Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion | Hacker News Reader

Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion

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188 pointsbilsbie518 comments

And in turn, trains are far more energy efficient than all kinds of cars. Trains are subsequently beaten by both electric and non-electric bicycles, which are the most energy efficient mode of transport currently known to man.

While phasing out ICEs entirely is clearly an urgent necessity, it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation, instead of going for EVs, which are a slight improvement, but not at all as big of an improvement as we could realize with trains and bicycles.

This is a very naïve view. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct?) but it's also missing the point by a wide margin - the "spherical, frictionless cow in a void" missing the point.

You're correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I'm not even looking for numbers here, because it's irrelevant.

What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Or just bring home groceries once a week. Or have kids. Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors. Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.

If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.

I take your point(s) that the argument cant be "Everyone just use bikes and trains". That's obviously not practical but to be fair it's not what is being suggested either.

But in relation to the point you made about bad or cold weather being a factor for bikes being an impractical mode of transport. Please take a few minutes to consider the points and examples provided in this video (1).

TLDW: There is a town in Finland (Oulu) where cycling is a primary mode of transport (over a fifth of of all trips are by bike and 77% of people cycle occasionally) even in winter when it gets down to -20 Celsius.

Weather is always spouted as a reason for not investing in bike infrastructure which is really annoying because that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It's the lack of safe and adequate bike infrastructure that stops people from cycling. Anyway, I thought it was worth adding that point of nuance to the discussion.

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

From the video: in the winter cycling capital of the world, 22% of all trips are taken by bicycle (all year round). This leaves 78% of trips not taken by bicycle. Honestly, 20% is what I'd expect as an upper limit for bike trips, in a place with great infrastructure and solid biking culture.

This is not an argument that (EV) cars can be replaced by trains+bikes. This is a solid argument, with which I agree, that bikes have a place in a transportation ecosystem and they should be encouraged. I was never disputing this - I own several bikes, and I actually prefer to rent uber electric scooters over uber cars.

We are in agreement so, in that bikes are an absolutely essential component of a more sustainable transport infrastructure. 20% by the way is a very large number in the context of the total number of trips taken by any given population and unlike you I do not believe this is an upper limit of what can be achieved with bikes but this is a separate discussion.

I just wanted to clarify a bugbear with me which is the "people don't use bikes because the weather is crappy". I know nuance is lost in such a few amount of words and that's probably not what you are saying in totality but i just wanted to highlight this point.

As an aside, I lived in a large city where amenities such as supermarkets were relatively far away. For a couple of years I got away with not owning a car and using a bike for all shopping needs. There are some examples of where a car would have been way more convenient but the fact of the matter is I made do without it. There are a large number of trips that I made with the bike that I wouldn't have done if I did have a car. Humans are creatures of convenience. There are some trips where a car (or something similar) is absolutely essential but for the vast majority it is not. In situations of necessity it is amazing what can be achieved. We are not living in an age of necessity with regards to means of transport but we really should be if the climate science is to be believed.

Between electric bikes and work from home during bad weather, I don't see why that upper limit couldn't go much higher in most large cities. The benefits outside energy use are also great. Increased safety, decreased noise and tire pollution, etc.

I am fine with snow, it is the rain that is the real fuckup ...

Haha, yeah. I guess things like Cargo bikes don't exist. Nor does just bringing your stuff onto the train and putting it into it's cargo holds. Or bringing your cargo bike onto the train.

Yup, private carriages are the only option for your occasional weekly or monthly tasks.

I guess its also just outright impossible to just allow for mixed zoning that'd allow for daily grocery shopping as well.

I've written in another comment that I'm very much in favor of cheap, small city EVs without all the safety features mandated in a modern car. I don't think we need a ton of iron to go shopping. But I also don't think it's practical to go all the way down to bikes - biggest velo vehicle might at most carry an adult, a child and groceries, while offering zero protection from the weather and very little safety, compared with the smallest and flimsiest hard-shell EV.

And I'm saying this while owning... let me count... 4 bikes, one of which is electric. And I absolutely love Uber electric scooters.

But no matter how I try to get creative, I just can't think of a way where you can have bike infrastructure covering everything. Too many pieces missing. Where would you park all those cargo bikes near train stations? And again, what do you do in winter with two kids?

Small city EVs on the other hand require no new infrastructure, zero major investments, are a fraction of the cost of a car, are non-polluting, and do 90% of what a normal car does. And when going on holiday - yes, you can take the train, which is what I'm actually doing btw.

All they need is a very small regulatory change. Allow no-highway cars with speed limits and none of the safety features of modern cars. Just do that.

I don’t believe anybody has ever suggested that bikes should cover everything.

People have pointed out that most people can use bikes for pretty much everything, but obviously there will be a need for the occasional car. Some people will need to use cars more, other less. But if you make the simple mindset change of first planning to bike there and then falling back to the car if you deem it infeasible, we’re already most of the way.

Most of the safety concerns for bikes disappear as soon as a certain amount of bikers are in the streets and the infrastructure isn’t actively hostile to them.

It's ironic that you ask where to park cargo bike while at the same time proposing EVs. Where do they park? Where do they drive? We are occupying massive amounts of land for car infrastructure completely covering it in concrete and thus contributing to urban heating. At the same time we have study upon study that shows that people are happier in places where they can walk/bike instead of driving.

Small EVs are the type of cars that are needed the least. They are a car for those cases where you essentially did not need a car.

The infrastructure is not a problem at all. Just use the one you have. If it can serve traffic demand using cars, it can serve ten times the same traffic demand using bikes (slightly less when using cargo bikes). Stop the segregation fantasy where drivers are allowed to get away with pretending that all roads default to limited access. They don't. Roads where first built for walking, then for walking and various form of animal transportation, then for walking, animal and cycling. When cars entered the picture, all the other forms of road use technically did not go away, outside of the small set of limited access roads that came up a few decades later.

Yes that makes sense. Steam engines had to be larger to be more efficient so the best size for them was a locomotive.

Internal combustion engines are sized at a point where they are profitable and efficient.

Electric motors allow us to make terribly small cars, and their small batteries will mean even more efficiency improvements. Combined with self driving abilities and we no longer need to own our own car…just hop on the city infrastructure and get driven to your destination.

In fact if we make it small and light enough you could suspend the car from a metal rail and now have an extra lane up in the roadway above the regular traffic. And then you can add another metal rail layer…and another. And you no longer need intersections because the rails can dip down or up to cross each other. So the biggest source of traffic latency (stoplights) and bandwidth limitations (not enough road surface area) will be eliminated.

Eventually we may build entire city blocks pre-fabricated with vertical and horizontal elevators inside, so you no longer need your own vehicle to navigate. Heating costs will be proportional to the external surface area and not to the volume enclosed by the building.

Our e-trike takes 2 kids, groceries, has full weather protection and brings joy to rider, occupants and many around. Protected bike lanes add the safety, but let's make no mistake, all the safety issues arise from motor vehicles.

As you allude to, this is a massive zoning issue (especially in the US). The infrastructure required to move people from their houses to places of work and shopping is insane, given where all those houses and places of work and businesses are. To make trains viable for everyone, you have to rework the entire built environment to move all of those places into different locations so that people can get from one place to another efficiently.

I live in a small/midsize city with relatively ok public transit for its size and the only places I ever take it is to downtown or the airport - places where parking logistics are terrible and it's easy to get to on public transport. Anywhere else (like going to the store or work) and getting there takes hours without a car. Living in areas that have better connections or better walkability triples my housing cost, so I own a car and drive. Cities need to be significantly more dense for more trains to make sense, but that density means clearing out all of the less dense buildings and building new. That's extremely costly and doesn't actually help the environment because of the massive amount of carbon needed to fix that everywhere.

This is the argument being made again and again, but if we look at the realities the average number of occupants was 1.6 in England [1] and is likely similar for other countries. Also have a look at cycling commutes in Finland on YouTube, lots of people. The argument that we can't change how we move is just an argument about not wanting change. I bet if we actually make cars cover all the direct and indirect costs (for both ICE and EV) instead of massively subsidising car travel, people would quickly change. Why do we need to subsidise the choice of a part of society to not want to change?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/314719/average-car-and-v...

> What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Or just bring home groceries once a week.

People without cars also have to do that. Groceries can be walked home (i know because i do it) and they also fit on busses. Mattresses are a rare thing and you can rent a taxi.

Also, there was a recent episode by the YT channel "Not Just Bikes" that really opened my mind to the possibility of 80% of these situations being comfortable accommodated by cargo bikes. They're really amazing and a bike-centric future in cities is actually pretty realistic.

As someone who bikes everywhere, I'd say 80% of these situations don't even need a cargo bike. The cargo bike covers maybe another 15%, and the rest you can deal with by renting a van once or twice a year.

Cargo bikes are far too expensive for this to work.

Then why do people buy cars? You can also manage without running water, people did it for most of human existence, but it doesn't mean it's what we want to do. Money talks - when they afford it, a supermajority of people prefer to own a vehicle. And we're on the cusp of making it non-polluting, cheap and sustainable. Let's not blow it because "trains are marginally more energy efficient".

> And we're on the cusp of making it non-polluting, cheap and sustainable

Electric cars? They're not really any of these things. They're just not quite as bad as gas vehicles.

I bought my first vehicule at 32, when I moved to the US.

Prior to that I was relying on public transportation, renting something for vacation, and coordinating with others.

In the US that was not sustainable.

Owning a car gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility but you either live in a place that requires a car every day, or one where you need it less.

If your neighborhood is well planned, with good access to public transportation, groceries, daycare, etc. then renting a car becomes viable for the cases bikes don't cover.

Trains, trams, buses and bicycles don't need to cover every case.

And I could totally do all those things just need to work a couple hours less a day, have more reliable child care and maybe fix the deranged hobo problem so my grocery and body make it home safely after most trips

> real humans occasionally need to move a mattress

And real humans can occasionally rent a car. Maybe it is not worth holding thousands of dollars' worth of rusting metal for that occasional odd job.

As for snow and ice, Oulu, Finland is an example of how infrastructure defines the way people live:

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

That still doesn't exactly solve the "30% of seniors thing", though.

And quite a few of them have will have unplanned trips to do from very sparsely distributed locations (also known as "houses in the countryside") to other very sparsely distributed locations (aka "their doctor" or "their family").

Also, car loan is perfectly suitable for planned, long distance trips with lots of cargo, which unfortunately happen at the same time for everyone (they're also known as "vacations"). I would not want to be Hertz on the 15th of August in a world without personal cars - unless you ban people from traveling cross country to see their family twice a year, which might be required.

I used to bet on "small scale on demand public transportation", but it requires either "communities paying drivers" or "engineers solving self-driving in rural roads", none of which is happening anytime soon.

In the meantime, though, we have to invest in trains, bike lanes, and downsize cars at the same time as electrifying them.

Mobility devices are great for bike lanes. What's funny about this comparison is that you're ignoring children, who absolutely cannot drive.

I'm curious, is "30% of seniors thing" solved by having a car in the US? Here in Japan, driving by senior is getting more problematic. Senior people live in rural are hard to give up having cars because public transport is getting poor and rural town have shrunk because of car society. Older people tend to cause car accident and anyway every people finally can't drive, so gov want them to release their license earlier.

The point was precisely that all of these odd jobs are individually occasional but collectively common. You only need to move a mattress once every few years, but you also take camping trips a few times a year, you have vet appointments several times per year, you want to take your dog to a more remote park a couple times a month, you want to take your kids (and all of the things they require) to visit their relatives out of state a few times a year (plus other road trips), you have to transport large furniture or shopping items a dozen times per year, etc.

Moreover, it’s also just convenient to be able to get across town in half the time that you can by public transit.

Isn't that cultural? We don't even think about getting such things delivered. Why not? Because it's expensive? More expensive than owning a $20,000 vehicle?

That's a kind of 'frictionless cow' blind spot as well. If personal ICE and electric cars disappeared from existence tomorrow, we'd adapt.

What you're missing is that many of the problems you're describing are due to building cities around cars. You can get the mattress delivered (and even if you don't, you usually can't fit a mattress in most vehicles and probably need to rent one). You go to the store more frequently, and buy fewer things, at a grocery store that's less than 5 minutes way by foot. People can and do transport their children by bike. Walkable cities with public transportation are considerably easier for seniors, because many of them can no longer drive. You're also leaving out folks with disabilities, for which walkable cities with good public transportation are life changing.

You're also conveniently leaving out cost. Transportation costs in walkable cities with good public transportation is considerably cheaper. Cars, gas, insurance, maintenance, parking, etc. is extremely expensive. My current transportation costs are roughly $80 a month. When I had a car, they were roughly $800 a month (with averaged maintenance costs included).

(Most) Folks aren't saying that cars shouldn't exist, just that in cities, they should not be what we design for, because their convenience for some people results in the inconvenience of most people.

EVs should replace ICE cars, but we should restrict how cars can be brought in the city, and we should limit where and how they park (especially by eliminating free parking). The costs related to this should be progressive, based on income.

I suggest you watch this video[1] by the awesome channel "Not Just Bikes". Bakfiets are a dutch cargo bike you can literally use for 99% of all your errands. People in a city do not need personal cars. And even Cargo bikes are only useful for 10-20% of occasions, depending on if you have big shopping tours or kids. For the 1 or 2 occasions a year where a car is needed, car sharing is the way to go.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

"We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."

It's funny you mention the Netherlands as your proof for your little list of gotchas. The Netherlands handles all your little gotchas fine, and so do more northern countries like Sweden.

The problem is the convenience of a car makes it not worth just putting on a layer of clothing for the weather. Use a car if you're going to travel 100km, but don't be like the rest of the people in my Montana town and use a car to go pick up the groceries 3 miles away just because it's 42 degrees and you're cold.

See by saying you need a car for these extremes you are actually just making excuses to use a car all the time.

>The Netherlands handles all your little gotchas fine, and so do more northern countries like Sweden.

Most people in the Netherlands who can afford it still have a car though. Yes i do a lot by bicycle but a car is far superior for many errands and trips.

No one said the car was inferior for those trips. It's unnecessary and far more damaging.

But at least in my experience (and I suspect in others' as well), those shorts trips make up a miniscule percentage of overall miles (and therefore emissions). It's commuting and road trips that account for 90% of my mileage

Well you should definitely be commuting by bike or public transportation. Don't know why you would think that wasn't in the cards.

Road trips? Why are you taking them in a personal vehicle? Because there isn't competent public transportation.

I'm against car ownership. Oh you can't get anywhere without a car? Maybe build another lane to a place where I care.

The article put up a simplified view in order to reduce the topic down to a single number of energy in vs energy out. It is a technical definition of energy efficiency, but without all that messy context that define transportation.

If we were to discussion energy in transportation the context is much richer and complex. The easiest way to see this is in weight. A EV car in general is much heavier than ICE cars, sometimes by a factor of 3x, which happens to cancel out the energy efficiency of the EV. We also have to consider reduce, reuse, repair and recycle aspect. EV car is generally more electronica complex and (according to what I have read), have worse reuse and repair aspect than ICE cars. EV might win on the recycle aspect, and train/bicycles obvious win on the reduce aspect.

We also have to consider drive distance. The average trip for a car (using statistics form my country) is 5km, which most of those being commute to and from work, with a majority within biking distance. Of course, if people need a car to transport kids, participate in hobbies, regularly transporting large items, then they might simply use that same tool to travel to and from work as a convenience. Owning a car enables unnecessary travel with car as well as enabling the necessary travel.

And finally we need to consider how stations for stores, buses and trains are designed. Train stations are not designed for a person to haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries. Subways however are rather much designed to make transporting a toddler and a single bag of groceries a fairly acceptable experience, and since subway stations generally has good coverage, people don't need to have 3 bags of groceries. Supermarkets that focus on subway users tend to be located in the subway stations, while supermarkets that focus on car users that travel a few miles from the store tend to have large parking lots and be located at the outer edges of cities near big highways.

> A EV car in general is much heavier than ICE cars, sometimes by a factor of 3x, which happens to cancel out the energy efficiency of the EV.

This isn't true.

The Model 3 has around half a ton worth of battery and weights around 2 tons. the GMC Hummer EV weights over 9,000 pounds, around 4.5 tons, which is roughly three times the weight of a Honda Civic. The hummer has around 1.4 tons in just battery (https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/07/business/electric-vehicles-we...)

The law in my country has a combined maximum weight limit (car + trailer) as part of their driving license, which has cause a bit of a problem with EVs. The extra weight from battery mean that there isn't much room to drive the car with a trailer, a problem which political is starting to gain some traction. The argument being put forth is that people are forced to use ICE car to pull things like boat trailer just because the law was designed for more lighter ICE cars.

If there is no additional weight with EVs then the law doesn't need to change. Are you saying that the people arguing that EV is being hindered are wrong?

Just as a small hint about that. EU has recently change their rules. The previous allowed max was 3.5 tons, but electric and gas powered cars has been given an exception to increase the max to 4.25 tons in acknowledgement that those cars tend to be heavier, and that the previous limit restricted the use of lower emission transportation. Source: Revision of the Directive on Driving Licences.

Of course politicians could be wrong and there is nothing to make it physical impossible to build a light weight EV. Restricting weight reduces road maintenance and decreases the breaking distance and if there is no need for increasing the maximum then everyone is better off with the old maximum.

> What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress.

The corollary is that real human civilizations have to move goods over roads with ICE trucks for the foreseeable future unless batteries approach the energy density of diesel.

Trucks are already moving to electric.

It not going to happen overnight, and currently bans on new sales only are scheduled for like 2040, but they're likely to be brought forward as people get more confortable with the idea.

Starting with last mile delivery in urban areas, trucks are going electric today. And it's not initially about energy density, it's about the poisons and pollution they emit.

I'd claim it's all about economics. There are small trucks commercially available for the first time now that can move the volume of packages required. And they're cheaper to operate than ICE trucks, so companies are obviously and quickly switching. The marketing points are frosting on the equation!

Semi trucks will move 'forward' to electric when the technology becomes available.

So far it's not, the state of the art prototypes can not do the required job.

Maybe it will be something like fuel cells instead, who knows.

Or in case of Singapore, your heat wave is our most days in 80% humidity. And on the days it isnt hot, it's probably pouring rain... you know 10 seconds of it is indistinguishable from jumping into a swimming pool rain.

When I move heavy stuff I don't use my car, I rent a truck, which was made for moving heavy stuff. I also don't see a reason to carry toddlers to grocery shops.

You take toddlers with you because leaving them unsupervised is illegal. Whether you’re driving your own car or renting a truck doesn’t matter—rail doesn’t suffice in either case.

Yes, not only cold weather is a culprit, but also hot. I can't even imagine a cyclist riding from one part of Dubai to another. It is dangerous.

bikes can carry and tow trailers to help with some of that. Also...groceries can be carried on the bars if a few bags

>You're correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I'm not even looking for numbers here, because it's irrelevant.

On the contrary, it's highly relevant in a world where we have a very pressing energy issue.

>What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress.

Cargo-bikes can cover many of the transportation use-cases the average person has, and the rest can be covered by utilizing shared transportation vehicles. No private vehicle ownership is necessary here, and private vehicle ownership and its use as the primary mode of transportation is >80% of the problem.

>Or just bring home groceries once a week.

Cargo-bikes, closer shops, public transportation, grocery delivery and/or higher frequency of shopping solves this

>Or have kids.

Cargo-bikes, public transportation solves this

>Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors.

Bicycles, public transportation solves this isse. Additionally, car infrastructure is more exclusionary to seniors than the alternatives - same with children, who are not allowed to operate a car. Not to mention people with disabilities. All more discriminated against by car infrastructure than the alternatives.

>Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.

Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.

>If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.

Essentially all of these problems can be solved satisfactorily with alternatives. Note that clean is also relative - the alternatives are very significantly cleaner than car-oriented transportation.

And we have barely even touched the subjects of transportation mode lethality nor economic discrimination, which are hugely significant - cars kill more than any other mode of transportation, and is more expensive both on the individual and societal level, making them a huge burden for poor people.

You're doing a lot of hand waving which basically boils down to equating "it can solve the problem in some scenarios" with "it's the optimal choice".

Can you use a cargo bike to do groceries? Sure. Can you rent a car to carry a mattress? yes. Can you carry two children on a bicycle? Ehh, ok, let's pretend you can, or you just take the bus.

But this is ignoring the fact that in the past hundred years, people have repeatedly chosen to own a car. Yes, including in places with good public transport. And surprising enough, even when the cost of a car + maintenance + repairs + financing + gas is a lot higher than just taking the bus, not to mention the comparatively trivial price of a bike. The very fact that you just don't see that many cargo bikes anywhere, but see cars everywhere is a pretty strong hint. That's the default hypothesis - that cars actually do bring value in people's lives. All you're offering to counter this is a list of "in specific contexts, bike may solve the same problem in shittier ways". I'm sorry, but I just don't see how freezing your ass off in winter on a bike is even remotely acceptable.

In my youth I actually tried this. Spent a winter with a motorcycle, and another winter with a bike. Both were complete and utter failures. I actually burned a set of gloves when I left them on the engine to get warm. And biking on the snow and ice... ugh. The bruises.

Plus small practical things. A cargo bike or a bike with a trailer basically take just as much parking space as a small car. And are a hellof a lot easier to steal.

Cars may kill more people than bikes, but you can't snap your fingers Thanos-style and have all cars replaced with bikes. Dramatically increasing the number of bikes in the street means mixing bikes with cars, which means a lot more dead people. I know it's the car's fault, but such is life, the universe is not fair. Still means more dead people.

> Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.

I call bullshit. Smelly, stinky bullshit. In the same city, with the same infrastructure, I see with my own eyes bikes and electric scooters disappearing in winter and reappearing in spring. That'd be just impossible if climate had no bearing and only infrastructure mattered.

> In the same city, with the same infrastructure, I see with my own eyes bikes and electric scooters disappearing in winter and reappearing in spring. That'd be just impossible if climate had no bearing and only infrastructure mattered.

They aren't saying weather doesn't matter. Just that people use weather as an excuse for bad infrastructure which matters much more, and is easier to change.

Also, people may not be aware that e-bike cargo van deliveries are already a thing in urban areas. Being enclosed from the rain is not a unique advantage of cars and removing cars from urban areas as much as possible is a necessary first step.

You might say, well that's just a small electric car and technically you'd be correct. A small, light, electric "car" that can intermix with pedestrians and cycles and wheelchairs and mobility scooters.

But energy efficiency is not the single goal and it shouldn't become it. The most energy efficient mode if transportation is to stay put. The most energy efficient form of living is a bunk in some barracks and so on and so forth. And some point we have to acknowledge that life is spending energy so why not on individual travel?

This is true. However, car-oriented development and car travel is inferior to alternative modes of transportation in essentially all other aspects as well, so this point does not run counter to these superior modes of transportation.

People aren't dumb. Cars are expensive yet extremely popular. Thus, car travel is superior when it comes to satisfying the needs of the owners. Train travel is often more costly and much more inconvenient. Air travel obviously doesn't work on short routes. Travel by bike comes closest in terms of cost and convenience, but only in good weather, for extremely short routes, and with relatively little baggage.

That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.

>People aren't dumb. Cars are expensive yet extremely popular. Thus, car travel is superior when it comes to satisfying the needs of the owners. Train travel is often more costly and much more inconvenient. Air travel obviously doesn't work on short routes. Travel by bike comes closest in terms of cost and convenience, but only in good weather, for extremely short routes, and with relatively little baggage.

This is purely a function of contemporary car-oriented infrastructure, nothing more. People do indeed select the choice that is most convenient, and the built environment as is today does favor the use of cars.

Though, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, and more, this is a grim mistake.

>That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.

Cargo bikes scale far better than cars. Germany, while better than the U.S, is still not peak built environment. As a nation they lean quite a bit on cars.

That's not even a little bit true.

Trains only go where there are tracks. Tracks are much more expensive to build and maintain than roads. Trains to do not run on demand.

Bicycles do not protect riders from the elements. Bicycles are not suitable for hauling large or heavy objects, or many objects.

This whole anti-car thing is getting tiresome. Yes, the US needs to dial back its car culture. But cars do have a place, and fill a niche that other transportation methods cannot fill.

most other aspects. not all.

Staying put may be most efficient but it does not qualify as transportation. Sometimes people do need transportation and that needs to be as efficient as it can be.

> it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation

This simply is pre-WWII urban planning. We used to have sustainable cities and comprehensive passenger rail systems before we teared them down for cars and suburbia.

For better or worse we used to have 4x less people

I dont see how it matters. Its not like we have run out of room. Just have 4x the number of small neighbourhood grocery stores

We're running out of something though, or some combination of things. Otherwise you wouldn't have such accelerating inequality and popular unrest.

The solution to that, in hindsight, was probably not building the majority of new housing in sprawling, low-density suburbs that require a car to get most places people want to go though…

Which is why industrialized countries with higher population density move back even faster to pre-WWII urban planning (EU), or sometimes never left it (Japan).

Yes indeed.

The fact that conservatives broadly have taken the position supporting of cars and car-oriented development is one of the most absurd things imaginable. Socialized inefficient infrastructure that was not even a thing a hundred years ago being considered a conservative policy, a real hoot.

I'm not sure how much of this is true.

I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.

>I'm not sure how much of this is true.

I'll admit to this not being an opinion I hold based on any kind of scientific observation, this does seem to be an opinion I have anecdotally observed among rural- and suburban-populations, which tend to lean more towards the conservative political spectrum than their urban counterparts.

>I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.

Kudos.

I’m not a conservative, but the independence that cars provide holds a certain appeal and aligns fine with conservative values. Anyway, conservatives happily embrace new technology all the time (almost all conservatives have a smartphone and an Internet connection, and those developments are much more recent than cars); adopting cars isn’t a contradiction at all—clinging to trains and bikes would be the contradiction.

So the best way would be to just use electric bicyclea and scooters for daily commutes, trains for long range transport of people and delivery service backed by trains and electric cars and other vehicles, possibly state sponsored to some degree for all deliveries long range and short range.

Indeed.

Any time the subject of electric car efficiency comes up the first comment is always "we should build trains." The perfect is the enemy of the good.

In the US, trains would require an expenditure of trillions of dollars with a multi-decade long fiscal commitment for an idea that's deeply unpopular with the citizenry. Ain't gonna happen here in our lifetime. Maybe in other countries, but not the USA.

You can buy an electric car today.

You can also buy an electric bicycle today, too, for 1/10 of the price of an EV.

Indeed, and I have one! But I cannot use my electric bike to visit my relatives in a different state. That's what my EV is for. (And it has a rack so we can take our ebikes on the trip too.)

I'd expect the train to be more efficient than the bike in terms of (load mass) * (distance traveled) / (energy used). Proportional to the size of the load, you lose a lot of energy to air resistance on a bike. Trains only push the air out of the way once on the front, and they're long, plus there's less friction from the wheels.

Looks like trains will beat out bicycles in some cases, but they lose out to e-bikes and e-scooters. Check the table in this helpful article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport

I’m certain we’re missing something in that article. An electric bike shouldn’t be more efficient than a normal bike - it’s heavier and the wind resistance is the same. My first guess is that the power use for the electric assist only considers the electric assist, not the human riders portion.

Humans are quite inefficient - we can convert around 25% of food energy to work. The losses in the power plant generating the electricity for charging the e-bike's battery and the motor's efficiency losses would result in a higher overall efficiency than 25%.

Heavier would seem like a benefit to me, wouldn't inertia improve its score over longer distances?

Trains travel much faster and air resistance scales quadratic. But otoh, being able to travel at faster speeds obviously is a major advantage for a train. Now, if we could just combine the two and have enough bike slots on a train, that would be amazing.

Oh right. Wonder how efficient a 15MPH train is.

While I also think that humanity would be better off with less cars, I think one shouldn't mix up those matters. To some extend, humanity needs cars and we should push for making those cars as efficient and environmental friendly as possible. Hence electric cars. They are the technology which allows us to use cars into the future.

However I agree, wherever possible, less cars would be good. Public transit and bicycles work well in those regions, which have the proper infrastructure. Some European cities are quite good in this respect, others are following.

Fun fact though: between an efficient electric car (like the Tesla Model 3) and an electric train or even a Diesel bus, there is little efficiency difference, in a lot of cases the electric car wins. But trains win on not contributing to congested streets etc.

Funny side note: the German high speed trains are called InterCity Express ... short ICE.

Writing this from one right now, going 200 km/h while having breakfast.

I would assume that electric bikes are in turn beaten by electric velomobiles. Those easily go 25+ km/h with muscle power alone. As long as you are reasonable fit a motor that is restricted to 25 km/h is dead weight on those most of the time.

Most sane government policy acknowledges this, even european right-wing governments:

Decarbonising Transport: A Better, Greener Britain

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... .pdf

> But we cannot, of course, simply rely on the electrification of road transport, or believe that zero emission cars and lorries will solve all our problems, particularly for meeting our medium-term carbon reduction targets to 2035. Road traffic, even on pre-pandemic trends, was predicted to grow by 22 percent from 2015 to 2035 much of it in cities, where new roadbuilding is physically difficult and disadvantages communities.

> We cannot pile ever more cars, delivery vans and taxis on to the same congested urban roads. That would be difficult for the roads, let alone the planet, to tolerate. As we build back better from the pandemic, it will be essential to avoid a car-led recovery. As I said in “Decarbonising Transport: Setting the Challenge” in March last year, we must make public transport, cycling and walking the natural first choice for all who can take it. Many journeys are short, could be done differently – and were done differently, in the very recent past. Even ten years ago, for instance, more children walked to school. We want to reduce urban road traffic overall. Improvements to public transport, walking and cycling, promoting ridesharing and higher car occupancy, and the changes in commuting, shopping and business travel accelerated by the pandemic, also offer the opportunity for a reduction or at least a stabilisation, in traffic more widely. That will benefit everyone, drivers included.

So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren't really helping.

>So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren't really helping.

My position is a general anti-car position, with a particular disdain for ICEs. See my other comments in the thread for my thinking on the way forward.

I am also anti-car, but it's a better sales pitch to suggest that in dense urban areas, removing pollution, reducing carbon and avoiding congestion can be done hand in hand with the shift to EVs than set them as opposites.

The extra leverage that urban traffic has to prioritise zero local emissions, lightweighting for pedestrian safety, vehicle redesign for visibility, silent operation, small vehicles for avoiding congestion (e.g. cycle couriers) is a lever to get general road transport and rural trucks to low emissions faster. It also lets more people into the cities (which is happening anyway but ICE vehicles are slowing it down)

I don't think we disagree, and I agree that I could probably refine my advocacy a bit.

I like trains. I really really like trains. I used to live in Japan so I know what life is like when it's organized around trains and it's awesome. I hate the sprawled-out American suburbs where everything is so far apart that walking, or even biking in some places, is just not practical.

That said, I just can't see America reorganizing already built-up areas around trains, if only because it would require the government to purchase too much land just to lay the tracks.

I absolutely think that all new development should be done in a transportation-first level of density. But the existing burbs are a lost cause. And so we end up with electric cars.

Time has great value, we only have a limitdd amoint of it and getting to spend less of it in transport and more of it spdnding time with loved ones or making art is good.

Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.

It seems like you have never been to a well connected and dense city, that has good public transport and bicycle infrastructure. Bikes and public transport can be at least twice as fast if not faster. Everything can be built closer together because you don't need all the wasted parking space and huge streets that cars require. I can really recommend the Youtube channel "Not Just Bikes". It has made me hate cars for all the useless space they take up, all the pollution (noise, air, rubber) they create, and the danger they present to anyone not in a car.

>Time has great value, we only have a limitdd amoint of it and getting to spend less of it in transport and more of it spdnding time with loved ones or making art is good.

Agreed. So much time gets killed by the mathematically unscalable car infrastructure, where many many hours get killed when people are stuck in traffic. These hours are essentially impossible to make more productive as well, as drivers are unable to perform other tasks while at the wheel. Public transportation does not suffer from this shortcoming, and bicycle infrastructure is inherently more scalable and hence traffic congestion is not a thing when it comes to bicycle infrastructure. Time spent bicycling also doubles as exercise, further enhancing the time-efficiency of this mode of transport.

>Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.

Not inherently. This is a mere matter of infrastructure, nothing else. Dense urban environment and rapid transit is clearly less time-wasting than the suburban car-oriented development, in essentially every aspect imaginable.

I bike roughly 30 minutes to work. The route I take crosses a bridge at the end and a point that’s notable for having traffic jam up. In perfect road conditions, no Traffic jam, the same distance by car takes 25 - 30 minutes, plus required time for finding a parking space. In the morning/evening traffic, it’s easily 10-20 minute on top of that. For distances around 10-20 km in the city, an ebike is absolutely competitive to a car.

Train gives you free time.

We’re not going to replace cars with trains in the timescales necessary to deal with climate change, even if we could convince everyone to upend their lifestyle. It just isn’t going to happen.

Most people still don’t own cars. Far from it. The key must be to ensure that billions of people don’t need to pass through the 1950-2000 infrastructure dead-end that e.g the US took, by betting on the car as the transportation mode of choice.

Just skip the bs restrictions on people other than you and mass murder them.

Road to hell is paved with good intentions or something.

Come again?

Ok. On the other hand, a complete migration to EVs won't solve the climate crisis either, as they are not energy efficient enough. Combine this with the fact that car-oriented developments are energy-inefficient in other ways - single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency, lack of walkability makes car travel mandatory, larger infrastructure requirements are again worse woth regards to energy efficiency, and so on.

Does this mean we should throw our hands up and not make an EVs? No, that would be a bad strategy, a complete non-option. We must halt the climate crisis, this is quite frankly mandatory.

So, how do we tackle this issue? If we want to deal with the problem in a timely manner, we have to work within the framework we already have today. This means some degree of replacing ICEs with EVs. Crucially though, we need to realize that the framework itself is bad, and requires replacement in the future. This means halting investments in non-sustainable built environments, building energy-efficient transportation infrastructure to connect existing places where it makes sense, and only building new places with appropriate transportation infrastructure.

Defeatism is not on the roadmap.

No one is arguing that EVs will solve climate change. They are necessary but not sufficient, and their issue isn’t that they aren’t efficient enough, it’s that (1) our grid isn’t yet fully clean and (2) cars don’t account for a sufficiently large share of emissions (so 100% of clean power for cars doesn’t address emissions for other applications).

> single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency,

We’re definitely not going to get everyone into small urban apartments in the next 50 years. We couldn’t build the necessary apartments fast enough, and the costs would be enormous for a relatively small reduction in emissions. The better value for money is building out our clean energy capacity as quickly as possible and disincentivizing waste via carbon pricing.

> Defeatism is not on the roadmap.

Cool, then let’s just terraform Mars and call it a day. Of course, we have to be realistic which means no terraforming Mars or building hundreds of millions of apartment units and equivalent rail infrastructure.

Yeah, would basically require demolishing most cities and rebuilding them around the train lines. Moving non-physical jobs to home has more potential.

Cities were demolished to accommodate cars in the past, I see no reason why such a retrofit would be impossible in the other direction.

There is some potential in reduction by moving jobs to WFH when possible, but this is not mutually exclusive with migrating to energy efficient means of transportation and urban development. Hence, I don't think it's relevant in the discussion.

In what way were they demolished? Cars allow for urban sprawl. People now have homes in places where they rely on cars to get to work.

I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it's just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don't need to be there in person, it dominoes. There's no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form. I used to work in SF and observe these things closely, and now I'm watching what happens as many of the techies leave.

At a minimum, because there is very little political appetite for it (apart from left-wing urban professionals) in large part because it’s an insanely inefficient way to meet climate goals (compared with building out clean energy sources and electrifying fossil fuel applications like cars), but also because it’s insanely invasive (it requires pushing everyone into a lifestyle they don’t want).

Is that a bicycle pedaled by a human, i.e., who converts calories into work at about 25% efficiency?

Does it take into account the farming and supply chain costs of that food it's about 15% efficiency by calorie, compared with gasoline which is close to 90% efficient IIRC. Or is it just food/fuel energy -> work?

> gasoline which is close to 90% efficient IIRC.

Common gasoline engines have an efficiency around 30-40%, assuming modern high-efficiency designs. For older designs this is closer to 20%.

I'm talking about the production of gasoline there (vs production of food).

Ah, my mistake. Your number matches gasoline refinement (I see 85% quoted), but that's only one part of the gasoline supply chain.

You can dig into the numbers on this helpful article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport

That article explicitly states that it doesn’t account for the energy or emissions required to produce the fuel.

The lifecycle emissions of an EV depend on how the electricity was generated, and the total emissions of cycling depends on the diet of the cyclist - even though the energy per distance is the same regardless.

Gasoline isn't 90% efficient. But yes, there's a study showing that a bicyclist with a meat-heavy diet is overall contributing more CO2 per mile than a modern ICE car. Electric bike is way more efficient.

I’d love to see that study and see if it takes into account how much energy was expended constructing the car vs the bike and the roadway required for the car. CO2/Mile on a basis of marginal energy invested for each extra mile is not a valid comparison.

https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog/climate-impacts-biking-v...

It doesn't count the manufacturing of each. It's still a valid comparison without it, cause most Americans who have a bike probably also have a car that they need for trips that aren't bike-able, and also cause it helps to separate fixed and marginal costs anyway.

This reminds me of the classic "if you wash recycling with water heated with electricity generated with coal it's not very carbon efficient".

Yes, that might be true, but it's the "coal" that's the issue, not the recycling. It says so little useful about recycling that it's basically a lie. But it does suggest we should phase out coal, not just to make recycling cleaner, but for everyone that uses electricity.

Similarly, I assume this study looked at red-meat reared in a GHG callous manner. Which says basically nothing about bicycles, but does tell us that we should take the obvious steps we're already aware of to decarbonize food. Not because it helps cyclists be more efficient, but because it's a smart thing to do for everyone who eats.

> Indeed, the use of fertilizers, methane gas released from livestock like cattle and massive food waste all contribute to the vast carbon footprint of food production. Since land is both a source and a sink of CO2, land-clearing for new agricultural terrain in tandem with deforestation drives harmful emissions, equating to approximately 26% of the global total.

This only really matters if cyclists eat more than motorists. And you might as well include other lifestyle factors at the same time.

Well I'm not sure. Refining is over 90% and so is extraction by the looks, but combined and add transport and yeah maybe it's more like 80%, in any case it's around an order of magnitude more efficient than western food production isn't it?

You got me wondering: how will Boring Company's Loop and Hyperloop faire in this same regard?

Hyperloop being near vacuum to remove/reduce friction from the area, while vehicle likely on floating MagLev skate, accelerating up to 1,223 kmph should certainly beat all current technology?

Ok then, what about a bike on the rails? Kind of like a jigger, but pedal powered.

That would probably be quite efficient from an energy-standpoint, but we'd need too much rails to make it work at scale.

Cool as hell, though. When going to visit one of my grandparents, I usually pass by a decommissioned railroad that now does bicycle draisines for tourism-purposes. I really should go ahead and ride that some day, it seems like a lot of fun.

Couldn't agree more, but if car owners get to vote in politicians who then force non-car owners to subsidize their new EV, it's going to be very hard to get them to understand common sense.

cargo bikes are getting trendy

Its natural and easy to find the bad parts of a new solution. EVs are not perfect. EVs definitely have problems. There are better solutions if you maximize for energy efficiency. People didn't buy ICE cars to be energy efficient, and they won't buy EVs to be energy efficient. They buy them because having a car is an integral part of a certain lifestyle. That lifestyle may not be equitable or sustainable; handling that problem is a different challenge.

- but -

We lack an intimate and personal understanding of the byproducts of ICE cars. We use a liquid fuel that we rarely actually see. The emissions are almost completely in gas form that we don't see. You don't have to "unload" bricks of CO2 and particulate from your vehicle.

But imagine what it would be like if you did. Imagine if CO2 was sludge that you had to handle. For every 10 gallons of gas you put into a car (approximately 70 pounds) you would have to unload approximately 200 pounds of CO2 (not counting water or other byproducts). You would have to find a place to put that. Do you drop it off at the filling station? What do they do with it? How many trips would you have to make to unload it? A 5 gallon bucket of water weighs about 40 pounds, if our sludge had that density, it would be 5 of those 5 gallon buckets. Many people struggle to carry a 5 gallon bucket (not you dear reader, other weaker people).

I don't think CO2 is actually toxic sludge, this is a mental exercise. I do think CO2 is a pollutant. I think if we had to personally and physically deal with CO2, no one would bitch about the minerals used in EV production.

> I don't think CO2 is actually toxic sludge

Judging by the fact that so far, we've been on the worst trajectory considered by the IPCC [1], CO2 has a good chance of ending humankind within a century. That is not directly "toxic", but it is dangerous.

[1] - https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2007117117

I think the nuance is important here. If CO2 was toxic we would have handled it already. Obviously CO2 is an asphyxiant, but so is nitrogen and that's 70% of our atmosphere. No one complains about atmospheric nitrogen. Our bodies handle CO2 continuously as a product of metabolism.

I view CO2 like I view processed sugar - if you have an energy deficit or energy balance, it's probably fine in small amounts; if you have a surplus, it's not ok.

I've been thinking about the industrial miracles of the 19th and 20th century. Steel, Aluminum, Concrete, Gasoline, Natural Gas, Plastic, Glass, Integrated Circuits, Artificial Fertilizers, Air Conditioning, Automobiles. If you only look at the positive side, all of these are truly miraculous - they've provided humanity with incredible increases in productivity and happiness. They've let people live longer and in less hospitable places. They've supported a higher population level than people expected was possible.

But those miracles have terrible side effects. I won't list them, it's too depressing.

This is a rip-off of freelancer Karin Kirk's original article[0] on Yale Climate Connections. Her primary sources in that article are federal agency websites[1-4] and address the points of mass energy production & vehicle consumption by type. And going solely by that math, it's a slam-dunk.

The problem--same as with any other modern system--is that there are far more variables to consider to arrive at total system-wide costs, many of these are "trust me" trade secrets of various manufacturers, and the feds themselves (thanks to regulatory capture) have also been known to fudge numbers in the favor of one private interest over another, so even those numbers aren't above cross-examination.

This is not a pro or anti EV post as much as a humility one. I see a bunch of web developers nerd-sniping each other over personal recollections of industry PR (everthing in the media, pro or con, is somebody's PR, BTW).

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. TCO is going to be a fairly good approximation of overall system-wide efficiency. Companies can only loss-lead for so long before going bankrupt, and they can only externalize costs for so long before being sued into oblivion. If EVs truly are this superior, nothing is going to stop them.

[0]https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/08/electrifying-tran... [1]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml [2]https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/data/browser/#/?v=9&f=A&s=... [3]https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=107&t=3 [4]https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_02.html

What I don't understand is how we didn't have these efficiency numbers in terms of kwatts/mile with an ICE/EV hybrid drivetrain, and why we haven't had them for decades already.

Why aren't hybrid drivetrains in Semis, RVs ... everything. Within 5 years of the Prius there should have been legislation mandating PHEVs for practically all consumer transport.

With a hybrid you can run an engine in the Atkinson cycle which (apparently) enables diesel-level mileage out of gasoline. You get the regen braking that dramatically improves city driving.

Every five years after the Prius is another travesty that we didn't have this legislation coming down the pipe.

By now in 2022, 25 years after the Prius and Insight, we should have had 50% or more of new cars being PHEV hybrids with 50+ mile all-electric range. It would have brought Russia to its knees, the Saudis would be an afterthought in policy, and we'd be so much more resilient.

And hybrids in addition to atkinson should enable other tricks for efficiency gains besides carnot output to reclaim heat from the engine and exhaust, like turbochargers do. Gas turbines at the utlity scale are at 60% efficiency.

Oh well.

You are completely right, for 20 years most of the automobile industry built cars that used more energy and especially polluted more than it would have been necessary if they had copied the technology of the Prius.

Our environment would look much better now, if they had.

But in my eyes, the time for hybrids is over, any new car should be pure electric as it is simpler and way more efficient.

Hybrids are really complicated to build.

F1 engines have something called an MGU-H which recovers thermal energy from the engine (turbocharging) but can also spool up electronically etc.

They can reach something like 50% thermal efficiency, but these are truly complicated machines.

I'm obviously not an automotive engineer... but...

1) electric motors are very high torque

2) electric drivetrains aren't really that complicated.

3) the hybrid battery isn't that large, so it's not the space for that

4) all the engine has to do is recharge the battery. Mazda could have probably done a rotary or honda done a miraculous small engine to do the recharging.

Sure I get that the early hybrids were complicated, they probably had both the electric drive and the engine delivering power and balancing things. But with skateboard design EV platforms (and that is over 10 years old at this point), the industry would have produced a very efficient and likely cheaper than a traditional big engine ICE platform with incentives and regulations by now.

It probably is moot now. 200 wh/kg at pack level LFP is coming into mass production, and 150 wh/kg sodium ion is coming next year. But for midwesterners, long haul truckers, RV drivers, and other long distance frequent drivers, the 50 mile PHEV with 200 wh/kg LFP should have a ten year lifespan and deliver carbon emissions savings.

But... oh well.

> By now in 2022, 25 years after the Prius and Insight, we should have had 50% or more of new cars being PHEV hybrids with 50+ mile all-electric range.

The problem with PHEVs is that so many people never plug them in, unless the automaker does something to them like with the BMW i3 REx, in which case said people wouldn't want them.

This is education and habits.

And when gas is at $5.00, an economic incentive.

It's also a practical difficulty. Small batteries in PHEV mean they charge slowly (makes public chargers less useful, EV road trips impossible).

Their tiny EV range requires them to be charged daily, which makes at-home charging a necessity in practice. But having such a good access to charging is also a thing that makes BEVs convenient. From this perspective PHEV a poorly-performing BEV with a baggage that reduces its performance, range, and efficiency, and occasionally is a less-efficient ICE to potentially save 20 minutes of time after 2-3 hours of driving at highway speeds.

Essentially like if every car was a ICE BEV hybrid, but the ICE in some power plant somewhere.

The reving and idling or low power output of the ICE can be avoided if it is in some power plant somewhere.

Eh, it's more like... exactly what the title says: EVs are just more efficient.

1 gallon of gas contains 33.7 kWh of energy. [1]

The average ICE car goes 24 miles on 1 gallon of gas. That's 0.7 miles per kWh (24/33.7 ≅ 0.7).

The Tesla Model 3 goes about 4.1 miles per kWh. That's 5.8x further per kWh, or 5.8x more efficient!

Most of the difference is because ICE engines are inefficient. They waste energy. Just like the article says. :)

The point made by the article about the source of electricity from power plants was simply that EVs are more efficient even when charged from coal fired power plants! Your point about the "ICE in some power plant somewhere" is temporarily true... as the grid de-carbonizes there will be fewer and fewer emissions from grid-scale generation. (Nuclear + renewables is my personal guess for where we're headed.)

It's kind of sad that several threads here are playing devil's advocate. Unless some dramatically better tech takes the world by storm in the next 2-3 years, EVs are going to completely take over the market. Economies of scale should dramatically drive down costs over the next 5-10 years, and then all new cars will be EVs. No one will want the old, expensive, dirty, loud ICE cars. And this is really good news for everybody!

  [1] https://www3.epa.gov/otaq/gvg/learn-more-fuels.htm
  [2] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310
  [3] https://ecocostsavings.com/electric-car-kwh-per-mile-list/

And even this comparison is lenient towards the ICE. That one gallon of gas doesn’t just poof into existence into the gas tank of the car, there’s a certain kWh requirement of energy to go from not having that gallon of gas, to having it.

Obviously the same is true for the electricity in the EV, but that’s dependent on the energy mix in your area. If it’s primarily renewables, this is another efficiency increase in favor of the EV.

> 1 gallon of gas contains 33.7 kWh of energy. [1] The average ICE car goes 24 miles on 1 gallon of gas. That's 0.7 miles per kWh (24/33.7 ≅ 0.7). The Tesla Model 3 goes about 4.1 miles per kWh. That's 5.8x further per kWh, or 5.8x more efficient!

Doesn’t this ignore how the fuel was produced, and delivered (refineries, fuel trucks, power plants, charger losses)? Are those losses negligible compared to the 1kWh once inside the battery or fuel tank? If so, then the comparison is fair

It feels really satisfying to read being said clearly what you would think should really be obvious to everyone, rather than the constant FUD and waffling about EVs.

> Eh, it's more like... exactly what the title says: EVs are just more efficient.

The articles point is also that BEVs are more efficient even if a fossile plant is used, since the plant can operate at better efficiency than a small ICE that also need to idle and rev to bad rpm ranges. Which was what I was trying to convey.

Which opening could you pour gasoline in a Tesla Model 3 to achieve anything else than a fire hazard? Any amount of those "33.7 kWh" gallons will get you exactly zero miles – how is that more efficient?

It's alluded to in the article, but the energy extraction from combustion in power plants is also more efficient than the combustion engine in your car (almost double in the case of natural gas using combined cycle).

Diesel electric systems are highly efficient ~85%. This is practical now in power plants, trains and shipping.

The same could be achieved on a small scale if someone would simply make it

Except building mild hybrids to avoid that problem might be more efficient than us building the mass production of lithium metals needed to make mass BEVs.

If we are battery constrained today, we need to consider the most efficient use of our limited battery supply. Start/stop idle technology is much cheaper than 1000lbs of lithium batteries in each vehicle.

----------

It looks like the most efficient solution involves like 50lbs of batteries, rather than the gross 1000+lbs of batteries that BEV fans want to use per car.

These are downright lazy arguments at this point. The F150 ranges 4000-5800 lbs. The F350 ranges 5900-7700 or more. Similar numbers for the Silverado to the F150 I think. And where I live at any given time in any given parking lot a random rock/cinder block is more likely to hit them than any other model. The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.

Or just use more trains and streetcars.

specifically, hybrids that have at least 20 miles of range and are plug in. this is an amount that allows the majority of commutes to be fully electric.

we have these vehicles that are really wfficient at moving people, called busses. they should all be electric.

and use overhead cables

We had trolley busses like 100 years ago

The most efficient solution for 80% of trips is 10lbs of batteries and a wire for 19%

But sodium batteries are very nearly in mass production so while we're continuing to insist that petrol is 100% of the problem cars cause rather than 50% I guess that will do.

Much idling could be avoided if traffic engineers would design roundabouts instead of 4-way stops. Nevertheless, some newer cars shut off at intersections and are designed for that.

Roundabouts have a failure mode that 4-way stops don't, akin to starvation in computer science. Consider a roundabout in a right-hand traffic country with connections in the 4 cardinal directions. If at a given time of day, there's a constant stream of cars from the west that want to go east, and virtually no traffic from the north or east, then a car trying to enter the roundabout from the south will be waiting a very long time.

> Roundabouts have a failure mode that 4-way stops don't, akin to starvation in computer science.

Putting roundabouts onto streets is not a binary decision: some intersections could be roundabouts, some could be lights, and others could be roundabouts with lights.

There was such a roundabout constructed by my prior job just outside the 4k factory parkinglot entrance.

Almost everyone were going from the highway to the parking except me.

I had to wait for a bus that was going straight so you could enter or two cars going straight in a row.

It got so bad that the workers started to give way to those coming from the starved road so it sorted itself out I guess.

If there's that much traffic, a four way stop will be even worse than a roundabout. You'll need a turbo roundabout, traffic lights or grade separated intersections in that case.

Four way stops are one of the dumbest inventions of man kind that are way over used in North America. Everyone has to stop all the time and it leads to scary situations at 2 way stops because people don't expect those anymore.

Here is a great video about life without stop signs in the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/42oQN7fy_eM

And here are some infinitely better alternatives:

Low traffic + low speed: raised intersections where right goes first.

Medium traffic + medium speed: priority road with yield signs on side streets and roundabouts

High traffic + medium speed: traffic lights

High traffic + high speed: grade separated intersections

A single “pause” (traffic light, roundabout, stop sign, even just a speed camera or change in speed limit…) in the stretch of the east-west road leading up to the roundabout can usually solve this. You only need occasional breaks in traffic to allow the secondary traffic to join.

Large UK roundabouts often have traffic lights that are only operational at peak times, to counter the effect you describe.

Small roundabouts don't have this problem.

In practice this rarely happens though.

A lot of walking would be eliminated too if you actually completely got rid of perpendicular intersections. You kind of need cars to stop sometimes to make it possible for people not in vehicles to get through safely.

There are still crosswalks which are distributed around the circle. Rarely there are pedestrian tunnels to get inside the doughnut, like in Paris to visit the arch.

One option:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble

It's not the idle at the stop sign that matters, it's the slowing and and re-accelerating afterward. Idle itself uses a trivial amount of gas - equivalent to around a tenth of a mile for a 15 second idle.

10th of a mile at 15 seconds is the equivalent of doing 25 mph. I'd not call that trivial considering you're not doing 25mph.

Have you ever tried to navigate a busy roundabout? I've been at roundabouts backed up at least a quarter mile. There is plenty of idling.

The cost of managing cars is so huge, we should really have more fluid intersections.

While partly true, it is important to note that improving efficiency of a single large energy source is easier to do than improving energy efficiency of a million cars.

Also, with solar and wind in the fray, and increasing renewable energy share, having an all electric energy consumption economy is better logistically and environmentally.

Even if current power generation for the grid isn't optimal (or clean), the move to EVs is the only way to allow for a cleaner system to work at all. That just isn't possible with ICE cars.

I dunno about about that. There's no reason ICEVs can't run on methanol, the production of which can actually be carbon negative. This is likely where shipping will go, so no reason cars couldn't do it. You can even convert modern cars over fairly cheaply, so you don't need to produce an entirely new vehicle.

Yeah, the only reason the EV doesn't obviously win without any calculation is because of the battery loss. And turns out it still wins.

Can we finally promote electric vehicles that don't weight +1000kg, and as aerodynamic as a brick? There is no way this is sustainable. We need something like vélomobiles

This.

But the problem is regulatory. China already has a number of under $5000 city cars that are perfectly fine for driving around. Problem is that they're completely illegal in Europe or US.

We utterly need a category of city vehicles that are barred from highways, can be driven in cities, and lack 90% of all the newer and ridiculously expensive safety features. We're moving in a direction where new cars are mandated to read the speed limits indicators and follow them. Honestly I'm hoping this particular piece of news is bunk, but it definitely wouldn't surprise me - regulators love regulations, car manufacturers love having extra features to sell, and it's fool-proof protection against cheaper alternatives.

A city car needs safety belts, and a built in speed limit. That's it.

No idea about the US, but in the EU this class of super light cars is allowed (with certain speed limits) and some also are produced in the EU, e.g. the Renault Twizy.

I'm not so sure that this would be very popular though. Even within cities, people do often want to go on the highway. e.g., the fastest way from south Minneapolis to north Minneapolis is to hop onto I35 and drive less than 10 minutes as opposed to the 40 minutes it would take going through city streets.

Weight is partially related to the fact that our existing battery chemistries are relatively heavy.

Also not sure why you think electric vehicles are not aerodynamic – the Tesla Model S Plaid has a drag coefficient of 0.208.

https://aptera.us/

.13 but I really need to drive around fewer behemoths to feel safe in it. Maybe a 4 wheel will make up for it?

Yeah I was gonna mention that one as well but didn't because AFAIK it's not really in production yet.

Regardless, the lowest drag coeff cars in the world seem to be electric ones so GC's point is still... strange.

Yeah, the more avoidable weight is the SUVs.

Many EVs (not all, obviously) are the most aerodynamic cars that exist because they have to be. Aerodynamics is extremely important to having predictable range in an EV.

Dacia Spring?

+ It's classed as a supermini, which can just about fit 4 adults. It's the same as a VW Polo, Ford Fiesta, Renault Clio.

+ Kerb weight of 970kg, which is less than ICE cars of a similar size.

+ Around €12,000 with incentives.

+ Top speed of 125km/h, so you can drive safely on highways (in the truck lane).

- Range is around 240km, but for its intention as a 'city car' that's more than enough.

- 1 star EuroNCAP rating.

- Battery doesn't have thermal management.

Absolutely. BMW, for example, have built really heavy EV SUVs and then slapped on huge batteries in order to get the 300+ mile range people expect. Miles per kWh is the metric cars should be optimising for, not just absolute range.

I realize this article focuses primarily on comparative energy efficiency, but missing from the discussion is an equally important comparison of powertrain reliability, complexity, performance, and long-term cost of ownership.

I have bought two cars new in my life, and held each for ~12 years. The second is on it's 12th year, and still going strong. Also there's really no reason that I won't be able to keep my car another 8 years, making it a 20 year car.

If I buy a 60k electric vehicle today, how long will it be until I replace the batteries? 10 years? 20 years? At what point does the maintenance cycle, render the car worthless?

Even after 12 years, the Saturn SL1 I had still worked as a car. There would still be maintenance cycles (oil, brakes, etc). But if you took that into the cost of ownership, it's still relatively cheaper than buying a new car.

Most ICE cars that age are either falling apart or long retired to the junk yard. They get nowhere near the fuel economy they might have had when they left the factory. Also, cumulatively the amount of maintenance, parts, and hours tinkering with the vehicle adds up.

A battery replacement is an economical choice for an EV. You could buy a new vehicle or buy a life extension of another decade plus. That's how long the battery lasts and there's very little else in the vehicle that is very likely to start falling apart. Electrical engines last a long time. Drive trains are much simpler. And parts for that are relatively cheap. So even if the engine were to fail, replacing it would be pretty straightforward and cheap probably.

E.g. a Nissan Leaf battery replacement will set you back around 7000 dollars. A lot of money for sure. But it will last quite long and when there's really nothing else wrong with the vehicle, it's a perfectly rational decision to make. Lots of original Nissan Leafs from 12 years ago are still driving around and quite a few will survive into their second and third decade. As it is one of the older EV models available, that's a great benchmark. We're talking first generation technology. The batteries and drive train were more primitive. Cooling and battery management were not a thing yet. Etc. Just great little vehicles. And a 7K battery doubles their original range (from 20kwh to 40kwh).

> E.g. a Nissan Leaf battery replacement will set you back around 7000 dollars. A lot of money for sure. But it will last quite long and when there's really nothing else wrong with the vehicle, it's a perfectly rational decision to make. Lots of original Nissan Leafs from 12 years ago are still driving around and quite a few will survive into their second and third decade.

This is better than Tesla which charges $12-20k + labor + parts to change the battery pack. But $7k is still a big chunk of change. That will set a price cliff on the car. Basically if it is worth $13k, but you're going to need a battery change in the next year, the true price of the car will be worth $6k on the market. Cars that are less than $7k become effectively worthless as the new buyer will be guaranteed to have to replace the battery pack on them.

This happens with home sales. Like if a house needs a new roof, the buyers will ask the home owners to discount the price of the new roof off the house.

https://www.way.com/blog/tesla-battery-replacement-cost/

Renault has found, to it's surprise, I guess, that 10 year old Zoes are keeping minimum 85% battery capacity.

The BMS babies the batteries. Forget what you think you know about LiPo from laptops and cellphones. For example: you can't get a Zoe without A/C. Why not? Because the battery is air cooled, by the A/C. If there is capacity left over AFTER ensuring the battery is comfortable, it is shared with the human occupants. :)

> Also there's really no reason that I won't be able to keep my car another 8 years, making it a 20 year car.

In northwestern Europe, the reason would be low emission zones. "Sorry, this type of car is not allowed here anymore." is a real thing here.

In reality I have only seen this happen to old/bad cars with equally bad diesel engines.

Take Brussels, the EU capital. Euro 4 diesel cars are forbidden there now. Euro 5 became mandatory for new car registrations in 2011 [0]. That means 11 years old cars could still be Euro 4.

These are not old or bad cars to a lot of people. Many are not able to afford car mobility anymore due to low emission zone restrictions on these cars.

It's easy for the upper middle class or above running society to develop a blind spot for this. "Just buy recent a second hand car or a new Dacia Spring" is not the answer if the money for that is missing.

Has enough attention been paid to this social side of the low emissions zones? I'm not so sure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...

Paris is going to lock out parts of the city for ICE cars in 24.

Where I live, we have to do emissions testing. And it passed this year.

The emissions testing was a result of the 1970s/1980s smog crisis.

Only for diesel cars and only in certain cities and you can still drive there if you pay a fine. It's perfectly reasonable.

How many components have you replaced on the Saturn? If you put 200k and 20 years on it then I am guessing you will need two new clutches, at least one pump and a bunch of sundries.

Tyre wear can be heavy in EV's if you put your foot down a lot, brake wear is a lot lighter.

At about 200k the battery may well go - but at 200k you can expect something major in your ICE drive chain to go. A new gearbox can set you back $6k - that's pretty similar to the cost of a tesla battery replacement.

These are what I can recall on the top of my head.

    Starter $800 (on warranty).  
    AC $400.  
    Transmission service $1500 at 70k.
    Coolant flush $400.  
    2 set of brake pads @ $400 a piece.  
    Timing belt $200.  
    Battery $100.  
    Oil changes at $30 every 3k miles. Lets call it $1k total.
    Cabin Air filter change every 15k miles $20
    Bottom heat shield $100
    Shocks @100k miles $250

Sundries sure, but spread out over time.

In the US, electric vehicle batteries are required by law to be under warranty for 8 years or 100,000 miles. In California, it is 10 years and 150,000 miles.

If the average ownership of a car is 12 years, that doesn't help for the next owner.

> the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that today’s batteries may last 12 to 15 years in moderate climates (8 to 12 years in extreme climates).

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/62813.pdf

"Today" being 2014 for this particular source.

I wonder if we have any newer information that doesn't rely on predictions?

On all those areas, an EV is better. Modern ICE vehicles are hugely complex because its they only way they can meet emissions targets. EV power trains are much simpler in comparison, and electronics are much more reliable. Batteries are not the issue that the naysayers say they are - lasting much longer than an ICE engine (which usually die around the 250k mile mark) , and at similar replacement cost at that point. And in the meantime you've saved hugely on servicing and maintenance costs - youd have changed the clutch and DMF at least twice by then, something that people like to leave out when they say "what about my iPhone battery, that dies in months".

Would like to know where you get those numbers. I just changed the clutch in my 2010 Toyota Yaris at 260,000 miles and it’s the first repair I’ve ever done on the car.

You have been very lucky. Many years of buying cheap used cars taught me that clutches tend to last less than 90k miles when driven by normal people. In addition you can expect at least one of the pumps on an ICE to fail in less than 100k and there is a small risk of an electrical component like the alternator going as well.

I've owned maybe 150 cars (personal ownership plus buying and selling). 100k miles is the usual point. Ive never owned one that had made it past 150k without needing a clutch. Many much sooner (town use only cars, maybe 50k?). Dual mass flywheels are always changed at the same time due to labour costs. A friend has a 2013 T5 van that needed it doing at 50k, bill was £1300. He never loads the van up (it's a people carrier really), and has done some long road trips as well.

Id suspect you do lots of highway miles with no gear changes (hence no clutch wear). Manufacturers now aim for ideal 150K life on a clutch, but that's aspirational, not the median by any means.

> cost of ownership

some of the cars that i've seen have EV equivalents that are so significantly more costly that the gas savings only start to work out at around 1.25-2x the average driving distance of a personal vehicle owner. it makes no sense for example for me to replace my glc300 with a eqc. and if you don't drive at least 10k miles/yr, the kona electric is more expensive than the kona ice.

a lot of discussions revolve around downgrading from an expensive ice to a cheap ev to make the cost work but that seems a bit disingenuous. of course getting a cheaper car is cheaper. when we do like-for-like, a lot of the advantages disappear.

Cost efficiency is where the money is. Quite literally. Miles per $ is the metric you need to apply to transport. You can fold the life time cost of the vehicle into that metric as well. All the interest, maintenance, inspections, etc.

In short, that's why a lot of commercial fleets are transitioning to electric. Dollar per mile is the only relevant metric there. ICE vehicle technology is basically going obsolete rapidly. Commercially, that game is over.

And the gap is widening every year. We've had a period where the tax incentives were important, helpful and necessary. But that is increasingly just a nice to have thing.

Fundamentally, it's not technically hard to build much lighter and efficient electrical vehicles. So, if the current ones are cost effective now, imagine how much more cost effective they could be.

This. At $5 per gallon, my 30 mpg ICE car can go 6 miles on $1.

My Tesla can go 4 miles with 10 cents worth (1 kWh) of electricity, or 40 miles per $1.

Obviously there can be mitigating factors, but even if you drive a 50 MPG ICE car, or your electricity is unusually expensive, or you drive your Tesla at 85 mph and only get 2 miles per kWh, it's still no contest.

The kicker is what happens if you get your kwh at the expense of a one time investment in solar and batteries. The grid or fast charging rate is the worst case in terms of pricing. You can actually charge smarter way cheaper than that. Many fast charging setups essentially only rely on the grid to top off the batteries if solar is not providing enough energy.

Basically, if you charge using solar panels that you own, the miles per dollar is a function of maintenance, and purchase cost of the vehicle and panels. The efficiency of the panels or vehicles are not a factor at all since the variable cost is 0$/mile. You only have variable cost when you charge the vehicle somewhere else. The non variable cost is basically the ownership of the vehicle and panels. Which you might simplify via e.g. leasing constructions.

The article is nonsense. It magically claims that regenerative braking makes up for losses from friction and heat. There's no way 87-91% efficiency can be achieved when 10% is lost just charging the car.

Bringing a car to a halt without regen uses only friction brakes. Bringing it to a halt with regen uses some regen and some friction. Both cars always have friction loss from rolling friction and drag.

What's not to understand about such a simple comparison?

> Bringing it to a halt with regen uses some regen and some friction.

To clarify, most EV cars use only regen braking until either the pedal is pressed (Tesla regens automatically by letting off the accelerator) or when the pedal is pressed hard (most other EVs).

I owned 3 different makes of EVs, this is incorrect for all three.

On a Nissan Leaf, mild regenerative is always engaged in Eco mode unless you touch gas. Otherwise when you put on the brake it's regenerative + extra braking with pads if necessary.

On BMW i3 it brakes regeneratively once you slip the gas. If you use the brake pedal hard it's still regen + pads.

On VW id.4 it's quite like on the Leaf.

On all three it's pads only braking only when the battery is fully charged.

What doesn't add up is 10% of the energy is lost just putting a charge in the battery. That means the overall efficiency is already 90% or less, regenerative braking or not. Now factor in losses from friction and heat, and there's no way the claim of 87-91% is valid.

Downvote me all you like, the chart is claiming that EVs are perpetual motion machines.

Here's the math:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32458027

I'm disappointed in HackerNews.

Really good diagrams illustrating where the energy is used.

And, as, always, glosses over the fact that even if EVs are simply just equivalent to ICE vehicles, moving a million point sources of pollution (cars) to a small number of single point sources (power plants) makes the pollution problem much easier to solve and improves the air quality in cities dramatically.

One number I challenge, though, is "0-4% for auxiliary use". My AC on an EV looks to be closer to 15% of cruising energy in a hot clime, and I know that my ICE cars always had a significant drop in MPG when I ran the AC, too. In addition, heating is "free" in an ICE car while it's probably a similar 15% in an EV car.

It would also be easier to solve if we moved from millions of consumers (cars) to 10000s (trains). And we wouldn't even need batteries. That is even less talked about.

Because ICEs and EVs are equivalent in capabilities. Trains and cars are not.

I wonder if there are any EVs that combine the battery cooling system with the heater! There is still some waste heat in an EV though I don’t know if it’s being well utilized yet.

Tesla already does that, all heat and cooling are in one system. Even the first Model 3 had a system for that.

They do this with the Octovalve and a highly efficient (Tesla designed) heat-pump.

In buses, the problem is so severe that there are some EV buses shipping with fossil fuel heat for cold climates.

And EVs in cold climates heat the batteries.

22% recapture depends on where/how you drive. I suppose when cruising on a highway (without much braking), it will be closer to 0%.

If any segments of the highway drive are downhill, you'll recapture some energy even on cruise at constant speed.

It has to be a quite noticeable downhill for a car to net pick up energy at highway speed. Small downhills still require positive power consumption (to overcome rolling and aerodynamic drag).

Obviously, there’s a point at which a downslope will offer regen, but these are the slopes where a manual transmission car would pickup speed if placed into neutral.

That's not my experience in my renault zoe. Often on almost imperceptible downhill slopes it will be at zero consumption, and there have been many areas where I can't back off the throttle in my ice vehicles where the zoe will be regenning.

True.

I'm assuming 22% is meant to indicate the average based on aggregated driving conditions.

That is true for a good flat one.

On one that curves and bends up and down, it is possible to capture back some energy, though, you do have to spend the energy required to go from point A to point B.

Energy density of gasoline > latest battery tech

Really don't see the arguments when the bulk of electricity generation in the world comes from burning fossil fuels - EV's are just feel good measure for people like eating packaged food does not remind you of the abattoirs.

Just because we currently burn fossil fuels in power plants (which are much more efficient than internal combustion engines btw) doesn't mean we always have to. Besides, development of electric vehicles increases development of battery technology, which is necessary for long-term sustainable energy generation.

The EV chart doesn't add up. 10% charging loss, 87-91% goes to the wheels? No other losses?

Not all the energy to power the car comes from charging. Some is generated from regenerative braking.

Um, all the energy recovered by regenerative braking was initially supplied by the charging input, which loses 10%. The overall efficiency simply cannot be 90%.

It's not fraction of total energy used, it's the ratio of the original input energy that ends up turning the wheel.

Imagine you had a line of 24 people and you asked them to cross a room with traps that kill 2/3rds of them.

66% of the people make it and for the 18 people who survive, send them round an outside corridor and back to the start and ask them to cross again.

This time 12 make it, repeat.

No more than 24 individual people can ever make it across the room, but even if we stop after a 2nd cycle already we have 30 crossings. One way to express that is that the crossing equal 125% of the initial people input into the system.

We haven't broken physics, were just arguing semantics.

> all the energy recovered by regenerative braking was initially supplied by the charging input

You're forgetting about gravity. People brake when traveling downhill, which is essentially using gravity to charge the battery (similar to hydroelectric energy).

The chart is kind of weird though. If there's 10% from charging loss, let alone from the other uses, how can you get back to 91%?

It's kind of wrong. With 10% charging loss, you cannot get 91% efficiency.

The chart even shows this.

I know. The chart is wrong. The entire conclusion of the article is based on bad math in the chart.

Losses due to friction, drag, and heat are NOT magically made up for with regenerative braking.

More energy efficient and also much slower to charge with a shorter range. Nothing we haven't known for 150 years. The reason we have had ICE vehicles for so long comes down to those two things.

Altough the slow charging is changing. Newer models can use DC charging at 350kW, which should increase to 500kW in the future. This is unpracticle at every home, but it should lower highway stops to 5-10 minutes, which isn't significantly longer then with gas currently.

...and way more boring.

You're downvoted, but I agree with you. EVs are so much more boring than the highly evolved, intricate design of ICEs. I marvel at the general principle, at what engineers continuously came up with to squeeze ever more out of them, even at such "simple" things as stroke order and cylinder configuration (V, inline...).

That won't change the fact that EVs are and should be on the way out. All the engineering of the world has not made them come close to the relative (really just relative) simplicity of EVs.

I also like ancient phone networks, CRTs, and mechanical calculators. And preserving small numbers of them as artifacts is invaluable, but only with a small number of enthusiasts or in a museum. There are a few Ford Model T still around...

> EVs are so much more boring than the highly evolved, intricate design of ICEs. I marvel at the general principle, at what engineers continuously came up with to squeeze ever more out of them, even at such "simple" things as stroke order and cylinder configuration (V, inline...).

EV powertrains aren't "simple" and are in fact "intricate", honestly to a higher level than ICEs. Even the motor itself is complex. But honestly, complexity is a bad thing. It means there's more things that can fail.

Let me make clear actually: I really think EVs are much more boring. To drive and to study. A part of my mind is sad that they are a dead end. But me nerding out about their engineering is not worth keeping them.

Well they better be since they typically only have the energy equivalent of about 1-1.5 gallons of gas in the batteries.

Semi-off-topic question: Have any government offices started programs to put out of work coal miners back to work mining the materials required for EV batteries and maybe also solar panels? In the off-chance that there is a blockade in China some countries may have to start mining these materials themselves.

... that's not how mining works. You don't get to just pick what comes out of the ground in a certain region.

I use satellites all the time to isolate specific mineral beds for mining. You can just-about 'just pick' what comes out of the ground when it comes to certain things. I look almost exclusively for agates. ASTER has spectral data exactly geared to that, LANDSAT 7 can get you semi-close if you know your terrain type. I'm 100% successful at every location.

I'm almost ready to start using them for Uranium before they get decom'd. I've trained myself on 7 years of this satellite data.

...that's not how mining works. You don't get to just pick what comes out of the ground in a certain region.

I never suggested that. Geological surveys paint a decent picture of what minerals can be mined from where. This is a well known process. Mining companies can relocate equipment and employees, especially if they have federal funding. It is a win for the federal government, national security and a win for the mining companies and their current/former employees. I will email congress to suggest it.

Some time ago I suggested something similar for semi-conductor production and it was not received well on HN either. Today the federal government is putting billions into local chip production. How well that money is put to use remains to be seen, but it is happening.

Not even in Minecraft :-)

Only if you ignore manufacturing and battery replacement.

"The emissions from Materials production and refining of the ICE are roughly 40 per cent less than for the BEV"

https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/project/contentpl...

A BEV makes up the manufacturing emission difference usually within the first year of operation.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt...

https://www.autoblog.com/2021/06/29/electric-vs-gas-emission...

First - this article is entirely about engine vs motor efficiency (ie what percentage of energy used is actually converted to forward momentum).

Second - your own source concluded that the studied BEV has lower lifetime emissions (including manufacturing) than the studied ICE car, albeit with a high uncertainty - they estimate that the the BEV has 27-54 tonnes of emmissions vs 58 tonnes for the ICE, or 47-93% of the ICE's lifetime emmissions.

Is Tesla still the only fully electric manufacture worth buying? If it is, all this legislation and subsidization are creating a monopoly. Also I'd rather not have a vehicle that can be software locked, so I'll continue to buy old used cars until I can just get a fully electric car that isn't connected to the internet.

It's really changing this year and Tesla is losing market share to the competition (though the market itself is growing). The competition has finally stepped up.

Buyers are opting for other excellent cars like the Kia EV6, the VW ID.3/ID.4/ID.5, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Mercedes-Benz EQC, the Polestar 2 and the BMW iX. The number of excellent options is rapidly multiplying, which is good for everyone.

Which is great. Some really nice ones coming out. I might be up for giving up my Volt in 15 years lol.

I refuse to even consider a Tesla for a host of reasons but I'm keeping an eye on the other options.

Yes, but electric cars need electricity which has to be generated from primary energy sources like coal, oil and uranium while combustion engine cars directly burn gasoline which is a primary energy source.

Thus, when you are comparing the efficiency of electric cars with combustion engine cars, you have to take into account the efficiency of the electricity generation process.

And the amount of energy needed to get the raw oil, distill and distribute the gasoline. Not to mentioni that electric cars are ideal to be powered by renewables, as they bring a great storage with them. In Germany, you need about 10 solar panels to provide enough energy for powering the car.

ICE engines convert less than 40% of gasoline's energy into movement, and the rest is lost as heat. This inefficiency is unfixable: the waste heat can't be avoided in a combustion engine. In cars there isn't enough space and carrying capacity for a steam turbine that could make a good use of the heat. In a stationary power plant, there is.

Stationary power plants are incredibly efficient, to the point that burning gasoline and transmitting electricity to an EV is still way more efficient than burning gasoline in a car.

You may be mixing up things with natural gas used for heating. Fuel -> heat is most efficient at the destination. But ICE cars don't run on heat, they radiate it away as waste.

Well-to-wheels, EVs are better in any energy mix.

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

Getting cars on electricity also centralizes the problem of emission control and improvements.

I doesn't often say that CO2 emissions for a new EV are higher than an ICE. After 10-20k miles you're just breaking even. Over the life of the vehicle the EV does have fewer emissions but it isn't a huge difference.

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

I don't want to feed the trolls, but this requires a response as it is highly misleading.

Cars last 100k+ miles now, and that 13k break-even number in your link is with the current US energy mix, which is rapidly decarbonizing. It is a big deal, and worth moving to EVs.

Both articles should simply state the lifetime carbon footprint of ICE cars and EVs. That is all that matters in this context - break even mileage and energy efficiency are secondary concerns.

GP’s point though is that the footprint of EVs is constantly changing. ICE cars can only ever work by burning fossil fuels, which inevitably results in a certain amount of emissions per gallon of gas burned. That’s not the case for EVs as the electricity needed for them can be generated in many different ways, some resulting in more emissions than others.

Depending on how the battery tech shakes out (such as the million mile battery) EVs may last much longer. Way less parts, regen braking rather than brakes, etc.

There is so much FUD out there from the professional astroturfers and the cranky old amateurs. But EVs will follow the path that solar and wind are: the sheer economics will sweep away ICEs in inexorable fashion.

> Cars last 100k+ miles now

Yes many do. Some are written off in their first year.

The main point is if we all miraculously switched to EVs, there are savings in emissions to be had, but it wont fix the problem.

Nothing "fixes the problem". That is a non-argument. But electric cars are a huge step in the right direction and important in enabling the transition to renewables. Be it only by being a storage by nature.

>Over the life of the vehicle the EV does have fewer emissions but it isn't a huge difference.

source for this? the article you linked doesn't seem to provide lifetime carbon emissions, nor does a 20k mile break-even point imply that there "isn't a huge difference" in lifetime emissions

Showing initial emissions: https://insideevs.com/news/549267/manufacturing-evs-70percen... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/26/lifetime-emissions-of-evs-ar...

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html shows the difference in annual emissions

https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/news/a... debunks the myth that the tesla battery is worth 8 years of driving, but still says its a bit over 2 years.

The difference in lifetime emissions between ICE and EV gets progressively larger as time goes on.

20k miles is nothing, though.

I realize many people drive that in a year, for me personally I take public transport so only do 3-4k/yr

You might help buy buying an older ICE to fund someones upgrade to EV. Or use a car sharing service?

If you are doing so little miles, you should of course either not own a car at all or an older, used car. Which will last very long under the conditions.

The electric vehicles may be more energy efficient once they are ready for driving. But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compared to combustion cars. It also needs rare earth metals which are mined by workers living the life of slaves.

Newer chemistries like LFP do not use rare earth metals and have far higher cycle times.

It is true that building an EV in the first place does embody more carbon, but the payback time is not that long (under 15,000 miles with a clean enough grid and under 50,000 even on the dirtiest grids). As the grid and supply chain decarbonizes that embedded carbon of manufacturing will also drop.

An EV gets cleaner as the grid you drive it on decarbonizes. An ICE vehicle will emit for its whole lifespan and will get worse fuel economy and emit more particulates, SO2 and NOX as it ages.

Anyone who claims EVs will save the planet is deluding themselves, but electrified transport needs to be one of many, many steps we take to decarbonize.

>Newer chemistries like LFP do not use rare earth metals and have far higher cycle times.

Technically correct, as lithium isn't a rare earth. Lithium mining isn't free from controversy, however. The "Lithium Triangle" in South America contains most of the world's known lithium reserves. Mining companies in Chile, the world's second-largest lithium producer, have less than a sterling human rights record:

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/lithium-mining-leaving-chiles-i...

100,000 EVs contain the same number of batteries as 500,000 PHEVs, which contains the same number of batteries as 2,000,000 hybrids.

Run the math. The 2-million hybrids will save the world faster than 100,000 EVs. Let's say ICE is 30MPG, Hybrid is like 40MPG to 60MPG. Even at the low end 40MPG, 2 million hybrids is the same number of emission savings as 350,000 EVs.

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Pure ICE technologies are also more important. Going from 20mpg to 25 mpg will have a bigger impact due to the huge number of ICE cars being made.

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There are 289 million vehicles to replace in the USA. The sad truth is that 1 million EVs/year changes nothing. We need faster production and faster replacement.

And there is no entity who can make 1 million EVs/year.

> It is true that building an EV in the first place does embody more carbon

Also, is this true for building a new EV vs building a new ICE car? People just regularly replace their cars and vehicles, and in that sense the transition need not necessitate any more carbon than would've otherwise happened.

Right... As opposed to oil, which is mostly sourced from free democracies right?

I've been running my car on E85 all year, US sourced ethanol.

But yes, US gasoline is also sourced from the US primarily. (Texas and Alaska). With a terminal at Brent / Arkansas.

And what's the oil input required to produce that ethanol?

So this is some very inaccurate statement, so lets clear up a few thing for those people that are not informed.

> It also needs rare earth metals which are mined by workers living the life of slaves.

First off, 'rare metal' is a specific group of metals that don't have much use in batteries. Batteries are made from Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt, Aluminum, Cooper, Lithium and Graphite. Non of these are 'Rare Earth' Metals.

Of course EV do use Rare Earth Metals but so do ICE cars, the difference is not actually that large. EV Motors have some more Rare Earth then would be found in ICE cars but its hardly a difference worth talking about much.

What you are referring to is like Cobalt mining. Cobalt mining is mostly done in the Congo and so of course has issues with working conditions and child labor. For the most part, about 80% of Cobalt is actually mined in traditional strip mining and workers there are very comparable to workers in all other types of industrial mining. Most large EV companies pretty much exclusively buy from the large mining operations.

The bad conditions, specially for children, come in in about the rest of the 20%, what is usually called artisanal mining operations. These are often private mines and the workers are not slave, they 'own' the mines but of course they are still poor and live in bad conditions and children working there is of course bad. But even there, its not universally the case, there are large efforts done to try to track those mines and reward those that have good conditions and block the others. Th

The problem is, there is a huge intensive for those mined materials to find a way into the supply chain. And since all these materials get refined in China its hard to verify.

But what people don't tell you, is that oil manufacturing also uses a large quantity of cobalt. So the idea that somehow EV are uniquely bad makes no sense if you look at it that way.

In addition, pretty much every manufacture is pushing out cobalt even from high nickel batteries. And of course LFP batteries that will make up over 50% of the market in the next decade don't use cobalt. Neither do next generation batteries like Sodium.

> But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compared to combustion cars.

While this is true now, this is mostly because of the less mature supply chain. Its not inherently the case. If you started fresh building up a ICE supply chain it would suffer from many of the same problems.

A Tesla made in Texas for example will have almost everything in one building and will likely be far more efficient then many ICE vehicles.

But it just takes time for the industry as a whole to optimize the whole supply-chain end to end.

So its really not a good argument against EV. This will automatically solve itself as you scale.

And even if it uses 20% more CO2 during manufacture, over the lifetime its still dramatically less CO2. And arguably just as important, the emissions that ICE cars blow into cities is horribly for the health of people and specially children.

Like most of these puff pieces, the destructive mining and limited volume of all the precious metals like copper, lithium & nickel are ignored. Until iron-sulphide can effectively produce the same results, it's still trading rats for snakes. Then there's the whole tire problem...

While simple articles like this may not cover the effects of mining, many other studies and articles do. What we see from those is that the impacts of mining related to EVs is only incrementally worse than the impacts from mining the minerals (and oil) used in ICEVs. Nickel and copper are used in conventional vehicles and in many other products. EVs are not the major usage of copper. Lithium is mostly “mined” by flushing warm water thought salt deposits. (Those photos you have seen online of massive lithium “mines” are usually a photo of a gold mine in Australia https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/hanking-to-pour-first-gold-fr...)

Yes, EVs are not without their problems, but compared to the status quo they are a major improvement, in particular to the much larger problem of CO2 and climate change that dwarf the local impacts from mining.

An article is not a puff piece simply because it casts something in a good light. This article is largely a transcription of the images from the linked report, and also addresses a common counter argument, “the power plants are dirty”. Batteries as energy storage/source are a related but entirely separate concern from the ratio of energy in to energy out (the focus of the article).

I also find it interesting to replace “precious metals” in your comment with “fossil fuels”, which also require destructive mining and have limited volume.

Neither nickel, cooper or lithium are theoretically limited. There might be temporary shortfalls until new mines come online but there is plenty in the ground.

Lithium iron phosphate battery are already in mass production and will be a huge part of the EV industry going forward.

> iron-sulphide

Not sure what iron-sulphide has to do with anything. There are lots of competing chemistries. Sodium will likely have a large part in the market. LFP already is and has lots of room for improvement as well.

> Then there's the whole tire problem...

I prefer trains to cars too but that's no reason to make up stuff.

Yeah but we risk “perfect” being the enemy of “progress” if we think that way, and people invested in the status quo will surely co-opt and fund this thinking too.

Usually the pursuit of perfection is FUD.

In my area, a local republican committee is very concerned about the fate of bunny rabbits, birds of prey and riverbank erosion. Amazing and inspirational, except the catalyst is that a bunch of land was cleared to build a factory, in an polluted industrial park, to manufacture wind turbine components.

Even though said turbines will be installed ~200 miles away, windmills attract a lot of ire in some circles.

Yah its a bummer when "tribalism" wins out over consistent ideals (e.g. the pro-business and US manufacturing party suddenly dislikes those things).

This Motor Trend article is a weak regurgitation of Karin Kirk's 'Yale Climate connections' promo blog for green energy, which uses US government's https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml claims.

There are a lot of very confident claims here but little substantiation other than academic postulations.

' The final loss of energy is from auxiliary electrical components like heated seats, lights, the audio system, and windshield wipers. Taken together, these accessories can consume up to 2% of the vehicle’s total energy intake.'

Ironically the complete reliance in BEVs to run accessories off their batteries is one of the major reasons battery life is so poor.

This sort of of vague proselytizing isn't helpful and arguably misrepresents BEV and to a lesser extent hybrid maturity IMO.

>major reasons battery life is so poor.

I thought that we were seeing batteries retain 75% performance past 250k miles?

I was discussing live battery drain in BEVs, which rely on running all accessories off them.

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