That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly.
We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.
We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.
Nothing is a silver bullet but I'll be much happier when we're done with ICE noise and exhaust.
Agreed. I can't even hear the engine in my car on the highway over tire and wind noise.
You mean like at a stop light or even a stop sign? A very common thing to be near in a city?
And what is your point, in general? Engines make noise. That's not under dispute.
> As required by the PSEA, (1) this rule proposes to establish FMVSS No.141, Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles, which would require [quiet vehicles] to produce sounds meeting the requirements of this standard. This proposed standard applies to EVs and to those HVs that are capable of propulsion in any forward or reverse gear without the vehicle's ICE operating. The PSEA requires NHTSA to establish performance requirements for an alert sound that is recognizable as motor vehicle in operation that allows blind and other pedestrians to reasonably detect a nearby EV or HV operating below the crossover speed. The crossover speed is the speed at which tire noise, wind noise, and other factors eliminate the need for a separate alert sound.
>[...]
> This standard will ensure that blind, visually-impaired, and other pedestrians are able to detect and recognize nearby hybrid and electric vehicles by requiring that hybrid and electric vehicles emit sound that pedestrians will be able to hear in a range of ambient environments and contain acoustic signal content that pedestrians will recognize as being emitted from a vehicle. The proposed standard establishes minimum sound requirements for hybrid and electric vehicles when operating under 30 kilometers per hour (km/h) (18 mph), when the vehicle's starting system is activated but the vehicle is stationary, and when the vehicle is operating in reverse.
Some ICE cars are noisier by choice of course but modern commuter cars are very quiet at the exhaust typically, the road noise is the dominant noise.
I have cars driving past me at about 50kph right now, I am barely hearing the engine for about 3 seconds or less as it passes, and the road noise continues to be audible for about 20-30 seconds. Pretty much all I am hearing is road noise. Same was true when I lived near a highway. Just a whooshing blob of road noise.
Indeed at slow speeds EVs are quieter. That probably does make a difference for inner city traffic, which is also where you really want less tailpipe emissions, EVs help there too.
It's pretty evident when you drive next to a large vehicle with knobby tires meant for off-roading (Jeeps seem to commonly have these). The tire noise is easily MUCH louder, even ignoring any engine noise.
The other thing, broadly, is road construction can lead to a huge difference in noise from highways. I'm sure you've experienced huge differences depending on the road surface.
I think that is good in one aspect though, road noise is the only warning you get that an EV is approaching, which in a PED/Cylcing friendly city is important.
Personally, I'd prefer strongly if road noise were eliminated entirely. It'd lead to a better society broadly by reducing noise pollution. Ped/cyclist safety is better handled by other policies than "just make more noise" IMO.
EVs are just cars, any tire that you can put on an EV you can also put on an ICE car, so that is not a differentiator.
EVs tend to be heavier though, and weight is a primary factor in how fast a tire wears.
Not to mention the jerks intentionally making noise with loud engine mods but I guess there's no getting rid of them.
I really don't think it is. We're thrusting ourselves into just new problems. Yes, we move away from old problems that gas-powered cars have, but we move into new problems. For one, EVs perpetuate the idea of the car, which is perhaps the most dangerous part. Then, there's all sorts of new things like building out the infrastructure required for EVs and mining the new materials. For example, have you looked into the areas where lithium mining occurs? It is not a clean process and brings its own new problems, especially for the local people. You have foreign owned and operated companies move in and suck out manufactured value from the land, all the while polluting the local ecosystem. It's oil all over again.
It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is. Yes, we should probably switch to EVs, but we should be switching away from cars as a whole. But we're not. Cars are selling more than ever. It's not contrarianism to simply look at facts rather than hype.
Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
*) it's estimated up to 20% of the US's defence budget is spent protecting oil supplies for a start, which effectively acts as a subsidy of around 70c a gallon.
If you want to undo the car centric culture and economy, you cannot just ignore the broad base of popular support it enjoys.
So yes the car is convenient but we also built many things to make it more convenient. In places where subways/rapid transit are made more convenient, there’s of course less parking and less road space and naturally % of car ownership goes down
It’s a choice. It’s not naturally always based on the merit of the car.
There's order of magnitude 1 car per US resident. Does it seem like there are 800 parking spots per US resident? A quarter of a trillion total parking spots?
I doubt my car parks in 800 unique places (including different street parking spots as unique) in a given year.
On the smaller end, call each space 16'x8'. That puts a little more than 2% of the entire land mass of the US as parking spaces (assuming I didn't get any of the exponents wrong).
If we did it once for cars we could do it again agin 'em.
I'm happy to accept the reality that currently we have no form of alternative transport technology that offers the same comfort & convenience of the car - but I also believe we'd've been better off in the long run if public spending hadn't been so grotesquely skewed in favour of that particular option - other technologies would have had a better chance to come to the fore (e.g. why have e-bikes/e-scooters taken so long to become popular - there's no particular reason I know of they couldn't have been a big part of our transport network 20 or 30 years ago), we could have laid out our cities so we didn't need to travel such huge distances on a regular basis (vs, e.g. occasional long-distance travel between dense hubs where most facilities and services could be accessed via walking/cycling etc.), goods transportation could've been revolutionised by dedicated automated networks etc. etc. For me the most convincing argument that exists against the size (and reach) of government power that we've become accustomed to is that so many opportunities for a better balance of transportation options have been lost to a virtually single-minded focus by the powers-that-be over the last 70 or 80 years on private cars above all else.
This is kind of a chicken and egg problem.
The value of a car is proportional to the extent of the road network. There is no value (for most cars) in isolation.
The original push for government investment in car-friendly infrastructure and highways was from industrialists, technocrats, and military minds. It was top-down planning, not bottom-up. After those major infrastructure investments (and divestments from commuter rail), the car was an obvious choice. Everything after that was self-reinforcing: more cars -> more roads -> more cars -> more roads. Of course if you already own a car then it is a sunk cost and you will prefer the government spend more on car infrastructure to benefit you, further perpetuating the investment cycle.
If the initial circumstances had been different (maybe progress in electrification proceeded a little faster and oil refining a little slower) then public transit and urban planning might have developed differently and the car would not be as important as it is now (practically a necessity in most of the US).
In the US, this is true.
In most European cities, you can just walk instead, or take the metro or a tram.
It's really convenient to just walk to where you want to go, and when the grocery store is a 10 minute walk away, you don't need to fill a car with groceries. Just go more often.
Need to go further? Clean and safe public transportation is often more convenient than having to drive yourself.
I really like being able to read a book on my way to work rather than paying attention to the road and making sure i don't kill myself or someone else.
Undoing our mistake is always an option.
I will not take my kids on any transit where they might be assaulted by a naked homeless man. America will never have safe public transit because it lacks the will to handle the mentally ill and addicts.
Thankfully in Australia's biggest cities our public transport systems are generally clean and safe to use - but a) they're not always super reliable, despite some improvements in recent years b) they're often poorly interconnected, meaning I could potentially do 80% of the journey sitting in comfort on a train, but spend 3 times longer than it would take to drive trying to deal with getting to/from train stations and c) there are still huge areas of said cities that are fairly poorly served by trains, and buses will always be a second rate way of getting around. Oh and d) you can't carry v. large items or animals on most public transport (*). All solvable problems, some easier than others, but there's a distinct lack of real political will to do so.
(*) e.g. it'd be a 15 min train ride to take my dog to the beach from where I live, but she's not a service animal so wouldn't even be allowed on, despite taking up less space than a human.
If you want to make wholesale changes quickly, you probably need the support of voters.
Nobody put 240V center-tapped, 60 Hz AC residential electricity to the voters either, but if you wanted to change it, you're probably going to need a strategy and a communications campaign to explain why and how.
London: 3.6b pounds https://www.google.com/search?q=london+tube+government+subsi...
New York: $7.2 billion https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics
Amsterdam: 370m euros for 3 months service https://www.railjournal.com/financial/dutch-government-provi....
Ok, Hong Kong appears to turn a profit.
(Even more abstractly, it doesn’t matter whether or not public transit is highly subsidized, so long as the positive externalities of that subsidization are deemed worth it. You don’t get to the size and density (and corresponding economic output) of cities like NYC by allocating personal parking space for every resident.)
If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.
EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs.
One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.
If we look at the economics of Uber and Uber Eats, we see that they have shifted to ride sharing and also delivery sharing. In that, it makes more sense to bundle up multiple people and deliveries into one. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like buses?
https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/design-change.html is very old and there are newer discussions, but I'm too lazy to find them for you. Also michaelmrose's answer.
It's also heavily subsidised and its cost does not include a signficant chunk of externalities.
Also, this has been discussed to death, but a large chunk of car usage can be replaced by other modes of transportation. However, that transition requires upfront infrastructural investment.
Sadly, arguments like yours ensure that investment won't happen. So, externalities will keep piling up, until the situation will get dire enough that 1. it can't be ignored anymore and 2. it's too late to meaningfully undo the damage.
> "Faced with severe shortages of oil .. Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia."
Had they not decided to invade Indochina (and China before that) US wouldn’t have embargoed oil exports to Japan.
It's OK to be against the Iraq war or all war, but it's not OK (or at least accurate) to say it was so we could get their oil, pretty much the exact opposite.
Stop fighting it, you're wasting energy.
pursuit of convenience and immediate utility with scarcely a thought for consequences propels us toward hard physical limits at speed
Not where I live, in north western Europe. Here the subways are fast, and not many use cars inside the city. Many buses and bike lanes too.
Here, cars are slow: traffic queues, finding a parking lot. But the subway never runs into any traffic queues.
And the subway is many times cheaper than a car's monthly cost. And I can read HN on the subway
Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about?
EV's have the potential to dramatically reduce our reliance on gasoline. Current EV technology is far from perfect, but do you think people will just stop having personal transportation? Do you think it's better to keep using gasoline cars forever? So you agree that some kind of non-gasoline personal vehicle is likely to be dominant for some time as a method of personal transportation, unless you are just ignoring reality completely or think that people will magically change how they live in even more fundamental ways without incentives to do so, which is magical thinking. So EVs are inevitable, since there is no other credible alternative to gasoline personal vehicles that is even proposed, and EVs are starting to displace gas vehicles in significant numbers.
So keep shouting as much as you like about how we need to 'stop normalizing the idea of a car' but just realize that less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the world will even bother to listen to it, and in the meantime we are likely to end up building several billion electric cars before another alternative comes around. If you want to change the world, develop the technology that makes it make sense to act the way you want people to act, because nothing else will persuade anybody.
Not that, for starters.
Is there data that proves inconclusively that electric vehicles AND the new infrastructure and mining and every other systematic thing that comes along with them and doesn't currently exist is actually (not just hopes and dreams) less impactful on the environment? Because as far as I can tell, your comment relies on that, and I haven't seen that data. I could care less about holding on to gas-guzzling cars. I would just like to understand things better before jumping headlong into a "solution" that may or may not be any better. And there are massive incentives for companies to jump into EVs, so there is a lot of conflict of interest with EVs. Can corporations and investors be trusted when they stand to make a fortune?
Again, my point is to reach an understanding. I do not currently understand why EVs are some bastion of hope when it comes to cars. The best data that I have seen does not account for disposal of batteries nor the mining, long term maintenance and upkeep and continual use of EVs, infrastructure, etc. when it comes to EVs. And if they are better, then where is the crossover point when all this is considered? Is it 10 years? 50 years?
And yes, I do think re-enforcing the car is not a good idea. You can think it's unrealistic, and sure, in the short term it probably is. But we shouldn't just throw our hands up and reach for a new "solution" that just brings new problems.
It is hard to find, but what I have found is that EVs cross over, in terms of emissions, around 6-24 months into ownership over ICE vehicles. This accounts for manufacturing to use. As far as I could tell, it does not take into account the new mining required, the new manufacturing centers, the new infrastructure, battery disposal, end of life scenarios, etc. Basically, what I've already said.
These are systems. Yes, in isolation EVs are better than ICEs. As you start to broaden the viewpoint, I think things get a loss less definitive such that the wins become a lot less impactful.
Being honest, I think the main reason that EVs have so much hype is that because people plan on making a lot of money from the lithium and other mines and selling the EVs.
Entangling ideology with progress is a recipe for getting nothing at all. We see this consistently in climate activism and drug activism. If you try to use a crisis (say, global warming) as a wedge to force your ideology (say, austerity) on the public, you get zero progress on said crisis.
But that's not "entangling ideology with progress", that's just ... pointing out the drawbacks of a progressive initiative (EVs).
Put another way, the idea of a burger decoupled from the beef industry has few negative externalities. The idea of a car decoupled from fossil fuels does.
Article here: https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/ Research here: https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/tyre-emissions
Right now, there's a big push to move to EVs. However, in the long run you might end up with more cars total. As the old cars aren't going away for a while. So you're kinda pushing a even heavier car dependence on society. All for a small net gain of reducing a few ICE vehicles.
If the same subsidies were also applied to (electric) bikes, public transit etc it would instead actually shift behavior.
EVs aren't saving society. They're saving the car industry.
Can do it cheaper like how they did in Paris: just give some of the roads and lanes to cyclists. Almost free, might need a bollard in the beginning, but the road is there already.
Maybe some of it, but it's very valid point.
Switching everything about the country's infrastructure from gas to EVs is a huge undertaking. If we're going to do such a massive change, just to end up with something that still carries all the same problems except one, that's a missed opportunity.
If there was a will to spend that quantity of effort in making public transit practical for the long haul and heavily promoting cycling and e-bikes for the short haul we'd be much better off.
Certainly no, that's not why people are "cautious". They are hesitant about EVs because they fear running out of "gas" mid-trip.
Most people don't give a shit about anything except their plans and needs (and not necessarily unreasonbly so). You can just look around at what kinds of cars most people purchase to reason what their priorities are (or are not).
Reducing greenhouse gasses are not on most people's priority list.
So for affordability's sake, figure out how to avoid cars entirely is the best bet.
Assuming charging is available at most gas stations on US highways, it's still not attractive to most people to have to wait 30 minutes (or whatever) for a fast charge to allow them to continue their journey.
Norway might be a good use case, but currently the US is not a good use case (except in town). So US buyers will still need one gasoline car for road trips.
Personally I'd prefer passenger train infrastructure over millions of electric cars. Equal or more cars is, as the article notes, still a bad thing.
Well no, it wasn't. My partner just bought a new EV recently and range anxiety is huge. I've been researching places to charge and there's nothing convenient nearby. There's an old business campus but it's a sketchy area to go sit for an hour or more. There's one near a starbucks close by but they are ridiculously expensive (95c/kwh). The best one is at a whole foods, but requires driving 15 minutes away from their destination, go sit there for an hour and then drive to campus. Not so great.
Would be better to walk, bike, take public transport or similar or course. And if your area makes that not viable, consider fixing that.
(All the famed bicycle paths in Copenhagen are relatively new - they can be added anywhere.)
Soil exhaustion, poisoning, and erosion; groundwater depletion and poisoning; deforestation; wild ecosystem destruction and food web destabilization; coastal sea surface and seabed destruction; river and lake poisoning; acid rain; carting invasive species around the world willy-nilly; anoxic ocean zones; hunting fish species to extinction; the ruinous effects of mineral and sand mining... all in parallel with the effects of extra carbon in the atmosphere.
Just to put things in context.
If anyone was serious about any of this, wfh for anyone that can is such an obvious solution with by far the lowest cost. Its a solved problem, we just don’t like the solution enough.
Fixing that is much harder than switching to EVs and would have a massive environmental impact. Buildings have 2x more global warming footprint than transportation.
A bike ala a Tern cargo bike solves most of a family with kids needs where I live. (disclaimer, I'm not living in a car based society like the US). Then for hauling big stuff or something one just rents one of the share cars in the street for an hour or two.
But I do live in the US where the city is fairly car-centric, and it is ludicrous to suggest as the person I first replied to did that a cargo e-bike is a full replacement for a short-range electric car like a Leaf. There are large commercial sections of my city that cannot be safely accessed by bike, as the only ways to get there include highway off-ramps that have a 12-inch shoulder, with concrete barriers to the right and cars going 50mph just a few feet to the left.
Few people would regularly bike on such a route with their children. Especially in inclement weather.
I can take care of 70% of my day to day life with my ebike. But for the remaining 30%, a car really is necessary. And that 20% is too frequent to rent, especially lacking the inexpensive carshare services of other countries.
> If a low range EV is enough 100% just buy a bike.
Pretending that a short-range electric vehicle is not useful because ebikes exist is just sticking one's head in the sand and pretending that people unlike oneself and locations unlike where one lives do not exist.
People will buy a car because otherwise they would be a low status male and they want to f#. Note that cars are expensive, I live in a poor country with absurd interest rates, so many are making debts that they will need a decade to get rid of, if ever, just so they can constitute a family.
Here at least car culture is squeezing the middle class into indebtedness and poverty and overcrowding the streets with cars and idiots, not a causal relation but a dangerous combination. Cars are great tools but f# car culture.
Road tripping. Visiting far away family. Day at the lake or beach. Going camping. How do you convince people to give all of that up and just be content with whatever is 15min away.
The USA subsidizes the suburbs to an absurd degree, pushing most of the costs into the future and making city dwellers pay more than their share for the rest.
Living in a relatively large house in the suburbs should in principle cost several times more than living in a flat in the city, because it requires vastly more infrastructure and the amortized cost of services is much higher. But our broken economic system has flipped this around and made suburbs extremely artificially cheap, while making most of the building practices that make denser walkable neighborhoods possible illegal under building codes and local ordinances.
All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park.
What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can afford to live in them. You can imitate such buildings cheaply, what you can’t do is build or maintain the support structures which made such places so appealing.
Wealthy parts of cities have vastly better schools and less crime than the average suburbs, but the American middle class abandoned cities. Air pollution again can go either way, suburbs often have surprisingly terrible air quality made worse by long commutes.
Social norms also vary widely, first graders in Tokyo take public transportation to school alone. This isn’t inherently unsafe or unreasonable.
Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.
Building around roads results in everything being pushed farther away and that includes other people’s homes too.
Do kids attending the same school really live that far apart? Seems like a very long distance, especially in a suburbian neighbourhood.
Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.
My suburban neighborhood also has a metro tax district that funds the roads sewers etc.
In either case, the suburbanites (especially near the beginning of the construction cycle) and initial construction companies are getting a huge subsidy from everyone else (and from future generations) to promote an inherently unsustainable and destructive living arrangement.
It's a kind of Ponzi scheme, and like any other Ponzi scheme, at some point the music stops and then the whole system is in an extremely precarious place.
Of course the suburbs don’t make sense, you have a half mile of road out to a neighborhood and another half mile of street in the neighborhood itself. The percentage of property taxes going to the road is probably just a few percent points. With only a few hundred houses, it would take decades to raise the 1-3 million to replace the road.
And underused parking lots. Dear god the huge, empty parking lots.
The upside of how sparse American suburbs are is that we can repurpose all the junk/wasted land with normal market incentives. Roads can be thinned and the land handed back to the owners of that land, along with the setbacks that are used to force people to maintain water-intensive lawns[1]. Upzoned buildings can be redeveloped to higher density or turned into small commercial stores as market forces dictate. Anyone who wants to hold out can still do so.
None of this requires absolutely banning cars[2]. People will stop driving as cars become less necessary for daily suburban life. Road trips can still happen. So instead of families with three or four cars, maybe they only have one or two. As car infrastructure is used less, it can be repurposed for transit networks that don't suck - i.e. BRT, light rail, or tram systems with dedicated rights of way.
"15 minute city" doesn't mean "you should only ever travel 15 minutes on foot and anything further will be stopped by the pollution police". It means "building a city so that everything you need is closer and more convenient".
[0] Surface street / highway combos, i.e. roads with 3 lanes on each side, highway speed traffic, no pedestrian infrastructure, and business access. They try to do everything and fail at everything.
[1] Incidentally this was sold as a way to stop communism, somehow
[2] OK, but can we still at least ban the giant Escalade mega-SUVs that let you run down like ten kids without even seeing them
You could also rent a car for the 5 or so days a year the average person is doing anything other than commuting, shopping, and other local activities.
Wow, people are going to be pissed off in thirty years. "Why didn't that fix it all? We have to do more?"
There's no reason that an EV needs to weigh as much as a Sherman tank.
And EVs make almost zero brake dust. On many EVs the pads will last the life of the vehicle, unless they malfunction due to non-usage.
So, EVs are a huge improvement.
Recently, tire manufacturers have started phasing out some of the nastier additives in tires (due to a new one causing fish die offs when it rains).
Tire dust is still terrible though. Hopefully, it’ll be the biggest environmental problem today’s toddlers have to deal with.
Also, due to range anxiety, they tend to use low rolling resistance tires that wear more.
I spend more on tires than electricity for my EV, so I can imagine someone offering low efficiency / low wear tires as an option.
The above leads to about 20% more tire dust on average.
Yes, they do. Even our lowly Fiat 500e's consumed tires much faster than any of our ICE cars.
It's not just raw power, which a Fiat 500e doesn't have much.
It's the fact that with an electric motor you have 100% torque at 0rpm starting from a standstill, which is when there is most opportunity to briefly spin the tire. Tire wear is much reduced when driving in a straight line at a constant speed.
There is no such thing as free lunch. If you start absorbing massive amounts of solar, you will have some effect on the environment that we have absolutely no clue about. Same with interfering with wind patterns and ocean currents, which would happen with energy generation at true humanity-scale.
Critical thinking left the room a long time ago.
One great example (some will say absurd and impractical) is just using energy whenever it is available, with minimum storage. That means cooking, heating water etc. during the day (or when the wind is high) and only using lighting and low-energy devices at night. Factories could work on a similar principle (producing more in the summer) but then we would have to rearrange a lot more stuff to suit the seasonal renewable energy production capabilities.
This may sound absurd but it only shows how much we are locked in our way of thinking about how reality is supposed to work, not what it is. There's no reason to have high quality on-demand electrical energy available 24/7/365 other than convenience. Convenience that fossil fuels brought us.
This feels like about as useful a solution as saying "the US could balance their budget by simply disbanding their military". Would it work if implemented? Sure. Would the resulting world be arguably better than before? Quite possibly. Is there a path to that outcome from the present day with a nonzero chance of success? Well...
It magically disappears from this universe of course. The photons know if it is actually being of use to sentient humans and decides to wreak havoc (in some as yet unknown fashion) only in that instance.
I suggest nothing other than what I said - discussions around new technologies, particularly those in response to perceived crises, rarely receive the scrutiny they deserve and rarely show both sides of the coin. This makes me immediately suspicious for the same reasons history has already shown time and time again.
Tidal Energy Is Not Renewable
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/zjl/tide.html
We really have to think this all through before jumping 100% on any particular bandwagon. Researching, testing, seeing how it goes and adjusting is a must.