What’s even better is less cars and more alternative means of travel. This comes in the form of biking, especially e-bikes, public transport, especially a large variety to serve various needs, and finally better zoning to create walkable neighborhoods and promote movement for going from place to place.
For the remaining trips not covered by the above, aka the exception case, using cars. Most car trips can even be PHEV and our non-freight transportation emissions would be substantially lower.
Even in the worst case scenario of everyone having to drive, PHEVs are a much better option as we transition to a fully society EV. I’m disappointed that most car manufacturers are trying to go through this all or nothing mindset of jumping directly from Gas to EV. A large portion of the population drives less than 50miles a day so a PHEV with ~50miles or range would make a huge dent in our emissions.
Complexity is often cited as the reason for not adopting PHEV, and I think that’s an easy scapegoat, as humans we’ve solved many complex at scale, if we can build massive fleets of Priuses over decades, why can’t we build more of them with a slightly larger battery.
I’ve also heard the economics don’t work out argument against PHEV, and we could say the same thing about EVs, they’re cool now but can we manufacture, and recycle enough batteries to keep up with demand?
EVs are heavy, Can we maintain road infrastructure that was built using fuel consumption taxes, for lighter weight cars?
Taking these concerns into consideration, I feel that PHEVs are awesome and we should all demand more of them, they are lighter than EVs, cause significantly less emissions and are a wonderful bridge technology that improves the car trips that we do need to take.
PHEVs are the compact fluorescent of cars. We're better off waiting for the BEV market to mature a little and get the full benefits. Battery weight and costs, along with the small size of electric motors, will naturally drive electric vehicles to be much smaller and even less polluting.
There a very good reasons other than environmental to free ourselves from the oil scourge.
> Complexity is often cited as the reason for not adopting PHEV, and I think that’s an easy scapegoat, as humans we’ve solved many complex at scale
EV reduces really a lot of moving and maintenance heavy parts, it is a game changer on its own. Double complexity and cram both into half the space, making maintainability even worse? I'm not sure, if use case allows would always choose EV by large margin now; we can manage (mostly) everything, but all has tradeoffs, and less complexity always better from lot of perspectives.
(Totally aside, almost every manufacture has both approaches available, not?)
PHEVs require two systems, that has to be more expensive than a pure EV if we weren’t considering the need for a smaller battery. As battery tech gets better, PHEVs will be less attractive.
A few years ago we had a car fire in a multi story car park that spread and destroyed 20+ cars which caused severe structural damage resulting in the whole structure being out of use for over a year. There has been commentary about the concern with EV weight in multi storey car parks but I can't help wondering what happens with an inevitable EV lithium fire in a confined space. There is a lot edge cases I don't think have been considered yet with the rush to EVs.
Lithium fires are a scary thing to deal with, but electric cars are something like 75x less likely to catch fire than ICE cars. [1]
Regarding weight, yes. Electric cars weigh more than comparable ICE cars. But it’s pretty rich how this is such a large concern when the target is electric vehicles, and not the ever-increasing size of vehicles (especially American) people are buying. A Nissan Leaf is still far lighter than a gas powered F-150—the top selling “car” in the US.
I was actually looking for a car with 50-100 miles of electric range and petrol for more. The closest thing I found is the BMW i3, but even used it’s very expensive. And it’s so very ugly.
I ended up getting a cheap petrol car instead. I’d still prefer to take the train, but it costs several times more than the petrol.
Opel Ampera was the answer a decade ago (series petrol hybrid with 50km EV range and 400km petrol range) but they didn't sell well and this architecture was all but abandoned.
Your country train system is broken, 500 km train ticket here costs 1/3 of the petrol required to travel there standard class, and is still cheaper first class... (Which is typically more comfortable than airplane or car.)
Even using LNG as fuel they're behind.
The only place I see gas cars still winning is short range with hybrids.
They still produce traffic noise, air pollution due to their tires and brakes, and ugly urban landscapes dominated by roads and car parking.
I would rather focus our efforts on improved density so that most people will choose walking, transit or bicycles as means of transport. These ways to move around our towns are also "better for the environment".
> I would rather focus our efforts on improved density
There are many places in the Midwestern US where there will never be density and the people there don't want it. In those places, people drive everywhere. Shouldn't we try and make their transportation less damaging to the environment? Public transportation isn't practical there due to the size of the area and the lack of density (which won't change).
It's easier to give people better tools than it is to try and change how they live their entire lives.
The short answer to that is: No.
The long answer to that is: Change zoning so that people can actually respond to a carbon tax that is high enough to capture the externalities of using gasoline and people will make choices that are better for the environment, while being the best for their particular needs, all on their own (You don't need to make the current thing illegal and you don't need to leave this with the NIMBY captured city government either, you can push allowances at higher levels of government that are not as NIMBY captured). The extremely inelastic demand for gasoline is largely driven by the geography of cities, which is directly dictated by zoning and building codes that force extremely low density, large dwellings. Change the zoning, change the cost of petrol and people will demand smaller and denser, which makes public transit and maintained bicycle infrastructure feasible, which increases elasticity of gasoline demand and in turn lowers the carbon tax needed to drive lower usage. It's a vicious or beautiful cycle all driven by what is allowed and not allowed in your zoning and building codes.
You are not wrong. But the sub title of the article is: "Experts say that across the board, EVs are a win compared to similar gas-powered vehicles."
Whether you look at manufacturing, sourcing of battery materials (which get recycled), energy production needed to power the vehicles, it all boils down to EVs being far better than gas powered vehicles.
Why is that? Kwh for kwh, EVs are just far more frugal with the energy. Petrol contains lots of energy, most of that is converted into vibrations, heat, noise, etc. And a little of it propels the vehicle forward. EVs produce a bit of heat, very little noise (tire friction mostly), and convert most of their power into forward motion and can actually recover some of the energy when you slow down through regenerative breaking.
Even if you use brown coal, which is a nasty fuel, to power an electricity plant, about half of it turns into energy and most of that ends up being used for useful things by the car. It gets more miles per kwh worth of CO2 emitted relative to ice vehicles. If you add the emissions needed to produce the vehicle (which you'd also have to do for an ICE car), it boils down to any difference being eliminated by this within 1 or 2 years of the vehicle hitting the road. Even if it is a bit more co2 emissions to produce the vehicle (which is debatable), the difference is wiped out early in the life of the vehicle by it just being more efficient. After that every year the vehicle manages to not break down, which as it turns out is mostly quite long, it just gets better.
Why is this important? One of the many myths that people keep rehashing, is that EVs are more polluting than gas guzzlers. This article attempts to rectify that. Of course, there's a lot of good work being done in the EV industry to improve things further. Cheaper batteries with less exotic metals, more efficient motors without rare earths, recycled materials, using renewables to power rapid chargers, etc. But even without all that, EVs are already cleaner.
Sure, we should do both in the same sense that we should floss twice a day and we should stop kicking children. One of them is more urgent and makes a bigger difference, so efforts should be focused on that one.
That seems like a good example because I can't see how resources are being kept away from "stop child kicking" in order to promote flossing. Doing both is entirely reasonable.
The resource that is in conflict is political attention. The more politicians and voters focus on EVs, the less is done to improve the walkability and public transit in our cities. EVs distract us from the real enemy: traffic.
Traffic is bad, but fossil traffic is strictly worse than EV traffic. So again, it seems possible to advocate both less traffic and that the remaining traffic should be better.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Even the Bay Area cannot get together and make meaningful improvements to non-car commuting infrastructure. I recall how many years it took just to get the dang bus lane from Richmond district to downtown. I will take any incremental positive changes I can get.
We can do both, of course. But making a sufficiently global change to our ecological dystopian future involves some sociologically hard problems:
Human population, the sociology of capitalism, industrialised consumerism, the unscalability of communities problem (both established structural debt and newer dysfunctional debt) and the consumerist voting fallacy ("I will vote with my money").
If there were fewer people, if there were less industrial-scale consumerism, if communities were scalable, if consumers were in fact globally engaged as purchasers and voting citizens...
I have heard an environmental scientist say that the order of responsible choices from worst to best is:
= buy an ICE vehicle
= buy a zero-emission EV
= DO NOT buy a vehicle
Of all the difficult sociological challenges that could certainly bring change, it seems that those likeliest to change are the human population (fewer) and zero-emission vehicles (more).
Improved density is worse for people and the environment. One should leave sufficient greens within a city for people and wildlife, and a row of trees or bushes can also easily shield traffic noise. Traffic noise which transit also produces in copious amounts.
Maybe increased density is relevant for some US cities, but European ones should definitely lower their density considerably. Most European cities are dead zones for anything but rats and pigeons, and people fare similarly badly.
> Which might be ok for the surrounding land, but isn't fine for the inhabitants of the city.
Even when the "surrounding land" is a 15-20 minute bicycle ride away, or a hoping on a train to smaller a little farther away (or perhaps have train stations at Nature preserves)?
Or perhaps green spaces like New York's Central Park or Toronto's Leslie Street Spit:
People need a green outlook out of their windows, surrounding greenery is linked to various kinds of psychological goodness. Having to commute to an overcrowded, dirty, needle-ridden park or outskirt somewhere isn't an option.
And for wildlife, continuous bands of greenery and routes of migration with only small interruptions (like street crossings) are necessary. Isolated islands are almost useless.
> Nonsense. The inner city being a concrete hellscape isn't being helped by nicer parts on the outskirts.
Why would the inner city need to be a "concrete hellscape"? You can have decent density without 'concrete hellscapes'. The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided/misinformed) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks:
The examples you've shown are north american. For almost all European cities to arrive at the density of those examples, you have do lower it. By a lot.
> I would rather focus our efforts on improved density
We can and should do both. When density increases smaller electrical vehicles, some entirely charged by solar on their roof, become practical. They are much lighter, use a lot less resources than a standard car, travel somewhat slower and generally ameliorate car problems, while being just as practical: usable in all weather, having cargo carrying capacity. Bikes and walking will always have these sorts of limitations.
Given that there is no easy transition to be made from the debt of dystopian infrastructure, it is clear that zero-emission per trip is the best way to address pollution in the local community.
How we get there will be a combination of public transit, elecctric transportation, shared vehicles, and bicycles.
But the US has more than 278 million vehicles on the road and trucks are the most popular type of vehicle.[1]
The change to a zero-emission strategy will take more than one generational cycle.[2]
Before improving density we need to provide more transit options so people think they can live without a car. Suburbs can support great transit for less cost than a car for everyone, but they cannot support the bad transit they get as people can afford to drive.
I used to think the inevitable "but the tire pollution!" commenter was just run of the mill hn pedantry, but it's been so consistent over so many years... I hope the pay is good, at least.
Not mutually exclusive things, at all. Most (all?) metros in the US are currently on a "density" kick also and I hope it continues...it's also a multi-generational problem where electric cars will probably go from niche thing to majority of cars on the road within a single gen
For quite a while there was a lot of concern the Li-on batteries in these cars wouldn't last more than a few years (3000 cycles) and that battery replacements would become really common. However so far the batteries have outperformed those estimates by quite some margin and have tended to last as long as the cars do and there is a growing second hand market for the used batteries in power storage where the top charge/discharge/capacity performance of the batteries is less important and their price is good.
There are now a few companies either ripping them apart and building powerwalls for residential uses from them and a commercial company that is simply racking old tesla batteries for grid storage. There is quite a lot of demand for cheap power storage and just because 20% capacity has been lost hasn't made them useless and most of these uses don't need 1C charge/discharge.
Solar and Wind is now a lot cheaper than using fossil fuels and its taking over at an increasing rate and a lot of the charging of EVs happens overnight too. Power needs are otherwise at their minimum overnight and this usually means less carbon dense sources as peak power tends to be the dirtiest.
People forget how large car batteries are. With a typical range of 300 km per charge, 3000 cycles correspond to a battery lifetime of 900000 km. The rest of the car will wear out long before this. In addition, electric cars are usually configured to only charge to 80%, except for long road trips. This further reduces battery wear by a lot.
3000 cycles in an EV with a range of 300 miles is 900,000 miles. That's a lot. Early EV batteries weren't that good; probably closer to 1000 cycles. At best. Which is still 300,000 miles. And of course some of the earlier ones were actually not that good even and had more primitive cooling and battery management systems.
Most recent EVs have warranties of eight years or 100,000 miles. Reason: manufacturers know it is extremely unlikely for any issues to emerge with the drive train during this time. Tesla was talking about the million mile battery during battery day a few years ago. A bit over 3000 cycles would get you there. It's a very realistic target.
What that means practically is that the drive train survives the car typically.
I agree with this, and now electric is fine for urban areas.
Right now, if you live in rural areas and need to travel a lot, electric is not yet good. I have heard in some places in the US, people need to travel close to 200 miles one-way to get to a hospital.
Also, new cars are way to expensive for me. Until the price drops to around 15000 USD, I will be driving old used cars. My current vehicle is 17 years old. Plus I get the benefit of not having it repaired at the dealership and no telemetry.
For non-US people, getting a car repaired at a dealership can be as high as 4x the price at your local gas station.
> I have heard in some places in the US, people need to travel close to 200 miles one-way to get to a hospital
This seems like it would be the extreme end of rural living in the US, but certainly some people live in those places. And yes obviously the EV range would not work that well for them currently...but what is the point of calling this out?
Reductions in access to medical care is an accelerated problem in rural US. Populations are sparse, declining, and unprofitable for our medical system.
The thing with rural areas is that very few people live there. Most people in the US live in or near densely populated areas. This is not an issue for them. And even rural areas have electricity and infrastructure. All you need to charge a car is a functioning wall socket. It won't be particularly quick but it will get your car charged eventually. A nice charger at home, a few functioning fast chargers in along nearby highways, etc. That's all you need. Most of the US has all of that within reasonable range.
Basically, your current situation is that what you are spending on fuel and repairs to keep your old car going would probably add up to a nice second hand EV pretty quickly. Also, I hope you don't get any medical emergencies and have to rely on a 17 year old car being able to drive 200 miles (which is a big ask). And if it breaks down, it indeed can get expensive. It's a good reason to not go on long journeys with cars that old. That and the fact that the fuel efficiency is pretty terrible for such cars generally.
You should be able to get a nice second hand EV for around 15K. It won't be the latest and greatest but you might find e.g. an old Nissan Leaf or something similar for that kind of money. You might reasonably expect to spend a lot less on fuel and repairs than you currently are. Do the math, I would suggest. Don't get too hung up on the range either. If you really do that 200 mile journey a lot with your 17 year old car, you are a brave man. More likely is that you rarely do that and given that you are so cost conscience about getting something better, your time is pretty cheap too meaning that a charging stop on your rare longer journeys shouldn't be the end of the world for you either. It all boils down to how much that is worth to you.
>If you really do that 200 mile journey a lot with your 17 year old car, you are a brave man
Last time was 400 before the pandemic, and in another month or so I will do it again. It use to be a rather regular occurrence before pandemic. But now it will start up to about 2 to 3 times a year. FWIW, where I am going the closest public charger is about 20 to 30 miles away.
All you need is a good mechanic and keep it well maintained. And were I live there are plenty of medical services, were I visit they are few and far between.
It’s always a bummer when you go into these threads and you see all the doom and gloom folks talking about the end of the world and we need to use less not more. I never know what their expectation is for the world. That we cut the population in 75%+ and go back to some kind of agrarian lifestyle?
I for one am pretty pumped for the future and excited for all the things to come. We should be aware of how we use our resources but it should not stop innovation.
It’s always a bummer when you go into these threads and you see all the doom and imagination-less folks mixing up calls for sobriety (= voluntary consumption reduction) with innovation break or regression.
Like I already hinted to in my original post. We should be actively aware of our consumption of resources. I know these sort of discussions devolve into a binary debate similar to gun regulation discussions. I take the middle ground, I know cars are not going anywhere for a lot of the world and I am happy to see any innovations we can get. We should definitely be exploring other forms of transportation but again, the conversation here was about EVs and not building bike lanes.
Totally agree with that. I wasn’t responding to bike lanes but to (should have pointed it in first post):
> we cut the population in 75%+ and go back to some kind of agrarian lifestyle?
This seems to assume a population control will directly lead to an agrarian life. That may happen as a secondary effect. Some people (me included) think that won’t. It is a controversial subject but we’re definitely moving forward through the Overton window. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
The current zeitgeist is extremely anti-human and anti-technology. You see this in comments like "we don't need more children, having children is selfish", when much of the developed world is already way below replacement rate, sometimes as low as 1-1.3. What they're saying is of course that _other_ people shouldn't exist but they should be allowed to remain and enjoy the now pristine nature. Global warming (which is very real) is used merely as a tool to further these ideas. They're the new Malthusians.
> We should be aware of how we use our resources but it should not stop innovation.
The past 250 years of innovation are a direct consequence of not really minding about how we use our natural resources and most of the associated externalities. There's still no sign of any meaningful decoupling, fossil fuels consumption keeps increasing. We had a chance with nuclear maybe and mostly blew it.
Currently the worldwide fossil fuel consumption is keeping more or less steady, not increasing. That is not good enough of course, but shows what could be done with more aggressive fixes and changes.
Yea I see the same things, from an otherwise intelligent and thoughtful HN crowd too. One of the comments is "Less people are better for the environment, no matter their lifestyle.". Like wtf? What are we supposed to do with that?
Stop birthing 14 kids at a time, as the earth cannot sustain an infinite amount of humans indefinitely. There is a breaking point; seems pretty straightforward
Fortunately we stopped increasing the number of kids in the world back around 2000. On a global scale it’s a solved problem (still pockets of the world where work continues and is important). The problem now is, how do we live more efficiently? I.e. within the means of the environment. And relatedly how to figure out proper distribution of stuff.
Unfortunately with your nasty comments nobody will listen to your position. It is also not as straightforward as you make it out to be. I know in your mind you think it is but especially when you take it to a global stage, the issue becomes quite complex.
The really great thing about electric cars is that people are actually adopting them, in part because they are better than the machines they are replacing; therefore their environmental benefits can actually be realised.
If you think you have a real solution apart from the fact that nobody wants to adopt it, then what you actually have is a fantasy. It’s far easier to imagine a paradise than to construct one.
The fact that they are simply better than the alternative in multiple dimensions has rapidly accelerated the transition.
It's kick started an arms race in battery production that's already delivered cheap batteries suitable for bikes, busses, large trucks and now flight, which will in turn be a leap forward for cars.
Meanwhile, the amount of batteries available for integrating renewables is turning into a surge, which lets us roll out more and cheaper renewables.
It's multiple, positive, reinforcing cycles even before you get to the reduction in local pollution, less brake dust, the ability to produce smaller cars, solar roofs, longer lasting vehicles, and a bunch of other good stuff.
I realize electric is the future and am looking forward to the changeover (even just the decrease in noise and tailpipe emissions will be a massive life improvement for people in cities), but I have so much trouble getting excited about these kinds of articles because whenever I take the hours and hours to actually follow the links through to the studies I have always found harms of ICE to be much more completely incorporated than harms of electric and benefits of ICE to be much less completely incorporated than benefits electric. It's to the point where I don't have the heart to put in the hours and hours to verify anymore.
So has anyone else followed all the links on this? Are they adequately accounting for the toxicity/environmental degradation from processing end of life lithium batteries, or is there magical thinking that somehow that process will become a lot better by the time a significant number of batters will need to be recycled? Are they accounting for the cost of the massive electric grid expansion needed to support this or are they obviously underestimating this? The article talks about trips to the mechanic like it is an environmental benefit rather than solely a cost benefit, but doesn't do the same on the drawback of the 20-30% cost premium for all electric vs ICE.
It seems like we are forcing a change prematurely with propaganda which isn't very smart because it sucks the life out of better alternatives given the current technology level. I.e. it would seem pretty obviously better to be spending political capital on changing zoning and building codes so that all the new construction, renovation, road building, etc. pushes cities to be more like Amsterdam and Stockholm (among others) going forward and have the transition to all electric take an extra decade or two as a result. That would directly convert car trips into bike trips and walking, which destroys even electric cars on the environmental benefit scale and could convert 20-30% of trips after a few decades of change. This would also have the large benefit of having the bulk of electric cars change over using later technology which should be more efficient and be a lot better for the environment (i.e. using sodium ion batteries or something even better).
> but he adds that households with more than one vehicle can consider diversifying their fleet to add an EV for everyday use,
Right, so production costs twice as much Co2 (and ignoring other environmental affects), but that's ok because of the net saving considering what it's replacing... but wait we aren't replacing because of range anxiety, we are augmenting... so it's not better?
These are the author's own arguments, its not consistent.
What causes the additional CO2? If it is the batteries, a PHEV typically has 10% of the batteries yet is sufficient to provide for electric only use in over 90% of daily usage. If battery production is not sufficient to meet the demand for EVs, then PHEVs are a good solution until production can meet the demand.
China is now manufacturing EVs with sodium ion batteries instead of lithium ion. What is the difference between CO2 between lithium ion and sodium ion batteries?
No, but you can teach people about contraception and make it easily available. Or you can not teach people about it, even teach them to avoid contraception because it is sinful, and you can erect hurdles such as prescription and point-of-sale requirements, cost, parental consent, etc.
And while voluntary contraception has a lesser effect than compulsory contraception (obviously, I'd guess), it has an effect.
With what? Electric trains? I'd love it if there were enough electric trains that I don't need a car, but trains will never go as many places as cars do so they won't 'disappear almost completely'. It will be sufficient if they are reduced by 75% and are electric. Part of this reduction will result from shrinking of the global population.
Electric cars are going to be an ecological disaster in hindsight.
Hundreds of kilos of lithium per car ending up in the water table per improperly processed end of life vehicle. Periodic burning down of entire boats transporting them across the oceans. Occasional burning down of houses with integrated garages.
They've been a really effective way to persuade a lot of people to get rid of the car they already have, the environmental cost of constructing it already spent, and get a new one instead with a whole new cost. Just after we've got the old school petrol systems running reasonably cleanly too.
That's nowhere near the current consensus. I think it'll be really obvious in about a decade.
Its not happening that way at all. These batteries aren't just going to landfill they are going into a bunch of places.
1. The old batteries are ripped apart into their individual 18650 batteries, tested and then repurposed into lower capacity/charge/discharge powerwalls and other uses.
2. There is a commercial company buying the second hand batteries and racking them for grid storage.
3. The lithium is being recycled for the batteries that have lost too much or shorted because its commercially viable to do so.
Batteries are immensely valuable now and getting more so as is the material and there is a economic value in their reuse and recycling and that is happening at enormous scale.
The ecological disaster was always going to be the cathode, not lithium.
That thing is mixed with some advanced polymers and the metal (be that manganese or cobalt) is hard to extract from this.
The process to recycle them is going to be extremely dirty and solvent laden.
> Electric cars are going to be an ecological disaster in hindsight.
As opposed to the not-ecological disaster of ICE cars?
The perfect is the enemy of the good: as long as we're stuck with cars (at least in short- or medium-term), let's perhaps consider the less sucky option.
The perfect would be investing in a high end rail network, city rail and then light and medium EV.
You're not really stuck with cars in any term. Both redesigning cities and building transport is a multi year programme. The HEV will prevent the perfect solution, in the opposite of the parable.
> Both redesigning cities and building transport is a multi year programme.
So for the existing housing stock, we'll just evict people from the low-density ex/suburbs, bulldoze entire neighbourhoods, and rebuild them at higher density?
I'm all for building new in a better way, but there's a lot of legacy out there.
For the remaining trips not covered by the above, aka the exception case, using cars. Most car trips can even be PHEV and our non-freight transportation emissions would be substantially lower.
Even in the worst case scenario of everyone having to drive, PHEVs are a much better option as we transition to a fully society EV. I’m disappointed that most car manufacturers are trying to go through this all or nothing mindset of jumping directly from Gas to EV. A large portion of the population drives less than 50miles a day so a PHEV with ~50miles or range would make a huge dent in our emissions.
Complexity is often cited as the reason for not adopting PHEV, and I think that’s an easy scapegoat, as humans we’ve solved many complex at scale, if we can build massive fleets of Priuses over decades, why can’t we build more of them with a slightly larger battery.
I’ve also heard the economics don’t work out argument against PHEV, and we could say the same thing about EVs, they’re cool now but can we manufacture, and recycle enough batteries to keep up with demand?
EVs are heavy, Can we maintain road infrastructure that was built using fuel consumption taxes, for lighter weight cars?
Taking these concerns into consideration, I feel that PHEVs are awesome and we should all demand more of them, they are lighter than EVs, cause significantly less emissions and are a wonderful bridge technology that improves the car trips that we do need to take.