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Comment by jnmandal | Hacker News Reader

They're cleaner, no doubt. But are they clean enough that a 1-1 replacement could avert massive ecological destruction à la global warming? No they are not.

They are a bridge towards lowering emissions but they cannot get us to zero or negative emissions. For as long as they are in use cars will simply remain "part of the problem". Acutely, personal vehicles used for quotidian trips are a large part of the contribution towards carbon emissions and can easily be phased out with improved urban and residential design patterns, public/collective transport infrastructure, and low-tech solutions like bikes, draft animals, etc .

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Just stop it. You’re not going to convince (at least in America) people in the suburbs and rural areas to give up their lifestyle. It’s just not going to happen. People are not going to ride a scooter 15 miles to and from the grocery store in freezing weather.

Everyone will have to pile into cities so they can ride a scooter to and from the grocery store in freezing weather. They simply will have to adjust or die.

Just move to a city which has nice weather all year around. Preferably with relatively flat and compact geography. It’s pretty straightforward, I don’t get why everyone is complaining so much…

Hopefully that was a sarcastic comment.

We just have to get better at City Planning in the States. It’s difficult, but not that difficult. Almost all of Western Europe has figured this out (along with health care and education). Dense cities with mixed zoning and good public transit are so much more enjoyable and efficient than the urban hellscapes we create in the USA. I have no delusions we will make any changes, but the changes can be made.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Would imply that Europe hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Sure large urban areas have decent mass transit. Many people still live in smaller towns, villages or suburbs and commute by car everyday. Especially in larger more decentralized countries like Germany.

in every country included 60-70% commute by car. Which is barely lower than it is in the US. I think it’s a myth that Western Europe is significantly ahead (and I think it applies, albeit to a lesser degree, to other areas like health and education). The grass is always greener on the other side of the ocean…

Don't people in suburbs have winter coats?

You say that as if 15 miles to the grocery store is an unavoidable fact of life. Grocery stores can and should be a lot closer to where people live. My grocery store (in Amsterdam) is a 5 minute walk from my home.

The big problem is that everything in the US has been designed around extreme car dependency, and more than that: extreme gas consumption. Because American cars are also much larger and heavier than they reasonably should be. Much about how American life seems to have been explicitly designed to maximise oil use and oil profits, even to the point where it stops making any kind of sense.

So if there's a reason this can't change, then it's because oil companies hold far too much power over American politics and over the way people think.

See also the recent conspiracy protests against "15 minute cities". The only meaningful reason I can think of why anyone would oppose that, is because it's going to hurt oil profits.

It's not just an American issue. Quite a few places in the world have similar situations (for various reasons). That problem is rarely a major issue, though; transportation in urban areas can be improved a lot and there's no reason to not implement different solutions for different circumstances, such as urban and rural areas. Fossil fuel-dependency _is not_ a problem we can solve with one single solution that fits everyone.

The tricky part is getting someone else to take the first step -- there's going to be a lot of changes if we really want to do this, and most people seems firmly convinced that someone else should take the lead.

There are indeed a lot of countries that have followed the American lead into car dependent urban design. But the issue is by far the worst in the US (and possibly Canada). Although SUVs exist elsewhere, they are far more common in the US. And in no other country do they get as ridiculously big as in the US.

But you're absolutely right there's no single silver bullet. The problem is big and complex, and so is the solution. Smaller cars, less cars, electric cars, more bike infrastructure, better public transport, better designed cities. All of those things are part of the solution.

Of course most of this is about urban areas; rural areas have very different requirements, and some of these solutions are irrelevant or infeasible there. Cities can do without cars, rural areas probably not, which is part of why electric cars are still important.

> Grocery stores can and should be a lot closer to where people live.

And how do groceries get to the vast network of local stores ?

Besides that the US is a MUCH larger country than the NL, distances in the US are also much greater than anything you can imagine in Europe. There's a reason our US friends measure travel in time taken, and not distance travelled. The number of shops needed to "locally supply" everybody would be gigantic.

The more stores that needs to be supplied, the more trucks needs to drive around supplying them, which leads to the question; what pollutes the most ?

If humanity wants to make an improvement, we need much more public transportation, and not like today where it's "once per hour unless you live downtown", but in a way that doesn't make a 30 minute trip take 90 minutes. If we manage that, it doesn't really matter how far away the grocery store is.

To give an impression of the size difference, the Netherlands covers an area of 16,160 sq mi (41,850 km2), and New York State alone covers 54,556 square miles (141,300 km2), and New York State is the 27th largest state in the US.

> My grocery store (in Amsterdam) is a 5 minute walk

And how many of those groceries are produced in Amsterdam ? Each an every one has been transported on one or more trucks to arrive in a convenient walking distance to you. I fully agree and understand that shops needs to be local, but they're not the most environmentally friendly solution.

Groceries get to the shops by trucks. This is no different whether you have large or small shops. The only difference is: do you send all the trucks to the same shop or do you spread them over multiple shops. Amsterdam has no problem keeping its many, many smaller supermarkets well-stocked. Sure, it's a logistical challenge, but not one that cannot be solved.

> Besides that the US is a MUCH larger country than the NL, distances in the US are also much greater than anything you can imagine in Europe.

Of course, but how is that relevant? The fact that a country is larger doesn't mean that you have to make people travel all that distance. Imagine the EU merges into a single country at some point. That's not going to change the logistical situation around Amsterdam in any way. Logistics is already very international in the EU.

> what pollutes the most?

Yeah, what pollutes the most? Lots of trucks driving to a central big store, and then having people drive even more cars to that central store, or driving all those trucks to smaller local stores that people walk to? For the smaller shops, you probably don't need big trucks, but smaller ones, which does mean more of them, but still not remotely as many as the cars your saving. And some delivery trucks in Amsterdam are pretty light and electric already.

> it doesn't really matter how far away the grocery store is.

It still does. Mind you, more public transport is absolutely vital. I totally agree with that. And Amsterdam has pretty decent public transport (though biking is generally faster), but I still prefer local shops.

I am tired of this idea that the US being large invalidates anything that happens in Europe as impossible.

I lived in Russia for a while, in a city in the middle of Siberia, and there is a night and day difference between how people live.

Russia is even larger than the US, but living in single-family detached homes is just not very common. So, most things tend to be within walking distance. And public transport is much more effective.

> American cars are also much larger and heavier than they reasonably should be.

To some extent, the larger vehicle size is a result of US vehicle safety standards.

To some extent but not a large extent. SUVs tend to be less safe than their sedan counterparts. Worse on rollovers, worse on emergency handling, and much worse on visibility. You might survive a crash better in an SUV, but you're more likely to get into a crash with an SUV, canceling out any gains and quite possibly eroding even further into loss of safety.

One of the only things that makes SUVs safer is their greater mass, which largely serves to make the road less safe for collisions with non-SUV drivers. With regard to vehicle size, I observed back in the 1990s when the SUV craze began that America was in a war of size attrition with itself.

Even a Mini Cooper is quite survivable in a crash. Crumple zones and airbags are not just standard issue on gargantuan vehicles.

From what I understand, it's the result of the lack of US vehicle safety standards. Or perhaps a loophole in them.

Trucks have different safety standards than cars, and car manufacturers find the car safety standards annoying, so they started marketing trucks to consumers. They don't have to obey the same regulations as cars, and yet because they're light trucks, they don't require a commercial driving license. That's the loophole through which the US car industry managed to drive their entire industry.

But two or three miles, no biggie. Bundle up and hit the road.

> It’s just not going to happen.

You say this as though we have any choice. It will happen; we can either do it ourselves, or we can wait until environmental collapse does it for us.

(I know which way I'd have preferred to go, but I seem to have been outvoted...)

Agreed. It's funny that many still cannot see the writing on the wall.

> But are they clean enough [....] ? No they are not.

1) Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

2) Accept that people are not going to stop using cars, and work with what you have, unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle, or you are able to invent something they will actually want more than cars.

But don't let good be the enemy of better either.

I think it's important to realize that "People will always use cars" and "We can and should reduce car usage" are not contradictory. We need to both offer and incentivize alternatives, find ways to reduce car dependency, etc and make sure that remaining car usage is as clean as possible. (This applies to both the car usage that we can get rid of in the mid- to long-term but haven't yet and the "residual" car usage that we can't seem to get rid of.)

> Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

This is what I meant by "a bridge." I don't think you really understand the point of my comment.

> unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle

I know you are being facetious but I ironically, yes there is a mysterious power that compels mankind to change their lifestyle. That's how we got here; it's not like the enclosure and industrialization was a grassroots effort or an accidental happenstance. Its called the industrial revolution for a reason. The truth is it was directed by a privileged minority with a lot of power. It was not done democratically. It certainly wasn't privileged consumers saying, "hey I want to give up generational farming of inherited land to live in an urban slum and work in textile mill". Their hands were forced by policy and in some cases violence. Societies are reticent and often reactionary. When that reluctance endangers the progress of the governing interests (capital here for all intents and purposes) suddenly "mysterious power"s become less fun to talk about.

But hey you don't have to listen to me; it also doesn't matter what we think anyways because like I'm saying its not like there is much personal choice in this shift -- unless youre in the really upper echelons, I guess then you can do whatever you want.

IMO the BEV is a far more flexible platform for transporation than the ICE.

Batteries are still made as cells. Need one for a car? Put 10,000 together. Need one for an e-bike? Put 10-20 together. Need one for a scooter? Put 5-10 together.

Cell economics are generally the same.

Furthermore, you can make the battery in an ebike or scooter removable and recharge it at work or at a friend's house. No gasoline stink. Or you can make the scooter/blade foldable and haul it in. Again, no gasoline stink.

For urban transport, BEV scaling provides the opportunity to affordably enable these energy efficient modes better than stinky dirty two stroke crap.

I think what can also happen is that you buy a city car with a 100 mile range, but if you need to go far, you rent an "extension battery", maybe a very energy efficient trailer, or even an ICE range extender. Or maybe it just attaches to the back of the vehicle, or if the battery is swappable, you swap in a rentable long range one.

And remember, don't concentrate on current battery economics. Between higher density sodium ion + LFP, sulfur chemistries, solid state, and maybe lithium air batteries, densities will go up by 2-3x in the next ten years. That means less materials, lighter vehicles / battery "rocket equation" for more range from a lighter battery with the same power storage, etc.

Zero or negative emissions is perfect being the enemy of bad. BEVs are an enormous opportunity to mitigate massive amounts of emissions AND be a better product that is cheaper for people.

There does not exist a practical political path to zero emissions right now, as much as it pains me to say so.

What we do need (and there is some political opportunity to do so) is massive funding of BEV transporation at all levels / form factors. There should be a 300-500$ price credit (phasing out 10% per year) for scooters and ebikes to get them prevalent. Make them stupid cheap to adopt.

Fund the hell out of battery development. Double down on all the national lab work on batteries (that lithium air paper recently was nice, we should see stuff like that out of every single national lab).

For cars, the charging part is inconvenient and there's still not enough infrastructure. So maybe combine a 20 kW battery with a hydrogen fuel cell rather than use superchargers. All charging stations are busy? Fine, get a refill of H2 and go.

Hydrogen is even harder to find than charging infrastructure. It’s not easy to convert a gas station into a hydrogen station.

To me the two solutions revolve around simple battery tech.

1. Charging stations like we have now but 100x as many.

2. Battery swap stations a la Nio in China. In their system you buy the car (for pretty cheap) and rent the battery. Makes upfront cost cheaper and batteries need replacing anyway so if you can swap batteries easily you never have to worry about this.

Battery swapping will utterly explode the amount of raw materials needed. It's going to be hydrogen cars simply because it is the genuinely scalable solution. The exact details don't really matter, so long as raw material usage is greatly reduced. You can have cars fully powered by hydrogen, or some kind of PHEV with a fuel cell range extender. Any variation of the idea will work.

I regularly use an EV for several weeks/months at a time and I also own an ICE car. The EV is in no way less convenient. While it takes longer to charge "on the road," I (and most people) only rarely do road trips of a length that intermittent charging is necessary. When I do, the extra 20 minutes spent at a charger is no big deal, you just plan accordingly.

On the flip side, on most days it would be much more hassle to spend 10 minutes or so refueling my ICE car instead of just driving home, connecting my EV and let it charge overnight.

Granted, I have a property that allows the installation of a charger. But so do basically all suburban Americans, many people in cities and around the world. People that live so urban that owning their own charging infrastructure is impractical are probably better served with public transport, anyway.

I charged my ev at my parents house over the weekend. 90kwh on a 1.5k standard outlet.

Charging with electricity is 10x easier remote than gas.

And makes you independent.

You have both of these options with BEV+H2, the H2 is just a ranger extender to keep the battery smaller, refueling on the road more convenient and the car's price lower. Renault has already done this for commercial vehicles (Master and Kangoo ZE). Plus I'm sure there will be options with the H2 tank compartment filled by a larger battery for people who prefer the former.

https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/news-on-air/news/kangoo-z-e-...

I'm not opposed to this idea after all here are also people driving gas instead of normal fuel.

Let's see I still think H2 handling is a little bit more risky

> Let's see I still think H2 handling is a little bit more risky

You should probably read this:

https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...

I used to think it was risky as well, given Hindenburg, Challenger and all. The reality is that it's no more risky than gasoline, it's just different.

Interesting, tx

This was possible because your parents own a house in the suburbs.

This is who EVs are for: People who own houses in the suburbs.

They don't work in cities. They don't work in rural areas. They don't work for renters.

EVs are for people who own houses in the suburbs.

It will help us getting to a place where we don't pump up stuff from below ground which ultimately ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. If we stopped pumping oil out of the ground, we would have left other CO2 sources which are from cyclical sources, and which we can deal with other ways.

> They're cleaner, no doubt. But are they clean enough that a 1-1 replacement could avert massive ecological destruction à la global warming? No they are not.

This is the main reason why I sold my Tesla and went back to my horse and buggy.

The real issue is that Americans are too rich and pampered.

If you reduce disposable income massively in line with the rest of the world, then they won't be able to afford private vehicles and the change will come naturally.

Income is also a measure of value / productivity. So reducing income is reducing value and productivity. Rest of the world will not benefit from reduced us value.

Yeah, this is the crux of it. Many responders here seem to believe they have a choice in the matter, or perhaps more acutely that their limited choiceset is the only factor in what happens.

People seem to have forgotten that government, trade, and economic policies enabled the status quo and it will be used (we can actually see it already is) to modify it. It's pretty hard to justify whining about your pampered lifestyle when the next folks can't even afford to eat.

Forgetting for a second food and agriculture (the biggest problem in carbon pollution that no one likes to talk about), it's no secret that the up front cost of an EV is higher, even with subsidies. It shouldn't be hard to imagine the logical continuation of that concept, extended through to supply chains from chips all the way to raw minerals.

You could provide even rough numbers to back up your claims. For example, personal cars being a "large part" of carbon emissions. A single container ship outputs more emissions than tens of millions of cars. What percentage of carbon emissions are actually associated with cars compared to the other behemoth polluters in the world?

In theory yes it can.

If all energy for making ev comes from renewable.

That's half-true for the running costs (if you ignore material wear, like tires and stuff). But the manufacture of cars (and stuff in general) and the gathering of materials (read: mining) for that costs a lot of energy and, more importantly, causes a ton of other environmental impact.

> But the manufacture of cars (and stuff in general) and the gathering of materials (read: mining) for that costs a lot of energy

Is there a reason that a large part of that could not come from renewables ?

There is literally nothing that we can do with Gas/Oil that we cannot do with electricity, or by extension by converting that electricity in to solid fuels like hydrogen or Power-2-X.

Normally, by the laws of thermodynamics, you cannot extract more energy than you put in a system, but since the energy for renewables is from external sources (mostly derived by the sun/gravity), that means we can severely reduce our CO2 emissions, or even start extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.

1kg of hydrogen has about 36 kWh worth of energy in it, and it requires roughly 50kWh to produce it, which is a bad deal if those 50kWh comes from gas/oil/coal, but if instead they come from excess solar/wind/hydroelectric energy, you're essentially gaining 36 kWh worth of energy that would otherwise be "lost".

Cars need resources one way or the other.

The ideal solution is always going to be mass transit. But if that isn't possible, then the next best idea would be fuel cell cars. They are also a type of EV and therefore zero emissions, but unlikely battery cars they do not have the massive mining requirements.

They require hydrogen storage, though, right? Isn't it a problem to store that densely enough to get meaningful range? I do believe it's popular for city buses, though; they can afford to refuel a lot.

Hydrogen storage is just a tank of gas. For most vehicles that will give you plenty of range. Easily >300 miles.

There's no issue with mass transit. It's possible. It's even inevitable.

I guess it depends what you mean by mass transit but communal, shared transportation solutions that replace private vehicle ownership. Yeah, that's simple.

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