Comment by zhdc1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zhdc1 | Hacker News Reader

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So yes and no.

> ...and you never have to worry about stopping at a gas station - the car is ready to go every morning and you don't even have to think about it!

If you have a home charging station. This immediately excludes a - very - large number of people in the EU and metropolitan US who live in multifamily housing or older towns and cities.

> an electric drivetrain is a way better driving experience than the miserable turbocharged 4-cylinder engines that everyone has been forced to use for fuel economy reasons today, even premium brands like Mercedes and BMW. These are nasty, underpowered, vibrating pieces of shit with no torque and no power unless you run them at thousands of RPM, where they're loud and buzzy. Just complete fucking garbage.

What are we comparing? A Tesla Model 3 against most non-premium cars? Of course. An MG5 EV/Roewe EI5 against a BMW B48 or a Honda K20C1? Questionable.

Let's not forget that there are plenty of fuel efficient 6 cylinder mild hybrid platforms that, quite frankly, compete very well with premium EVs. Range anxiety aside, are they necessarily better? Again, questionable, but the overall package that comes with an M340d or an A6 55TFSI is better than the equivalent Model 3/S (or even, imo, any of BMW or Audi's EVs).

Climate change is a species-ending threat. Emissions caused by fossil fuels is a huge piece of that.

> Climate change is a species-ending threat. Emissions caused by fossil fuels is a huge piece of that.

It's not a species-ending threat (at least, to humans). That said, the realistic outlook for global warming is bad enough.

EV is a technology in transition. It will get there. It's getting there. It's not "there" yet for every use case.

Why? A large part isn't because of the technology, it's about population density. The countries that pollute the most also happen to have sub-par public transportation networks. Range anxiety isn't an issue when the default option for most people is light rail.

The solution is likely going to come down to: 1. Urban planning. Car friendly zoning, building codes, minimum parking requirements, and other regulations are starting be reversed in the US. It's already happened across most of the EU.

2. Switch to low emissions electricity generation. Power plants are still the leading emitter, full stop.

3. EV adoption. My point above wasn't an argument against EVs as a technology, but a statement of fact that - as a technology in transition - it's not superior for all major use cases. This should change over the next couple of decades.

I mostly agree with what you said but

> Power plants are still the leading emitter, full stop.

is not true, at least not regionally. In Massachusetts, for example, power is 20% of emissions while transportation is 37%.

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-clean-energy...

In Canada heating is the leading emitter. And even if power is the leading emitter in the OP's region, power plants are lowering their carbon output far faster than any other source.

I assume you mean the power mix is shifting to solar/wind. Or are coal power plants lowering their carbon emissions somehow?

Coal -> Natural Gas is still the leading source of emissions reduction, but that transition is nearing its completion. The shift to solar/wind is what will continue the transition.

Never forget, the electric car is here to save the car industry, not the planet.

It is species-ending, but not for humans. And human-made climate change is far behind direct over-exploitation and habitat destruction due to sprawl and agriculture in terms of what things are actually killing species.

Because of modern consumerism, something that convincing everyone to replace one working car for a newly constructed one doesn’t solve. Quite the opposite really.

From a CO2 standpoint, replacing an ICEV with an EV is a net positive. There are some super efficient ICEVs like a Prius where that might be a more equal trade but for most other ICEVs it really is worth doing.

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