Why do we have these silly discussions?
Six years ago Tesla was going out of business and the stock price was going to tank.
When that didn’t happen, we started having other silly conversations.
If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air.
Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States.
https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-ov...
But also sometimes transit agencies just do dumb things (see, Boston de-electrifying a few bus lines).
It's mostly because it takes 10-20 years to transition a transit agency to ZEBs. Many agencies in the US are in the process of doing this. The timeline is due to things like:
- FTA monies used to purchase existing ICEBs require vehicles to be retained for their "useful life", which is often 12 years/500k miles;
- Retrofits or rebuilds of bus garages take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The timeline is dependent on design + construction + utility requests (which alone can sometimes take 2-3 years);
- Budgets!
Along with that comes refactoring service, due to so many vehicle service blocks not being compatible with the ranges of current batter-electric bus technology.
New York City needs fewer cars, not more. Given the longevity of the modern ICE car (15-20 years) it's going to take a long time to replace existing ICE cars in NYC.
In rural places, replacing ICE with electric is surely a good thing. In cities, we need to scale down car use significantly, while scaling up walkability, bikeability, and public transit. Even if we switched every car and every gas station over to electric today, we'd still have to burn insane amounts of coal and natural gas to power those cars -- not to mention the microplastic pollution generated by tires and roads that is actually made worse by the increased weight of electric vehicles.
The solution is fewer cars, and those cars that can't be replaced by other modes of transit ought to be electrified.
I simply meant replace all gas cars with electric, and we’d have cleaner air
> If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air.
Apologies if I misunderstood you. But surely you can understand how this statement sounds as if you're talking about every person in those cities, not just the current ICE drivers.
To pass the Turing test, a computer has to infer the missing context.
For example, “is this human really saying the solution is for every human being to buy an electric car ” or is he implying that people should trade in their gasoline cars for electric ones?
Statistically speaking, how often do people say everyone should buy an electric car, even if they don’t own or need a car?