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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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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.

And the comparable GMC Hummer EV is 9,063 lbs, 2,923 pounds of which are batteries.

> The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.

The metals thing comes from Russia (nickle) and Congo (Cobalt), and Argentina/China (Lithium).

The steel thing is *already* solved, with 88% of USA's steel being composed of recycled steel. You're hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn't right now.

Nickel is mostly produced in Indonesia and some pacific islands. Most growth of new nickel is in Indonesia. Its refined in China.

Lithium is mostly from Chile, Argentina and Australia but its mostly refined in China.

> You're hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn't right now.

The amount of lithium even if 100% recycled isn't nearly enough to cover what is needed. We know how to recycle it, in fact we have far more recycling capability then we have material that we can recycle. Everybody invest in recycling but there is not much to actually recycle yet.

Saw a new GMC Hummer a few hours ago for the first time, it was pretty strange to see because I thought it was a "new Bronco" at first or something (from the front). Then saw Hummer and GMC and was even more confused, but least knew what it was.

Seeing your comment above made everything make sense; it's pretty dang "not my style" but whatever floats (or tows) your boat

> The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.

There's lots of things the markets haven't "solved".

Also, getting a lot more nasty things out of the Earth will also most probably mean more dead kids in the mines of Africa, but I'm sure the market won't advertise that. At least the Saudis don't directly kill kids in their oil-fields explorations (they kill them only indirectly in Yemen, with the guns they've purchased from the West using the money they got from the oil-fields).

Yes and we need to end the weapons race of ever increasing car sizes. It makes accidents much more deadly, uses much more energy to move people and takes up unnecessarily large amounts of space in our cities.

Agree, but probably inappropriate to expect EVs to end that weapons race alone. Perfect not being the enemy of the good and all that.

Or just use more trains and streetcars.

Like Berlin and Munich and Prague and Düsseldorf and Warsaw and Amsterdam and The Hague. I lived there, without a car. I rented a few times when not on train or flight out of town. It's not for every city, though switch out trams for busses (Stockholm) and it could work in many places.

Yes, and you have to go even further and more general. The solution is actually urbanism. You can't just build trains and hope everything is gone be fine.

Living in low or high density urban environments is far more efficient in pretty much every single way that we can measure. CO2, energy, land use, water use and so on, and not just by a little but by a huge margin.

Transport can be electrified trains, trams, trolly buses, metros. This uses very few battery materials and essentially no new technology. All technology read to deploy in large numbers.

This would also 'solve' the housing crisis as increasing density around transportation with mixed use is what leads to much cheaper living cost (housing and transportation need to be seen together).

This talk by famous City Planner Peter Calthorpe is really good and goes into detail. He and his teams were charged with making a few projection plans for California and have really good numbers on all of these things (except the nuclear I mentioned):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4

He has other great talks about his work in China as well, this is a bit more academic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqldZhxl86I

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.

That, or drastically smaller vehicles such as e-bikes. Especially if you can take them on a larger vehicle (i.e a train) for part of long commutes.

i wish we had proper cycle storage on all trains, it is extremely awkward to place them on transport.

U also wish EU didnt have the silly 25 km/h limit on ebikes, I can pedal faster than that myself

Electric "unicycles" seem much easier to transport on trains than a bike. Though I wonder if they're considered "e-bikes" in the EU.

they are banned on the london transport network, supposedly due to danger of lithium battery fires. But self-built ebikes are not banned

For taking a bicycle on the train, may I suggest the Brompton folding bicycle? Electric version also available.

Also, did you know about the EU speed pedelec category L1e-B? It gets classified as a moped with maximum speed of 45 km/h and maximum 4 kW power.

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

Next your gone tell me you could replace the plastic wheels with once made out of steel. Crazy stuff.

For this to work however you need to change far more then just the buses, you need to change the whole development pattern. I put some great links in my other comment.

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.

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