The Electric Car's Shrinking Role in Reducing Oil Demand | Hacker News Reader

The Electric Car's Shrinking Role in Reducing Oil Demand

austinvernon.site

15 pointstuatoru28 comments

I wish municipalities put a larger focus on human powered transportation like walking and cycling. So many high tech logistics solutions I see seem to try and cover for the fact that we’ve built our cities to be innavigable for people.

I dont like how the world seems to be tending to be people stay at home, dont do anything, and be as efficient as possible

The movie 'Surrogates' comes to mind

You know what would be even more efficient.... Fewer people...

Perhaps but I doubt anyone here is going to publicly admit support for mass murder on the scale of hundreds of millions as a means of dropping Co2 output. At least not without enough hatred and resentment drummed up for whatever arbitrary label of people that's unfortunate enough to be the sacrificial goat.

This seems to be regularly suggested here. And the general target seems to be the poor, because then you can tell people they need to kill the poor or become poor themselves. So it's a simple case of them or us.

Literally the same argument that Hitler made:

> The Nazi Generalplan Ost policy ('Master Plan for the East') was based on its tenets. It stipulated that Germany required a Lebensraum necessary for its survival and that most of the indigenous populations of Central and Eastern Europe would have to be removed permanently (either through mass deportation to Siberia, extermination, or enslavement) including Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech and other Slavic nations considered non-Aryan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

Yes. But we've already reached peak child. So once the current glut passes breeding age the population should steady and start to fall.

Hephaestus over here

Actually the massive efficiency of the current world depends on lots of people. Reducing populations will result in less efficiency.

Instead we should be trying to grow populations as we're headed for a demographic collapse requiring extremely high taxation of the young to care for the old. It's a slow moving disaster.

Nah just put them in a pod, matrix style, as efficient as it gets, no more physical strain, no more "what am I going to cook tonight", the transhumanist dream

No, that's not what efficient means. Most people are happy to be alive, and their existence is a good thing. Your comment is an example of misanthropy sometimes found in climate activism and environmentalism more broadly.

Where do you conclude “stay at home” and “don’t do anything” from?

Key points: a range of autonomous delivery vehicles will reduce the number of trips that families make, especially those in more built-up areas.

Sidewalk bots that weigh 50 lb and move at 4 mph (already in operation); bike lane bots that weigh 100-150 lb and move at 12 - 15 mph (ditto); golf cart bots that weigh a few hundred lb and move at 25 mph (being trialed); large trucks on freeways, and eventually vans.

Also, aerial taxis for slightly longer trips: 6-10 seat short range electric planes that can use small local airfields to fly point to point, up to 200 mi or so.

The shrinking role is more about reducing annual mileage on the Camry in the garage from 12,000 mi to 6,000 mi or less, than it is about autonomous electric taxis.

For certain hip young urban dwellers maybe. I literally don’t have a single use for any of the things that you mention.

You never get anything delivered? Remarkable.

That wouldn’t be substitutive of my own car mileage as your comment implies.

Increasing the variety of things that are delivered (and the percentage of purchases delivered rather than fetched), rather than you fetching them yourself, would do that.

It must have, if you have done an Amazon purchase and had it delivered to your home.

And, if it really hasn't for you, it has for the many millions of people who have substituted getting things delivered to their house instead of driving out to get it themselves.

For better or worse, electricfication of transportation, whether that involves automation or not, is happening and will be impactful.

I'm not sure most deliveries really reduce the recipients mileage.

The alternative to Uber eats coming round with dinner 5 times a week is that you bought enough food to cook your own dinner when you went shopping on Monday.

I agree with the fact that it's better to cook at home than order in 5 times a week. However there are many people who just don't cook, and I think that 5 Uber deliveries a week is better than 5 trips to get takeout (assuming the Uber delivery is done on motorcycle or bicycle compared to trips in the car).

Seems like it might depend. I might be able to pick up dinner on my way home but delivery might need a whole round trip. In some cases delivery might be able to make a few deliveries in one trip but I'm not sure if that's done in general for things like Uber eats.

Wher I live, the supermarket has been doing deliveries for over five years. Up to 40 miles away.

Closer deliveries could easily be made by low-speed autonomous electric golf cart sized vehicles.

People already use Amazon for deliveries before autonomous driving. That substitution already happened, and switching to autonomous vehicles for last mile deliver isn’t going to change the consumer’s driving habits.

Again, either you use Uber eats or, like me, you don’t. I don’t see how the mechanism of deliver changes that decision, for the customer?

Delivery doesn't have to change qualitative features to shift tripmaking demand, it just has to become relatively cheaper and faster, which AV does promise. "The cheaper it is, the more we use it" is a basic outcome of supply and demand.

If a restaurant can run delivery bots at a low enough operating cost, they can offer free neighborhood delivery. Who would make a trip to pick up an order, given that?

There is a big gap between what the average person does, what they need and what they should do.

More efficient deliveries will only have one consequence, and it's always the same, everything you gain will be cancelled by the rebound effect

Rather ridiculous premise based on the idea that we won't be working in offices anymore. A trend from covid that's rapidly reversing right now.

Too many people try to predict current micro changes into macro trends.

Did you read a different article? This one mentions telecommuting precisely once in passing. The rest of it is about the unbundling of every other usage of cars for tripmaking into a variety of solutions that match scale of trip and cargo more precisely.

Daily dose of HN comment doom scrolling. Stay positive guys :)

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