We really need to change our culture to support mass transit and pedestrians more. I live in a town with fantastic bus service and extensive pedestrian infrastructure, and people in my apartment complex DRIVE THEIR CARS to a gas station/liquor store they could throw a snowball to. Hell, I’ve seen people make a longer walk to their car than it would’ve taken to get to their destination.
China ate their lunch, now they cry
EVs aren’t working
EVs are the highest growth sector for personal vehicles but are growing a little less than expected, and we can’t make big profits yet
Automakers also rely on dealers to sell vehicles and the dealers often make most of their money from repairs and maintenance. More than half the maintenance for ICE vehicles is just non-existent on EV’s. Not a lot of stuff to do when you get your tires rotated and your brakes checked every 5000k miles.
Yeah, I keep reading articles saying the same thing. Auto industry and dealers complaining EV sales are slowing down, yet as you said, it’s the fastest growing category.
Of course profits aren’t as great now coming off that high during expensive fuel prices the last few years, COVID related shortages causing prices to skyrocket, etc. Not to mention inflation decreasing the value of people’s income.
This is a huge point. The other considerations are: EVs are balls expensive compared to ICE counterparts and often require $500-2k worth of electrical work at your house (assuming you even own it) to put in a charger. If you live in an apartment, good luck.
And oh, btw, the chargers aren’t standard. Each charging site has different plugs, apps you have to download, etc. Then there is the lack of charging stations that highlights the range anxiety people have with EVs.
Adoption would be so much faster if EVs cost $15-25k and there were adequate standardized charging options available.
the chargers aren’t standard. Each charging site has different plugs, apps you have to download, etc
– US has 2.5 common plugs. An old one that’s mostly gone, the standard one, and Tesla. However Tesla opened theirs as a standard, and it looks like they will be de facto standard across the US
– The protocols are compatible. The adapter for my Tesla to use the other standards is mostly plastic and dumb. You just need something to fit a different socket
– yes, the state of apps sucks. Everyone wants to maximize their profit. However I thought most non-Tesla chargers had a credit card reader, so as long as you can find it and it works, you can use it without an app. Tesla is another story, but does seem t add a lot of convenience with their app
the chargers aren’t standard. Each charging site has different plugs
IDK where you’re from, but in europe it’s all standardized and all cars, regardless of brand, use the same plug for both AC and DC charging. The whole app/rfid tag mess is true though.
dedicated circuit installed with materials for the wire, breaker fuse, and conduit was $600 including electrician labor
I live in a high cost of living area so getting my charger installed was quite a bit more. However, it was slightly less than the cost of the new range/oven circuit I also recently had done. So, I guess it’s as affordable as anything is here
Yeah so I looked into this little while ago and I own my own house so in theory I can put the box in. The problem is I only have on the street parking and the house is set back away from the road and there’s a garden between the road in the house.
So how the bleeding hell am I supposed to charge a car? I’d have to run a long cable through the garden, over the fence, over the pedestrian walkway, over the grass verge and to the car. Someone is going to trip over it and then think they can sue me.
Or the government could just install a street furniture like they do parking metres, but I have no way to force them to do that.
So how the bleeding hell am I supposed to charge a car? I’d have to run a long cable through the garden
Personally I’d replace part of the garden with a driveway and parking space. Sure, it’s ugly. But it’s what billions of people around the world have.
Or the government could just install a street furniture like they do parking metres, but I have no way to force them to do that.
Most cities have a plan to do that (though it might just be a plan, with no funding allocated yet)… But there are challenges - in particular vandalism. They have been more successful/cheaper to maintain (and more likely to actually work when you park there) at locations with 24/7 security guards and quick police response times.
They also prioritise short term daytime parking as it’s better to charge EVs when direct solar is available - far cheaper than other power source (except hydro, but hydro generally can’t produce enough power). And they prioritise somewhere like a shopping district where you might only park for 45 minutes allowing dozens of people to charger their car per day instead of just one overnight. Shopping districts are also setup to prevent vandalism as well (and prevention is cheaper than repairs).
Every shopping mall in my city already has a parking spaces where you can charge an EV. In fact it’s often free (or at least, included in the price of parking at the mall). It works well enough but it’s never going to be as convenient as charging at home… those parking spaces are nearly always empty in my city, even though they’re free people would rather pay for the convenience of charging overnight.
Yep these are all true points, but not unexpected as with any innovation. Just like how computers were immensely expensive, and without standards for decades.
EVs are relatively new in the scope of technology. Capitalism just wants to make you think it’s an issue. In reality this is gonna take time and lack the profits every company is striving for, which to them is a failure.
EVs cost more up front and then cost less with fuel, maintenance, and longevity.
This is kind of true. A lot of the maintenance requirements for ICE vehicles is not needed for EVs. So you save money on things like oil changes and if you can charge at home then charging is probably cheaper than gas. But that battery probably needs to be replaced after about 5 years and that is a very expensive maintenance cost.
EVs are expensive because of the battery.
A cheap car is not a novelty, specially for asian manufacturers. There is no cheap EV because there is no cheap big ion-li battery.
Toyota strategy of focus on hybrid and hydrogen seemed weird to me. But over the years has been started to make sense.
The world needs a better battery. Until that, EVs will be heavy and expensive.
Very much this. Lithium batteries are the best battery we’ve got (at manufacturing scale) so far in terms of energy storage density, but the best we’ve got isn’t very good.
Gasoline has an energy storage density of around 13 MJ/kg. That’s a ton of energy, so much so that a vehicle can waste most of it generating so much heat that we have to bolt on a cooling system (with the associated weight) and still have enough to go highway speeds for hundreds of miles on a quantity of fuel weighing less than one of the passengers.
Toyota loves hydrogen because it’s got a storage density slightly higher than gasoline. Hydrogen has some serious volume and storage issues, but the density is there.
Contrast that with lithium ion batteries at ~0.7 MJ/kg (for the really good ones, which usually aren’t used in cars). Less waste heat, to be sure, but the bulk of the vehicles weight, the main factor in speed and travel distance, is the insane amount of material necessary to store the “fuel”.
Electric motors are far more efficient than ICE, but we need orders-of-magnitude improvements in battery storage density before EV can really take advantage of the greater efficiency. Until then manufacturers don’t have a choice, EV will be heavy and thus expensive.
So we can start focusing on real solutions to climate change. Like building cities that don’t depend on cars for transportation. Right… right?
Great cities are handled, now how do we make rural areas work without cars?
“building cities”
Well, one can attempt to make it easier going forward but this isn’t sim city where you can just demolish your entire infrastructure and remake it to suit your needs.
Doing so will take decades to even start to have an impact on personal vehicle usage. Decades we don’t really have.
I’m not really saying it can be done overnight. But imagine if all the money (heck even half the money) that went into trying to build electric cars went into building some good transit systems supported by strong transit oriented design. It would have done way more to tackle climate change than making cars EVs. It’s a long term process but one that far more likely to make a difference than EVs.
If you want to talk about real solutions to climate change I wouldn’t aim as consumer facing things like cars or household recycling. That’s all BS to make people focus on what their role in it is to distract from the fact that the vast majority of emissions come from things like:
Industrial and manufacturing processes Electricity and heat generation Transportation (with vast majority being bunker fueled chips, and agriculture.
Me getting 25mpg versus 30 ain’t moving the needle on the emissions numbers the same way moving to renewables for electricity generation and eliminating shipping emissions would. Or mitigating agricultural emissions which produces tons of the worst kinds of greenhouse gasses (methan and nitrous oxide).
And then we have fugative emissions from unintentional leaks or more accurately irresponsible processes and maintenance from things like fracking, oil/gas extraction and transport. Quite literally just drilling into gas and releasing it into the air.
But yea, my Honda is the problem.
I’m not saying everyone has a part to play, but don’t let the arguments and focus be on anything other than the big culprits of greenhouse gas emissions. We could pass meaningful regulations and provide meaningful incentives and actually move the needle on green house gasses.
Industrial and manufacturing processes Electricity and heat generation Transportation (with vast majority being bunker fueled chips, and agriculture.
Unfortunately I don’t run an industrial manufacturing process or shipping company… so there’s not much I can do there other than prefer to buy products/services that involve fewer emissions.
I’ve installed solar on my home… and some day I’ll probably add a battery (when they’re cheaper), but that’s about all I can do.
So for me at least, this stuff isn’t a huge priority. I’m already doing everything I can.
Me getting 25mpg versus 30 ain’t moving the needle on the emissions
Huh? That’s almost a 20% reduction in your vehicle emissions and private transport is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses. It’d definitely “move the needle”.
I’m not saying everyone has a part to play
I am. Might be a small part for some, but it’s a part. It could be as simple as using LED lighting instead of incandescents (10x lower emissions, and 10x lower power bill) or cooking with induction instead of gas (4x lower emissions, boils water 2x faster, and cheaper though how much depends on your gas prices).
Those two changes I suggested don’t even cost any money. They save money.
A lot of other changes also save money - green hydrogen, for example, was $4/kg two years ago and is $3/kg today… it was projected to be cheaper than gas some time between 2027 and 2040… but thanks to Russia’s war it’s already cheaper than gas now in some parts of the world. Suddenly the industry is scrambling to accelerate that transition.
The liquid natural gas industry has no long term future and not because of emissions - it’s just not going to be const competitive for much longer.
It’s already hard to convince people to use EVs, convincing them to use public transportation is even harder. It’s completely understandable why they don’t want to use public transportation tho: it kinda sucks in most countries. Here in germany it’s simply unreliable. If you use it to get to work, you can expect to get there late quite frequently and the same goes for the way home. Fixing the issues public transportation has and making cities less car dependent takes time and we don’t really have that much anymore. EVs aren’t perfect but it’s a compromise.
Trade shipping is incredibly efficient when it comes to moving large quantities of goods. Transportation, as a whole, consumes about a quarter of the world’s energy output. Meanwhile industry verges on near 60%. A large portion of that is refining and manufacturing coupled with new construction.
While I understand that people’s immediate reaction is that we need more EVs or, on the extreme end, somehow restrict cars. People also need to understand that’s not the sector that is going to have the most corrective impact on the coming climate disasters.
They are also trying out old-school sail ships
