Electric Cars Are Still Not Good Enough | Hacker News Reader

Electric Cars Are Still Not Good Enough

theatlantic.com

12 pointsbookofjoe16 comments

For the present, electric cars are mainly vehicles for conveying a sense of smug superiority onto well-to-do people.

If you fly overseas yearly, you burn so much jet fuel that your driving doesn't matter.

Yeah, I know this is gonna sound pretty obvious, but you don’t get to the endpoint without a lot of bumps along the way. It’s a bit of chicken and egg problem. Technology and infrastructure just doesn’t appear magically.

But the good news is, China started a decade ago and we’re well on our way

Electric vehicles will soon be cheaper than ICE vehicles. That’ll accelerate the snowball

Now all China needs to do is stop burning so much coal.

China burns less coal per capita than:

  * Serbia
  * Australia
  * Greece
  * Germany

amongst others including several US states (US overall isn't far behind).

Wait, what?

In 2020, China was burning 82.27 exajoules, Germany 1.84 exajoules. Reference: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

According to their national censuses, China's population in 2020 was 1,419.9m. Germany's was 84.4m.

That's .0579 exajoules per million in China, .0218 per million in Germany. Looks like... less than half coal per capita in Germany?

There's some less reliable, more recent statistics, but nothing at all that hints that Germany is burning more coal than China per capita. Sources?

Even if it were true, per capita figures where the we are dividing by a vast number of people living in third-world conditions are disingenuous.

If we are looking at any sort of pollution, we should only divide it by the headcount of those actual consumers who produce it. Not hundreds of millions of their countrymen who just pad the per capita denominator.

In related news, Canada doesn't pollute that badly ... per square kilometer.

All righty then, at exajoule per million square kilometers, China's still way ahead burning coal at 8.572 versus Germany at 5.146.

Canada burned only half an exajoule of coal in 2020 per my source quoted above. That's, uh, .013 exajoule per million residents, far below China or Germany, or .05 exajoule per million square kilometers, again far below China or Germany. So yeah, Canada doesn't pollute with coal that badly. Good job Canada.

I still don't even know what "those actual consumers who produce it" is supposed to mean. Like, people who work at coal plants? Are you sentient?

They are building nuclear plants.

They are transitioning off fossil fuels faster than the US. Keeping in mind that we also use them to produce a large majority of our things.

Look at the slope between US, EU, and china: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?t...

But that’s irrelevant to driving electric cars.

A really big problem with electric cars is they just aren't well suited to cold climates.

>Electric vehicles accounted for 82.4% of new vehicles sold in 2023, up from 79.3% in 2022, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-....

https://archive.ph/VPwlp

> Public chargers are sorely lacking and prone to malfunctions[...] But price matters most of all

Either you own a garage or you don't. How could price matter more than that?

50% people in EU are living in apartments. That means that you are excluding 50% of potential buyers because it is more affordable for them to own gas car - cheaper and "charged" faster

I don’t think they should be considered potential buyers until their streets are lined with chargers.

Text-only, no Javascript, works where archive.ph is blocked:

    curl -si40A "" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/americas-lost-year-electric-cars/677686/ \
    |grep -o "ArticleParagraph_root.*</p>" \
    |sed 's/.\{61\}/<meta charset=utf-8\/>/' > 1.htm

    firefox ./1.htm
    links -no-connect -force-html 1.htm

Disabling Javascript also works. Ads require Javascript, but reading the article does not

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