The grid isn’t ready for 300M EVs by 2030

The rest of Europe has 230V, 3 phases + neutral, with 400V between phases.

The power distribution company is competent, I have full confidence in that. Yes, they have plans and know what they're doing and what's coming - but they need money to do it, and they're not going to get it anytime soon.

At least this country is very pro-nuclear.

IMHO the usage patterns and the population density make this a much harder problem here than in the US.

Many households have multiple cars - one or two for the parents, then maybe one for the eldest child that still lives with the parents. Each car is used daily or almost daily.

There definitely is less daily driving per vehicle - but there's much more vehicles per square kilometer.

Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should compare the average of a city like Berlin, Cologne or Amsterdam, not the average of an entire large state like Germany.

The city where I live has nearly 3 million residents on just 50km2, and it's not even the most dense city around. Compare that to San Francisco (second most dense US city) - which has 815k residents on 120km2.

People here live in very dense cities with agricultural/natural space in between, you don't have that in US cities which are mostly long stretches of single-family households. We don't have single-family households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-rich and the few people living in the villages around the cities.

> If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.

That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue is - the grid isn't able to provide that much power and especially not during peak hours, not to mention the missing power generation capacity. The grid is already nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.

Which may be fine on it's own, but if you're planning on bringing a bunch of new demand on to the grid, you're headed towards an uncomfortable corner.

it's fine if people use ICE vehicles now and then to visit family, go to a specialty store, etc. it's the daily and weekly trips that need to be fixed.

and the breakeven point does not need to be quite so dense as London. for example, the DC area has a lot of sprawly (at least by east coast standards) suburbs. the DC metro has some room for improvement, but it is still much better than a car for getting into and out of the city during peak hours. though I'll admit I sometimes splurge for an Uber. cars are much more competitive when you don't need to park them.

Obviously it wouldn't scale that well for everybody but I wouldn't be surprised to see, if self driving cars master Manhattan, some more well-off people who aren't currently at "private driver" level of rich to move to self-driving cabs or such to avoid crowding and go point-to-point.

The big advantage of the trains was in leaving Manhattan and going to Long Island, though, compared to the car-bottleneck-hell of the bridges and tunnels.

The weirdest thing about moving to car-centric Silicon Valley are the after work drinks. These are often in the office (since they are located at motorway junctions away from anything else) and then you stand there carefully nursing your one drink since you all have to drive home.

In London you'd just go to a pub for a few beers after work with your colleagues, or meet up with other friends after work because you all worked in the city centre anyway so it was easy.

A) This problem does exist in cars. Highways crawl to a standstill when there's an accident.

B) there's no such thing as "train collisions". Its not like cars. They don't get into "accidents". It would be unacceptable for public safety if they did. There are other error modes which cause delays, but its not the same thing as tacitly accepting the deadly consequences of the flow of vehicles being loosely regulated and fully decentralized.

C) I think you're severely undervaluing just how much of a "you problem" it is when your car breaks down vs just how fleeting a problem it is when a train is delayed. The inherent statistical risk of the universe is averaged over everyone. You won't ever be randomly on the hook for 3 digit sums of money at random intervals.

The agency argument really underplays the great freedom of not owning a car. Not owning a car means not being tied to where you are. I can get on a plane and move anywhere on a whim. There's nothing to sell off. I can chase any opportunity I want. I'd rather have two wings than 4 wheels. Hows that for personal agency!

The reason why people own cars is for flexibility and to have some more control over their lives. Which is also a status symbol. It’s also really, really helpful with kids.

Is it still doable with public transit? Yes. And Singapore is easily one of the more pleasant and doable on that front. But it’s also a lot of dealing with crowds, taking time walking (while carrying things) or just not going, having to fit within society, and often having unpleasantness shoved in your face (well, as much as Singapore has anyway, which isn’t a lot) from society as part of the normal routine.

Unlike Paris, SF, NYC, at least you won’t have too many buskers and scam artists messing with you, which is nice.

If you get in a car, due to all the costs and taxes, the experience is generally a more quiet and pleasant one, and you can go anywhere on the island with (less) worry about what loud/raucous/unpleasant mess you might be stuck being near. And if you do get stuck somewhere, as long as you have AC, you can roll up the windows and mostly ignore any shitshow going on. Which is nice.

Compared to NYC, Paris, SF, Seattle on my list of ‘ugh’ places with public transit), it’s not on the bad list at all.

When I lived there, it was about as good as Switzerland or Tokyo with how well it was run (you’re welcome PAP), but obviously a different cultural feel.

Unlike Switzerland, you do have the more Chinese influenced ‘everyone’s business is my business’, especially from the Ajimas.

And if you’re a Gwailo, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb everywhere - and everyone DOES notice - which has pros and cons.

Also, no worries about folks bringing Durian onboard in Zurich for instance.

I didn’t even try Indian public transit, but that’s my loss I guess. It was sketchy enough just using cabs.

Driving in India is an invitation to get scammed and/or ruined on its own, so

I can’t imagine wading through the crowds. That said, the scams tend to be less in your face than in the western societies, and the scammers more subtle and far less violent. Which is nice, I guess?

Germany, Spain, and UK have good public transit, and middle of the pack for pleasantness.

The Danes run decent public transit in the big cities, but the lack of density meant you could easily be stuck somewhere (and have a very long, very cold walk) if you didn’t know the local holiday schedule. And they didn’t do much signage to tell you.

If done well, Public Transit can be very effective and definitely reduces cost and load with having a vehicle.

But it’s not a place for quiet contemplation (except perhaps in Switzerland, but even then it depends on the day), and it means you’re always dependent on the society you’re in and have to know how it works (and when) to get anywhere.

Which can be limiting in a way Americans outside the cities are used to not being limited.

Also, there is a reason New Yorkers are known for being in your face assholes. You would too - or be crushed - if you had to deal with the people in their daily life that they do.

You need to go back more than that. In the 80s nearly every car had rear drum brakes, that phased out in the early 90s or so. Only the very cheapest cars had drums past that timeframe.

> They lasted pretty much the lifetime of the car.

Having owned a few drum braked cars (including all four wheel drums), not really. You still need to change them as they wear out, it's just a lot more work than disk brake pads which can be swapped out in a few minutes.

The rear brakes do a lot less work than the fronts, particularly on smaller lightweight cars (the kind that still had rear drums in the 90s) so in that sense yes, those rear drums lasted a good while (but certainly not the life of the car).

If you put front drum brakes on a fast & heavy car, you'll be wearing them out pretty quick.

Maybe dust in the drum isn’t a problem? Or maybe it’s designed so the dust accumulates somewhere other than on the friction surface inside the drum?

It maybe a false memory effect but I vague remember this notion about trolleybuses.

https://youtu.be/vSNtifE0Z2Q

It seems like this factor could be easily solved with torque output adjustments, but it won’t be unless it’s regulated.

The unwashed masses now expect every BEV to be performant without knowing the maintenance costs of actual ICE performance cars.

Manufacturers feed into this, as dealers love to have repeat customers for an otherwise low-maintenance car.

And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy.

OK.

Do you commute to work by walking? How long does that take you each day? How about the grocery store? How many people do you have to do grocery shopping for? What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.

No, people aren't just lazy. Most people don't have the time or money to live that lifestyle.

Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.

That, and the introduction of the car has allowed people to live far from places of work, food markets, stores, schools, churches, etc. There isn't as much pressure to build closely to minimize distance which is why postwar developments looks like sprawl instead of the compact cities that dominated historically. It becomes necessary to drive everywhere.

> People are just lazy.

Eliminating parking space would change the incentives. If you know parking will be a huge pain, it offsets a good chunk of the convenience. (It might be painful at first, but our current practices are financially unsustainable. Sometimes you have to break crooked bones so that they can be straightened out.)

Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because I like to walk and have always lived places with good public transit.

So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area, I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it often worked.

But I also frequently found direct routes to places I needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park, I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route along El Camino Real would've been short enough to walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.

Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written off as too inconvenient for me.

As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I lived in the area, I'd probably quickly have given up and resorted to learning to drive.

And frankly, that's one of the more pedestrian friendly areas I've visited in the US outside the highest density urban cores.

Already acknowledged, but it doesn't improve the picture for the grid.

> huge parking areas allowing for more dense development and thus shorter overall drive distance.

Ceteris paribus. If we move to EV rideshare, eventually houses might become closer together. But that will be a much slower effect and you'd have to deal with energy usage based on current building distances.

> It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.

Already mentioned.

A whole lot of transit is a chicken and egg problem where people buy cars because the transit options aren't good enough, and so have incentives to use it, and so rider numbers remain too low to justify increasing them and/or it deters people who strongly prefers to use public transit from even moving there.

You need to treat it as a public good not just for those who use it, but for those who might want to use it and even those who don't but end up benefiting from less congestion and the environmental benefits, and be willing to subsidise it more aggressively, and rideshare options, with or without self driving, could help drive down the cost of operating many "bus routes" that'd be particularly expensive to operate with mostly empty full scale buses.

OK, create an incredibly complex transportation system that adds a ton of mechanical failure points—so buddy can read his book uninterrupted, take a nap, or watch a TV show? And what's the net gain for humanity here? If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their work-life balance is problematic.

Who's going to pay for this system? If they pass the costs onto the consumer, the average schmoe isn't going to be able to afford to travel with what maintaining a system of this complexity would cost.

What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the car running alongside the train?

Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to be in the office, let alone all the time. The solutions are travelling less, not increasing the complexity of the transport infrastructure and consuming more juice just because someone doesn't want to stop what they're doing for a minute or two.

People say WFH is apparently bad for productivity—so what's coding from a train? Productivity is measured in value generated and quality of that output, not time invested.

As for cars and trains matching speeds to facilitate transfer of a pod, what's that going to do to the price of real estate so transport can do that all over the place?

The office is dead. Long live the office.

Having to be at the airport 2 hours in advance is solely due to the security theater we all participate in. Back in the 90s you could indeed show up 15-30mins before takeoff. Magic pods aren't going to solve it: you'll just sit for two hours in your pod instead.

Trains in Britain used to detach some cars while driving at high speed, so-called "slip coaches". Turns out it is needlessly complicated while providing negligible real benefit. High-speed rail already operated in a hub-and-spoke structure, and one 5-minute stop every hour 100 miles or so is barely noticeable.

Even if that’s only, say, 10% of the population in less dense areas, it could still make a significant impact on traffic and emissions as well giving an economic boost to downtown areas, since there’s now a reason for people to live near them.

You can take public transport pretty much anywhere you want to go. It’s clean, safe, and generally reasonably priced.

The downside is that houses are smaller and more closely packed. By American standards, the kitchens and bedrooms are cramped.

But dystopia? Hardly.

Yes, it's not a solution for everywhere. It's not a solution for everywhere in Norway either. But the point was not that. The point was that contrary to the comment I replied to, it is perfectly viable to serve areas that are quite low density. When you consider the low density areas in Norway that are served by trains, the proportion of the US population that lives in lower density regions is tiny.

Start solving this for the places with 10+ million people and change rural areas last, if needed (most likely you won't need to change anything).

It’s way easier and safer to charge an EV than to fill a gas car (electricity is everywhere), so you can expect the solutions to come progressively (with some bumps along the way of course)

It’s a good thing, EV will become a big part of the battery we need for a renewable grid, absorbing the excess electricity in period of overproduction.

In my opinion, if people care about the environment, it needs to be bikes, and delivery / utility vehicles only. Everyone else should be on public transit.

Thats not what I said.