Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles? | Hacker News Reader

Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

hannahritchie.substack.com

175 pointsbpierre401 comments

This article and the IEA sources that they rely on assumes that an EV is a car. That’s not a good assumption: electric bicycles and trikes like the Aptera are much better direction for the vast majority of individual transport.

At that size, you can rely on smaller batteries and solar panels for many journeys (it isn’t fully sufficient for an Aptera but an e-bicycle with a small roof can ride as long as the Sun shines).

Using three tons vehicles for long-distance journeys or for the transport of goods isn’t efficient: trains (and last-mile delivery on cargo bikes) are a lot more economical in both energy, accident risk and individual time (or vehicle investment if you assume an autonomous future).

If we don’t use the energy transition to shift away from the domination of heavy, polluting, deadly cars, we would have lost an opportunity.

I agree with anything you said. At this point I'm already happy when the media doesn't try to praise drones (Volocopter, Lilium, Joby, ...) as the ultimate solution to our traffic problems, unfortunately.

Aptera is a thing again? I remember reading about it when I was in high school over a decade ago. I thought they smashed their prototypes and went bankrupt?

Their homepage is claiming up to "40 miles of solar powered driving per day" and "1,000 miles on a single charge". Even given the size and layout of the vehicle, that seems impressive as heck if true. It's in reservation stages for ~$26k, which is also not bad.

When I was in college, the car was being advertised as 100 MPG. The car looks virtually the same, if you can get 100MPG you can probably get insane ranges without huge batteries.

It's basically a motorcycle on three wheels, those things have great milage.

> It's basically a motorcycle on three wheels, those things have great milage.

The mileage really varies on a lot of things. Cruising on the highway with some side cases and a little bit of gear I usually only get like 35ish MPG on my 1050cc bike, into the low 40s without any cases and with my windshield fully down/off. Fully loaded with camping stuff I'd only get like 30mpg. My 650cc bike with some cases as well got like 40ish, mid 40s without any cases, but really didn't have enough power to feel great when needing to overtake on highways with big trucks.

Some really small motorcycles will get into the 80s, but its really not a given that motorcycles have high mileage numbers.

I agree that on highways motorcycles' horrible drag (easily 2x of cars) results in terrible fuel economy considering their size.

Around town at low speeds (therefore drag is negligible), size becomes an asset, and a small motorcycle or scooter can get very good fuel economy, assuming it doesn't have an insanely overpowered engine.

An electric motorcycle or scooter around town is extremely efficient.

For example, the Arcimoto (https://www.arcimoto.com/) gets 5.5 miles/kWh.

The Aptera (which blurs the line between motorcycle and car) gets 10 miles/kWh! By comparison the Model 3 (the most efficient current mass market EV) gets 4 miles/kWh.

The original Aptera went bankrupt a decade ago. However couple of the original cofounders managed to get some funding to buy back the name and some of the original IP and restarted the company a couple of years ago.

> Using three tons vehicles for long-distance journeys or for the transport of goods isn’t efficient: trains (and last-mile delivery on cargo bikes) are a lot more economical

That sounds intuitive to me but the fact that train tickets are so expensive on long distances (more than twice than if you travel alone in a car) makes me think it's not the case.

The price difference is because the vast majority of costs for car transport (direct, like road maintenance and indirect, like millions of people dying because of pollution) are handled by the state. Trains can easily be much cheaper as most costs are fixed and they can handle orders of magnitude more traffic without congestion.

> That sounds intuitive to me but the fact that train tickets are so expensive on long distances (more than twice than if you travel alone in a car) makes me think it's not the case.

Have you factored in all the costs associated with owning a vehicle (e.g. cost of purchase, maintenance, etc)?

Yep, train travel in the UK is more expensive than driving under any circumstances by at least a factor of two or three other than when commuting into London, where parking charges make the economics work.

You don’t include the health cost of pollution and the cost of accidents: healthcare and loss of life make driving far more expensive. That cost is not paid for by the drivers at the moment.

I'll give you the health costs and climate costs but the costs of accidents are paid by drivers through their insurance premiums.

Train tickets include track maintenace, but if you travel by car, you usually don't include road maintenance, car purchase, etc in the travel price (as they're often hidden and include many subsidies and tax breaks).

Additionally, a train always costs the same amount to run, no matter the number of passengers, so in countries where trains don't see much use (like the US), they'll be much more expensive than they should be.

If you look at how DB sells the vast majority of their tickets (Sparpreis and Super Sparpreis) in the 9,90 / 14,90 to 49,90 price range (including for 1000km long distance journeys), train travel can be relatively affordable (but obviously still more expensive than car travel if you travel short journeys, fill the car with 7 adults and don't include the road maintenance paid for by regular taxes)

vast majority of their tickets (Sparpreis and Super Sparpreis) in the 9,90 / 14,90 to 49,90

If you are flexible and plan ahead. If I decide now to go visit my sister tomorrow (~4 hours by the fastest train route), want to get there not much slower than by car, and travel at a time that is convenient for me, then I'll end up paying a lot more if I go by train, even if I'm traveling alone.

Yes, that's necessary to provide incentives for people to spread the load over the whole day. Otherwise everyone would pile into the same trains during the middle of the day instead.

Nobody is saying it’s unreasonable. Just that there remains a valid justification for owning a car. Not driving it everywhere, all the time. But having one.

I don’t really agree with that. If driving 7+ people is something you do every day, sure. But for the vast majority of people, there is no valid reason whatsoever.

I’ve never owned a car, and stopped during the middle of my driving lessons because I didn’t see the purpose in it. That was 10 years ago, and I’ve moved halfway across the country, traveled a lot, never had a car, and overall I spend significantly less on travel than the friends who do own cars (while traveling more comfortably)

Passenger rail in the US, like Amtrak, is spectacularly subsidized.

Amtrak is receiving $19.26B over the years of 2022 to 2026. $4.8B a year. That is an increase from the $1.7B/year it received from FY17 to FY19

The FHWA is handing out $52B in FY22. Now, you might say, oh, well, more people drive, so the FHWA is clearly a more sensible place to invest. But Americans spent $743B on their cars, including payments, interest, and insurance.

It's a scam.

I wouldn't call it a scam. The subsidy per rider is, in fact, a relevant number. As others have pointed out, commuting by rail in America largely sucks, particularly in an age of COVID and rampant crime in many metro areas. In Portland a dude literally had his face and ear bitten off the other day at a light rail station. People will pay more for cars because everything about the experience is better.

In Portland a guy had his ear bitten, and ~100 people died in their cars in crashes.

Not in one day, and there's been a lot more violence than that on Metro, including shootings and stabbings. I'm much more comfortable with the risk on the highway, which is in many ways contingent on my own behaviors. Rational or not, I suspect many, many people agree with me. Likewise, buses were hilarious during the pandemic. Nobody wanted anything to do with them, and that's increasingly true every cold and flu season. How many people do communicable viruses contracted by mass transit kill every year? These are not flip comments. I'm just making the case that there's a reason people prefer cars, and it's not just because of some failure to build sufficient mass transit.

Because of unprofitable long-haul routes through the middle of nowhere that no one in their right mind would use instead of flying but that are kept for political reasons.

The northeast corridor, which is basically the only Amtrak route that is actually focused on being a useful route for passengers, runs at a profit.

> Using three tons vehicles for long-distance journeys or for the transport of goods isn’t efficient: trains (and last-mile delivery on cargo bikes) are a lot more economical

You are right - Rail freight is extremely expensive (typically more expensive than road except for very long routes) and cargo bikes have a tiny payload.

Think about container ships - massive vehicle and much lower cost vs rail freight (dependent on distance).

Surprisingly not that much lower, which is why Transsiberian Railway is still a main transit hub.

What matters is large volume per ride, which trains can definitely pull off.

Related, recent Electrek video discussing the next moves for countries that have phased out ICE for EV, such as Norway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F6Bz-0EKA0

> the next moves for countries that have phased out ICE for EV, such as Norway

"Phasing", perhaps. "Phased", not yet...

Approximately 19% of passenger cars in use in Norway are (pure) EV, with 7% plug-in hybrid and 5% conventional hybrid. That leaves 40% diesel and 30% petrol.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_N...

Norway has the luxury of exporting pollution the rest of the planet as a means of financing their pivot to green technology at home. Not every country can do that.

Taken in isolation, it's an interesting case study in EVs, but I'd be careful about extrapolating too much.

Good luck selling that idea (in America, at least).

There isn't any reason people in America couldn't choose such things. They just don't. If the selling of the idea is failing, maybe the idea is the problem and not the people you're selling it to.

> isn't any reason people in America couldn't choose such things

I mean, sure. I don’t want to. I lived without a car in New York and it was great. I live with a car in a low-density area and it’s also great. There should be a carbon tax, but that’s a fancy way of saying some people get cars and some don’t.

(Specifically: I don’t want to walk or bike when it’s -20° F. I don’t want to load up my skis every time on a bus, I literally can’t with a snowmobile, and I enjoy doing those things.)

To be sure many Americans will worry about the danger of being in the smallest vehicle on the road — having to contend with SUVs, full-size pickup trucks.

But just as the Japanese found a foothold in the U.S. auto market in the 70's, if there were an electric car for under $10K I suspect a lot of people would find that their fears could be somewhat tempered.

> if there were an electric car for under $10K

We are very close to finding out, at least for the moment. In Oregon the combined federal & state tax incentives make a Chevy Bolt a $10.6K car.

> if there were an electric car for under $10K

Somebody should make a concept car that is electric but without any electronics (apart from battery and the motors, obviously). Apart from the battery, what's expensive in a modern electric car is that you are essentially sitting in a giant smartphone with 4 wheels.

Why is that necessary? Electric motors provide the unique opportunity to create vastly simpler (and thus cheaper) cars than ICE versions. This could over-compensate for the battery costs. But seems car manufacturers fill it with more electronics. I'm sure there are market opportunities for cars that just bring you safely from A to B without having some semi-self-driving-but-not-really Twitter client on board that opens the doors with an app on your mobile. I'm fine using a key, thank you very much.

> Why is that necessary? Electric motors provide the unique opportunity to create vastly simpler (and thus cheaper) cars than ICE versions.

The majority of the market (dollars-wise, at least) doesn't want a vastly simpler car though. They like having heated leather seats, heated steering wheels, comfortable interiors with good AC and heat, and a decent stereo.

Also, its not like you're realistically going to cut the price in half taking out the stereo. The actual car thing is the vast majority of the price.

Heated seating doesn't need to turn my car into a smartphone. A reasonably simple stereo neither. Bascially what you could have in a car in the 70s.

It would be interesting to know how much cost it would cut to leave out the hundreds of sensors and CAN bus stuff and phone-home interactive NFC magic. Less dev costs, less certification, less maintenance, less licensing.

A brand new with markup replacement of the head unit/smart stuff guts of an ICE car I had was ~$1,500 including labor. That core essentially ran Android with a lot of custom skinning and applications, so essentially a cheap Android tablet slightly hardened to handle the heat of a car parked in the sun. What does a set of 19" wheels cost? A set of tires to put on those wheels? The full brake assemblies? The ABS system? We're easily now past a multiple of that cost of the smart stuff guts/head unit and we' don't actually even have a way to spin those wheels or change their direction much less seats or seatbelts or airbags or, you know, a frame.

The screen and radios are usually pretty darn cheap BOM-wise. You really think a computer with less compute capacity as a cheap modern cell phone makes up a significant portion of the cost of a new car?

You seem to be completely ignoring the rest of the iceberg that this glorified screen rests on.

And no, not every car needs to have top-end leather heated fake-racing shaped seats. Some people just want to get from A to B and not everybody has a SWE salary/compensation like the slightly-detached-from-normal-people's-reality crowd here at HN.

Of course when I discuss this with a tech crowd I need to expect a tech-focused attitude. See it as a challenge .. I mean, some people write compilers that output only move instructions (still Turing complete) or build websites entirely running on solar power. Minimizing electronics in an electric car could just be another creativity-inducing restriction. Just saying "it can't be done" does not sound like real Hacker spirit to me..

> You seem to be completely ignoring the rest of the iceberg that this glorified screen rests on.

Yeah the stuff it rests on such as the frame, the suspension, the wheels... That's the vast majority of the cost of a car. What sensors are you thinking about that add supposedly many many thousands of dollars to the cost of a car? Backup sensors aftermarket, at retail, can be had for $20. Mobileye sells aftermarket ADAS kits for <$1k installed, at retail. What do you think an automaker moving a million of those a year pays per unit?

Tear out a all of those computers and sensors from a $35k car and....now you're at a $33k with a lot of the comfort options removed.

Which part of the iceberg do you imagine makes up the majority of this cost? Which seems to be the most expensive part: the Android tablet, the $200 worth of sensors, or the couple thousand pounds of metal called the frame?

Could you ship a car without many computers on it? Sure, maybe. You'd have a hard time meeting emissions requirements without some kind of EFI though, so instantly there's a computer there. Same goes with needing to have some kind of EGR system to once again meet emissions and fuel economy standards. Then, you're going to have a hard time having a purely mechanical ABS, which without you'll get incredibly poor safety scores. These days a backup camera is required in the US, so you'll need some kind of display and a camera.

Like, sure, one could make a car without many computers in it. It wouldn't be radically cheaper than cars with computers in it, it will probably perform worse and have fewer comfort features. The only real selling point would be "hey, its a basic car!"

You probably wouldn't sell nearly as many units as the big auto makers, as I really doubt it would be as popular (for example, why isn't the Mirage the most popular car in the US?). This means your per unit manufacturing costs would be higher. In the end I imagine such a vehicle would actually cost more in the market than less as some of the big costs like safety testing would amortize over a much smaller fleet of vehicles.

Even the Aptera, an incredibly stripped down car, is estimating ~$25k base.

Lets take the Mirage for an example. ~$16kUSD for the extreme base tier. Tear out the computers, the motor, the transmission, we're probably at like $11k. Now add in a 45kWh battery pack at ~$151/kWh so ~$7k, and we're at ~$18k. Add a drive unit/charging system for another few grand, and we're at ~21k. Starting price for the Bolt, $27k, and that comes with all those fancy "make the car a smartphone" features. And if we price it with the Bolt's battery size (60kWh) it gets even closer.

> You'd have a hard time meeting emissions requirements

Not sure what emissions you are thinking about from an electric car that needs regulation circuits. You know, the thing I'm talking about. (And that I'm still claiming could end up vastly simpler than ICE cars if we only tried).

But in any case, in absence of a good faith basis to a discussion, it doesn't seem worthwhile for either of us to continue it.

> But in any case, in absence of a good faith basis to a discussion

I do agree to the absence of good faith in this discussion. My comments have real experiences and cost estimations directly pointing to statements made by the other side. The other side of the conversation makes accusations of being disconnected from reality without actually giving examples, never actually addresses any questions, never actually gives any counter examples, etc. Perhaps we can both learn to be better communicators?

I did go a bit off topic talking about EGR systems, I kind of lost focus on EVs for a second there and talked cars in general. But either way, an EV is going to have computers to actually drive the electric motor effectively, a BMS, etc. Otherwise you're going to have some bad range, you're driving experience is probably going to be pretty poor, and you're not going to be able to really interface with any public chargers.

If you'd answer even one question, can you actually estimate how much an average car would save if they went without the "make a car a phone" stack? What kind of equipment do you propose they actually remove, and what do you think that equipment costs? I'd truly like to understand where you're coming from with that, because from what I see its <10% of the cost of a car.

And maybe I'm disconnected from reality, but the average new car sold today is now $40k, despite the Mirage still being sold for ~$16k. If there was really a massive market for cheap cars and I'm just too disconnected to notice, wouldn't Mitsubishi be moving a lot more Mirages?

You mean like the Citroen Ami (2020), from 7k€ ?

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/electriccars/article-114...

how exactly would this work if you have multiple small children, or are disabled, or a variety of other things.

Why is there this insistence that Americans are just 'big dumb'

You're replying to the wrong person.

I find the city to be better for small children and for disabled people than car focused suburbs to be honest. It means stuff is closer to get to and both groups of people are not completely reliant on other people driving them around to get to places. I do not believe the only way a world can be livable for disabled people, small children, and elderly people, is to pave the entire country in tens of millions of miles of roads and drive on them with heavy and dangerous polluting machines.

city downtowns are filled with criminals, homeless, and drug addicts. not very kid friendly env

What fraction of the driving population do you assume drive because it's their only mobility option?

Do the blind, seizure prone, or folks otherwise unable to drive a car due to health reasons count too?

Our cities are designed for cars. Hell, most of our society is designed around owning a car. It is horrendously impractical in a lot of places to go without a car.

Our public transit systems are largely garbage, if they exist at all. Bike lanes are extremely rare, and are really just used as free car parking.

Take my commute to work for instance. It's about 3 miles, but it would be impossible to bike, as there are huge and dangerous hills. Likewise, walking would be very difficult. It takes about 10 minutes to drive to work, and a bus would be over 40 minutes.

We have major infrastructural failures that make it very impractical to exist without a car in most cases.

Our suburbs are designed for cars. Our cities are retrofitted for cars.

That might seem pedantic but I’m not trying to be. The point is that we do actually have significant areas of population which are ready to be reworked to prioritize cycling without completely changing the way we live.

Suburbs can also prioritize safe cycling. Take a look at bentonville Arkansas. It has a tiny downtown but most of it looks and functions like a suburb. They’ve made it safe for everyone to ride their bikes to commute and for pleasure. It’s not a blueprint by any means, it’s a passion project by some rich folks, but it’s proof that the suburbs can be retrofitted with a vision and will.

Bentonville's core is vastly different from the surrounding suburb/exurb/metro area which is mostly 0.5+ acre lots built in confined subdivisions connected via 4-8 lane arterial stroads - typical American car style suburban planning. The damage is done, retrofitting this development pattern to suit cycling over F150 throughput is just not something that will be achievable in the Bentonville, or the greater US.

I live in Kansas City and there is a valiant effort happening here to put in meaningful cycling infrastructure. There are bollard protected lanes from downtown out to the inner ring suburbs, additionally we have a residential grid that would allow safe cycling around town, but the new lanes are going completely unused. Visit the KC reddit and look at the vitriol being spewed - 'why are my tax dollars being wasted on this', 'i cant park', 'it ruins business'... These are the people coming from our outer ring suburbs where cycling is just not an option - they can't even fathom a place without cars.

Eh, they will change their minds pretty quickly once they can't afford fuel for their car any more.

Have you looked at what's happened in Bentonville in the last few years? The cycling infrastructure that's been built extends well beyond the core and does a remarkable job connecting the suburban style development with the downtown core.

They've built miles and miles of greenways and off street bike paths. I was there three months ago and rode all over town without once feeling threatened by auto traffic. Is it perfect? No, absolutely not. But I defy anyone to go there, ride their bike to commute around, and walk away thinking "getting around by bike in in the US is impossible."

I don't think Bentonville is repeatable everywhere, and it may even be a fluke, but it's certainly proof that it can be done.

I'll admit it has been 3 years since we considered moving there (we tried living for a month to get the feel of it), but I wonder how well suburban style development is going to scale for utilitarian cycling to occur. The population is what, maybe 100k now? What about when its 10x that? (think DFW)

I don't think it does, and I don't think bentonville is the ideal. I just think it's proof that it's possible to start mitigating and designing toward a better future with what we have.

That is nice, but I wonder what the ratio of driving to riding bicycles is in Bentonville. I assume the residents still own cars.

Is improving cycling infrastructure thereby increasing miles traveled by bike a success? Or does this need to be completely binary?

This morning I would have had to bike in the dark, in a 35f rainstorm. Not going to happen.

I've done such things. It is surprisingly not bad if you spend ~$500 on fluorescent breathable rain gear and lights.

The biggest problems are leaves on the stupid green paint they coat the bike lanes with, and increased stopping distance / driver fatigue for the cars.

Storing the rain gear at your destination in a way that lets it dry out is also a big concern.

Being cold is not an issue at all. If anything, you will be too hot while rising.

Realistically speaking, what percent of the commuting population could do this on a daily basis? Many people have additional limitations that also need to be considered. E.g. Have to pick up the kids after work, have to shop after work, age/health constraints, etc.

You'll have great trouble selling that idea in many parts of Europe as well.

At least in large cities, lots of (mostly young) people are already fully on board with a largely car-free future. It's increasingly common to dream of not owning a car at all, instead of having a dream car. All of my american friends my age have some resentment that they're practically forced to own a car even in dense cities. So urban planners just need to enable a car-free lifestyle, and the shift will happen on its own.

Contrast in European and Asian cities, it is already extremely common to not own a car. In my city, even the people I know who own cars only use them for long journeys or when public transit is insufficient. And these bike/trike EVs are the dominant method for deliveries (mail, packages, food, etc... all use electric bikes) since they're cheaper to drive and maintain, drivers don't need a special commercial license, and they can be faster than traffic a lot of the time.

It's a lifestyle shift, but it's definitely doable to sell this idea.

As I like to point out in most of these threads, not everyone live in a Californian-like climate.

Wait until you discover the dutch.

Bicycles are the most common form of transport where I live in Umeå, and in the two nearest cities, Oulu and Vaasa. I’ll let you check what the weather is like today.

I’m not advocating bicycles to transport wood (the most common industry here) to the train.

Hah! I've been to Oulu. These people are hardy. Riding bikes in winter near the Arctic Circle is tough work. Yet the bike racks were full in January when I visited a few years ago.

It's not tougher than dressing up for going outside.

Heat and rain are bigger barriers to bicycles than cold. You could make a case for ice, but you can address that at the infrastructure level. You can make a case for hills, but again, infrastructure (namely, minimizing grade and going around whenever possible). It's a lot easier to wear a coat than it is to wear an air conditioner; if Tw > 30, you are risking heat stroke by pedaling. California, except the far southeast, has generally cooler and much drier summers than most of the United States.

Also, it's +2 in Umeå right now, which is warmer than I thought.

Heat can be mitigated too, to a certain extent. Shade from trees, reducing the urban heat island effect, and infrastructure to minimizing stop-and-go.

The biggest barrier to bikes is deadly cars.

Oslo was so littered with ebikes they had to put a limit on them and introduce a licensing system, pushing huge numbers further out.

Even if they're not as useful during winter, they're still everywhere.

In theory.

In practice the market has spoken as to what kind of a form-factor people find the most useful for personal transportation in different climates and economic development scenarios. There’s no reason why ICEs couldn’t have supported the kind of vehicles some people imagine other people need.

The market has spoken, EVs only started gaining traction when they started resembling actual cars in form and function. Think of it as parallel evolution. Dolphins and fish.

The market is profoundly distorted by single use zoning, parking minimums, density maximums, wide (and high speed) stroads, and other urban design choices that force long journeys. It's also not safe to be on an ebike surrounded by electric Hummers, F-350 super duties, and your normal "whole kindergarten class in the blind spot" Escalades.

Having just spent a week in Utrecht it's very clear that "the market" can certainly show a preference for ebikes over cars.

What's your justification for saying that it's the US with a profoundly distorted market and not places like Utrecht?

The massive state, federal, and local bureaucracies shaping the public & private realm to always guarantee easy parking for automobiles & a network of high-throughput roadways between them yet only occasionally & reluctantly doing the same for other modes of transportation. Note that guaranteeing easy parking for automobiles also results in destinations being so far apart that other modes of transport usually become impractical.

How about the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand?

People want this kind of development, they flock to it, and they are willing to pay astronomically high prices to get it. The government keeps the supply low with exclusionary zoning that makes all types of construction except car-centric single family housing illegal.

You have evidence of that claim? I took a look around me. The most expensive and highest demand areas are actually not transit accessible at all and walking is not really feasible as the houses have lots of land and are very spread out. I am in the Sacramento area for reference.

Yes, Granite Bay is a great place to keep your sports car collection, but places in Sacramento where you can walk and bike command a premium compared similar places without the same walkability.

But you are moving the goal posts here. The person I responded to didn't say compared to similar places without the same walkability. They said "the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand". Granite bay shows this to not be a fact.

Well for starters Sacramento is just a really poor example. Most of CA isn't. It's a consequence of hyper aggressive SFH zoning (~80% of the SCAG area is SFH, used to be even higher) and the era in which CA grew being the mid century period.

There basically aren't any properly transit served and walkable areas in Sacramento. Closest would be Midtown and Richmond Grove, but they aren't really very good at all compared to neighborhoods in cities with actual infrastructure.

But despite that they are _still_ some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the area on a cost to sq foot basis. The trend of walkable transit served areas being in high demand is near universal across the US.

Again just like the other poster you are trying to move the goal posts. The comment did not say some. The comment said "the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand". I provided a single example that proves this statement is not a fact.

edit: comment not commit

I don't have a metric for in-demand, but as I said, they are amongst the most expensive on a per-sq-ft basis, which is a much more useful metric for "expensive" than total cost. I didn't move the goalposts at all.

Again you are moving the goal posts.

I will break it down for you. The original poster said 'most expensive' not the 'most expensive on a per-sq-ft basis'. You are arbitrarily adding the words on a per-sq-ft basis because you FEEL like its much more useful. You provide 0 evidence to support this.

For example here is evidence that most people besides you feel that total cost is a much more important and useful metric. The follow sites selling homes list total cost as the main metric NOT the price per sq foot: https://www.zillow.com/ https://www.realtor.com/ https://www.movoto.com/ https://www.redfin.com/ https://www.trulia.com/ https://www.homes.com/

Edit: Here are the top three sites on google when you search "most expensive areas to live in the us". A three seems to use median home price not median price per sq ft. https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/most-expensive-cities-i... https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-expensive... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08091...

To be fair, the comment didn't say "every expensive and high demand neighborhood in america is walkable and transit accessible" either.

Never forget that most statements, especially imprecise ones like the one you quoted can be interpreted in many ways. It is very easy to find an interpretation that is incorrect, especially if you disagree with/dislike the premise.

The reason I say this is that your single example didn't seem to disprove the statement in my eyes. I read the statement as meaning that walkable neighborhoods are in most cases in much higher demand than other neighborhoods in the same region.

I don't really think either of us is wrong, more that the imprecision of the statement and language in general can be unfortunate and cause disagreement.

Also note that nobody will ever respond well to being accused of a logical fallacy. They are useful to understand what is happening and to rile people up. Not so much to convince anyone (that doesn't already agree with you) about anything.

I would add that the most expensive are the areas with biggest density, naturally with this kind of traffic a city council would create as many means of transportation as possible.

Which is why I'm always surprised by the makeup of the coalition of voters that support strict zoning. Personally, I don't understand how zoning isn't seen an impairment of property value requiring ongoing payments from the government to the owners, with the idea being that if the zoning is a benefit to the community then the community's taxes should be paying for that benefit. As it is, it's a hidden tax that prevents open discussion and accurate cost/benefit analysis.

That may be true in some places, but I'm skeptical of any causal relationship. To use Portland as a example familiar to me, the urban area is the least wealthy. The most expensive, exclusive neighborhoods are around the edges and have awful transit service. Looking at bigger cities, what's a better example? You certainly don't move to Manhattan just because it's walkable.

"You certainly don't move to Manhattan just because it's walkable."

depends on the person. People might move there because of the "vibe" or "excitement" and that tends to go hand in hand with places you can walk.

If it counts I emigrated in large part to be somewhere nicer to walk, but I am unusual. Not unique, though! Jason Slaughter (of NotJustBikes) moved to Amsterdam from Canada explicitly for its urban design.

Depends on what you mean by "wealthy". Cost per sq. ft. of housing in the urban area of Portland is much higher than the suburbs of Portland. That's indicative to me of higher market demand in the urban area.

> How about the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand?

I'm not entirely sure that correlation implies causation in this case.

Do most people move to cities specifically because they're somewhat walkable with good public transportation, or do people move to cities for other reasons such as more access to better paying jobs?

Would people in cities rather drive to work if it was possible rather than taking a chance every day that the people next to them on the bus/train weren't some strange/risky people?

There are as many reasons for moving as there are people. I lived in Berkeley even when my job was in Newark because I hated the idea of living in a parking lot with a mayor (credit to Ghost Ride the Volvo's apt description of Fremont)

Everywhere is distorted. As such it's meaningless to insist one or the other is preferred - it's down to an environment heavily influenced by policy. As such, choices can change if policies change.

I don't think I said that. All places people live, aside from frontiers, have rules applied to them and those rules affect how people get around. The Netherlands has different rules than the US, and within that framework the market (I didn't say the word free) shows a preference for ebikes.

Similarly, when I lived in the US I had to go 1.1 miles to the nearest coffee shop (or shop of any sort), and opening a coffee shop in my neighbourhood would have been illegal, and shut down very quickly. And that wasn't even all that far from the downtown of a medium-sized city (Sacramento).

In lots of the US it's illegal for developers to propose anything other than Single-Family Homes. They are codified to have large minimum size requirements and often have setback requirements forcing the house to be a certain feet away from the street. Businesses are legally required to be segregated from residential used, even corner stores. Lots of businesses in the US are zoned to mandate a minimum amount of parking.

The justification for a lot of these zoning laws is explicitly that developers and the market will not provide adequate home sizes or parking, so minimum requirements are forced on developers. When law forces huge houses, no mixed use, and huge minimum parking lots, the only built environment that emerges is a car dependent one. Older US suburban neighborhoods, like the post-WWII suburbs, had smaller (900-1200 sq ft.) homes because these minimum lot and floor area size requirements weren't in place yet.

If you're curious about areas with different land-use requirements, there are cities in the US like Boston, Berkeley, or Emeryville (just off the top of my head) with more permissive zoning laws that have much lower car modeshare than other parts of the US.

The situation in Utrecht isn’t a function of “the [free] market” though. It’s distorted by significant taxation of cars and subsidization of biking. It’s legislation on both sides, and American legislation can change, especially locally.

Look at bentonville Arkansas for an example.

But does "free market" mean you are free to pollute the air and cause a climate crisis? Is that the kind of freedom we want?

>The market is profoundly distorted by single use zoning, parking minimums, density maximums

None of which they have in the developing world yet those nations become wealthier people buy cars basically as soon as they can make the economics pencil out. People like to sit in expensive four wheeled air-conditioned boxes more than they like the alternatives.

Cars are a great way to show you've become wealthy until everyone has one and suddenly driving isn't as pleasant. The developing world (vague terminology there, though - would somewhere like Bangkok count?) tends to have mediocre transport and no infrastructure to stop drivers from killing people riding bikes or walking.

> Utrecht

is not representative of common reality.

It is also not much representative of "market forces", cars have to respect very strict "Urban Access Regulations" (similarly across Europe, but in Holland in particular)

Not that it is bad in general, but Utrecht is not a good example of what will happen around the World and actually make a difference.

China + India will soon be inhabited by 3 billion people combined, Utrecht has only 500 thousand residents. It's basically a glitch in the matrix.

Small note - Utrecht is not in Holland.

Right, I translated in my mind from Italian Olanda.

“The market” spoke twice, during the oil crisis of 1975. It was made very clear to said market that if oil was priced at competitive levels, people who made that decisions would be bombed out of existence and the memory of men. Horrors are committed every day, including today, in Yemen, in your name. Starvation, genocide, rapes…

There is nothing more shockingly unethical and disgusting to pretend that killing millions of people every year and destroying entire countries is somehow moral because of “the market”.

Streetcars are "EV's". They've been gaining traction for a 100 years and more.

They also tend to carry more traditional batteries (lead-acid) as they tend to be connected often to the grid.

> In practice the market has spoken as to what kind of a form-factor people find the most useful for personal transportation

That market contains the heavy lobbying by oil firms and car industry to keep trains at the sorry state they are in.

What if the market, often times a manifestation of social and cultural greed and ignorance (and acquiescence and conformity and manipulation), is wrong? What if the market, which has fundamentally brought us to the brink upon which we find our collective selves and is driven by short term profit motives, cannot be trusted to do the right thing for the sake of the future rather than the immediate or even near term? What if the market, the deity that capitaism worships, is only interested in self preservation and not at all concerned with sanctity of all life on the planet.

I do believe it is both interesting and frustrating that people (in general) fail to challenge the validity and utility of their own beliefs, even when those beliefs have been shown to not hold up under the scrutiny of others. Then, there is also normacy bias.

What's kind of silly is the adulation of "market" as some kind of God. Talking about, or implying that "markets are always right" is a diversion, a red herring by those who are served by such "markets". We need markets (super and other types) but just because we need them does not mean they are an intelligent being who is "always right". Is Greed good? Is Greed our next God? I think it was proven in a movie already that greed is not good.

"Let's build bike lanes that are so scary only the bavest will dare to use them - and also subsidise cars in any way we can." - "The market has spoken, people want cars!"

Well, the market has also spoken as to what kind of councils get elected and what kind of plans those councils approve. Of course, that's in large part because car owners pay infrastructure taxes cyclists don't. But that's also precisely what the market is - the segment who's paying. If wishes built livable cities there'd probably be more of them.

The market is rigged by an industry(ies) (auto, oil) to develop society in its favor. Without a major 'refactor', the US doesn't have a chance at efficient urban design that would support individual use transport.

It is rigged because people want high speed climate controlled transportation. Prior to oil and autos, there were enclosed carriages pulled by horses.

The market was rigged by oil and auto before cars were climate controlled.

There are antique cast iron boxes that were filled with hot charcoal to keep carriages warm.

Cyclists have cars too and pay the same taxes, since it’s basically unavoidable in the US.

But also bikes cause negligible damage to infrastructure and barely require any resources compared to cars, so the costs are usually much lower for bike infrastructure.

The problem is that it's not just the people who decide who gets elected. Like it or not, the chances of winning an election highly correlate with advertising budgets, and the fossil fuel and car industry has sunk dozens of billions of dollars in campaign contributions, (S)PAC donations and other legal and illegal forms of bribery to make sure their interests were taken care of.

>Like it or not, the chances of winning an election highly correlate with advertising budgets,

This is just BS/lies at the local level.

Moneyed PACs aren't fighting it out over councilor, selectman and planner positions for random suburbs.

Pretty much all the money these candidate dispense is either self raised or comes from an official political party who don't really doll out meaningful amounts to these elections

As one who has run for local office in a Seattle-area suburb, yeah, there's no oil industry money sloshing around. At best one might get a few local businesses (at best), and some individuals for small amounts. If you're the big swinging genitalia incumbent, you might even be able to afford yard signs without dipping into personal funds!

One would seem to win local elections by being the incumbent, and knocking on a lot of doors.

Slightly different angle than the parent post:

What about the state and federal subsidies for road infrastructure? A locality that wants to go a different (less car dependent) direction would be leaving that infrastructure money unspent, which isn't fair to the local voters who contributed tax money to the state/feds. They rigged it so that the locals paid for the roads via their tax money, their only choice is to take the money and build more roads, or kiss the money they sent to the state/feds goodbye.

Wouldn't the above kind of hamstring local politicians? Would it be safe to assume that the pro-car lobbyists at those higher level of government want to keep it this way?

The issue is that you have path dependence in what gets built and the resulting constituencies.

When everyone already drives cars (the US), there’s significant opposition to investment in other types of infrastructure/built in support for investments in car infrastructure. Whereas there are plenty of cities around the global where such constituencies exist for other modes.

I don't think it follows from the fact that most people drive (buy) cars in the US that they actually prefer it. Corporate lobbying and politics have ensured that you can't function in the vast majority of the US without a car. People in cities in Europe that support and/or prioritize bike/pedestrian traffic see many to most people preferring it. I went through childhood, uni, and the first year of my professional life living in car-dependent (but still nice) places. I moved to a city where I can (and do) live without a car and I vastly prefer not having to drive. I suspect many who say they prefer cars haven't even had the opportunity to live somewhere where they aren't a necessity.

People that live nearby city center prefer them, get a few more KM radius away and sunddenly cycling to city center is no longer so much fun.

80.7%: Percent of the US population living within urban areas https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

The fact that some US urban areas are less dense and more car dependent than most European urban areas is at least in part due to the reasons I mentioned already. Obviously people who live in rural areas will need and prefer cars but my point is that it is hard to say "Americans prefer cars" when most Americans have never had the opportunity to live somewhere where they don't need a car.

Those other kinds of ICE vehicles are supported in poorer markets. In the Third World people use motorcycles and scooters and so on all the time, for all sorts of things.

If lithium becomes scarce, electric vehicles become more expensive. An increase in the price of vehicles produces a similar effect to a decrease in people's incomes, so the market would push people towards smaller vehicles just like in the Third World now.

As a concrete example, tiny electric cars are common in China. Amusingly, the government doesn't like tiny cars because they are hard to regulate. It really is the market that has spoken. https://restofworld.org/2021/tesla-vs-tiny-cars/

UK and USA have some of the lowest rates of motorcycle usage in the world, they're part of the transportation solution in almost every other nation more than they are here.

It's just never considered because the types of people working on policy in this area aren't motorcyclists.

Motorcycles are unavoidably far more dangerous than cars, that's the reason it's not seriously considered in nations that are rich enough to use cars. I used to ride. Had a major crash and got lucky. My relatives that rode lost organs. Several of our biker friends died or spent months in the hospital after their wrecks.

It would be interesting to see the ratio of deaths per 100 million miles driven in motorcycles vs all other motor vehicles across countries.

Answering to my own comment to answer the broader discussion.

- I’m not from the US and I’m not talking about the US market;

- I don’t believe “the market” provides some value judgement. Rather, it’s just the aggregate behavior of people under their existing realities. We can and should aim to change those realities, but ignoring them because “they’re wrong” will not yield workable solutions.

I wish the market did a better job of ensuring that car owners pay all the related infrastructure costs for their vehicles, as opposed to some things that are paid for by other taxpayers.

Gas might cost more without subsidies. Car ownership in cities would cost more to pay for parking. Roads outside of cities would be paid for from local taxes. Trucks would pay more because they damage roads much more than cars, which would encourage rail and boat transport. Etc.

It's not a free market if these things are being paid for by all taxpayers, including those who don't drive, or don't drive as much.

I guarantee you 100 percent that there are orders of magnitude more electric scooters in the world that electric car-shaped vehicles.

You are simply wrong.

The Aptera is going to cost $30,000 (more than entry-level cars) and will only seat two people. I'm not really sure the appeal over an electric bike or motorcycle for an individual given the huge gulf in cost. This is not a good solution for most people who do not earn enough to justify an expense like that, even more so given the product is new and has a higher potential for being unreliable.

There is also the problem of solving family transport, which has no good answer other than EVs. Although, for a lot of people, work-from-home has reduced their annual mileage several fold.

Sure, if one likes to enjoy cold, snow and arrive wet at work during Winter, or sharing body odors during Summertime, also assuming healthy enough to stay on a bicycles or trikes.

And yes I know plenty of people do endure weather conditions for their two wheel drive, most never will unless forced to do so.

There are enclosed pedal assist vehicles out there that can keep you dry. A bit harder to park than regular bikes but that's not a hard problem to solve, just convert some car parking spots into something smaller.

At that point it is no better than using a car.

I live in Umeå, Sweden. Most people here bike.

I’m not entirely sure what your point is.

Between the age of 10 and 18 years old, biking was the only way to get anywhere, there were hardly any buses available, didn't had parents to drive me around at the pleasure of my wishes, and no money for taxi.

I know pretty well what it means to cycle everywhere, regardless of weather conditions or not having a place to exchange clothes.

> bicycles and trikes like the <who cares> are much better direction for the vast majority of individual transport

in your opinion? Better in what way? Does everyone think like you?

Between your and their assumption, I personally think theirs sounds more realistic, they just assume the norm continues to be the norm.

Thank you so much for your helpful contribution to a debate about how the world is changing its transport infrastructure.

Not as helpful as wishful thinking and being unrealistic, so, thank you.

In theory, but that would also require changing how/where many people live (which would require a lot of construction which would require energy and concrete - both bad things for the environment). I’m thinking over my schedule today and needing to drive the kids places, often many miles away in different directions, plus going to work, running errands with multiple people, etc. Both a bike and a trike would be wildly inappropriate. Especially where I live where it rains steadily for 9 months of the year. A car is the only practical way to move around without somehow either having fewer people to move around, moving the places we need to go closer together, changing the weather or moving to a drier climate, etc.

Frankly I would love it if that was a reality and everything was within easy walking or biking distance, but it simply doesn’t match reality as things are currently built.

A cargo ebike is a game changer for all of this. I can bring 2 kids to school and do a full grocery trip without even breaking a sweat. I do 6 miles each way and since I avoid traffic it's just as fast as driving.

Plenty of people bike all 4 seasons, the Netherlands is the go-to example... it rains a lot there. Driving to work under-dressed in a heated box is a luxury that's kind of harmed a lot of people's ability to know how to dress for the weather. It's not particularly difficult.

>A cargo ebike is a game changer for all of this

Not so long as a "never in a lifetime on average" crash remains an acceptable justification to spend tens of thousands of dollars it's not. And that's ignoring weather and convenience.

> Not so long as a "never in a lifetime on average" crash

What does this mean?

People justify purchasing large vehicles with their fear of being hit by one.

> "never in a lifetime on average" crash

That’s a strong argument against SUVs, a type of vehicle that is notoriously dangerous because drivers can’t see children in front of their hood. It also flips over and kills people inside at minor incidents.

Cargo bikes don’t have those issues.

It's an arms race - cargo bikes might not have those issues, but for one of those types of crashes I'd sure rather not be on a bike.

That's why I only leave the house to step into my Marauder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDoRmT0iRic I think every other vehicle should be banned.

>flips over and kills people inside at minor incidents.

>a strong argument against SUVs

This kind of hubris to think you can plan the exact details of the market for a product followed up by cognitive dissonance when it doesn't work out drives me up the wall.

The SUVs back in the day when they were becoming a thing had fine visibility, great even by modern standards. Then you people said they rolled over too much and were too unsafe so they grew wide to be stable and they got thick bodies and doors and strong pillars and high belt-lines to be strong and nobody could see out of them. And then you people backed over your kids. And then we got backup cameras and all sorts of tech. And now you people complain the screens are distracting and un-ergonomic. You see the pattern here?

Just stop trying to tell everyone else what's good for them and then force it on them and we wouldn't have this problem.

Want me to do zoning too? Because it's basically the same story.

who is “you people” here

Something tells me the intersection of the "you people" trying to reduce car dependence and the "you people" arguing to make cars bigger and heavier is not a large one.

Increasing car size (sometimes) increases safety for the driver at the expense of anyone in a smaller car or not in a car. Road deterioration also increases exponentially with vehicle weight so people that opt for no-car or smaller cars are effectively subsidizing the excessive vehicles of other people with their tax money. iirc a Hummer causes 21x more damage than an "average car."

https://www.gao.gov/products/109954

Good for you!

My needs are:

- have place for a family of four, two of which are small children;

- be something I can use with said family in -15 Celsius;

- Be able to be used for a 200km trip weekly with said family;

I have an EV.

- two cargo bikes, each ridden by each adult

- layers, and canopies for aforementioned e-bikes

- train

Of course, speaking in the ideal. Just because the car has been the only option for so long doesn't mean it's replacement has to replace every trip either.

I'm a family of five, three kids and my wife and I and we commute around using this method all the time. I do on average 20-30km per day on week days and a little less on the weekend. My 12 year old son bikes along side me on his own bike. If it rains, we put on waterproof clothes. As the Dutch say "we're not made of sugar!". When we need to visit another city (or other parts of Europe) we jump on the train!

"We're not made of sugar" - seems it is a popular proverb around the world.

EVs might be less efficient, but not by multiple orders of magnitude. A google search indicates about 5.8 to 125 Wh/km per person. I don't think traveling with trains changes the overall travel time by much, even though they do go faster, and a Tesla with 2 people will probably use about 100Wh/km per person.

I think bicycles certainly have a place in the Netherlands, with actively car-hostile policy, a very high population density and hardly any distance longer than 300km; but any nationality that enjoys their personal space will probably be better of with something else.

I do wonder if rails or road are more efficient ecologically and economically. I've been wondering about smaller-and-slower-than-airliner planes or even eVTOLs, since they don't need a lot of infrastructure and the physics are surprisingly efficient. The technology isn't there yet but sooner or later I don't think flying is a bad idea. A small 4-seater airplane uses about 10-20 liters of fuel per 100km at faster speeds and more direct travel than a car, and if legislation allowed barrier-less mass-use and thus mass-production, planes wouldn't cost much more to the end user.

Hi! Do you live in The Netherlands or somewhere else? If the former, I have a question, though I guess anywhere in Europe is probably close enough.

I just moved here from the US. I live in the Noord Brabant in NL and currently own a car. The village I live in does not have a train station, not to mention that it is pretty pricey to take the train to work, both in time and money. My commute costs about €15 per day on public transport and up to 2 hours each way. I also have family that live in Belgium, about 150km away, also in a small village with no train station. Driving makes a lot of sense for me currently.

Sorry, to the actual question. When you travel abroad, what is your cutoff for taking the train versus flying? From where I live to Brussels, it's about half the price to take the train versus flying, but go out a bit further to Paris, and it's about 25% cheaper to fly. If I'm in NL, it seems like it would almost always be more economical to fly if the destination is more than 300km away. These are also cursory Google searches so the timeline is 3-4 weeks out. When planning a trip months in advance, I would assume the flights and train tickets will be cheaper, but likely still comparable in terms of percentages.

My car is also very efficient. A full tank to drive 600km costs about €60. I realize I would need to pay for parking at the destination, but if I'm staying at a hotel or outside the city center, I think it would still be cheaper. Another cursory train search, Eindhoven to Prague is €140 per person round trip. Traveling alone, probably worth it, but with a family, driving seems more economical.

I feel a bit ramble-y but hopefully that makes sense. I'm trying to figure out how this whole "European" thing works :)

Noone is going out alone, let alone with their kids, on a cargo bike at -15C

Trains are only useful within and between densely populated areas. The 200 km weekly trip might well be to a cabin in the mountains, definitely no train.

Going to a cabin in the mountains is a luxury few of us can afford. Even fewer of us can afford to buy such a cabin more likely you would rent it for a weekend or week. So if you're going to the mountains say twice a year we could assume that you also rent a car to get there, and back.

Even if they own a car, the aim is to reduce car ownership and drastically reduce car usage/need, not eliminate them entirely. There are 289MM cars in the US (.87 cars per person), in The Netherlands there are 8.7MM cars (0.5 cars per person).

People miss this so often when they respond to arguments to reduce car usage with "I need a car because of xyz reason" where that reason probably doesn't apply to most people, certainly doesn't apply to all people, or only applies to most people because whatever society they exist in (probably the US) is incredibly car-centric already. The Netherlands is clearly not car-centric but with 0.5 cars per person clearly people that need (or strongly want) cars still have them. Reducing car usage in the US can only have positive benefits for society imo.

You don't need to bike every trip to reduce your reliance on cars! Even if you replaced solo trips in the spring and summer with a bike, for many people this ends up being a big reduction in car use... which isn't only good for the environment and your health, but reduces car wear & tear.

If you're not interested enough to invest in an ebike, an escooter is a good way to try... though it removes the exercise element and restricts you to what can be carried in a backpack.

You can't be serious. It's great it works for you. An ebike isn't a serious replacement for cars used by families in most of the world.

> An ebike isn't a serious replacement for cars used by families in most of the world.

"Most of the world" is a big place.

Are there more cars or mopeds in the world? I assume that the typical family in Asia has either a scooter or no vehicle, so an ebike would be an improvement for them. Probably the same for Africa and a lot of South America. I'm confident that numerically there are more families without cars in the world than with.

I mention this to demonstrate that most of the world doesn't have cars, and they get along ok. Such a thing is not impossible.

It's understandable that you're having a hard time imagining it because you live in a car-centric society, but "most of the world" is objectively wrong here.

There are roughly 1.4bn cars in the world for 7.8bn people... so most people get around without one.

You can see it if you travel a bit, in India and China you'll see families getting around on bikes and scooters. Over 1/3 of the Dutch use a bike as their primary means of transportation. People often cite weather as a reason not to, but if the Finnish can regularly use bikes to get around (another European country with high bike use)... nearly anyone can.

With that logic you could also argue that much more will be needed for trucks and heavy equipment. I don’t know if it averages out, but I don’t think you can assume that less is needed not more, or the same as the article.

The form factor of a motorbike has been around and more affordable than a car for a century now. I don't think it's the type of engine that makes the majority of people in the developed world prefer to spend substantially more money on vehicles which are considerably more stable and crash resistant, enclosed from the weather and with room for passengers and cargo. If they get e-bikes, they tend to get them as well which might reduce electricity use but requires even more batteries.

And I say that as someone that's managed 18 years of adult life without owning a car or motorised bike living in a country with one of the densest (but still entirely unsuitable for most long distance journeys) rail networks around...

> living in a country with one of the densest (but still entirely unsuitable for most long distance journeys) rail networks

I'm very curious, what country has such a dense rail network that isn't very good for long distance journeys? Is it because it's in a hub-and-spoke system with the capital/largest city as the hub, and if you want to go from spoke to spoke it sucks?

The UK. Lines interconnect all over. But that doesn't mean connections are possible when you want them and don't involve time padding and risk of not making them and sometimes completely illogical routes, and even with one of the world's highest densities of stations many places people want to go to don't have a station particularly nearby or a last mile solution that isn't a taxi. And no matter how good the end-to-end connections are, they're not suited to any journey involving non-trivial amounts of luggage. Compromises you may have to make include adding extra hours or overnight stops to journeys, taxis for the last mile or twenty, not having more than one bag's worth of luggage, or spending a lot more money than the equivalent journey by car even without the taxi/hotel bills. And not travelling at all when the rail workers are on strike, like today

There are certain things train services are excellent at, like serving people's daily commute at predictable times into a congested city centre (with the caveat crowded trains aren't necessarily a pleasant experience) and letting you travel whilst drunk or putting the finishing touches to your presentation, but they're not going to eliminate many of the most common uses for cars.

Please don't conflate British Rail mismanagement with "trains are bad". Your trains are bad. America's trains are bad. They don't have to be.

There is a disconnect here with you replying to someone who was talking about the ideal, with your reality. No one is saying train systems in a lot of places, right now, are perfect. We can make them more perfect in addition to moving more freight onto rail, doing more last-mile deliveries on e-cargo bikes, and making it reasonable for people to replace more or most of their sub-5km car trips with a bicycle. Not only is that possible, but it's necessary to approach that ideal.

> There is a disconnect here with you replying to someone who was talking about the ideal, with your reality.

Their ideal is my reality, because I've never owned a vehicle with more than two wheels and live in a country whose rail density and usage is arguably exceeded only by Japan. So I think I'm pretty well placed to comment on the impracticality of most people forgoing the use of cars altogether in favour of ebikes and rail.

If you don't have any answers to points like trains being unsuited to carrying luggage, rail schedules being suboptimal for individual journeys outside peak use zones and times and most places not being close to a station even with a rail network as dense as the UK's, please don't resort to strawmanning it as "trains are bad" and insisting that everything I said about rail logistics boils down to British Rail[1] management...

I'm all in favour of people walking and cycling more and getting trains when that makes sense, but that isn't going to result in many of them not needing cars (and associated batteries) for other journeys.

[1]an organization with this name was wound up in 1997 and replaced with a succession of franchises - many with exprience running rail networks overseas - awarded by competitive tender. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, changing the management wasn't a panacea...

The UK rail network sucks. Try taking a train(or tram) in Switzerland.

I read the original post as questioning an assumption (the article assumes ev cars) and proposing a different assumption (ev bikes). The parent you replied to questioned the new assumption (most people won't feel that they can get by with ev bikes).

His experience in the UK seems like it would be relevant to most people in the US, and I assume Canada and Australia also. You can't sell this to people on just your terms, you have speak to them on their terms, too.

I agree with what you said that the problem needs to be attacked on multiple fronts (public transport, mining, zoning, doubling grid capacity, current subsidies and special interest groups, etc).

I assume we'll get there, but it's going to take a while, likely more than a couple decades to start making a good dent in countries with a lot of car-dependency.

> Your trains are bad. America's trains are bad. They don't have to be.

And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. The odds of the US or Britain improving their rail systems in order for them to be more efficient/usable are vanishingly slim, to the point that we should likely bake their crappy nature into our assumptions of requirements.

We can't even figure out how (here in the US) to build subway tunnels as cheaply as ones in Europe, if I recall right. I am very skeptical that we will ever manage to approach the ideal here, for a variety of reasons (suburban / car-centric lifecycle being so deeply embedded here, etc) which I don't think can be addressed by science. It seems like an economic problem, where paying to rebuild everything is so expensive that no one will do it in the short term, even if the long term gains could be great.

> The odds of the US or Britain improving their rail systems in order for them to be more efficient/usable are vanishingly slim, to the point that we should likely bake their crappy nature into our assumptions of requirements.

It's a matter of time: the political polar-opposite states of Texas and California are both working on high-speed rail projects, though they are rather unambitious in scope.

I'm curious if the dysfunction of British Rail is also related to the patchwork privatization like it is in the US. Is that still a thing? last I read, parts of the network - and/or trains - were owned or operated by a Virgin subsidiary.

> I'm curious if the dysfunction of British Rail is also related to the patchwork privatization like it is in the US. Is that still a thing? last I read, parts of the network - and/or trains - were owned or operated by a Virgin subsidiary.

Patchwork privatization hasn't helped matters and allows some companies to extract a bit of monopoly profit from a subsidised industry (the infrastructure remains nationalised, franchises are awarded to private companies for running rolling stock in certain regions routes for fixed terms, some companies were really struggling and had their franchises taken over the government and there are other quirks of the franchising system like franchises being required to lease rather than own trains and some services being mandatory to run, and prices are regulated).

But the root cause is that running rail networks is a hard problem: demand fluctuates from hour to hour and decade to decade more than the infrastructure can, optimisations for network efficiency aren't necessarily going to align with individual passengers' demands, when stuff breaks down a well-used part of the network gets cascading problems, governments have lots of other things crying out for more subsidies (and a purely for-profit network would be smaller and thinner). The UK also has older than average infrastructure and very expensive and occupied land right where new lines are most needed, although other countries are cursed with geography which is more challenging in many other ways

> the infrastructure remains nationalised,

Slight correction. Renationalised, rather than remains nationalised.

The infrastructure was renationalised, because Railtrack preferred handing out dividends over maintaining tracks, eventually leading to a derailment that killed 4 people and injured 70, and led to trains being restricted to 20MPH across the country for months afterwards, because they had no idea how fucked any of the rest of the rails were.

> trains (and last-mile delivery on cargo bikes) are a lot more economical in both energy, accident risk and individual time

This works if you live in a perfectly flat country with completely contiguous landmass and no islands.

I use Norwegian trains whenever I try to go to a different city.

Great if all you ever need to do is go to cities.

> electric bicycles and trikes like the Aptera are much better direction for the vast majority of individual transport.

If it doesn't ever get hot or cold where you live, or ever really rain, then yes. If an ebike works 90% of the time, then I'm getting the car. Might still get the bike, but I also have to have the car, and that will take just as much battery material as if I drive it 100% of the time.

I live in Umeå, Sweden.

It was -15ºC today. Most people I saw outside were on bicycles.

Out of curiosity, do ebikes work at all this time of year, or do the batteries freeze? (like they do in inferior EVs)

> e-bicycle with a small roof can ride as long as the Sun shines

Is this true? I can go through a 630Wh battery in 2-3 hours of riding and I can't imagine current solar being able to keep up with that. I think you might get an extra ~30 minutes of riding, but not ~forever~ unless you mean pedal power.

Your mileage will vary, but the order of magnitude works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EyRqQhuwio

I think you just confirmed for me that you don't know what you're talking about.

>electric bicycles and trikes like the Aptera are much better direction for the vast majority of individual transport.

I think a vast majority of people in the United States that choose to drive cars, suvs and pickups would disagree your assumption.

I don’t think we should focus on 4% of the world.

Fair enough. You focus on where you think is important and I’ll focus on where I choose to. In my case the United States is 100% of my world.

People like cars and find them useful. Otherwise they wouldn’t spend inordinate amounts of money on them.

People find the car they are in great because they are isolated from the people outside. People outside typically aren’t fans of the noise, the pollution, the million and a half deaths per year, the entitlement, and having most of our shared habitat dedicated to parking.

It’s a classic case of not taking into account enormous externalities.

People also like when they can go to a coffee shop and the barista shows up, even when it's raining, and that the bags of coffee are delivered on time, and that their Amazon packages are delivered and that their local grocery is staffed by workers who may live far away and can commute to work and sell them tomatoes grown in South America delivered right to their local neighborhood, which were carried on trucks to the local port in Brazil before loaded onto ship, sailing to a nearby port, loaded onto a train, and then shipped by a truck to the grocery. They take it for granted that when their plumbing goes out, someone can quickly drive to their location and provide the necessary work to restore service. They take it all for granted that they are living in a modern industrial economy that is made possible by cars and trucks (and yes, also trains, ships, and planes).

It's a classic case of not taking into account enormous externalities.

Only thing they I would counteract is that at least for those living in cities you aren’t necessary right.

I used to own a car. More then a year ago we moved to a cargo bike (electric) which is enough for most of our needs. It can even have an extra trailer, so we can do all groceries and bring our kids with us, in safety and all weather conditions. Even visits to the recycling park are possible with it.

When we do need a car we use a car sharing service for which i have a subscription and can take any type of car available at any time within walk or cycle distance from my house.

As such i think city families probably are fine just owning a cargo bike (or two) and for long distance trips make use of a shared car (or train).

No, cars plus planes are much more convenient for travel than bikes and trains.

That is definitely not to say that there is no place for bikes and trains. US certainly needs more of both.

But please stop pretending that a family of 4 can go anywhere on bikes in the weather. Or even going to the beach with all gear in perfect weather. Just not going to happen.

I can assure that anyone in a traffic jam disagrees with you–violently so.

More roads aren’t a solution.

I lived in European capital and I live in Bay Area, California now.

I would take sitting in traffic jam in my car in comfort with audiobook and AC anytime over being in freaking people jam in subway.

Especially during flu and covid waves.

More roads are the only solution, and have been for at least 4000 years.

For those 4 millenia, people have gravitated to a 30 minute each way commute, on average.

More roads implies bigger cities and more amenities / economic growth. If bikes mean more people can commute to the city, then they will eventually win.

The electric bike people really need to shut up with the activism.

Electric bikes are more unsafe than motorcycles ! This is irregardless of infrastructure (eg. I checked stats in Netherlands which is cyclist utopia according to HN).

I used to ride a motorcycle but I would never actively encourage someone to start it - it's just irresponsibly risky. If you chose to do it regardless (like I did) that's your choice - but me advocating it is like promoting smoking or alcoholism/drug abuse.

The unsafe part of an e-bike is the cars running people over.

I agree with you: we should get rid of that part.

That's not true at all - driving on two wheels is inherently more dangerous, increasingly so the faster you go.

Not to mention that the older/less fit you get the harder it is to react to these situations (tire slipping, hitting holes, stuff hitting you in the face, pedestrians jumping in front of you)

I've said this before - if I put a child seat on a motorcycle I would get social services called instantly. Puting it on an e-bike and I'm a progressive hipster caring about the environment.

The biking propaganda is getting ridiculous.

E-bikes have a top speed where crashes are rarely dangerous unless they involve a car.

>Overall, the report concludes that the main culprit in all bicycle (regular and electric) injuries was the rider’s own behavior (44 percent) — a steering error, for example — while 32 percent was road conditions. And the majority of these accidents affected only the rider. Two-thirds of the 110,000 traffic victims treated in Dutch hospitals last year were cyclists, VeiligheidNL says. The survey was conducted with hospitalized riders between July 2020 and June 2021.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/13/23023361/e-bike-injuries-...

This is in Netherlands - Mecca of bicycle infrastructure.

I mean how is this even controversial - riding on two wheels vs driving on 4 between a steel cage is inherently more dangerous - you have to be a zealot to deny that.

Which part of your quote disputes that bike crashes at bike speeds are generally safer than motorcycle crashes at motorcycle speeds?

How does that change the fact that biking is order of magnitude more dangerous compared to driving a car ?

It's like saying "cocaine isn't that bad, look at what heroin does to people".

I think this is wishful thinking. People's preferences aren't going to change overnight (I don't see a reason this one would change at all), and manufacturers are already making a tough sell with EVs themselves, so they'll cater extra hard to other familiar things people already want

The only way I see this changing is regulation, and that would be political suicide for whoever pushed it in the US (the main place where it would be relevant)

Put people on an e-bike and tell me how they react.

"I'm getting rained on from the front, either driving OR a long walk OR waiting for a bus are better". And I live in a city with no real winter

Always liked the USGS take on mineral reserves.

> Reserves data are dynamic. They may be reduced as ore is mined and (or) the feasibility of extraction diminishes, or more commonly, they may continue to increase as additional deposits (known or recently discovered) are developed, or currently exploited deposits are more thoroughly explored and (or) new technology or economic variables improve their economic feasibility. Reserves may be considered a working inventory of mining companies’ supplies of an economically extractable mineral commodity. As such, the magnitude of that inventory is necessarily limited by many considerations, including cost of drilling, taxes, price of the mineral commodity being mined, and the demand for it. Reserves will be developed to the point of business needs and geologic limitations of economic ore grade and tonnage. For example, in 1970, identified and undiscovered world copper resources were estimated to contain 1.6 billion metric tons of copper, with reserves of about 280 million tons of copper. Since then, about 600 million tons of copper have been produced worldwide, but world copper reserves in 2021 were estimated to be 880 million tons of copper, more than triple those in 1970, despite the depletion by mining of much more than the 1970 estimated reserves.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-appendixes...

Appendix C to 2022 Lithium Statistics and Information.

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...

I'm reminded of the Hunt brothers attempt to corner the silver market in 1980 [1].

> But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.

> “In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.” [2]

Price seems to be able to make material availability very elastic. If there is a huge demand for lithium and our collective resources are bent toward obtaining it (or finding a substitute) I think you can trust "The Market" to find a way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

[2] https://priceonomics.com/how-the-hunt-brothers-cornered-the-...

There's a geothermal well near the Salton Sea in California where the scale that builds up in the pipes is high grade silver ore. The wells there are also being targeted as lithium sources. I've wondered if storage of heat in underground rocks (a cheap form of long term energy storage) could be combined with drilling into promising formations to extract traces of useful elements.

Sodium ion batteries work just as well and should be arriving this year [1].

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-top-ev-battery-mak...

Sodium ion batteries are less dense than lithium have a third of the range, I'm live in argentine and see the destruction of open mining for rare metals for cents, make me wish this happens, but for now dense electric cars of not low range will probably use lithium and smartphones and notebook probably will continue to use lithium for long time, maybe be replaced by graphen but in the long game.

> Sodium ion batteries are less dense than lithium have a third of the range

Got a source for the "one third" part? According to [1] and [2] lithium ion is up to 265 Wh/kg and sodium ion has 160 Wh/kg.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2021/07/30/catl-reveals-sodium-ion...

edited for clarity

> lithium ion is up to 265 Wh/kg and sodium ion has 160 Wh/kg

This is what less dense means.

sure. but it seems one third of the range seems too pessimistic according to those numbers.

Sodium is about half the range with the older unimproved designs (new experimental ones are closer to parity with li-ion), it's better than the density number suggests because it's lower internal resistance - less steep discharge curve than li-ion.

What is the energy density by volume?

Which is more important for cars? Weight or volume?

I would imagine that volume ultimately controls how much you can fit and that weight just negatively affects range of you have too much.

And keep in mind the Nickel-Cobalt Lithium ion chemistries are responsible for the "battery fire" Tesla stories.

So the Nickel-Cobalt batteries require a lot of cooling and safety systems. So this reduces the PACK level density to 60-70% from the lofty cell densities. So 240 wh/kg nickel cobalt chems drop to 160-180 at pack level.

LFP and Sodium Ion do not have such issues. They are inherently safer, so the Pack densities are potentially 90-95% of cell density with good design.

And to emphasize, CATL is putting into PRODUCTION in 2023 160 wh/kg sodium ion.

The other trick is to mix lithium and sodium ion cells in the same pack. So you do half at 160 wh/kg sodium, and half at 210 wh/kg LFP (LFP is hitting that in 2023 as well), then you get 185 wh/kg effectively.

IMO this Sodium Ion announcement marks when/where the barrier to electrifying 80-90% of consumer transportation AND allow India and China to get their own cars. It should just be a factory scaling issue now.

IMO this means the BEV drivetrain will be fundamentally cheaper than the ICE drivetrain by 30% in possibly 2-3 years. ICE cars will simply not be price competitive. The BEV will accelerate better, smoother, more reliable, be cheaper in maintenance, more torque/towing ability, AND it will be cheaper when you buy a new car.

That's for a 300 mile fast-charge electric car, with roadmaps to 400 mile with 200 wh/kg sodium ion.

Again, if sodium sulfur hits 2x to that (the research papers say 3-4x) in 5-10 years, that means the number of cells and cost to make the car and vehicle weight all drop that much more. You'll have 500-600 mile range cars that possibly cost half of what an ICE drivetrain would.

If I'm not mistaken, aren't the Argentine mines brine-based? These aren't your typical 'pit' mines. Furthermore, isn't the location of these mines in the arid high plateau near the Andes?

Looks like lithium ion battery density has tripled since 2010 from about 100 Wh/kg to 300 Wh/kg:

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-lithium-io...

160 Wh/kg for sodium ion would be higher than the ~105 Wh/kg LMO cathode and about in line with LCO, LMO/LNO and NMC cathodes up through 2012.

I think LMO is lithium manganese oxide, which might be the same type of battery as in my 2013 Nissan Leaf. Mine's 24 kWh, but they're up to 62 kWh now:

https://www.batterydesign.net/nissan-leaf/

They use AESC cells, which are 80% nickel with a Ni-Mn-Co mix:

https://insideevs.com/news/348513/envision-aesc-ncm-811-batt...

Perhaps better cathodes could double sodium ion battery density over the next decade?

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/10/catl-will-mass-produce...

In mass production this year in China will be 160 wh/kg Sodium Ion and the company claims it can be 90-95% density cell-to-pack because sodium ion is like LFP: doesn't require as much safety stuff as the nickel-cobalt chemistries (which reduces pack density to only 60-70% of the cell density).

That's (based on current reputed pack densities of Tesla Model 3 SRs) good enough for the 300 mile consumer BEV. As in, the city car for a huge percentage of the world population.

I believe the roadmap is to get sodium ion to 200 wh/kg in a couple years, with good CTP yield means 400 mile cars like Model S. NO LITHIUM. NO NICKEL. NO COBALT.

Sodium Sulfur will probably happen in another 10 years based on papers. That may offer 400-500 wh/kg IIRC.

Given that they still have lower energy density and fewer charge-discharge cycles, I'd say we can be optimistic for the future but we can't currently claim that they work "just as well".

Sodium ion batteries are even better in one respect, they are not as easy to catch on fire, they do not produce the kind of fires lithium batteries do, or give off the same poisonous (and sometimes explosive) gases. It can take over 3000 gallons of water to put out a Li ion car fire (and that fire can re-ignite weeks after due to the chemicals and stored energy) [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWq-Mq1Uqpw

Here they discuss what would happen if you dump a ton of sodium in a large pool of water:

https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-you-were-to-dump-... into-the-middle-of-an-ocean-sized-pool-of-water

And here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNWTpfHovHM

I said they were safer, not completely safe. If a fire happened with a Sodium EV I suspect they'd treat it as a grease fire and try to put it out with chemicals not water, but I am not a firefighter.

Sodium sulfur battery however readily forms a sulfate salt with a hot steam explosion, which is different from sodium metal alone. Lithium battery emits lots of hydrogen gas alongside being super hot which makes for a bigger boom and hot fire that will burn underwater.

This is like arguing water is dangerous to drink as it contains hydrogen, which explodes.

If they're really arriving this year, I would expect an update that is more recent than Q3 2021.

Lithium-ion batteries have existed for many decades. It's not like nobody ever thought about using sodium, which is the most obvious substitution. The problem is that sodium has a much larger ionic radius, which means that inserting and removing it from the cathode tends to wear that out a lot quicker. As a result, most sodium-ion cathodes are doped manganese oxides, which is basically ignored for lithium batteries since its energy density is low. Even with this, the lifetimes are not ideal.

PNNL announced a breakthrough this July in a nickel-based sodium-ion cathode, but the cycle life (90% at 300, suggesting 80% at ~650) is still significantly shorter than what we expect from lithium (80% at >1000), and any NiO2-based cathode is going to carry an exothermic decomposition risk, electrolyte (Na or Li) notwithstanding. PNNL claims they are competitive with the state of the art in longevity for all Na-ion batteries. Also, the PNNL battery uses 10% cobalt to achieve this.

https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/longer-lasting-sodium-ion-ba...

I expect CATL to release Na-ion batteries for the very-low-cost vehicle market in China, which is not what Americans have come to expect from cars.

Can batteries be created to make the process of reclaiming the lithium orders of magnitude easier?

A completely different topic: Politics tends to focus on forcing consumer vehicles to go electric, is this really the right move? Most cars are not driven a lot in a day. But cars that are used for work (fleet, uber/deliveries) are used much more, so the benefit to them being electric is far greater. Trucks too most likely. Shouldn't this be where we focus our attention to get the best bang for the buck? And also make sure we don't drive the price up making it more expensive for the vehicles that are driven much more? Imagine the scenario where lithium prices are driven up by legislation-borne demand, we would instead have more cars with less lithium, and thus less range. Maybe that's ok, I dunno. That said, more electric cars means more and better infra and tech that will be created. So obviously some good stuff. Life is so complicated.

Most people shouldn't need to own a car. I don't mean that in a "self driving will save us" way. But that a personal car is parked 95% of the day. In a city huge areas are used for storing these blocks of metal not in use. More accessible car sharing could make less people feel the need to own a car.

Isn't the problem that the car's that are parked 95% of the day are all moving at the same time in the last 5%? It feels like building a carless society is a lot more deliberate effort and requires a lot more public good will than electrifying what we have. That being said, it's probably the better long term goal.

If some strain of covid crops up that's way more deadly, maybe then we'll permanently transition to not hauling our butts around to stare at computer screens anyways.

Unfortunately there's still a lot of jobs that require said butt hauling.

Yeah, but there's a lot that don't.

Other idea... Employer should by law pay for commute and time spent commuting. And bonus for going to the office shouldn't be less than some minimal amount if the worker doesn't work remotely.

Self driving cars can park themselves far away, clearing the streets for traffic. For commutting, people need to own the car for the same reason farmers own their equipment: they all need it at the same time so it isn't economical to rent it.

More useful bus and train, and other mass-transit options, along with densification would go a long way towards that too. Unfortunately though, there's no getting around the fact that driving is convenient as shit. It's a luxury that most Americans have become accustomed to and won't want to give up.

I live in a city but the pandemic meant that I was able to park my car for short grocery trips where previously I would have taken a bus.

Unless you have a family. It has to be there when you need it.

Here in Québec we had an elected official who used to preach against cars and then once she got elected bought a SUV because, like everyone else with kids, she needed it for her family.

The "you shouldn't need to own a car" attitude is arrogant and authoritarian in nature.

No, the authoritarian and arrogant attitude is from those thinking it's their right to drive everywhere at whatever cost to others.

And you're missing the point. Why do you need a car because of family? Think further than your own nose tip. Wouldn't it be nice with a society where you didn't have to drive to do any little chore? And the few times you needed to drive, a care from some car sharing service was available outside your apartment building?

Most people shouldn't need to own a car.

Do you understand why making such proclamations about other's lifestyles is authoritarian?

Also, it's not so reasonable to declare others "authoritarian" because of the detection of an externality. Unless, one has nominated one's self as a superior arbiter of truth. If you are equal, then it's up to you to convince others.

> Do you understand why making such proclamations about other's lifestyles is authoritarian?

No, I don't. I don't say people shouldn't own a car. I say people shouldn't need to. Please explain how that's authoritarian.

And please stop calling me authoritarian and arrogant just because you disagree with my views..

> Also, it's not so reasonable to declare others "authoritarian" because of the detection of an externality. Unless, one has nominated one's self as a superior arbiter of truth. If you are equal, then it's up to you to convince others.

No, the base case is no cars. The authoritarian view is to demand everyone else has to bend to your will. Children playing outside my house? No, they can't, stcredzero has decided that should be a high speed road for their car. Want to enjoy a peaceful evening? No, stcredzero has overruled you and decided their engine sound is more important. Want to eat outside at a restaurant? No, stcredzero has decided that space is for storing their metal box.

Who is really the authoritarian?

No, I don't. I don't say people shouldn't own a car. I say people shouldn't need to. Please explain how that's authoritarian.

My apologies if you took it this way. If you aren't making prescriptions for other people's lives, then you have nothing to fear or be offended about. Only you know the contents of your own mind.

No, the base case is no cars...

Who is really the authoritarian?

Isn't that relative to what the status quo is right now? To answer that question, ask: Who is asking that people be convinced, and volunteer to change?

If you live somewhere, where there are no cars, then your base case doesn't imply having others change. If you live somewhere, where there are already cars, then your base case implies you want people to change.

You are talking over the parent poster, not trying to understand the situation. Your rosy picture is not in line with my life experience.

I lived in Tokyo where I took the train and walked everywhere. I also lived in Quebec, which is cold and inhospitable during parts of winter.

If you have a car, it's possible to do far more in Quebec than Tokyo. I had a car rental service in tokyo that I used (Times Rentalcar) and often when I needed a car, it was not available — even reserving a week in advance.

Moreover how, exactly, do you intend on restructuring the life of people in cold areas? Are you going to show them Strongtown and Notjustbikes videos and shame them into moving into high density areas?

Speaking of authoritarianism, I even had police in Tokyo ask me for my papers in my house in front of my young children. You may not like it, but "safe" high density living also has a strong police aspect to it with less privacy. I hope you aren't part of an unappreciated minority group in your high density walkable community.

No, the other poster is taking my original post and twisting it. I haven't said people shouldn't be allowed to have cars. I've said we should strive for a society where you don't need to have a car. Of course that won't be possible everywhere or for everyone. But it should be possible for many more than it currently is.

Your example of the car rental service is kinda my point. It's not good enough now, but if it were always available, that would make it possible for many more to ditch owning a car themselves and only rent as needed. We shouldn't look at status quo and use that to decide, we should look at bigger structural changes.

FWIW I currently live in a small mountain town with 2500 people at 1000 meters above sea level, with -18 C yesterday and ~30 cms of snow today. So I know a lot about living in remote and cold areas.

And please don't accuse me of "shaming" people, that's wrong of you. I want to give people more opportunities, not less. For many cars is the only choice, and an expensive one. Walking, biking, public transit as additional choices would make lives better for many.

> Why do you need a car because of family?

Logistics. With a car the schedule is much more flexible and that is a major advantage when you have small children.

Also with four or more people on board it's not really that terrible in terms of space efficiency.

If you want to lower traffic/car ownership single-occupant vehicles are your low-hanging fruit, not families.

But could you imagine a future where you didn't need to bother with all that logistics? What if school, soccer practice and work were all in walkable or bikeable distance, for instance? I'm not advocating people to be forced to sell their cars, I'm advocating for moving towards a society not based around everyone having to drive everywhere.

> What if school, soccer practice and work were all in walkable or bikeable distance, for instance?

They are for me now and actually always have been.

I walk my child to daycare 1300 meters every weekday because I live in a somewhat walkable European city. I also work remotely but if I didn't I would probably commute by tram, because my stop is less than 250m away. Shopping is done via one of those delivery services that appeared during the pandemic. Alternatively I could go to the supermarket and farmers' market, both of which are within 500m of my apartment or just buy something in one of the corner stores that are even closer - I don't do that because contrary to what the Not Just Bikes guy says, daily shopping goes from quaint to annoying really quick when you have a family.

I also grew up in a commie superblock where I had a school, playground, culture centre, supermarket, pharmacy, dentist, library and even a clinic not only within walking distance, but reachable without going through a single zebra crossing because most of the parking spaces were in streets parallel to the main roads wrapping around the superblock.

With all that I still have a car, which I drive less than 7000km annually, because there are use cases where public transport just doesn't do it for me, namely: weekend trips to places which either have poor or non-existent public transport or visits to my extended family, from which I return too late to catch the direct line back home which functions only during the day.

If everyone followed my model of living we would have even less cars than countries advertising themselves as cycling-oriented like the Netherlands and Denmark, where people with families also generally have cars if they can afford it.

Cars are a massive convenience when you have unpredictable little humans to watch over.

My original post was promoting car sharing services. Your usecase could be perfect for that, if they were reliable and always available, right?

At least it works fine for me. Whenever I need a car, I rent one parked outside. Instead of the street block being full of unused cars taking up the space, we now only have a few designated spots for these share cars, and some short term parking for visitors.

There is plenty of authoritative and arrogant attitude to go around. Our most precious resource these days is time. If it takes longer it is not acceptable. Once you solve that issue at the same or lower price point then people will (start to) get onboard. I am a car guy and I think that owning a car sucks.

We essentially came to simple choice: less people, higher standard of living, more people, shittier standard of living.

Either choice will require unpopular measures, but at least let’s make the choice consciously.

I’m convinced “more people” way will lead to terrible authoritarian tyrannical society. So my choice is less people and cars are fine.

I have two kids and no car. Not every family needs a car.

I live in Italy, millions of people don't live in huge cities, but in small villages where you need to take a car for a lot of activies.

I use my kitchen not more than 1.5 hours a day on average. Not to mention toilet and bathroom which I use even less. I guess we should all live in two room "apartments" and rest be communal ;)

I actually agree with you about better support for car sharing, but low usage by itself is not a particularly strong argument.

"I guess we should all live in two room "apartments" and rest be communal"

Maybe not forced, but there are plenty of people for whom this setup would work fine, and has it historical precedent. Even if it's not for you or me, who cares? If some developer thinks it'll work, let them build it.

That's called dorms, and should probably be a decent sized part of affordable housing solutions.

It is when in a city those cars take up huge amounts of public space.

Well, pooping in the kitchen sink is not sanitary, so if you can solve that problem we are golden. Yes, it's a good point, there is a heck of a lot of stuff that is not efficiently utilized. I only wear 3% of my clothes on any given day. I have never used my drill (because I lost the charger but that's beside the point). Don't get me started on books or my kids' toys. But then again, the government isn't trying to mandate we all wear clothing made of a scarce material which would increase the price and possibly cause some people walk around naked in cold climates.

Those electric cars that aren't being used could theoretically be used as renewable grid load balancers, but in reality I doubt many people would degrade their battery longevity for a few bucks a month they'd likely get from it from the power company.

At a miniumum, the electric cars could be scheduled to take power only when high proportions of wind energy are on the grid -- thereby causing steep declines in demand, sufficient enough that a few coal and gas plants go offline earlier in the evening (for want of demand).

The main reason it's not worth it is because renewables are still negligible. This is likely to change once they aren't and the demand for storage becomes much higher.

The reality is that electric vehicles are a fools errand. The real winning strategy is one that overall reduces dependency on vehicles, and moves more to walking, biking, and mass transit. This would mean actually making hard decisions and having policy changes though. You lower the CO2 produced by orders of magnitude compared to even electric vehicles.

That would be a great place to live, and several decades from now, it may exist.

Several decades from now is too long to wait for an energy transition.

We went from "We're going to the moon" to landing on the moon in under a decade. We could make this transition that fast if we really wanted to, the problem is there are a whole lot of entrenched interests in not making this transition.

Going to the moon required building a couple of rockets. Changing how most cities look like requires a lot more material and a lot more manpower.

We can do a lot that would help. We can build electric mass transit (trains, street cars, busses). We can legally mandate that roads have large sidewalks / bike lanes and limit the size of rods. We could remove stroads completely. With how often roads go under maintenance, those rules would be able to be implemented fairly quickly. Remove zoning restrictions that limit density, or make artificial space like setback requirements and parking requirements, then let infill development do the work.

There is a lot that can be done with the stroke of a pen and will be fixed naturally over time.

No cars for poor people. I think that’s the obvious direction we’re heading. Congestion pricing. The private jets will still fly off to Davos every spring.

> private jets will still fly off to Davos every spring

I’m surprised nobody has proposed a synthetic jet fuel mandate for private jets. It’s defensible. It would jumpstart demand for a fuel we’ll need for general aviation. And it lets folks keep flying.

As a former poor person, fine. I hated my car.

You aren’t poor. Poor people need cars.

Depends on where they live. Where I live most poor people don't have a car.

Then why did you have one?

Governments will need to subsidise EVs and create better mass-transit for those that cannot make the switch, but this is really a personal decision based on their own pros and cons. In a fully renewable grid how is using public transport over your EV orders of magnitude lower?

Indeed, and my push Jevon's paradox.

Really, its one arrow in a portfolio of changes needed.

All cars need to be EV for net zero and < 2 degree global warming to be achieved not just a subset, there can't be any fossil fuel powered cars on the road by 2050. As hinted below though you could hit 2 birds with one stone and focus on a great EV ride sharing network, guess it depends on how well EV prices can come down and whether cars owned outright will become out of reach for the average person.

Much of the issue here is from using, in my opinion, terms that are misleading.

The article defines resources as all known mineral deposits. It defines reserves as resources which are economically extractible.

Here's the issue: when you already have plenty of reserves, you don't go looking for more. None of the charts which detail existing resources and reserves tell you anything about the quantity of lithium which exists on the planet. These numbers are only really useful when mining companies ask themselves "should I prospect for more?"

If mining companies are actively prospecting and not finding enough to fill anticipated needs, then you have a problem. Not before.

We cannot afford to ransack places like Chile to extract lithium for 'electric vehicles', which plumb new depths of pollution and third world degredation. The extraction of rare earth minerals for our electronically surveilled and controlled future comes at a terrible cost, as Siddharth Kara's new book "Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives" outlines in excruciating detail.

https://read.macmillan.com/lp/cobalt-red/

No one wins in this race to the bottom. If you are contemplating a BEV I would urge you to read up on just how ecologically appalling the batteries are for our planet and people.

Oil ain't a picnic either, so what's the answer?

Grid-powered public transit replacing 80% of trips by personal vehicle.

This is the sort of elitist fantasy nonsense promoted by the WEF that completely disrespects the average person and family.

European families seem to do OK using public transit.

...only in big cities. Rural areas including the suburbs of the 100k's still depend heavily on individual transport...

How is public transport elitist? If anything it's the opposite.

This. Americans are too used to owning a personal car and driving it even though short trips can be replaced by public transit.

I agree US is too big to be covered by public transit, but if we want to win the climate war, US has to cover all its states and make public transit seamless. Once this goal is complete, discourage owning of personal vehicle.

Also a picture comparing car vs bus [1]. Now compare the green house emission between two.

[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/space-required-to-transport-60-pe...

Lithium isn't a rare earth mineral or metal, it is the 33rd most common element on earth.

There is a substantial cost to doing nothing and continuing the status quo

There is a very substantial cost to destroying the planet chasing after a toxic, highly inefficient and polluting alternative to ICE vehicles. Hybrid vehicles are clearly the answer. Tire pollution is a far more serious problem than tailpipe emissions.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electr...

This scene is absolute madness https://twitter.com/siddharthkara/status/1611042107871080449

> Tire pollution is a far more serious problem than tailpipe emissions.

What an extraordinary claim.

Not a claim, a fact. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/

Because BEVs are much heavier than ICE vehicles and have very different torque characteristics they produce significantly more pollution. Much of the dirt poluttion attributed to diesel is actually tire particulates.

Your claim is that tire pollution is a more serious problem than exhaust. These articles do not support this claim. They state that more particles come off tires than exhaust. That's not the same thing. Does tire pollution contribute to global warming as much as fossil fuel exhaust? I haven't seen anything to indicate that.

I'd like to see a number on the difference in particulate production from tires on EVs – I suspect it's only about 20% more.

Read up on it. There is so much mumbo jumbo about 'global warming' that makes little sense. Tire pollution is a very serious tangible problem.

So your theory is global warming is not a serious tangible problem but tire particulates are?

Pretty much, yes. I think there are sorts of serious flaws in the belief systems that used to be called 'global warming' (which is now renamed 'climate change' as the 'warming' science didn't make sense). Tire particulates are a huge polluting issue, compounded by the disastrous mistakes being made in trying to force heavy electric battery powered vehicles on everyone.

OK thanks! I’ll disregard your opinions on the matter.

I suggest you wean yourself off your belief systems and do some reading up on causes of pollution!

What is the sustainability cycle in your opinion if we don't mass switch to EV?

According to most research the current plan is absolute net zero by 2050 and offset by reforestation, but that would not cover people not switching to EVs? Also projecting significantly further into the future, fossil fuels are not a renewable resource, what do we do when it runs out?

I agree with your sentiment and also understand that this won't stop the world's thirst for a commodity (see: dole bananas, hersey chocolate, all mined gemstones, and dinosaur juice). If we really are a global economy I would like to see proactive protections for these countries (like fair trade agreements) that guarantee environmental regulations are imposed and observed and that workers are fairly compensated and not exploited ... i actually think that might be possible if the the US and EU lead and lithium-block operations from more authoritarian companies with similar interests like china who have already taken over large parts of africa's mining operations through truly nefarious (IMHO) belt and road investment.

It's over. The Chinese control the world's rare earth minerals. Along with India they also produce the vast majority of global pollution, while the western world self destructs in an orgy of self flagellation over various junk science climate dramas. https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/94-o....

It's not just lithium that's the problem; copper is also a major component, and we don't have nearly enough of that either.

A full transition to electric vehicles is not viable with current technologies. If we can make a big leap in solid state battery technology then that could make all the difference, but the viability of those is being continuously postponed.

In one of his most recent videos, Peter Zeihan cites some things, which actually make me question his objectivity in this matter.

    - He claims that graphite will be a problem. I'm not sure if this will
      be if we divert coal and petroleum away from energy to graphite, which
      would sequester that carbon.
    - He's not aware that the aluminum industry has made plans to become 
      carbon neutral. I'm not sure if they really mean it, but they've
      made plans.
    - He claims that at no point in history, has the world doubled the 
      availability of a resource by a factor of 2 in 10 years. This just
      strikes me as fishy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf85EuQKWeQ

I have dug into this rabbit hole recently and haven't seen any studies indicating Copper is going to be a problem, do you have a source? Cheers

>A full transition to electric vehicles is not viable with current technologies.

So maybe, just maybe, Toyota wasn't that wrong by not going full gung-ho about EVs.

Something that I think needs to be considered more is the now dominant thought that Electric Vehicles = Lithium BEVs. We should not be putting all eggs in that one basket.

Obviously they are the most widely developed, and hydrogen fuel cell technology isn't anywhere near the point where it is ready. But we shouldn't stop developing it. Then there's the fascinating "aluminium air" battery [0] concept which could work so well for people away from traditional infrastructure, or even in small city cars where you can't easily charge at the side of the road in a parking bay.

I want to see a future where there are 10s of different types of electric and zero carbon vehicles on the roads. Each tailored to a different market and vehicle type.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium–air_battery

> hydrogen fuel cell technology isn't anywhere near the point where it is ready. But we shouldn't stop developing it.

Scientific development on the technology should continue, but the focus on FCEVs as a use case is misplaced. The idea has been worked on for decades, but we're just about as far away from practical hydrogen infrastructure as we've ever been. It's still only available in any meaningful way in two metro areas in California. There are far more practical solutions to fast EV fueling than hydrogen.

Is that true? The Tesla semi presentation cracked me up with the huge container of batteries prepared to charge a single semi. The grid load for charging any meaningful number of EVs simultaneously is hilariously out of reach (even if we could build the generation capacity, NIMBY-Americans will never accomodate the transmission). It seems to me that hydrogen is a relatively elegant solution to this problem. We are good at transporting and storing compressed gases today. It seems to me that building out that infrastructure is more likely than the gigantic power delivery infrastructure necessary to charge lithium batteries.

> the now dominant thought that Electric Vehicles = Lithium BEVs

In popular media, perhaps. Research, including industrial R&D, continued on other fronts.

That said, the periodic table seems to limit us to hydrogen, lithium, sodium and perhaps potassium. Life chose hydrogen (with carbon). We’re transitioning from hydrocarbons to lithium (with carbon; some are trying silicon). Sodium is close to being a viable contender, but it’s heavier than lithium, which barring a chemistry breakthrough will relegate it below lithium.

I don't think anyone is stopping anything, really. It's just functions doing work: If one thing get's easier and cheaper and safer and is building a track record, all at the same time and without signs of stopping or running into any obvious issues, we are increasingly less incentivized to think up alternatives. I don't think that's unreasonable. In the end, the issue is mostly a very, very small number of people in all of existence, who are capable of meaningfully developing new technologies (and always at the cost of not advancing something else, because they would all be capable of working on something else).

We have been good about increasing the number of capable people, so it will not be one or the other, but even so, right now, it's harder to imagine a world with an abundance of top engineers making new technologies actually possible, than it is to imagine new techologies.

If you have a spare 17 minutes, this great, informative video by Wendover Productions [1] goes more in-depth about the various problems with Lithium-ion batteries.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dnN82DsQ2k

"It’s easy to imagine that decades from now, the chemistry of batteries will have changed so much that they will use two, three, or four times less than today."

It's easy to imagine, but is it even possible? My understanding is that the lithium is the charge carrier, and while there is some room to improve efficiency, less lithium means less capacity.

OTOH, it's quite possible that, eg, sodium batteries become viable, and the whole debate becomes moot.

This is correct. It's like saying do "in the future we'll have gasoline that contains 2, 3, or 4 times as much energy." Sure, different gasoline chemistries have different energy densities. But there's thermodynamic limits to it, unless you're switching to an entirely different chemistry.

IIRC, we're already at ~40% the thermodynamic limits of lithium, so tripling or quadrupling are out of the question.

How do lithium-sulfur batteries weight in on this? They have the (theoretical) 2-3 times the wh/kg capacity compared to li-ion.

> is it even possible?

I believe so. As I understand it, in current cell designs, only a fraction of the lithium leaves the anode. This limit is deliberately imposed to preserve the integrity of the physical structure of the anode. Increasing the deintercalation fraction (the percentage of lithium that moves in the electrolyte) is being actively researched. So are other cell types where the whole problem is avoided.

And yes, lithium isn't the only possible choice.

See Lithium-Sulphur which has a theoretical limit of ~2500 wh/kg vs ~250 wh/kg of todays lithium batteries. So you're looking at up 10x improvement, if we can get to 1000 wh/kg that's your 4x.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium–sulfur_battery

Is Lithium the only barrier to EV's? Are there any global supply chain logistical issues that may arise should ongoing conflicts escalate? Do the same supply chain issues affect ICE and EV's equally? I honestly do not know but I see this get brought up when people discuss EV's more so than Lithium.

Could the existing coal mining companies transition or relocate to locations rich in Lithium, possibly offering their employees relocation bonuses? Some of the coal mining companies are in the process of shutting down and it seems like money could be saved by repurposing some of the equipment and utilizing some of the coal mining team experience. Could states offer financial incentives to relocate and switch to mining Lithium?

Are we still reliant on Cobalt as part of the Lithium battery? There is an interview with Siddharth Kara that suggests all lithium batteries contain cobalt and thusly depend on child slave labor. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIWvk3gJ_7E [video][14 mins]

Yes, the Lithium and Cobalt sources we have currently running wouldn't be enough to turn every single vehicle in the world to an EV.

But we don't need to do that.

New mines for both Lithium and Cobalt are being started, new battery chemistries are being investigated (including ones based on _wood_ [0]), there is also the option of ethanol/biogas/biodiesel for existing ICEs and maybe even green hydrogen if someone manages to optimise the process about 5x to make it cost-effective.

And the main thing people tend to forget: EV batteries are highly recyclable. We're up to 90% now, closing up on 95%. The biggest thing keeping it from being a huge industry is lack of batteries to recycle.

Like the article says, reuse of old EV batteries is a hugely valid option, more so than recycling. A 50kWh battery with 50% capacity loss is till a 25kWh battery, which will run a full American McMansion for a few days easily.

Compare that to ICEs where the fuel is literally burned up in smoke and is exactly 0% recyclable.

[0] https://www.storaenso.com/en/newsroom/regulatory-and-investo...

Lithium iron phosphate (lifepo4) do not contain cobalt

> There is an interview with Siddharth Kara that suggests all lithium batteries contain cobalt and thusly depend on child slave labor

That is demonstrably not true. AFAIK the majority of EVs use LFP batteries that have no cobalt. The current RWD Model 3 in the US also uses LFP. That's the direction most EVs will probably head over the next few years.

It's not just LFP batteries that don't use cobalt. Tesla's medium density batteries use a "high nickel" cathode rather than a nickel-manganese-cobalt cathode.

I'd like to learn more about that but I am coming up blank. Everything I've found suggests even the new Tesla 4680 continues to rely on some amount of cobalt.

Lithium iron phosphate are not widely used in EVs. They gave poorer energy density, so lithium ion is preferred. I think electric golf carts use LiFePo batteries, to keep costs low and because range is less of an issue.

The vast majority of EVs in China use LFP, and China has most of the EVs in the world. And even in the US, by volume I wouldn't be surprised if the RWD Model 3 is a reasonable fraction of total EV sales.

Most EV's in China use LiFePO4 batteries, and China is the largest EV market.

LFP batteries have not been widely used outside China till now because CATL[1] owns the important patents. The patents expire this year.

The energy density discrepancy is not as bad at a system (whole vehicle) level as it appears at cell level, for various reasons. And there are lots of use cases where LFP has more than enough energy, provided the price is right.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CATL

The energy density is partially offset by the higher cycle life of LFP even while charging to 100% SOC.

For instance Tesla recommends an 80% charge for daily unless you know you are going to go a long trip, while on their LFP version they recommend a 100% daily charge to keep cell balance as the LFP pack will have a much longer life than a NCM pack at 80%.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_jo/GUID-7FE78D7...

LFP are ideal for shorter range commuter/daily driver cars and LFP tech seems to be closing the gap with cobalt energy density.

Lithium is the only major mineral in an EV that does not have a significant use elsewhere. Steel, aluminum, manganese, nickel, iron, phosphate, cobalt, rare earths, et cetera have significant industrial uses outside of EV's. So while EV's can put a lot of pressure on those supply chains, the effect is on a different scale.

Traditionally Lithium isn't mined, it's concentrated out of a brine. Some miners are setting up hard-rock Lithium mines, but those are on a vastly different scale than a coal mine, so there would likely be very little equipment overlap.

A significant number of batteries still use cobalt, although the percentage of batteries that are cobalt-free is increasing.

I reject the premise of the question, because you don't need lithium for electric vehicles. We could get by with shitty low-range batteries the way other EVs have. We would just need to standardize battery-swapping at the equivalent of gas stations. Drive 100 miles, drive into a battery-swapping station, service technician swaps the battery, you're back on the road in less than 5 minutes. We did it 100 years ago, we can do it again. So lithium isn't a blocker.

I also think we shouldn't own as many personal vehicles as we do, and should start to move legislation toward more funding of better (and faster, and more efficient) public transit, and more taxing of private vehicles. We don't need to have so many private vehicles, we are just addicted to them.

This will never work. Components in cars are engineered to be organized as efficiently as possible. The overhead from having replaceable batteries will kill the amount of storage you can have. There is no way you can have generic attendants swap out batteries in 5 minutes. Working with EVs is a dangerous job that you can't just pay an uneducated minimum wage worker to change. The batteries are extremely heavy and are placed in locations that you need a car lift to get to. Plus theres all sort of liability and safety issues from potentially messing up a battery swap or getting a bad battery and blowing up your car.

I dont know how scalable this is, but Nio (electric car maker from China) are building automatic battery swap stations. See e.g. here (video is in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv7OQofChbg

edit: I think it takes more than five minutes though, especially when you have to wait in line.

> Components in cars are engineered to be organized as efficiently as possible

Ever heard of an SUV? Cars are not designed to be efficient, they are designed to meet product goals. Sometimes those goals are efficiency, such as meeting an emissions or efficiency regulation. But most of the goals are "what do we think some schmuck will pay $30K for?"

If 100 years ago, replaceable batteries were not a barrier to storage space, they certainly shouldn't be now, unless we're just admitting that we suck so much at building cars now that we can't even make them like we did 100 years ago. Battery swapping services existed for 20 years. It only stopped because the market decided gas would rule instead.

SUVs have no relevance to the question. In every EV, and modern cars, the location and layout of every component, especially the battery is a highly engineered process. The battery specifically is not only the most valuable component they need to store as much of as possible, it is the most heavy and most dangerous. Teslas blew up because the battery wasn't stored safely. Store it too high and you risk rollovers. This doesn't even take into account the danger of high amp battery packs being moved around and shared between vehicles. You're oversimplifying a very difficult problem

I had a friend ask me a few years back about investing heavily in some ETFs that were connected to lithium mining and other minerals used for tech products. I cautioned them against it. Not because I don't think the need for these materials will continue to grow, but because I worry that increased demand will spur new innovation in finding, extracting, and processing them -- which would drive down prices in the long run. I don't have a crystal ball, but that seems to be a common pattern in the history of our exploitation of this planet's resources.

This is such a dumb analysis - Lithium batteries are used in everything - tools, consumer electronics, medical devices, home and grid storage and all of the sectors that will be using it soon. Not to mention if you want to push larger transport sectors and grid de-carbonization you will need massive GwH batteries with 100kg+ of lithium. We clearly need more solutions, stop pushing lithium batteries like they can solve all the world's energy problems.

"We clearly need more solutions, stop pushing lithium batteries like they can solve all the world's energy problems."

That's right. We need to push natrium based batteries for stationary use cases, like grid storage and reserve the lithium based for mobile use.

If we have a looming lithium shortage, instead of pushing EVs, we should be pushing PHEVs which use 1/10th the batteries and require 1/10th the energy and time to charge. Over 90% of most driver's daily use is less than 1/10th the range (40 km) of a typical EV (400 km) so a PHEV with 1/10th the battery means they will rarely need gasoline. For longer trips, you can use gas so there is no range anxiety.

One EV reduces one driver's gasoline usage by 100%. With the same amount of batteries we could build 10 PHEVs and reduce 10 drivers' gasoline by 90%. This is a 9 times greater reduction in gasoline usage than building EVs.

If we're really serious about lowering CO2, we should be pushing PHEVs, not EVs that we don't have enough batteries for.

IMVHO

> How much lithium does the world have? We don’t really know for sure.

That's the simple main point. The rest are speculation. Oh, sure "not being sure" is not a reason not to try, but is a reason to have some backups. SO far we lack them. And that's the main issue.

The secondary issue is recycling of metals, so far we have many experimental procedures, more or less doable at a not-just-lab scale, but nothing usable on scale.

The corollary issue is that we do not have just cars, we also have airplanes and ships. So far some eVTOL have popped up but also prove they are not much more than very-short-range cars replacers for certain use cases. We also have some battery-electrical ship (and modern sub), but nothing really usable on large scale.

Long story short: the road is very long and looking for alternatives is a MUST. A company can fail, it's perfectly normal, a society should NOT FAIL by all means and when happen it hurt much.

> nothing usable on scale

There are many battery recyclers in China that grind up lithium ion batteries all day every day and recover the metals.

Even if you can do it on scale and with a very high recovery rate of 90%, after 7 cycles half of the lithium is gone. Given the massive environmental effects of the mining and the relatively scarce reserves we need to allocate the metal very carefully. It should not be used to maintain a broken business model IMO.

Where does that 90% figure come from? The state of the art appears to be 99%.

99% in a lab, if you are very good. 90% IRL (on industrial scale) is my educated guess given that you have losses in the whole reduction network and diminishing returns in the extraction process.

Probably depends on the vehicles, right?

If we'd use more public transport like trains and busses, we might be very well off.

Musk said in a Q&A recently that Tesla will need to start its own mining and refining ops to support battery production

https://youtu.be/KeEmVxMFM4Q?t=3063

There might be enough lithium for EVs, but lithium is needed not only for EV batteries. Overall, there is no enough lithium to phase out fossil fuels. Not even for the first generation of technology devices. Here is the presentation given by prof. Simon Michaux where the problem is explained in more detail and supported with data:

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

Lithium is not the only problem, other minerals are too. And, just like the original article says - the pace of extraction.

Are not people who make examples of the Netherlands or Norway as bike coutries missing that it is possibly just prohibitively expensive to own a car there, not that most people actually prefer bikes?

For everyone? No. Fortunately we don't need lithium for everyone's EV. Other battery chemistries and designs are already coming to market, like sodium batteries, solid state batteries, and more.

Once again, Afghanistan has it. China is getting it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.htm...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-24/chinese-f...

Isn’t this article quite pointless considering everyone is aware of the current Lithium resource limitations and new technologies targeted to replace lithium are already emerging? For example the Sodium Ion batteries hit the news recently.

Similar to oil, we can all speculate what is the remaining capacity we haven’t extracted but eventually it all comes down to - can we get it cheaper somewhere else and preferably using own resources instead of paying 3rd party (country)?

This article is a great example of how to draw conclusions from changing data, and how to call out the sources of uncertainty at every turn. I think a few were missed based on the comments below but I don't think that was done out of nefarious agenda but rather an attempt to keep the essay short as the author seems to have done enough research that i trust they didn't overlook these second order implications.

Volume is not the only issue. How about the moral aspect of mining in underdeveloped countries with poor working conditions...

This is definitely an issue which is well underestimated!

Portugal (e.g in Covas de Barroso) [1] and Spain (e.g. in Cáceres) [2] are facing huge pressure to settle for lithium mines, without much consideration for the social and ecological impacts on those regions...

It is still considered as a green energy, simply because we decide to forget about part of the process. Just as we did for gas, and plastic.

Energy price should take in account all the impacts (recycling included), the avoid being considered as a magical solution, and rush blindly toward the next crisis..

[1] https://www.portugalresident.com/lithium-wars-step-up-in-cov...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/459191d9-774d-4a2b-8ec6-ba472017b...

Even if we have more electric vehicles, that doesn't decarbonize anything unless the source of the energy doesn't generate carbon dioxide. In many places you're just moving the source of carbon dioxide (often with a total increase). I think that part is often overlooked.

I find it hard to believe that pulling electricity from the grid would increase carbon emissions vs. a vehicle burning gas in its own engine. How is that possible?

And even if it were (I suppose a very clean natural gas car vs the worst coal plant ever made) the electric still has the advantage of regenerating braking.

Driving overland will not recover much breaking energy. That is only an advantage of EVs under town traffic conditions, where cheap efficient public transportation is the better solution.

An EV is much heavier, thus you need more energy to move it. But I think in total it should still be a net win for EVs.

But the real problem is that we move 2000+ kgs around to move a human of 80 kgs around. EVs don't fix that. EVs are mostly to save the car industry, the solution is to drive less by creating a society where people don't need to own a car and drive everywhere.

> An EV is much heavier

The most popular EVs in the US are roughly 0-10% heavier than the comparable ICEV. Yes, some EVs are much heavier.

US already have insanely big cars, though. So very different than in other markets.

what vehicles are you using for this comparison? I was surprised to see that a base model 3 weighs in the same ballpark as a 330i. however, a model s weighs >500 lbs more than a 540i, and there doesn't seem to be anything in the corolla size class that's even close to 3000 lbs.

I suspect that if this is true, it's only because the most popular cars in the US are so large that the battery weight doesn't matter as much.

> But the real problem is that we move 2000+ kgs around to move a human of 80 kgs around.

Why is that a problem? If I want to visit my friend who lives 200 miles away, I'm not going to hop on a bike, or walk, or find a horse and buggie to take me there. Vehicles are not inherently evil. In fact they're a great enabler. Even if we take your example at face value and assume nobody travels beyond their city. How is that person who needs a wheelchair to get from point A to point B going to go a mile or two to the grocery store and get their groceries home?

The problem with cars is their carbon footprint, and EVs go a long way to solving that.

How often do you travel those 200 miles? Why can't you use a car share service for that one occasion? I'm not assuming people never travels beyond their city.

Why do car enablers always use people needing a wheelchair to push their agenda? If you're so concerned with their well being, wouldn't it be better if they got the roads for themselves and didn't get stuck in traffic and could always find parking close?

Or if they didn't need a car to travel miles to a grocery store but it was next door instead?

And no, the problems with cars are much greater than their carbon footprint. What about their area footprint for parking? The insane land used for roads? All the deaths? The pollution and micro plastics from their wheels? How children can't play outside in streets? How the streets instead of a nice neighborhood is just traffic? The noise?

And no, EVs doesn't solve much about the carbon footprint, not unless the energy is all green. It just moves it around.

Funnily enough cars suck for people with wheelchairs compared to a specialty designed EV. Mostly due to the doors, lack of a ramp, misplaced steering column and an unnecessary chair.

Turning a wheelchair into a speedy electric vehicle is quite easy if not cheap. It's one wheel removed from an electric recumbent trike.

Exactly!

As can probably be gleaned from my posts here, I'm an activist working for better cycling and human transportation in how we do urban planning.

And one thing I often see, at least locally, is how those using a wheelchair or other amenities want better pedestrian infrastructure (or cycling infrastructure). Not car infrastructure. Many don't have the ability to drive, or the money for a special car. But a motorized tricycle, or an electric wheelchair using bicycle ramps works great.

the wheelchair argument is bs, I agree. every family does not need to have a car for the small fraction of wheelchair users to get to the store.

however, you are not going to connect with your audience when you say things like this:

> How often do you travel those 200 miles? Why can't you use a car share service for that one occasion? I'm not assuming people never travels beyond their city.

cars are not fungible. the driver's seat in my car is always in the right position for me, I'm familiar with all of its controls and weird quirks, and I don't need to reserve it. it's always ready for me in my garage at a moment's notice.

my point is: the only real advantage to your proposal is cost, and I would be willing to pay a lot more than I currently do to keep my car. it would take something more like Japan's train network for me to actually be enthusiastic about giving up my car.

But that is kinda my point, with how society is right now of course people want to keep their cars. I'm not talking about banning them. I want society to move in a direction where it's easier to not own a car, so people voluntarily prefer not to have their own.

I agree will all of the above points but the last is not really true, there is a concerted and clear agenda across the board to transition everything to electric and then use mostly wind and solar to power the grid (with already available solutions for energy storage due to fluctuations in wind/sun).

I don't see a lot of people really pushing for others to fundamentally change their habits and lifestyle (even getting people to eat less red meat is incredibly hard) and I think that's just because it's fundamentally harder to convince a large number of people to change their habits vs. a small number of dedicated people working towards green energy.

We should strive for both of these things together and share the same goal.

2000kg+ EVs still have substantial lifecycle carbon footprints even if their local emissions are much lower than a gasoline car. They are certainly useful for 200 mile trips, especially with a group of people, with well-developed road networks & underdeveloped transit networks, but the relative development/utility of different transport networks is a political choice. And 200 mile trips are a small percentage of trips — most are short & local (with the specific radius of local generally depending on a locale's land use regulations).

EV lifecycle carbon footprints are much lower than a gasoline car's.

It's not, GP is wrong and making a deceptive argument.

The energy grid is already lower carbon than gasoline powered ICE vehicles, especially with natural gas taking over a lot of the energy production. But it's only going to get even better as more and more renewables come online.

It's easier for your giant utility company to have the capital to build out a solar farm to power your car/house/etc than it is for you and I to have the capital to build personal solar production to do the same thing. Even more so, some things only make sense at scale, like large scale wind energy. Placing a giant turbine in my backyard, even if the HOA and city allowed it, would work for me, but not my neighbor, and if they built one too we'd be competing with each other. Better to do it on farms leased or ran by utilities.

Besides, how is the renter going to de carbonize their electric car unless the grid does it?

I'm not trying to make a deceptive argument. I may be wrong, but I stated what I thought was an important point: you need generators to decarbonize, not merely a switch to electric cars. Electric cars are an enabler for decarbonization, agreed, but focusing only enabling technology is not enough. It must be coupled with changes in energy generation to achieve a significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. I fear the emphasis on half the problem will leave the problem unsolved.

The article "Factcheck: How electric vehicles help to tackle climate change" <https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...> seems to make the same point (if that's a bad source let me know):

* "EVs are responsible for considerably lower emissions over their lifetime than conventional (internal combustion engine) vehicles across Europe as a whole.

* In countries with coal-intensive electricity generation, the benefits of EVs are smaller and they can have similar lifetime emissions to the most efficient conventional vehicles – such as hybrid-electric models."

Which is my point: we need to decarbonize the generators. The article even goes on to state this: "However, as countries decarbonise electricity generation to meet their climate targets, driving emissions will fall for existing EVs and manufacturing emissions will fall for new EVs." Note the requirement to decarbonize the generators. This is a real issue, for example, in 2021, coal-fired electric power plants accounted for 91% of West Virginia's total electricity net generation <https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WV>. There's an assumption by many that utilities' electricity generators will over time produce less carbon dioxide, but I'm not convinced that it will "just happen". Such a change will require continued emphasis over time.

Why do you focus on a state that has one of the dirtiest electricity production and one of the lowest rates of EV sales in the US?

If we focus instead on electricity production by source in the USA between 2011 and 2021: Electricity produced...

with oil: 42TWh => 35TW (-16%)

with coal: 1730TWh => 900TWh (-48%)

with gas: 1010TWh => 1580TWh (+55%)

with solar: 2TWh => 164TWh (+8900%)

with wind: 120TWh => 378TWh (+215%)

with nuclear: 790TWh => 780TWh (-2%)

with hydro: 310TWh => 250TWh (-20%)

So not only was 600TWh of dirty coal replaced by cleaner gas, the amount of electricity produced with fossil fuels dropped by more than 200TWh. Meanwhile, electricity production by renewables significantly increased.

Or in other words, if you had bought an EV in 2011 and driven it until now, it would have gotten cleaner every year, which is not going to happen with an ICE.

Source: our world in data, numbers slightly adjusted for readability.

AFAIK powering a BEV from electricity generated by fossile fuel has a higher efficiency than an internal combustion engine. Especially if you factor in the refining steps for car fuel.

Let’s put aside the fact that a state of the art gasoline engine is about 20% efficient and an EV is about 50% efficient if you include power delivery deficiencies if we use non renewable fuel sources. What you’re stating is an infrastructure problem, not a specific EV problem. Genuinely would love to see literature how a EV increases the total carbon increase compared to a ICE vehicle.

You don't need an academic paper to see how much carbon is used to actually manufacture a lithium ion battery that is mined versus recycled domestically in the country the car is produced. Just follow the supply chain in how the mining process works for typical batteries today.

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-co2-emitted-manufac...!

An average sedan from production to driving within its life time produces 38 metric tons of CO2 emissions compared to 16 metric tons as quoted by your article for the battery. I still fail to see how an EV is by any means dirtier than a gas car.

Copper mining is very dirty (not necesseraly C02-wise), and an EV needs 4 times more of it (IIRC) than an equivalent ICV.

No its not overlooked, its called wheel to well efficiency and EV's are more efficient than ICE even if run off fossil fuels at a power plant, which it won't completely since even the US has a renewable/carbon free mix of about 20% currently on the grid.

Multi-stage heat recovery power plants are more efficient than even the best ICE engines in cars, there is no need to worry about space or weight so you can have very complicated heat recovery and emissions gear maintained by dedicated staff rather than being in my vehicle.

Power plants can run off less refined or even unrefined fuel, the efficiency of refining is often overlooked along with physically shipping refined fuel to fueling stations.

Finally it decouples the power source from the vehicle. Even if it where no more efficient to run EV's off fossil fuels burned at power plants, your vehicle can get upgraded to run off solar or nuclear or wind or whatever in the future while you get to keep the same vehicle. Any programmer should recognize the value of separating concerns for easier migration.

Where I am we have a garbage incinerator power plant with an elaborated scrubber system, EV around here are technically running partially off garbage. This is not carbon free by any means, but effective at reducing landfill use and getting power out of it.

In the US, even the power plants that run on fossil fuels tend to run on natural gas, which produces roughly half the CO2 of a coal fired plant.

True and we have a lot of natural gas and in a pinch we can run our vehicles off coal if needed even if not ideal. The flexibility of the power source due to decoupling seems so often overlooked especially when thinking about energy independence and protecting national interest.

> I think that part is often overlooked.

On the contrary, it is one of the most popular bad faith arguments against EVs.

Fortunately, science has long since come to the rescue. In the dirtiest coal-burning power generating region of the US, an EV is still ~20% less polluting than a car that burns gasoline directly. That is your worst case. Most US power generation is far cleaner.

Wind provided 25% of electricity in Texas in 2021 [1]. A decade ago, it was close to 12%. A decade from now, it will be 45-50%. Even now, by selecting only the nights with strong winds, an EV driver can tap the grid when 50% of the electricity comes from nuclear and wind turbines.

Carbon sources aren't moved. They are decommissioned.

[1] https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/10/13/ERCOT_Fact_Sheet...

Even if we have more electric vehicles, that doesn't decarbonize anything unless the source of the energy doesn't generate carbon dioxide.

The point of EVs, is that it liberates that energy use, allowing it to be decarbonized. If the energy storage is in the form of fossil fuels, then this is a significant blocker!

We won’t be using Lithium by 2050 anyhow. If not aluminum ion batteries, then some other substitute.

Without strong supporting facts for viability of that "some other substitute" it sounds like "Full self-driving is just around the corner".

2050 is almost 3 decades away. There are at least two public companies that are in testing phase for such batteries today. Starting at coin sized (they last 2x longer). Then AA and then larger scale. I’d guess 5yr out which means 10.

AFAIK the mineral reserve bottlenecks are cobalt and manganese, not lithium!

Manganese is not a problem from resource availability. World reserves are 1.5 billion tonnes, and up to a trillion tonnes of manganese are available from seafloor nodules.

Cobalt isn’t essential in the way lithium is. We already have working cobalt-free chemistries in EVs, e.g. LFP.

It doesn't matter because there is only around a quarter of the copper needed in the world, so unless there's space mining the lithium wont be the problem any time soon.

watching all the drama happening lately around climate change issues, this is very much interesting and needed read, thanks!

If the vehicles are trains then yes.

Good topic but the tldr wasn't super inspiring for me "Yes, the world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future": decades isn't really sufficient for this imo. It would ideally be.. multiple centuries at the very least? Then the author says something like "we have no idea how much lithium there is" so guess nobody knows this answer, but fair enough as it's quite early stage...

Without knowing the scale of secondary uses of batteries built for cars, or the economics of recycling, I doubt the answer is knowable beyond that horizon.

Here's a video on the former Tesla CTO's battery recycling company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLr0GStrnwQ

I feel the article violated Betteridge's law of headlines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

A better formulation would be "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the null hypothesis.".

That is, instead of "no", say "it's nothing".

And many people here comment like it wouldn't. I guess you're so used to Betteridge's being true that you presume the answer in the article is "no".

One of the core problems with environmentalists, intelligent people and anyone left wing really is that we insist on doing nothing until we have a perfect solution. Instead of trading climate change for a lithium shortage, we will fail to push these cars because there might be some imperfection for someone somewhere someday. And a massive serious issue is better than a tiny possible future issue we didn't foresee.

Hence the world is run by stupid, selfish, shorttermists who "just do it".

I don't think most of the folks suddenly apprehensive about lithium & cobalt mining are left wing.

I don't think anyone on the right wing cares at all either way. So even if it's only a small part of the left wing, it's composed on 100% left wingers...

Anecdotally, the only people in my larger circle of family & friends who bring up cobalt mining are the right wingers. You are probably right that they don't actually care, though. It's concern trolling.

I’ll take the troll bait, if that’s true then why are “left wing” people the main driver of EVs? Criticizing a technology is one thing. Willing to adopt it is another.

Its pointless to make everything a political topic, with you being the righteous one and everybody else wrong (or worse). Ie am neither on any scale, agree with some aspects of each and reject some other stuff, its easier not being in US where society seems extremely polarized and the other group is always to blame for all one's misfortunes.

EVs generally currently don't make that much sense, we just fuck up environment in a different way. Maybe you don't see those open pit mines in 3rd world, child slaving for that cobalt in your batteries but I do and I do mind. This isn't some potential issue in far future, but right here right now. Any tesla is running a bit on child labor, now everybody can please get off their high horses for a while? EVs being charged by electricity from coal power plants - sure its transitory, so lets start having a discussion when its about to stop being so.

What is an actual solution is very good and cheap public transport. Some less smart part of population in less developed places like US get knee jerk reaction to even suggesting it, but simple fact is - as long as everybody will want to drive in their own ever more massive block of metal and chemistry, we will have numerous issues and will keep shooting ourselves in our own feet long term. No EV is going to fix that, not this century.

1. Lithium isn't the only mineral to be concerned about.

2. "The technology will improve" is not always a reliable strategy. Fusion is perpetually almost here, for example.

3. Without a federal money printer propping up the EV market it would not exist.

4. Just because a lifestyle works great for you, e.g. walkable cities and ebikes, doesnt mean it will work for everyone.

5. How far into a dictatorial, command economy, are we capable of going into to effect a massive energy transition, i.e. how much do we force changes a substantial number of people have serious problems with?

All of these concerns, even #1, have applied to communist car driving America and its 25% theft of everything..

I would tax the beejesus out of energy use and personal road use and invert most income tax to make something closer to a free market than the US is.

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