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Damage to roads goes up with the FOURTH power of axle weight. ALL passenger cars create insignificant road wear compared to heavy trucks.

https://x.com/ajisuzu1/status/1681123111364620294?s=46

I can't see that thread, I don't have a Twitter account.

Also, aren't heavy trucks much fewer than regular cars plus don't they have designated routes?

You don't need an account to see a thread: https://nitter.net/ajisuzu1/status/1681123111364620294

Volume does not matter, same with routes. You could probably reduce it to the following, passenger vehicles do no damage to roads. If a road is only driven on my passenger cars it will probably succumb to age/weather damage before weight.

The equation is:

    A * (W / A) ** 4

So, a 2 ton car is 1 unit of damage; a fully loaded 18 wheeler is 20,000 units. On top of that, we expect a 30 mile/day drive from the car, but more like 300+ from the truck. So, throwing in mileage:

    car = 30 units
    truck = 6 million units

If trucks are just 1% of the vehicles on the road, they'd still be 99.9% of the damage.

Dump trucks are even worse.

Transportation engineer here.

They are much fewer, and they do tend to have different travel patterns than other vehicles, and there is an equivalent average daily traffic for truck traffic where you convert each truck into a large number of other vehicles.

When you do that, the wear due to truck traffic still absolutely dominates almost always.

The wikipedia article about the 1950s study which only conjectured a fourth power itself says that is widely contested as implausible data fitting.

I doubt there is any sustainable alterntive to a privately owned two-ton vehicle that is also a privately owned two-ton vehicle. They're all just incredibly inefficient, and pollute in their own way.

> Hybrids can be smaller, cheaper, lighter and gentler on the grid. Each of these matter.

EVs do not affect the grid as much as you would think, and might even benefit the grid once vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home technology (+corresponding economic incentives) becomes more common. Think about it: right now we have enormous amounts of battery storage, sitting idle most of the time, that has already been paid for.

Most people do not charge their EV from empty to full every day, most people aren't using DC fast charging and not during peak hours. Most days the average EV owner probably drives 30 km and charges that amount at home, overnight.

There are probably millions of electric ovens/stovetops in any given country. If they were all turned on at the same time, it would definitely overload the electrical grid. But this doesn't happen, because of their sheer number. We can safely assume each oven will use a fraction of its rated power on average, possibly with a small peak when the average person gets off work.

From my experience, having an EV for daily driving actually changes the electrical consumption less than the months where the pool motor is on. Which makes sense since the pool motor runs all the time (even if it's dual speed).

I disagree. The sustainable alternative is to get an EV for 98% of the time and rent a purpose-built vehicle for the edge cases whether those edge cases are for long distance, towing, or hauling.

Let the rental companies keep and maintain the gas cars.

I agree, but most people don't want to think that way.

Plugin hybrids are a great answer for those people, but they're not buying those either. I mean, roughly 90% of car trips in the US are under 30 miles roundtrip. Therefore, nearly every PHEV is designed to handle 30 miles of fully electric driving. That means they are an EV 90% of the time for the average consumer.

The problem is, most consumers don't understand this so when they see that a PHEV only has 30 miles of range they think that's absurd when most of the time it's actually more than enough. Of course there are outliers and people who they wouldn't be right for, but we're just talking about most people.

I would love to drive a PHEV, but the math just doesn't work out. They're $10-$20k more than the ICE equivalent. At best I'm going to save like $1000 a year on gas.

You're right about the math. I don't blame you for making the decision based on the cost difference, but not everyone makes a car buying decision that way so it's important to point out the other benefits for the folks who are willing to pay more for those other benefits.

Every time I suggest “just rent a ICE for the edge case trips” people look at me like I’ve just kicked their dog

It does decrease the amount of trips you take, to be fair. It doesn't have to, but it does.

Also, renting is a pain. I used to rent 6-10 times a year and about 50% of the time you'd get what you asked for, or had to run to an airport for better selection. I'd ask for a subcompact and they'd give me a van, vice versa...

Seriously, I am very surprised how resistant people are to it. When I was younger my dad had a big car and all year he would drive it by himself to work, but we ”needed” this big car once a year to go on family vacation and then filled that car to the brim for this one trip. It would have made so much more sense to just have a small commuter car for his daily commute and then just rent a gigantic car once a year for the family trip that could actually hold all our stuff.

With the monetary and opportunity cost of renting (hassle, unpredictability, risk) it makes sense very very quickly to just own an ICE car for the predictable edge cases.

Have you rented a car recently? It’s a nightmare half the time.

In engineering I’d call that a high risk single point of failure.

There is no fundamental reason for car rental to be that awful.

App-based free floating rental cars (think e-scooters, but with actual cars) are ubiquitous in large German cities and work extremely well. There are usually several free cars within a 5 minute walking distance, and booking one takes less than 30s. You can even pre-book a car the day before, and the company will bring it close to your home (if necessary), and reserve it for you.

The classical rental car experience (AVIS and co.) is comically bad in comparison.

Avis was fine the 1 and only time I used it. Car was ready waiting for me in the parking lot. Just hop in they said. Keys inside. Quick check at the gate and that's it

But things could have gone wrong. Hassle was lurking around every corner.

Your own car also could break down.

Not sure about Germany but in London Zipcar are almost comically expensive. Basic Vauxhall Corsa for £85/day, plus an upfront joining fee. Pricing up a random week in Feb, I could rent a similar car from a traditional hire company for a whole week for less than £70.

What are you talking about? If car rental is your nightmare, you frankly haven't lived.

I rented a Toyota Rav for a road trip from Seattle the SW for 12 days. $700 plus fuel and done. That hyperbolic math you haven't done doesn't check out.

So you are telling me, that for a car with a 30k MSRP, instead of renting it once a year for 700$ for a road trip, I should purchase it outright... Because of unpredictability and risk? Millions of people rent cars every day. Maybe your hassle tolerance is infinitesimally low?

In engineering, I'd call it innumeracy.

The last time we rented a car, they refused to give us any car. We had paid over $400 already. There were no other rental options anywhere. My father had to drive 14 hours round trip to pick up my family.

But yeah, I’m sure renting cars is always just perfect and never a nightmare.

Why did they refuse? That makes it sound like they had cars but decided not to give you one, despite your pre-payment.

That’s precisely what they did. It was a one-way rental paid for on the Hertz website, and the local guy didn’t want to give up the car. So he refused.

When I called Hertz about it, they said they had no authority over the local agents. When I press them on it, they hung up on me.

There are definitely omitted parts to this story. We get it. Everyone does it. But this is definitely not the whole story.

Of course there are other parts to the story. But you have the salient facts.

What I'm pretty sure happened is that rental cars were in high demand for quite a while after Covid, and the local office didn't want to lose a car. (One way rental away from a small market, means there's not much of a chance of somebody delivering a car one-way back to that location anytime soon. So that means they have to pay to get a car shipped in from another market.) So they refused to give the car up.

If you want to hear the excuse the local agent originally gave it was that the rental was in my wife's name but the card it was paid for was my MIL's card. It was my wife who went in to get the car at first. But when both my wife and MIL went in to get the car, he still refused to give up the car, and stated that he wouldn't rent them a car.

So you can believe whatever you want about how I'm hiding things in the story. Believe me, if I spent the time to tell the whole story, it wouldn't reflect poorly on us, but only make Hertz look much, much worse.

Is it that hard to believe that a consumer had a bad experience with a rental company? I mean, seriously... have you ever watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles? It's only funny because so many people have experienced it. I'm not the only one in this thread citing a nightmare experience with a car rental.

A couple I am friends with tried to rent a car in NYC the day before Thanksgiving. Reserved a car online in advance, got to the rental place, only to be told that no vehicles were available. So instead of a car, they had to take the only form of transportation they could arrange at the last minute: the Megabus. Which is always fun with a small baby and luggage.

As I understand, theirs is a fairly common post-pandemic car rental experience.

> Have you rented a car recently? It’s a nightmare half the time.

I've run into this and it sucks. "all our cars are rented"

there are times when there are no cars.

Most of my car rental experiences are like that one Seinfeld episode. I reserve car X, and when I get there, they say they don't have car X (that they allowed me to reserve) but I can use car Y. Sometimes it doesn't matter at all, especially if they're going to pay for the gas. But it does bother me that I want a Honda Civic and walk out with a Dodge Charger or Ford F250.

> Have you rented a car recently? It’s a nightmare half the time.

I have never had a nightmare experience renting vehicles, and I do it fairly often. Perhaps I'm lucky.

Driving your own car is comfortable, especially if you have been driving it for a while. I especially want my car, that I know, on a long distance trip.

Especially now that UI design of cars has started to follow the experimental churn of the mobile phone industry instead of following most established designs everyone is familiar with.

Because for most people, the edge case trips are holiday ones. Which a lot of people tend to have at the same time: so try renting a vehicle when everyone needs one.

"Just alter your lifestyle to match the kind of car I want you to buy"

I agree and more or less live this way, but it doesn't work for everyone or everywhere. In order to be able to easily and cost efficiently rent a car you need the right infrastructure.

Totally agree. Hybrid still make a lot of sense and It's a real shame most brands released half-baked hybrids and jumped straight to EVs, other brands never even bothered with hybrids. I drive a Volvo XC40 PHEV and I can go a whole month without running the engine, I only do so on long trips or idle it for fluids to run through it. And it only added $20 to my electricity bill (not living in the US).

I'd really like to see a plug-in hybrid pickup where I can do 10-20 miles on a charge without needing the gas engine to even kick on. I get that by the time you put all that infrastructure in, an engineer starts asking why we don't just omit the ICE and add batteries for range... but I think there is an unmet need. That would allow me to do at least 50-70% of my miles all electric.

I do quite a lot of truck stuff: 2-3 major construction projects a year, gathering / transporting multiple cords of firewood at various stages annually, commercial landscaping, driving forestry roads for engineering work and hunting, etc. And I have a motorcycle that works a lot of the time for commuting needs. BUT, I also have kids and so I do end up needing a passenger vehicle, a need which is unfortunately filled by my truck since my wife has to also commute.

There is no way an electric vehicle would allow me to do the stuff I do. My truck offers 385 miles of range, and I usually carry enough extra fuel to get double that when I go into some extremely remote locations where there will simply NEVER be charge infrastructure. And I absolutely need it sometimes. I saw some poor guy driving that road get stuck in a Tesla out in the middle of nowhere. Not sure what that guy was thinking but he ended up getting towed out after failing to get a charge off of a gas generator after running it for 8 hours. It's bad fire country out there and he's very lucky that wasn't a concern at the time.

> I'd really like to see a plug-in hybrid pickup where I can do 10-20 miles on a charge without needing the gas engine to even kick on.

Next year, the 2025 RamCharger

https://www.ramtrucks.com/revolution/ram-1500-ramcharger.htm...

92-kilowatt-hour battery pack paired with a 130-kilowatt generator

This is the ideal middle ground.

I would like for the market to stabilize around PHEV for a decade while the rest of the infrastructure catches up.

That looks awesome!

Hybrids are indeed really neat but I think your math is off.

Yes EVs are heavier but 1,000lbs more is not causing the type of wear to roads that you think it is. Model y is something like 4,300lbs. Max load capacity of a semi is 80,000lb distributed across multiple axles. Most trucks are probably not loaded to max but I could see the axle weight hitting 20k lbs.

Heavier vehicles are definitely going to need heavier compound tires or potentially cause more wear on the tires. I don't think tires is a worthy argument. Even a Hybrid is going to be consuming tires and then you are going to have to get into the argument of which is the lesser evil, potentially increased tire wear or increased point of use pollution.

The grid is just fine. Most charging happens at night and EVs have the potential to reall help out the grid. There is a large push for smarter home devices to min/max use depending on the grid condition. In times of overgeneration, EVs can soak up that energy.

That's because the American car market is pure nonsense, it's not a problem of EV.

My own electric car is close to half the weight of a petrol F150. So the F150 uses more petrol and wears more tire as well.

Those kind of massive cars are only needed for farmers and construction workers in the first place.

And yet millions of people who don't work in those industries chose F150s. You can't solve the climate problem by telling people what they should want.

And yet that's exactly why they got this vehicle in the first place, because of some tax rebates on larger vehicles. Somebody else already chose it for them.

Pigouvian taxes also work in the car industry and this industry isn't that special.

> My own electric car is close to half the weight of a petrol F150.

Looking at the Ford website, a F-150 starts at just over 4000lb. So your EV is a bit over 2000lb? Which one is it?

beware, lots of hybrids are basically scams.

Range extenders probably aren't what you expect - You still have to charge.

For example the bmw i3 range extender won't let you drive on gas. It will put charge in the battery while you are driving or stopped, but it won't generate nearly enough power to keep up with freeway driving.

Other hybrids are basically ICE cars that can capture a little power and feed it back.

and hybrids have twice the complexity - all of ICE + all of EV.

The complexity is the killer for me. I think with the advances in efficient (>90%) propane synthesis and direct fuel cells, we will see some fuel cell hybrids to give the fuel cells time to warm up. But even then, the extra complexity is very high.

Honestly; as a guy who traded in his pickup for an EV - I won't buy a Hybrid. Too many moving parts and performance is generally crap until you get into price ranges I'm not willing to pay.

Re: Range - ~250 miles is perfectly fine for me and mine 99% of the time. I haven't paid for charging since (checking...) July 2023. Roughly 6mo. Else, we take the Mrs 600mile range SUV the 1-2x/year it would be awkward to take my car.

If my wifes car died today? I have absolutely no idea what I'd replace it with. Dailying an EV for ~4 years now, I'm not sure I'd be ok going purely EV household yet.

Hybrids have the most maintenance and catch on fire more than 10x more than EVs. They are solving a problem that shouldn't be solved.

Car fires aren't the a significant enough cause of car crash deaths to matter.

Maintenance seems to be a manufacturer problem more so than a hybrid vs others problem. Toyota Priuses have been the beater Taxi of America for a good decade now. These hybrids are troopers.

If Rivian and Tesla maintenance stories are any indication, Full-EVs seem to be an order of magnitude behind on dealing with problems during the ownership period.

Maintenance has nothing to do with EV vs gas. I have a 2011 Nissan Leaf. Maintenance is keeping the tires inflated and changing the wiper blades. 50k miles and still on its first set of brake pads.