Also, it's not unrealistic for a Model 3 to do 80,000+ miles. Some have already managed 100,000 miles[1], which is apparently the minimum warranty period too.[2]

[0] https://stacker.com/stories/3356/states-producing-most-elect...

[1] https://electrek.co/2019/10/21/tesla-model-3-100000-miles/

[2] https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/how-long-does-a-tesla-ba...

I really don't appreciate people on HN posting wildly inaccurate links, I think that's something we need to be discouraged from doing. Second, are you unaware of solar panels?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com