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I think the recent electric scooter boom and subsequent pushback by communities shows that: - There is (IMHO huge) pent-up demand for last-mile style electric transportation: scooters, bicycles, etc. - The electric drive technology is starting to reach a point where it can support a whole new space of designs that make this sort of transportation appealing to a wide variety of users (i.e. not just fit young adventurous people; the elderly, young children, etc.) - Sadly, infrastructure, laws, and social norms move way too slowly and are the limiting factor for what could be a major quality-of-life improvement for many many people.

Note that "EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane ... probably less than $10k." is a pretty good description for the electric cargo bikes that are already starting to emerge.

I would love to see cities and towns adapt faster to accommodate things like this:

The Car-Replacement Bicycle (the bakfiets) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

How to Transport Kids by eBike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCvx65egUDE

This American Mayor is Creating the Ultimate Biking City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVWv9O0qQ4

If you're ever in San Francisco, Miami, or NYC, check out what Revel is doing. Electric mopeds that rent for $0.50/min! They're such an excellent way to get around and see the city (at least in San Francisco where I ride them)

It is soooo expensive what was about $1/hour in China.

I am amazed by the Bakfiets, but i am confused at why delivery guys aren't already using it, there must be some reason for why these are unusable in other countries, like, here in italy we see delivery guys everyday and i think that if someone found it useful they would've already started using it, so, why not? What is keeping people from using the Bakfiets? There MUST be a reason for this.

I think in Italy there is still a cultural barrier

Electric cargo bikes solve so many problems I don't even know where to begin. Faster than cars in traffic, cheaper, easier to service, extremely flexible in configuration, modular, hackable, healthier, quieter, etc. They can carry a week's worth of grocerys and you don't even need to sweat. I have lost track of all the companies popping up in the last years with new products in the space like urban arrow [1], onomotion [2], babboe [3], carla cargo [4].

[1]: https://na.urbanarrow.com/ [2]: https://onomotion.com/en/ [3]: https://www.babboe.co.uk/ [4]: https://www.carlacargo.de/products/ecarla/

Tesla RV for 70k? Can you teleport me into your alternate universe, please? ;) Different brand might make more sense, but even those will probably cost you at least doulbe that, unless you're maybe only talking about certain climate zones, bare minimum living standards and an abhorrent range together with some other bad tradeoff decisions regarding price vs. quality. Or maybe in a decade or two (at today's prices/without inflation).

Also, others made the point already about rent for the space to park on (most likely outcome would be high taxes and rent for RV parks (don't think they'd be much more efficient than regular housing on a sqft basis, especially if you're not putting them on top of each other, Ready Player One style).

Also, others made the point already about rent for the space to park on (most likely outcome would be high taxes and rent for RV parks

I can't speak for everyone but the way I would circumvent that would be to buy a piece of unrestricted or minimally restricted land that allows an RV as a primary dwelling. This requires some research on youtube among the existing RV nomads. Non-farmable land is very affordable. Some states are stricter on this than others and some counties within those states also vary a bit. Land is an investment vs dumping money into rental space. A few acres of land, some solar panels on the RV and some next to it should provide enough power to get by. The missing piece is water and one can plonk down a large water tank and have a truck come out to fill it every 3 to 6 months and/or do rain capture assuming one knows how to implement proper filtration. Some states promote rain capture and some ban it. Many RV's already support composting toilets and have grey/black water tanks. Some states will require installing a septic system, whereas some states have rules on the books but nobody to enforce it. I would suggest also having an EV motorcycle or street legal side-by-side for going into town for groceries. That requires some research as well as to which of those is supported by that state/county/province. For internet there are 4G/5G modems specifically designed for RV's and boats that have multiple external roof mounted antennas and can use multiple SIM cards.

Plenty of people/road-nomads already do this. They have a piece of land that is their legal domicile and sometimes they just stay put on that piece of land. My preference if I went this route would be to have a hybrid RV for times when solar is not cutting it.

The downside of all this would be finding people that can perform advanced maintenance on the RV and staying close enough that a towing job would not be crazy expensive. Some mechanics can bring a subset of their tools out to the remote location. I would suggest researching RV's that are based on common platforms. The upside is that one could research which states have the most conducive weather, taxes, laws, culture, etc... and if any of that changes, just buy land in a better state, pack up your solar panels and move there. When the market is right, sell the previous few acres of land and the old tank. Tanks are affordable and it's easier to just buy a new one than to clean and move the old one. Another potential downside to putting an RV in the middle of nowhere is that when dodgy people find out someone is alone and isolated, they become a target. One has to be ready to defend themselves. Try to find a piece of land that is not visible from any of the roads.

I literally did this.

My recommendation is just learn how to repair the RV yourself. RVIA has an online cert program you can take for $300.

I know how to repair RVs and I just had to pay $6700 to repair a $55K RV before selling it. Do not underestimate how expensive RVs are to pay someone to fix.

That's awesome that you did your own training. Agreed the RV's, especially the less common platforms are crazy expensive to have someone repair and that is assuming one can even find a mechanic that will touch it. That's why I suggest using a common platform if one can manage having a smaller RV. One example would be RV's based on the Ford F450/550 platform [1]. There are plenty of Ford mechanics and I envision Ford some day having an EV or hybrid version of the example I linked. Linking overpriced example, there are more affordable examples

The people that build "custom schoolies" are especially on their own unless they are part of many forums/facebook groups of schoolies and can find a mechanic that knows how to work on school buses.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53fkkxc-IWw [video, annoying music]

Half width vehicles ignores the following issues.

- Busses. How do you make them half width? (or perhaps, uncharitably, do you think public transportation is worthless?). If busses stay the same width how do you write the driving regulations for mixed width vehicles and retrain the driving public so that fatalities do not skyrocket.

- Bulk delivery vehicles. Same as above.

- Half width means less vehicle stability at speed. Reducing vehicle height is constrained by human size. Worse stability means reduced speeds to reduce fatalities. Consider San Francisco, where a large proportion of the city cars are from commuters traveling 30-60 miles per day. What are the rules for commuter roads with mixed width vehicles?

- Reduced width would likely mean smaller wheels, increasing rotational speed. Tire and brake pad wear is now a non-trivial factor of car pollution. Half width vehicles would / could make this worse.

very unsure if half width vehicles will become a thing, but what's for sure is that micromobility will expand. We will see more electric scooters, ebikes etc. They solve so many traffic and environmental problems in cities.

I wish there was something to make smaller vehicles more palatable. Where I live everyone drives huge vehicles. They need the AWD or 4wd for traction in the winter. They probably don’t need to be F150 size and above for that though. I’m thinking like a weight/size tax on registration.

Many US states have weight/size taxes and fines that are still "on the books" but haven't been enforced in decades. Maybe as gas taxes drop below certain funding goals they will re-evaluate enforcing them.

I really wanted to get an electric motorcycle, but the current market leader charges $20k for something that can get to highway speeds and go 70-80 miles on a charge. I'll have to stick to my $9k ICE motorcycle for now, unfortunately.

but this is just a bandaid on a much larger problem: our cities and highway system were designed and built in eras where the amount of cars on the road was a fraction of what it is now. I-95 has become a complete abomonation, and some e-scooters and bikes wont fix that

You just have the existing big lanes but limit them to buses, emergency vehicles, maintenance, and deliveries.

Or public transit becomes an enormous fleet of half-width on-demand driverless microcars

Battery's DO NOT scale like you claim.

A desiel semi is much lighter than an Electric Semi is. That's why Tesla Semi hasn't launched yet. They are currently trying to change the regulation for maximum allowances on US Roads from 10k to 14k.

The Delta-V on an electric vehicle has the problem that the battery scales more proportionately to weight and range than a desiel equivelent. Desiel gas has a tremendous amount of energy stored so compactly that is impossible to match with electric batterys.

That's why Tesla Semi hasn't launched yet.

On the other hand Volvo (and Scania) launched electric trucks years ago and I see them driving around all the time. So whatever is preventing Tesla trucks from launching it is related to them and their design and goals, not a fundamental problem with the concept of electric trucks.

Are you in Europe? If you’re comparing Americas/Australian to European truck designs, it’s an apples/oranges comparison.

You have to compare the compact stored energy of liquid fuels after it gets converted to useful forward motion via a heavy, noisy, inefficient, costly to maintain and fuel engines.

It's basically a thought terminating cliche at this point.

ICE cars are way lighter than EV cars with a reasonable range. It's not a cliche, it's a true constraint of reality, which EV enthusiasts decoupled from reality frequently seem to forget.

And yet reality tells us EVs are still 4x more efficient.

Efficient from a energy perspective != efficient from a convenience perspective.

Hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense and cheap. It’s possible to pack so much more energy in such a lighter, more compact space with them that the overall vehicle can be dramatically lighter and have longer range at the same time.

Additionally, doing so is so cheap, it often more than makes up for any efficiency issues, especially if the comparatively better end to end efficiency (and lower pollution and maintenance costs) of a EV comes with convenience issues like reduced range, lack of infrastructure, etc.

For mid-sized commuter vehicles, it’s trending more and more towards EVs as prices drop, charging infrastructure improves, and usage patterns make it convenient (such as at-home or at-office charging).

It still has a way to go for things like commercial or heavy recreational trucks, RVs, etc. It also has a way to go in smaller vehicles like Motorcycles, where the reduced range (due to some pretty fundamental weight limits) makes them more suitable for moped like inner city commuting or very short range trips.

And that’s compared to normally aspirated gasoline. It’s harder still to beat diesel, especially if super/turbo charged which has better energy efficiency, higher energy density, and except for some jurisdictions cheaper fuel prices.

In what way?

Heavier vehicles cause exponentially more damage to roads. It’s not like building roads is an energy free exercise.

They are also significantly more dangerous in traffic collisions. That kinetic energy has to go somewhere when you crash.

Electric cars with current battery tech will only be a stop gap solution until we get something like induction in roads for longer distances.

Personally I think the Dutch and Danes have a better solution already with low tech bike infrastructure and electric or pedal bikes.

It’s cheaper, requires less maintenance and makes their populations healthier.

“Halving” vehicles has been possible for long time, also seen it mentioned numerous times over the years. Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car, odd of person in small car dying are much higher. Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society.

As for the RV, you still need parking and most people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. Most cities are already strict on RV living, especially long term local RV living; if it became even more popular, they would become even more strict. RV also are impossible to insulate, as a result, frequently follow the weather; majority of people don’t want to be constantly driving around to find and adjust to a new location.

Too true. It not possible to reach any sensible climate goals by replacing all gasoline cars with EVs. We need to rethink mobility. And we need smaller vehicles in order to optimize battery-weight/transported persons/goods. And we need new solutions to safety instead of adding bulkier safety devices, which drag down transportation efficiency. Limit top speed?

commented further up with a similar sentiment but i'll comment here too. "rethinking mobility" will not fix how idiotically layed out most of our existing infrastructure exists today - especially large sprawling haphazardly built cities like LA and Austin

> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car, odd of person in small car dying are much higher. Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society.

Some people are already driving smaller cars than I imagined we'd be comfortable with, but I can see ways to ease more people into the idea of trading their safety for a smaller car. High gas prices help, but things like reducing lane sizes just enough to make driving smaller cars feel more comfortable, but not enough to be too dangerous for larger vehicles, increasing the amount of small car only parking spaces, and lots of advertising money would probably convince a lot of people small cars are what they want. If car manufactures start making more and more tiny cars (especially inexpensive cars) many people aren't going to have much of a choice. I'm pretty sure most of the American public could be sold on it eventually if someone were willing to spend the money.

> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen

It has already happened. I drive an ebike in Paris almost every day. It's even smaller than a "half vehicle" and has absolutely zero protection, save for the helmet. I wouldn't trade an ebike for a "thin car" though, because an ebike can go anywhere. It's an incredible level of freedom.

> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car

There's no need to imagine what that that would be like, because the situation has existed for years already: what you describe is just everyday reality for motorcyclists.

Will there ever be more than a fringe of the population willing to be exposed to the mortality risks motorcyclists are exposed to? Last time i looked your chance of being killed is an order of magnitude higher on a motorcycle.

That's as it may be, and it varies by culture, but it is clear that there can be no requirement for an "authoritarian society" before there could be smaller/narrower vehicles sharing the roads with larger ones, as this is already commonplace in many different kinds of societies around the world. In some places motorcycles/mopeds/tuktuks are more common than full size cars.

> Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society.

In fact, you already have no right to drive whatever kind of vehicle you want on public roads. There's no part of daily life that's more regulated. And there's no interesting argument about freedom to be had here. We build the roads as a society, so we have every reason to make rules about what kinds of vehicles are allowed on those roads.

Today, we allow an absurd range of plainly unsafe vehicles on our roads, but I think the status quo is untenable. As technology makes the cars safer it's going to be harder and harder to justify allowing giant vehicles piloted entirely at the discretion of flawed humans. In a world where the car knows you're asking it to speed up into a crosswalk full of children and can prevent you from doing it, it's basically absurd to insist that the car should instead respond only to the driver's whims. What I'm trying to say is that size is just one aspect of this. We need to entirely rethink what we're allowing on public roads.

Driving in general is completely unnecessary and results in all sorts of less than desirable outcomes. If it was up to me, whole industry would disappear unless the vehicles were for industrial or military use only, no were near humans, autonomously driven, zero emissions, etc.

Largest issue is not even death and pollution, it’s that they literally enable culture division and isolation - which is toxic to real progress.

Some cities like Austin, TX allow RVs within the city if you have enough setbacks. Personally, it's quite easy to buy a small amount of land in unincorporated county land that's very close to a city. I did, and I can hit downtown in under 20 min. I wasn't even trying to optimize for distance, if I was I'd have bought 5 acres at 10 min out.

Nobody ever rides bikes on the road, you're right.

I think you need to see the problem in terms of "bigger, more protected bikes" rather than "tiny cars"

Electric RVs require: parking, charging facilities, sanitary facilities, and maintenance.

A few people with "camp mode" is a complete different proposition to millions of people with mobile homes. Not to say it couldn't be done, but cities would have to become mobile labour camps and the infrastructure costs would be significant - mostly the cost of space formerly used by brick and mortar real estate.

And owners would be charged rent for use of facilities. So that $70k is not going to be rent free.

all of this is likely to happen in Europe/China, much less in US where corporations still rule and there are much less federal rules, and almost no chance in most of Africa/MiddleEast/India which have no infrastructure for this.

How is living in an EV RV any different from living in a motor home today? Most people want an actual home/apt not a cramped car with no space, its not the same thing at all.

The Battery RV thing will probably hit the same issue as people who already tried this housing hack, legal bans.

They're still going back and forth in the courts but Mountain View, LA, San Diego and probably other such places that become the next target will probably fight this legally, for the same reasons they fight any other type of cheap housing.

Too soon

The infrastructure to fast charge EVs at home will require power grids to be of much higher capacity.

Also all the fossil fuel that we burn now needs replacement by non fossil fuel sources - other than Nuclear nothing can deliver.

We already know how slow the world is at re-embracing nuclear, so don't hold your breath just yet

I think this is a good insight, and I hope this comes to pass, but a couple points:

> the world's largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are electric

What about cruise ships, freighters, freight trains, and aircraft carriers? They're diesel or nuclear-powered. Or maybe nuclear still counts as having an electric motor, just with a nuclear generator instead of a battery?

> only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core

Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.

Yes there are a lot of corner cases that I didn't belabor in my post. Most of the very heavy vehicles you mention are in fact already diesel electric. ie a diesel motor operates as a generator to provide electricity for the electric motor that moves things along. Just replace the diesel with a battery and you're there. (not as simple as it seems but right in theory)

With small cars in a city core these cars rarely go faster than 40 mph and on average about 30mph with traffic lights so you don't need the separation that you would want on a freeway. Several vehicles like this are already available or under development. I suspect that a Smart Car would come very close to meeting this spec already.

   > Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.

Probably would be a problem. I don't know that the author was thinking "a car that is half the width of a normal car" as "a vehicle that takes up substantially less space". Perhaps we'll all be riding around in Go-Karts, who knows? :)

Freight trains are also electric, just with diesel generators. I'll completely speculate 2 things that stand in the way of them going fully electric:

1. Trains derail, crash, etc.

I live in a city that's a rail hub. We probably have a derailment every couple years even with annual rail/rail bed maintenance. They will fix the rail, the roads around it, and have everything back up and running in less than 2 days. You spill some diesel and it sucks to clean up. You spill Li and you walk into "environmental disaster."

2. Money. When it's cheaper, then they'll get serious.

To the last point it's similar to fleet vehicles for large fleets. You see a lot of pledges to go all-electric by 20XX. That's because replacing a fleet requires a TON of capital already, and fundamentally changing the vehicles is an order of magnitude higher.

Think about a delivery hub like the post office. They have a network already established for purchasing gasoline, delivering it, local storage, refueling process, etc. They have operations built around it.

You now likely have to have parallel infrastructure for electric, which means negotiating major power consumption with each local power company, purchase of new or adjacent land, buildout, etc. Can you refuel in the same time window to not effect operations? If not, can you shift operations without impacting customer experience?

Now, you will see companies deploying all-electric in niches, especially when it opens up new market opportunities. Those tiny urban vehicles could enable vehicles to go where they could not before, reducing time spent walking. And that might have a shorter timeline than autonomous drones that don't run old ladies over.

I think even more than cruise ships and freighters, the biggest all-electric vehicle impact would come from all-electric airplanes. They still haven't gotten off of leaded fuel (see #2). The emissions there are massive.

But I think #1 will be a barrier there too. And the bureaucracy will slow it way down just like it did with unleaded jet fuel, which exists now, but is essentially unused.

And I guess a theme I'm coming up with is that electric is cool and all, but won't impact big % points of emissions until it's adopted by cargo, not human transport.

And cases like trains and large ships that are electric, but fuel the local electric with local power generation bring up the other big point: How would we even begin to power cargo? It's orders of magnitude more massive than consumer vehicles and it's growing so fast that supply can't meet demand.

Anyway, whatever. I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be an expert on any of this, and I'm rambling.

Trains would not be battery operated and have no risk of spilling the toxic battery components. They'd be powered by third rail or overhead wires. That is how most pure electric trains are powered today already.

It's also how cars could be operated - either by overhead or (more likely) inductive pick-up.

The battery concept is kind of dumb and a relic of IC engine thinking. For local urban journeys you could half-size the cars, provide common power, and add automated navigation to optimise density and efficiency.

Getting rid of batteries would hugely lower cost and weight.

Cross-country is a different problem, of course.

Wiring sucks and is faulty. It's already a problem with mass transit-systems today. Wiring the whole city? Good luck not burning down the city because of stupid people doing stupid things. The demand for independent vehicles still remain in the city, at least in the next decades. And batteries are at the moment the only viable technology for this. Hydrogen might become another solution, or maybe one of the magic fuels in development turns out to be real and useful, who knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy

Available in Europe since 10 yrs ago. Not a rare sight, but not super-popular either.

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric)

Many diesel trains and ships are using the engine as a generator to drive electric motors.

It provides a lot of flexibility.

> largest vehicles (huge mining trucks)

Battleships, Oil tankers, Oil rigs, container ships, nuclear submarines... Are all NOT electric.

honestly many are, they are just producing their electricity on-site using other fuels :) u can't realy store enough energy in a battery to cruise the atlantic.

EDIT - think of nuclear submarine as a swimming nuclear power plant

> The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core.

i don't think anyone's going to bother

i think we'll just all do what paris did and kick them out, rather than to try to create a whole new batch of differently-sized ones

Please change electric to battery powered... I don't think the largest mining trucks are battery powered. They have diesel generators that power an electric drivetrain.

It depends upon where you are loading up your material. There are huge electric dump trucks that make more electricity carrying material down the mountain than they need to us to drive empty back up the mountain (45 ton eDumper).

> Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent.

what about parking, that will just become another ever increasing form of rent.

Hi. An electric tv is my dream.

Is your current television set a diesel one?

I use Interactive Reality Entertainment. It’s co2 free