Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion

And in turn, trains are far more energy efficient than all kinds of cars. Trains are subsequently beaten by both electric and non-electric bicycles, which are the most energy efficient mode of transport currently known to man.

While phasing out ICEs entirely is clearly an urgent necessity, it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation, instead of going for EVs, which are a slight improvement, but not at all as big of an improvement as we could realize with trains and bicycles.

This is a very naïve view. It’s technically correct (the best kind of correct?) but it’s also missing the point by a wide margin - the “spherical, frictionless cow in a void” missing the point.

You’re correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I’m not even looking for numbers here, because it’s irrelevant.

What you’re missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Or just bring home groceries once a week. Or have kids. Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors. Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it’s a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it’ll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.

If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it’s CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.

I take your point(s) that the argument cant be “Everyone just use bikes and trains”. That’s obviously not practical but to be fair it’s not what is being suggested either.

But in relation to the point you made about bad or cold weather being a factor for bikes being an impractical mode of transport. Please take a few minutes to consider the points and examples provided in this video (1).

TLDW: There is a town in Finland (Oulu) where cycling is a primary mode of transport (over a fifth of of all trips are by bike and 77% of people cycle occasionally) even in winter when it gets down to -20 Celsius.

Weather is always spouted as a reason for not investing in bike infrastructure which is really annoying because that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s the lack of safe and adequate bike infrastructure that stops people from cycling. Anyway, I thought it was worth adding that point of nuance to the discussion.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

From the video: in the winter cycling capital of the world, 22% of all trips are taken by bicycle (all year round). This leaves 78% of trips not taken by bicycle. Honestly, 20% is what I’d expect as an upper limit for bike trips, in a place with great infrastructure and solid biking culture.

This is not an argument that (EV) cars can be replaced by trains+bikes. This is a solid argument, with which I agree, that bikes have a place in a transportation ecosystem and they should be encouraged. I was never disputing this - I own several bikes, and I actually prefer to rent uber electric scooters over uber cars.

We are in agreement so, in that bikes are an absolutely essential component of a more sustainable transport infrastructure. 20% by the way is a very large number in the context of the total number of trips taken by any given population and unlike you I do not believe this is an upper limit of what can be achieved with bikes but this is a separate discussion.

I just wanted to clarify a bugbear with me which is the “people don’t use bikes because the weather is crappy”. I know nuance is lost in such a few amount of words and that’s probably not what you are saying in totality but i just wanted to highlight this point.

As an aside, I lived in a large city where amenities such as supermarkets were relatively far away. For a couple of years I got away with not owning a car and using a bike for all shopping needs. There are some examples of where a car would have been way more convenient but the fact of the matter is I made do without it. There are a large number of trips that I made with the bike that I wouldn’t have done if I did have a car. Humans are creatures of convenience. There are some trips where a car (or something similar) is absolutely essential but for the vast majority it is not. In situations of necessity it is amazing what can be achieved. We are not living in an age of necessity with regards to means of transport but we really should be if the climate science is to be believed.

Between electric bikes and work from home during bad weather, I don’t see why that upper limit couldn’t go much higher in most large cities. The benefits outside energy use are also great. Increased safety, decreased noise and tire pollution, etc.

Haha, yeah. I guess things like Cargo bikes don’t exist. Nor does just bringing your stuff onto the train and putting it into it’s cargo holds. Or bringing your cargo bike onto the train.

Yup, private carriages are the only option for your occasional weekly or monthly tasks.

I guess its also just outright impossible to just allow for mixed zoning that’d allow for daily grocery shopping as well.

I’ve written in another comment that I’m very much in favor of cheap, small city EVs without all the safety features mandated in a modern car. I don’t think we need a ton of iron to go shopping. But I also don’t think it’s practical to go all the way down to bikes - biggest velo vehicle might at most carry an adult, a child and groceries, while offering zero protection from the weather and very little safety, compared with the smallest and flimsiest hard-shell EV.

And I’m saying this while owning… let me count… 4 bikes, one of which is electric. And I absolutely love Uber electric scooters.

But no matter how I try to get creative, I just can’t think of a way where you can have bike infrastructure covering everything. Too many pieces missing. Where would you park all those cargo bikes near train stations? And again, what do you do in winter with two kids?

Small city EVs on the other hand require no new infrastructure, zero major investments, are a fraction of the cost of a car, are non-polluting, and do 90% of what a normal car does. And when going on holiday - yes, you can take the train, which is what I’m actually doing btw.

All they need is a very small regulatory change. Allow no-highway cars with speed limits and none of the safety features of modern cars. Just do that.

I don’t believe anybody has ever suggested that bikes should cover everything.

People have pointed out that most people can use bikes for pretty much everything, but obviously there will be a need for the occasional car. Some people will need to use cars more, other less. But if you make the simple mindset change of first planning to bike there and then falling back to the car if you deem it infeasible, we’re already most of the way.

Most of the safety concerns for bikes disappear as soon as a certain amount of bikers are in the streets and the infrastructure isn’t actively hostile to them.

This is a really good point. If we start adding bicycles to the US, more people will die. And we will need to have a greater percent of bicyclists than the Netherlands before the death rate starts to drop off. Having safe bicycle routes is a long way off.

Base rate and attribution fallacies.

When a car kills a cyclist it’s not the bicycle being dangerous, and you can’t compare numbers directly without normalizing by some metric (hours, km, trips). Although in the latter fallacy I believe correcting it will make bikes look worse.

I agree.

Also keep in mind people of all ages are allowed to ride bikes, which is luckily not the case for cars. This source does say elderly and children are more likely to be part of cycling accidents (not necessarily fatal) https://www.veiligheid.nl/kennisaanbod/infographic/infograph…

Also driving under influence is (hopefully) much more prevalent in case of cyclists.

Hence, car drivers switching their transportation mode to bikes don’t have the same risks as the entire cycling population.

And more people die in car accidents each year than in wars. You need to compare against the number of trips made and I suspect they are substantially greater for bicycles.

No way “most” people can use bikes for pretty much everything.

I get what you are advocating for. I have had several periods in my life where I used a bike as my primary form of transportation. But it only works well in a pretty narrow set of circumstances.

The point is that within the boundaries of city life, it can absolutely work for most trips, provided the infrastructure is not completely car-centred.

Within the bounds of a childless, healthy, individual, who can work remote, living in a city that is well designed for bikes. Unfortunately this is a nearly negligible percentage of the existing population/infrastructure. There are many many decades of change, including universal rent control, required for the rest of us.

It’s ironic that you ask where to park cargo bike while at the same time proposing EVs. Where do they park? Where do they drive? We are occupying massive amounts of land for car infrastructure completely covering it in concrete and thus contributing to urban heating. At the same time we have study upon study that shows that people are happier in places where they can walk/bike instead of driving.

Small EVs are the type of cars that are needed the least. They are a car for those cases where you essentially did not need a car.

> At the same time we have study upon study that shows that people are happier in places where they can walk/bike instead of driving.

People prefer living in places they can dress in t-shirts and shorts. But trying to dress in a t-shirt in the snow won’t make you happy.

It’s true that all else being equal, a walkable city is the best. But we don’t have that, and we’re not likely to have it soon. All we can do is work on a solution for today and tomorrow. And I really don’t see OP’s original point of trying to skip EVs.

Because vast amounts of public money has been spent and continues to be spent on cars that could save lives and prevent massive ecological harms were it spent on adequate transport technologies.

Tesla alone has received enough in subsidies from california to build a decent transit system for about a quarter of its population.

The infrastructure is not a problem at all. Just use the one you have. If it can serve traffic demand using cars, it can serve ten times the same traffic demand using bikes (slightly less when using cargo bikes). Stop the segregation fantasy where drivers are allowed to get away with pretending that all roads default to limited access. They don’t. Roads where first built for walking, then for walking and various form of animal transportation, then for walking, animal and cycling. When cars entered the picture, all the other forms of road use technically did not go away, outside of the small set of limited access roads that came up a few decades later.

Yes that makes sense. Steam engines had to be larger to be more efficient so the best size for them was a locomotive.

Internal combustion engines are sized at a point where they are profitable and efficient.

Electric motors allow us to make terribly small cars, and their small batteries will mean even more efficiency improvements. Combined with self driving abilities and we no longer need to own our own car…just hop on the city infrastructure and get driven to your destination.

In fact if we make it small and light enough you could suspend the car from a metal rail and now have an extra lane up in the roadway above the regular traffic. And then you can add another metal rail layer…and another. And you no longer need intersections because the rails can dip down or up to cross each other. So the biggest source of traffic latency (stoplights) and bandwidth limitations (not enough road surface area) will be eliminated.

Eventually we may build entire city blocks pre-fabricated with vertical and horizontal elevators inside, so you no longer need your own vehicle to navigate. Heating costs will be proportional to the external surface area and not to the volume enclosed by the building.

Our e-trike takes 2 kids, groceries, has full weather protection and brings joy to rider, occupants and many around. Protected bike lanes add the safety, but let’s make no mistake, all the safety issues arise from motor vehicles.

As you allude to, this is a massive zoning issue (especially in the US). The infrastructure required to move people from their houses to places of work and shopping is insane, given where all those houses and places of work and businesses are. To make trains viable for everyone, you have to rework the entire built environment to move all of those places into different locations so that people can get from one place to another efficiently.

I live in a small/midsize city with relatively ok public transit for its size and the only places I ever take it is to downtown or the airport - places where parking logistics are terrible and it’s easy to get to on public transport. Anywhere else (like going to the store or work) and getting there takes hours without a car. Living in areas that have better connections or better walkability triples my housing cost, so I own a car and drive. Cities need to be significantly more dense for more trains to make sense, but that density means clearing out all of the less dense buildings and building new. That’s extremely costly and doesn’t actually help the environment because of the massive amount of carbon needed to fix that everywhere.

This is the argument being made again and again, but if we look at the realities the average number of occupants was 1.6 in England [1] and is likely similar for other countries. Also have a look at cycling commutes in Finland on YouTube, lots of people. The argument that we can’t change how we move is just an argument about not wanting change. I bet if we actually make cars cover all the direct and indirect costs (for both ICE and EV) instead of massively subsidising car travel, people would quickly change. Why do we need to subsidise the choice of a part of society to not want to change?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/314719/average-car-and-v…

> What you’re missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Or just bring home groceries once a week.

People without cars also have to do that. Groceries can be walked home (i know because i do it) and they also fit on busses. Mattresses are a rare thing and you can rent a taxi.

Also, there was a recent episode by the YT channel “Not Just Bikes” that really opened my mind to the possibility of 80% of these situations being comfortable accommodated by cargo bikes. They’re really amazing and a bike-centric future in cities is actually pretty realistic.

As someone who bikes everywhere, I’d say 80% of these situations don’t even need a cargo bike. The cargo bike covers maybe another 15%, and the rest you can deal with by renting a van once or twice a year.

I agree with this - unless you have a single item that almost fills the cargo bucket, panniers are fine. Most cargo bikes I’ve seen don’t have any more carrying capacity than a regular one laden with panniers. It’s like truck vs. estate or something - sure there’s some added convenience, and it’s easier for single big things, but is it worth the specialised vehicle if you have/otherwise need (people capacity, maneuverability, whatever) the other one anyway?

That is maybe the most ridiculous comment I’ve ever heard when comparing cargo bikes to cars.

Cargo bikes cost between $2k and $5k, can be easily stolen, take as much space to park as a car, and carries one person.

Cars carry 5 people and can cost between $5k and $10k.

So cargo bikes are really no match.

You’re comparing brand new cargo bikes to used cars. The real comparision would be a new cargo bike (2-5k) vs a new car (>40k).

You’re making the assumption that the cargo bike seats only one person, when a parent could easily seat two children on a cargo bike.

You’re making the assumption that everyone would be using the cargo bike as their primary day-to-day transportation, when the cargo bike is mostly useful for either transporting young children, or when transporting cargo. At other times a more reasonable choice would be to use a regular bicycle.

You’re making the assumption that cargo bikes take up as much space as cars which is just downright false.

New cars don’t cost $40k in the real world.

Also, there is close to no second hand cargo bike volume so it is absolutely a fair comparison.

If I want to buy a vehicle I don’t care if second hand cargo bikes are available or not. I know that second hand cars so exist though.

It is much better to view cars as a yearly cost, or a per mile cost.

Most people don’t pay $40k up front, instead they pay $4k to $10k per year for a new car.

So let us assume 2 adults and 3 kids.

$5k for a _very nice_ cargo bike capable of transporting 1-2 kids too young to cycle on their own.

$4k for _nice_ bikes for each adult. ($2k x 2)

$3k for _good_ bikes for each kid as they grow out of the cargo bike. ($1k x 3)

$1k a year on maintenance for the bikes if you don’t want to do it yourself.

$1k for locks and a crash course on how to lock your bicycles to stuff making it too much of a pain to steal.

That’s $15k, or the cost of your lower end for a car for 3 years.

So between year 3 and 4 you can start either just replacing the bicycles with new nice ones because you like brand new, get yourself even more expensive electrified bikes, or spend it on other stuff.

And all the while here you could also settle for just “decent” bicycles which cost way less.

What kind of math is that?

That car will last you 10 years something you can hardly say about the cargo bikes.

You don’t need a new car every year.

Are you seriously comparing a $5k car to a brand new, high quality cargo bicycle?

The equivalent cargo bike to a $5k car is below $500 and kids bicycles are below $100.

Edit: As for why I calculated like that? It is quite normal for a car to cost $5k per year. You have insurance, maintenance, repairs, taxes, financing, depreciation and fuel to pay for.

If you _only_ spend $5k on a car you’re either going to skimp on a lot of those costs or pay it in maintenance, repair, and fuel… or you should compare it to the same tier of bicycles. Used bicycles you fix up yourself.

> take as much space to park as a car

They really don’t.

I’m not sure why you need 5 people for the things listed above, like carrying groceries?

> can cost between $5k and $10k.

And how much per year in insurance/tax/maintenance?

I can’t even piece together how this could be true.

A family probably only needs one cargo bike. An brand new _expensive_ cargo bike costs around the same as the yearly cost of a car.

If you think your car costs less, calculate your TCO.

For what a single car costs in taxes, insurance, fuel, and maintenance for a year your could get 5 used bicycles and a nice cargo bike trailer off amazon.

Then why do people buy cars? You can also manage without running water, people did it for most of human existence, but it doesn’t mean it’s what we want to do. Money talks - when they afford it, a supermajority of people prefer to own a vehicle. And we’re on the cusp of making it non-polluting, cheap and sustainable. Let’s not blow it because “trains are marginally more energy efficient”.

> And we’re on the cusp of making it non-polluting, cheap and sustainable

Electric cars? They’re not really any of these things. They’re just not quite as bad as gas vehicles.

I kinda hate this kind of semantics. Paper cups are polluting, using this definition. Literally everything in human civilization is polluting.

I practical terms, when using words to actually mean something as opposed to bash opponents over the head with them, EVs take away something which is burning gas exactly in the places with the most population density and replaces them with something which is not burning oil in the places with the most population density. What’s left in terms of local pollution? Break pads? Still less than gas vehicles, due to regenerative breaking. Microparticles from tires? Yeah, that’s about it.

If you also want to count pollution from manufacture and energy generation, then you kinda have to also count pretty much every activity humans engage in, including hiking in the woods because your backpack is manufactured somewhere, using energy.

The effects of car pollution for human health are 99% burning fuel. EVs take this away. I think it’s fair to call them non-polluting, and not play word games with this.

Local air pollution of newish cars is primarily from tyres and brakes, as is the effect of vehicles on waterways. What is from burning is mostly trucks (which are better replaced with trains for about 70% of use cases in a sanely designed area). An EV with decent range will also take until well after it is bricked by a remote software update to break even with keeping a small capacity hatchback running.

Producing an EV and building and maintaining car infrastructure uses massive amounts of fossil fuels and entails horrifically destructive mining of large quantities of rare elements such as cobalt and niobium.

All for the end result of wasting vast amounts of time, space, and tax money in any urban area to force a suburban lifestyle that is even more destructive, economically unsustainable, and wasteful.

EVs are much more efficient than ICE.

If you want to disincentivise congestion, or car accidents, or road wear, or suburban sprawl fine.

But don’t just spout climate change denier talking points about EVs.

EV busses are a hot trend right now, they make public transport cheaper, safer and greener.

Do you really want people to believe that they are environmentally worse than the ICE vehicles they are replacing? What about urban delivery trucks going EV? How does spreading that fiction help?

Battery busses are much worse than trolley busses or rail. They’re also significantly more expensive than all other options.

Their only upside is nimbys might let you have a transit system if you suggest them.

Oh, so the busses are not safer in terms of collisions or pedestrian fatalities.

How do you account for dangers of battery production and disposal? Are injured EMTs and mechanics, due to high voltages, also considered? How do you account for pollution of installing upgraded transformers and lines to the bus depot for charging batteries?

To be fair, a sanely designed bus system (ie. RBT or busses that aren’t useless because they’re stuck behind a car) is just is safe as light rail…but then you can just build light rail because it’s cheaper.

I usually expect the people doing Lifecycle Cost Analysis to think of these things and quantify them.

Have they all missed these deaths that you’ve uncovered? Enough death and destruction to overwhelm the well studied impacts of air pollution?

I bought my first vehicule at 32, when I moved to the US.

Prior to that I was relying on public transportation, renting something for vacation, and coordinating with others.

In the US that was not sustainable.

The US is absolutely massive - and in some places, this is absolutely not true and you can use public transport for everything AND it’s better than driving. And in other places, the nearest public transport is hours away (by car!!).

Yeah, we have cities too.

It’s just that there is trains between them. Or buses that are not greyhound. By « we » I mean Europe. It’s small, but large enough.

And yeah, density, yadada …

It’s fine. Différents place, different organizations. You guys also have a massive army so you will end up being right.

There are also a whole lot of places places in the US that no one would call a city or even a town. And a whole awful lot of people live in those places! Rural in the US often means living an hour or more drive from the nearest place with a real grocery store.

That’s totally doable in a big city such as NYC. Been in here for 20 years and never owned a car. I do drive occasionally and rent a car for a few days to a week. Always works out for me and my non glamorous lifestyle.

Owning a car gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility but you either live in a place that requires a car every day, or one where you need it less.

If your neighborhood is well planned, with good access to public transportation, groceries, daycare, etc. then renting a car becomes viable for the cases bikes don’t cover.

Trains, trams, buses and bicycles don’t need to cover every case.

And I could totally do all those things just need to work a couple hours less a day, have more reliable child care and maybe fix the deranged hobo problem so my grocery and body make it home safely after most trips

> real humans occasionally need to move a mattress

And real humans can occasionally rent a car. Maybe it is not worth holding thousands of dollars’ worth of rusting metal for that occasional odd job.

As for snow and ice, Oulu, Finland is an example of how infrastructure defines the way people live:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

That still doesn’t exactly solve the “30% of seniors thing”, though.

And quite a few of them have will have unplanned trips to do from very sparsely distributed locations (also known as “houses in the countryside”) to other very sparsely distributed locations (aka “their doctor” or “their family”).

Also, car loan is perfectly suitable for planned, long distance trips with lots of cargo, which unfortunately happen at the same time for everyone (they’re also known as “vacations”). I would not want to be Hertz on the 15th of August in a world without personal cars - unless you ban people from traveling cross country to see their family twice a year, which might be required.

I used to bet on “small scale on demand public transportation”, but it requires either “communities paying drivers” or “engineers solving self-driving in rural roads”, none of which is happening anytime soon.

In the meantime, though, we have to invest in trains, bike lanes, and downsize cars at the same time as electrifying them.

Mobility devices are great for bike lanes. What’s funny about this comparison is that you’re ignoring children, who absolutely cannot drive.

Well, they’re part of the “cargo” during holidays, I suppose ;) ?

But yes, of course children need a different kind of transportation.

Though, arguably, it’s easier to pedal with your toddler on your back than with your grandma !

I’m curious, is “30% of seniors thing” solved by having a car in the US? Here in Japan, driving by senior is getting more problematic. Senior people live in rural are hard to give up having cars because public transport is getting poor and rural town have shrunk because of car society. Older people tend to cause car accident and anyway every people finally can’t drive, so gov want them to release their license earlier.

Is “realising licences for old people” a thing in Japan ? I can’t event imagine someone arguing for that in France. (Old people are practically the only ones to vote in substantial numbers.)

What’s the typical age limit ?

There are no hard age limit but over 75yo needs cognitive test when renewing license. IMO “driving by old people isn’t the best way for transport” is general consensus now, even for most old people. But many people still want driving to live because there are very few alternative, and rural farmers are tend to old. Hate for old dangerous arrogance driver is increased by an notorious deadly accident in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higashi-Ikebukuro_runaway_car_…

The point was precisely that all of these odd jobs are individually occasional but collectively common. You only need to move a mattress once every few years, but you also take camping trips a few times a year, you have vet appointments several times per year, you want to take your dog to a more remote park a couple times a month, you want to take your kids (and all of the things they require) to visit their relatives out of state a few times a year (plus other road trips), you have to transport large furniture or shopping items a dozen times per year, etc.

Moreover, it’s also just convenient to be able to get across town in half the time that you can by public transit.

Isn’t that cultural? We don’t even think about getting such things delivered. Why not? Because it’s expensive? More expensive than owning a $20,000 vehicle?

That’s a kind of ‘frictionless cow’ blind spot as well. If personal ICE and electric cars disappeared from existence tomorrow, we’d adapt.

What you’re missing is that many of the problems you’re describing are due to building cities around cars. You can get the mattress delivered (and even if you don’t, you usually can’t fit a mattress in most vehicles and probably need to rent one). You go to the store more frequently, and buy fewer things, at a grocery store that’s less than 5 minutes way by foot. People can and do transport their children by bike. Walkable cities with public transportation are considerably easier for seniors, because many of them can no longer drive. You’re also leaving out folks with disabilities, for which walkable cities with good public transportation are life changing.

You’re also conveniently leaving out cost. Transportation costs in walkable cities with good public transportation is considerably cheaper. Cars, gas, insurance, maintenance, parking, etc. is extremely expensive. My current transportation costs are roughly $80 a month. When I had a car, they were roughly $800 a month (with averaged maintenance costs included).

(Most) Folks aren’t saying that cars shouldn’t exist, just that in cities, they should not be what we design for, because their convenience for some people results in the inconvenience of most people.

EVs should replace ICE cars, but we should restrict how cars can be brought in the city, and we should limit where and how they park (especially by eliminating free parking). The costs related to this should be progressive, based on income.

I suggest you watch this video[1] by the awesome channel “Not Just Bikes”. Bakfiets are a dutch cargo bike you can literally use for 99% of all your errands. People in a city do not need personal cars. And even Cargo bikes are only useful for 10-20% of occasions, depending on if you have big shopping tours or kids. For the 1 or 2 occasions a year where a car is needed, car sharing is the way to go.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

“We tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”

It’s funny you mention the Netherlands as your proof for your little list of gotchas. The Netherlands handles all your little gotchas fine, and so do more northern countries like Sweden.

The problem is the convenience of a car makes it not worth just putting on a layer of clothing for the weather. Use a car if you’re going to travel 100km, but don’t be like the rest of the people in my Montana town and use a car to go pick up the groceries 3 miles away just because it’s 42 degrees and you’re cold.

See by saying you need a car for these extremes you are actually just making excuses to use a car all the time.

>The Netherlands handles all your little gotchas fine, and so do more northern countries like Sweden.

Most people in the Netherlands who can afford it still have a car though. Yes i do a lot by bicycle but a car is far superior for many errands and trips.

But at least in my experience (and I suspect in others’ as well), those shorts trips make up a miniscule percentage of overall miles (and therefore emissions). It’s commuting and road trips that account for 90% of my mileage

Well you should definitely be commuting by bike or public transportation. Don’t know why you would think that wasn’t in the cards.

Road trips? Why are you taking them in a personal vehicle? Because there isn’t competent public transportation.

I’m against car ownership. Oh you can’t get anywhere without a car? Maybe build another lane to a place where I care.

There’s a huge infrastructure and zoning problem that incentivizes some jobs to be in transit-friendly places (professional services - so they have easy access to their customers) and others to specifically not be in transit-friendly places (manufacturers - so they have easy highway access for shipping). If you’re living with someone in the other category of work, at least one of you is necessarily living in a location that requires commuting where I am.

I have the short end of that equation, so I’m commuting 20 minutes by car (vs. nearly 2 hours by bike or by bus). It just doesn’t make sense to have transit go regularly enough or direct enough to where I’m commuting to (one rider buses are worse than cars!!).

You’ve given up then. You’ve tried nothing and you’re all out of ideas. Go have “fun” in your 20 minute commutes.

When your partner dies from participating in one of the most dangerous activities Americans do on a daily basis? Yeah, that would suck.

It’s hard to change you life to avoid such a convenience, but it’s possible if you try.

So…I should try more by doing what, exactly?

Assuming I’m an average driver, and across a 30-year career, that commute is increasing my changes of dying something like 0.3%, given the number of miles I’m driving (that’s a whole lot higher than I expected!) by car vs. 0.03% by bus. But…by bus, I’ve spent an additional 3% of my entire life (assuming I live 100 years = 876,000 hours) commuting, so the balance of that equation shifts pretty far in favor of car commuting (and I’ll switch to electric at some point soon once EVs are purchasable without a 6-12 month wait…).

I will grant you that riding a bike 4 hours per day would probably improve my lifespan more than that 4 hours (due to improved fitness), though will likely also cost me my relationship because all I’ll be doing is working and commuting to work. But this would enable me to move closer to work! Win/win!

>So…I should try more

Yes. You’re replying to the meme comment: “We tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” and you’re literally saying you’re out of ideas.

>by doing what, exactly?

You’ve already mentioned you have a 30 minute commute. What could you do to reduce that? Maybe your SO has better options for public transportation to their work than you do and you could move to take advantage of that while giving you a commute close enough to bike. You could car pool. You could work with your local government to increase public transit options. Get an E-bike and take that to the faster public transportation routes instead of waiting 2 hours on the bus. You could just take the bus.

There’s a 20 mile differential between my SO’s work and mine. And this is one of the closer options work-wise for me. So…either we both commute by car or I do.

My bus option is a single transfer. But it still takes 2 hours. Bike to the transfer takes the same amount of time as taking the bus. E-bike 20 miles is a possibility, though we’re probably talking higher chances of death that way than a car. Biking by human power would probably be lower chance of death (due to lower speed and better cardiovascular health).

Working with the local government generally doesn’t work…especially for something like this where it’s adding a bus route for one (which is worse than a single occupant vehicle). I’m like the definition of a case where single occupant EVs make sense…

The article put up a simplified view in order to reduce the topic down to a single number of energy in vs energy out. It is a technical definition of energy efficiency, but without all that messy context that define transportation.

If we were to discussion energy in transportation the context is much richer and complex. The easiest way to see this is in weight. A EV car in general is much heavier than ICE cars, sometimes by a factor of 3x, which happens to cancel out the energy efficiency of the EV. We also have to consider reduce, reuse, repair and recycle aspect. EV car is generally more electronica complex and (according to what I have read), have worse reuse and repair aspect than ICE cars. EV might win on the recycle aspect, and train/bicycles obvious win on the reduce aspect.

We also have to consider drive distance. The average trip for a car (using statistics form my country) is 5km, which most of those being commute to and from work, with a majority within biking distance. Of course, if people need a car to transport kids, participate in hobbies, regularly transporting large items, then they might simply use that same tool to travel to and from work as a convenience. Owning a car enables unnecessary travel with car as well as enabling the necessary travel.

And finally we need to consider how stations for stores, buses and trains are designed. Train stations are not designed for a person to haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries. Subways however are rather much designed to make transporting a toddler and a single bag of groceries a fairly acceptable experience, and since subway stations generally has good coverage, people don’t need to have 3 bags of groceries. Supermarkets that focus on subway users tend to be located in the subway stations, while supermarkets that focus on car users that travel a few miles from the store tend to have large parking lots and be located at the outer edges of cities near big highways.

> A EV car in general is much heavier than ICE cars, sometimes by a factor of 3x, which happens to cancel out the energy efficiency of the EV.

This isn’t true.

The Model 3 has around half a ton worth of battery and weights around 2 tons. the GMC Hummer EV weights over 9,000 pounds, around 4.5 tons, which is roughly three times the weight of a Honda Civic. The hummer has around 1.4 tons in just battery (https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/07/business/electric-vehicles-we…)

The law in my country has a combined maximum weight limit (car + trailer) as part of their driving license, which has cause a bit of a problem with EVs. The extra weight from battery mean that there isn’t much room to drive the car with a trailer, a problem which political is starting to gain some traction. The argument being put forth is that people are forced to use ICE car to pull things like boat trailer just because the law was designed for more lighter ICE cars.

If there is no additional weight with EVs then the law doesn’t need to change. Are you saying that the people arguing that EV is being hindered are wrong?

Just as a small hint about that. EU has recently change their rules. The previous allowed max was 3.5 tons, but electric and gas powered cars has been given an exception to increase the max to 4.25 tons in acknowledgement that those cars tend to be heavier, and that the previous limit restricted the use of lower emission transportation. Source: Revision of the Directive on Driving Licences.

Of course politicians could be wrong and there is nothing to make it physical impossible to build a light weight EV. Restricting weight reduces road maintenance and decreases the breaking distance and if there is no need for increasing the maximum then everyone is better off with the old maximum.

> What you’re missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress.

The corollary is that real human civilizations have to move goods over roads with ICE trucks for the foreseeable future unless batteries approach the energy density of diesel.

Trucks are already moving to electric.

It not going to happen overnight, and currently bans on new sales only are scheduled for like 2040, but they’re likely to be brought forward as people get more confortable with the idea.

Starting with last mile delivery in urban areas, trucks are going electric today. And it’s not initially about energy density, it’s about the poisons and pollution they emit.

I’d claim it’s all about economics. There are small trucks commercially available for the first time now that can move the volume of packages required. And they’re cheaper to operate than ICE trucks, so companies are obviously and quickly switching. The marketing points are frosting on the equation!

Semi trucks will move ‘forward’ to electric when the technology becomes available.

So far it’s not, the state of the art prototypes can not do the required job.

Maybe it will be something like fuel cells instead, who knows.

Green Hydrogen is going to be a big part of fixing the mess made by fossil fuels.

Blue Hydrogen and small Fuel Cell hybrids got pushed harder than they should have been by some oil and gas people, which left a bad taste in many people’s mouths but, as long as it’s not being used for something that you could do with mains electricity or batteries instead, Green Hydrogen is part of the solution. We need it for making chemicals and fertilizer and as an analog to pumped hydro storage.

A view on this from a anti-oil and gas angle is here:

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/01/cleantech-talk-chemical…

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/03/cleantech-talk-chemical…

Hydrogen cars, no. Hydrogen shipping, maybe. Hydrogen for chemical feedstocks, yes.

Green hydrogen right now is green washing. Clean hydrogen production is easy to do, but is more expensive than dirty hydrogen production.

When that equation changes (which it will do eventually), clean hydrogen production will win out and at that time, we’ll need infrastructure to support it. The question is just: when will it happen?

Green Hydrogen became cheaper than dirty hydrogen in the US as of the recent Inflation Reduction Act:

> The cheapest cost of production for grey hydrogen in the world today comes in at a monthly average price of $1.71/kg in the US Midwest, according to Platts, with green hydrogen in the US Northwest coming in at $3.73/kg. Subtract the $3/kg via the tax credit, and that renewable H2 would cost a developer $0.73/kg to produce.

Good point - Didn’t realize IRA addressed that! Though technically it hasn’t been signed into law yet and I assume it doesn’t go into effect immediately?

“Electrolysis from renewable energy” isn’t an obvious boogeyman. That’s essentially the definition of green hydrogen–maybe you’re arguing that someone is selling counterfeit green hydrogen, but that’s not an indictment of green hydrogen. In any case, would it kill you to spend a couple sentences explaining what you mean rather than trying to be all mysterious and making us guess?

Or in case of Singapore, your heat wave is our most days in 80% humidity. And on the days it isnt hot, it’s probably pouring rain… you know 10 seconds of it is indistinguishable from jumping into a swimming pool rain.

When I move heavy stuff I don’t use my car, I rent a truck, which was made for moving heavy stuff. I also don’t see a reason to carry toddlers to grocery shops.

You take toddlers with you because leaving them unsupervised is illegal. Whether you’re driving your own car or renting a truck doesn’t matter—rail doesn’t suffice in either case.

Yes, not only cold weather is a culprit, but also hot. I can’t even imagine a cyclist riding from one part of Dubai to another. It is dangerous.

bikes can carry and tow trailers to help with some of that. Also…groceries can be carried on the bars if a few bags

>You’re correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I’m not even looking for numbers here, because it’s irrelevant.

On the contrary, it’s highly relevant in a world where we have a very pressing energy issue.

>What you’re missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress.

Cargo-bikes can cover many of the transportation use-cases the average person has, and the rest can be covered by utilizing shared transportation vehicles. No private vehicle ownership is necessary here, and private vehicle ownership and its use as the primary mode of transportation is >80% of the problem.

>Or just bring home groceries once a week.

Cargo-bikes, closer shops, public transportation, grocery delivery and/or higher frequency of shopping solves this

>Or have kids.

Cargo-bikes, public transportation solves this

>Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors.

Bicycles, public transportation solves this isse. Additionally, car infrastructure is more exclusionary to seniors than the alternatives - same with children, who are not allowed to operate a car. Not to mention people with disabilities. All more discriminated against by car infrastructure than the alternatives.

>Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it’s a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it’ll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.

Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.

>If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it’s CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.

Essentially all of these problems can be solved satisfactorily with alternatives. Note that clean is also relative - the alternatives are very significantly cleaner than car-oriented transportation.

And we have barely even touched the subjects of transportation mode lethality nor economic discrimination, which are hugely significant - cars kill more than any other mode of transportation, and is more expensive both on the individual and societal level, making them a huge burden for poor people.

You’re doing a lot of hand waving which basically boils down to equating “it can solve the problem in some scenarios” with “it’s the optimal choice”.

Can you use a cargo bike to do groceries? Sure. Can you rent a car to carry a mattress? yes. Can you carry two children on a bicycle? Ehh, ok, let’s pretend you can, or you just take the bus.

But this is ignoring the fact that in the past hundred years, people have repeatedly chosen to own a car. Yes, including in places with good public transport. And surprising enough, even when the cost of a car + maintenance + repairs + financing + gas is a lot higher than just taking the bus, not to mention the comparatively trivial price of a bike. The very fact that you just don’t see that many cargo bikes anywhere, but see cars everywhere is a pretty strong hint. That’s the default hypothesis - that cars actually do bring value in people’s lives. All you’re offering to counter this is a list of “in specific contexts, bike may solve the same problem in shittier ways”. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how freezing your ass off in winter on a bike is even remotely acceptable.

In my youth I actually tried this. Spent a winter with a motorcycle, and another winter with a bike. Both were complete and utter failures. I actually burned a set of gloves when I left them on the engine to get warm. And biking on the snow and ice… ugh. The bruises.

Plus small practical things. A cargo bike or a bike with a trailer basically take just as much parking space as a small car. And are a hellof a lot easier to steal.

Cars may kill more people than bikes, but you can’t snap your fingers Thanos-style and have all cars replaced with bikes. Dramatically increasing the number of bikes in the street means mixing bikes with cars, which means a lot more dead people. I know it’s the car’s fault, but such is life, the universe is not fair. Still means more dead people.

> Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.

I call bullshit. Smelly, stinky bullshit. In the same city, with the same infrastructure, I see with my own eyes bikes and electric scooters disappearing in winter and reappearing in spring. That’d be just impossible if climate had no bearing and only infrastructure mattered.

> In the same city, with the same infrastructure, I see with my own eyes bikes and electric scooters disappearing in winter and reappearing in spring. That’d be just impossible if climate had no bearing and only infrastructure mattered.

They aren’t saying weather doesn’t matter. Just that people use weather as an excuse for bad infrastructure which matters much more, and is easier to change.

Also, people may not be aware that e-bike cargo van deliveries are already a thing in urban areas. Being enclosed from the rain is not a unique advantage of cars and removing cars from urban areas as much as possible is a necessary first step.

You might say, well that’s just a small electric car and technically you’d be correct. A small, light, electric “car” that can intermix with pedestrians and cycles and wheelchairs and mobility scooters.

They’re literally saying weather doesn’t matter. I mean, you can hardly be more clear than “Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.”

I’m sorry for appearing confrontational, but the original comment was pretty much “we should ignore EVs and just skip to trains+bikes because they’re better”. I’m not disputing that bikes are ok, and as it happens I own several and love riding scooters. But taking “bikes are ok” and using it as a stick with which to hit EVs has just one result: later adoption of EVs, more people dying early because pollution, more carbon in the air.

I didn’t say that we need to chose just one solution. OP did, quite clearly. And then followed up with arguments which are rather weak, to which I’m responding a bit less politely than I otherwise would.

But energy efficiency is not the single goal and it shouldn’t become it. The most energy efficient mode if transportation is to stay put. The most energy efficient form of living is a bunk in some barracks and so on and so forth. And some point we have to acknowledge that life is spending energy so why not on individual travel?

This is true. However, car-oriented development and car travel is inferior to alternative modes of transportation in essentially all other aspects as well, so this point does not run counter to these superior modes of transportation.

People aren’t dumb. Cars are expensive yet extremely popular. Thus, car travel is superior when it comes to satisfying the needs of the owners. Train travel is often more costly and much more inconvenient. Air travel obviously doesn’t work on short routes. Travel by bike comes closest in terms of cost and convenience, but only in good weather, for extremely short routes, and with relatively little baggage.

That being said, cities don’t have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It’s the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that’s not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.

>People aren’t dumb. Cars are expensive yet extremely popular. Thus, car travel is superior when it comes to satisfying the needs of the owners. Train travel is often more costly and much more inconvenient. Air travel obviously doesn’t work on short routes. Travel by bike comes closest in terms of cost and convenience, but only in good weather, for extremely short routes, and with relatively little baggage.

This is purely a function of contemporary car-oriented infrastructure, nothing more. People do indeed select the choice that is most convenient, and the built environment as is today does favor the use of cars.

Though, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, and more, this is a grim mistake.

>That being said, cities don’t have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It’s the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that’s not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.

Cargo bikes scale far better than cars. Germany, while better than the U.S, is still not peak built environment. As a nation they lean quite a bit on cars.

> Cargo bikes scale far better than cars.

That’s a huge misunderstanding. They scale in exactly the same way: they have space usage that grows linearly with the number of owners. They are of course smaller, but also carry only one adult. A city that has a problem with x million cars will have the very same problem with 3x million cargo bikes. That’s a serious problem, because cities tend to grow ever more dense. The constant factor simply doesn’t change the equation. The only thing that scales better is a shared mode of transportation, but that doesn’t offer the same level of freedom as individual transportation and is often not as efficient as one would like (e.g., subways getting overcrowded during rush hour).

That’s not even a little bit true.

Trains only go where there are tracks. Tracks are much more expensive to build and maintain than roads. Trains to do not run on demand.

Bicycles do not protect riders from the elements. Bicycles are not suitable for hauling large or heavy objects, or many objects.

This whole anti-car thing is getting tiresome. Yes, the US needs to dial back its car culture. But cars do have a place, and fill a niche that other transportation methods cannot fill.

Staying put may be most efficient but it does not qualify as transportation. Sometimes people do need transportation and that needs to be as efficient as it can be.

> it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation

This simply is pre-WWII urban planning. We used to have sustainable cities and comprehensive passenger rail systems before we teared them down for cars and suburbia.

I dont see how it matters. Its not like we have run out of room. Just have 4x the number of small neighbourhood grocery stores

We’re running out of something though, or some combination of things. Otherwise you wouldn’t have such accelerating inequality and popular unrest.

Ya, we’re running out of wealth mobility. No one can afford houses because corporations vacuum up all the money.

The solution to that, in hindsight, was probably not building the majority of new housing in sprawling, low-density suburbs that require a car to get most places people want to go though…

Which is why industrialized countries with higher population density move back even faster to pre-WWII urban planning (EU), or sometimes never left it (Japan).

Yes indeed.

The fact that conservatives broadly have taken the position supporting of cars and car-oriented development is one of the most absurd things imaginable. Socialized inefficient infrastructure that was not even a thing a hundred years ago being considered a conservative policy, a real hoot.

I’m not sure how much of this is true.

I’m a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.

>I’m not sure how much of this is true.

I’ll admit to this not being an opinion I hold based on any kind of scientific observation, this does seem to be an opinion I have anecdotally observed among rural- and suburban-populations, which tend to lean more towards the conservative political spectrum than their urban counterparts.

>I’m a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.

Kudos.

I’m not a conservative, but the independence that cars provide holds a certain appeal and aligns fine with conservative values. Anyway, conservatives happily embrace new technology all the time (almost all conservatives have a smartphone and an Internet connection, and those developments are much more recent than cars); adopting cars isn’t a contradiction at all—clinging to trains and bikes would be the contradiction.

So the best way would be to just use electric bicyclea and scooters for daily commutes, trains for long range transport of people and delivery service backed by trains and electric cars and other vehicles, possibly state sponsored to some degree for all deliveries long range and short range.

Any time the subject of electric car efficiency comes up the first comment is always “we should build trains.” The perfect is the enemy of the good.

In the US, trains would require an expenditure of trillions of dollars with a multi-decade long fiscal commitment for an idea that’s deeply unpopular with the citizenry. Ain’t gonna happen here in our lifetime. Maybe in other countries, but not the USA.

You can buy an electric car today.

You can also buy an electric bicycle today, too, for 1/10 of the price of an EV.

Indeed, and I have one! But I cannot use my electric bike to visit my relatives in a different state. That’s what my EV is for. (And it has a rack so we can take our ebikes on the trip too.)

I’d expect the train to be more efficient than the bike in terms of (load mass) * (distance traveled) / (energy used). Proportional to the size of the load, you lose a lot of energy to air resistance on a bike. Trains only push the air out of the way once on the front, and they’re long, plus there’s less friction from the wheels.

I’m certain we’re missing something in that article. An electric bike shouldn’t be more efficient than a normal bike - it’s heavier and the wind resistance is the same. My first guess is that the power use for the electric assist only considers the electric assist, not the human riders portion.

Humans are quite inefficient - we can convert around 25% of food energy to work. The losses in the power plant generating the electricity for charging the e-bike’s battery and the motor’s efficiency losses would result in a higher overall efficiency than 25%.

People generally dont need more calories that they already have, they need less. They must do (but dont do enough) physical exercice to loose extra energy they consume (in places where cars are an issue).

Sure, but that doesn’t really play into the equation when comparing the pure efficiency of different transportation methods. Of course in practice since it’s good to exercise at least 30min daily, you can think of the energy spent during that as free from a efficiency standpoint

Heavier would seem like a benefit to me, wouldn’t inertia improve its score over longer distances?

No, the only things that matter are the losses and those are due to air resistance (same), rolling resistance (increases linear with weight) and losses due to braking/acceleration (grows quadratic with weight). Heavier is always worse. Note that electric bikes usually don’t even have recuperative braking due to the complexities involved.

If heavier were better, we’d see all Tour de France riders use cast iron wheels and frames ;)

You might be thinking of heavier race cars with bigger engines generally having higher top speeds. They aren’t more efficient, just more powerful, and weight doesn’t affect top speed (only acceleration).

Trains travel much faster and air resistance scales quadratic. But otoh, being able to travel at faster speeds obviously is a major advantage for a train. Now, if we could just combine the two and have enough bike slots on a train, that would be amazing.

While I also think that humanity would be better off with less cars, I think one shouldn’t mix up those matters. To some extend, humanity needs cars and we should push for making those cars as efficient and environmental friendly as possible. Hence electric cars. They are the technology which allows us to use cars into the future.

However I agree, wherever possible, less cars would be good. Public transit and bicycles work well in those regions, which have the proper infrastructure. Some European cities are quite good in this respect, others are following.

Fun fact though: between an efficient electric car (like the Tesla Model 3) and an electric train or even a Diesel bus, there is little efficiency difference, in a lot of cases the electric car wins. But trains win on not contributing to congested streets etc.

Funny side note: the German high speed trains are called InterCity Express … short ICE.

Writing this from one right now, going 200 km/h while having breakfast.

I would assume that electric bikes are in turn beaten by electric velomobiles. Those easily go 25+ km/h with muscle power alone. As long as you are reasonable fit a motor that is restricted to 25 km/h is dead weight on those most of the time.

Most sane government policy acknowledges this, even european right-wing governments:

Decarbonising Transport: A Better, Greener Britain

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/… .pdf

> But we cannot, of course, simply rely on the electrification of road transport, or believe that zero emission cars and lorries will solve all our problems, particularly for meeting our medium-term carbon reduction targets to 2035. Road traffic, even on pre-pandemic trends, was predicted to grow by 22 percent from 2015 to 2035 much of it in cities, where new roadbuilding is physically difficult and disadvantages communities.

> We cannot pile ever more cars, delivery vans and taxis on to the same congested urban roads. That would be difficult for the roads, let alone the planet, to tolerate. As we build back better from the pandemic, it will be essential to avoid a car-led recovery. As I said in “Decarbonising Transport: Setting the Challenge” in March last year, we must make public transport, cycling and walking the natural first choice for all who can take it. Many journeys are short, could be done differently – and were done differently, in the very recent past. Even ten years ago, for instance, more children walked to school. We want to reduce urban road traffic overall. Improvements to public transport, walking and cycling, promoting ridesharing and higher car occupancy, and the changes in commuting, shopping and business travel accelerated by the pandemic, also offer the opportunity for a reduction or at least a stabilisation, in traffic more widely. That will benefit everyone, drivers included.

So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren’t really helping.

>So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren’t really helping.

My position is a general anti-car position, with a particular disdain for ICEs. See my other comments in the thread for my thinking on the way forward.

I am also anti-car, but it’s a better sales pitch to suggest that in dense urban areas, removing pollution, reducing carbon and avoiding congestion can be done hand in hand with the shift to EVs than set them as opposites.

The extra leverage that urban traffic has to prioritise zero local emissions, lightweighting for pedestrian safety, vehicle redesign for visibility, silent operation, small vehicles for avoiding congestion (e.g. cycle couriers) is a lever to get general road transport and rural trucks to low emissions faster. It also lets more people into the cities (which is happening anyway but ICE vehicles are slowing it down)

I don’t think we disagree, and I agree that I could probably refine my advocacy a bit.

I like trains. I really really like trains. I used to live in Japan so I know what life is like when it’s organized around trains and it’s awesome. I hate the sprawled-out American suburbs where everything is so far apart that walking, or even biking in some places, is just not practical.

That said, I just can’t see America reorganizing already built-up areas around trains, if only because it would require the government to purchase too much land just to lay the tracks.

I absolutely think that all new development should be done in a transportation-first level of density. But the existing burbs are a lost cause. And so we end up with electric cars.

Time has great value, we only have a limitdd amoint of it and getting to spend less of it in transport and more of it spdnding time with loved ones or making art is good.

Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.

It seems like you have never been to a well connected and dense city, that has good public transport and bicycle infrastructure. Bikes and public transport can be at least twice as fast if not faster. Everything can be built closer together because you don’t need all the wasted parking space and huge streets that cars require. I can really recommend the Youtube channel “Not Just Bikes”. It has made me hate cars for all the useless space they take up, all the pollution (noise, air, rubber) they create, and the danger they present to anyone not in a car.

>Time has great value, we only have a limitdd amoint of it and getting to spend less of it in transport and more of it spdnding time with loved ones or making art is good.

Agreed. So much time gets killed by the mathematically unscalable car infrastructure, where many many hours get killed when people are stuck in traffic. These hours are essentially impossible to make more productive as well, as drivers are unable to perform other tasks while at the wheel. Public transportation does not suffer from this shortcoming, and bicycle infrastructure is inherently more scalable and hence traffic congestion is not a thing when it comes to bicycle infrastructure. Time spent bicycling also doubles as exercise, further enhancing the time-efficiency of this mode of transport.

>Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.

Not inherently. This is a mere matter of infrastructure, nothing else. Dense urban environment and rapid transit is clearly less time-wasting than the suburban car-oriented development, in essentially every aspect imaginable.

I bike roughly 30 minutes to work. The route I take crosses a bridge at the end and a point that’s notable for having traffic jam up. In perfect road conditions, no Traffic jam, the same distance by car takes 25 - 30 minutes, plus required time for finding a parking space. In the morning/evening traffic, it’s easily 10-20 minute on top of that. For distances around 10-20 km in the city, an ebike is absolutely competitive to a car.

We’re not going to replace cars with trains in the timescales necessary to deal with climate change, even if we could convince everyone to upend their lifestyle. It just isn’t going to happen.

Most people still don’t own cars. Far from it. The key must be to ensure that billions of people don’t need to pass through the 1950-2000 infrastructure dead-end that e.g the US took, by betting on the car as the transportation mode of choice.

Just skip the bs restrictions on people other than you and mass murder them.

Road to hell is paved with good intentions or something.

People arguing for restricting others’ freedoms while enjoying them themselves is what I see.

Good old genocide is the ultimate conclusion to that and undeniably the most effective option.

You mean I’m arguing we should work to have fewer cars in e.g Asia? And that’s whose restricted freedom? Those who have good enough infrastructure to not need cars?

I don’t get it. The idea is not not force people to need cars by building poor infrastructure and poorly planned cities. I’d love to not need to own a car (and I’m not American).

Not sure why you keep talking about genocide and to be honest it’s not quite coherent.

And it’s a great idea, good thought. I used bicycles in cities where it was possible. But that, and public transportation, only goes so far.

A personal car gives incredible freedom, especially to the poor. Suddenly they can live affordably far from work, choose better work places, do work on the side, transport luggage on the cheap.

Inevitably, the only way to stop people from getting cars is to make the licensing and their cost prohibitively expensive.

So they will take overcrowded trains that may not be on time, and/or live in closets or be lucky not to get into a serious accident on a bike/moped in a city not made for them.

Solving battery energy density and EVs are a good compromise.

But yes, you’re right, cities should not be planned around cars. Imo, there should be more of them actually, but alas it seems that’s a lost art and everyone’s gathering in whatever big cities were made in the past couple of centuries or earlier.

Genocide is a dumb example stemming from my belief that death is better than life in squalor heh. Obviously most people don’t think that.

Ok. On the other hand, a complete migration to EVs won’t solve the climate crisis either, as they are not energy efficient enough. Combine this with the fact that car-oriented developments are energy-inefficient in other ways - single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency, lack of walkability makes car travel mandatory, larger infrastructure requirements are again worse woth regards to energy efficiency, and so on.

Does this mean we should throw our hands up and not make an EVs? No, that would be a bad strategy, a complete non-option. We must halt the climate crisis, this is quite frankly mandatory.

So, how do we tackle this issue? If we want to deal with the problem in a timely manner, we have to work within the framework we already have today. This means some degree of replacing ICEs with EVs. Crucially though, we need to realize that the framework itself is bad, and requires replacement in the future. This means halting investments in non-sustainable built environments, building energy-efficient transportation infrastructure to connect existing places where it makes sense, and only building new places with appropriate transportation infrastructure.

Defeatism is not on the roadmap.

No one is arguing that EVs will solve climate change. They are necessary but not sufficient, and their issue isn’t that they aren’t efficient enough, it’s that (1) our grid isn’t yet fully clean and (2) cars don’t account for a sufficiently large share of emissions (so 100% of clean power for cars doesn’t address emissions for other applications).

> single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency,

We’re definitely not going to get everyone into small urban apartments in the next 50 years. We couldn’t build the necessary apartments fast enough, and the costs would be enormous for a relatively small reduction in emissions. The better value for money is building out our clean energy capacity as quickly as possible and disincentivizing waste via carbon pricing.

> Defeatism is not on the roadmap.

Cool, then let’s just terraform Mars and call it a day. Of course, we have to be realistic which means no terraforming Mars or building hundreds of millions of apartment units and equivalent rail infrastructure.

Yeah, would basically require demolishing most cities and rebuilding them around the train lines. Moving non-physical jobs to home has more potential.

Cities were demolished to accommodate cars in the past, I see no reason why such a retrofit would be impossible in the other direction.

There is some potential in reduction by moving jobs to WFH when possible, but this is not mutually exclusive with migrating to energy efficient means of transportation and urban development. Hence, I don’t think it’s relevant in the discussion.

In what way were they demolished? Cars allow for urban sprawl. People now have homes in places where they rely on cars to get to work.

I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it’s just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don’t need to be there in person, it dominoes. There’s no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form. I used to work in SF and observe these things closely, and now I’m watching what happens as many of the techies leave.

> In what way were they demolished? Cars allow for urban sprawl. People now have homes in places where they rely on cars to get to work.

Local example: There were plans in the 1950 to have a highway cross through Berlin Kreuzberg (The A106, today Oranienstraße for the locals). Part of those plans were put in motion, the buildings around Kottbusser Tor date back to those ideas. Massive local protests put a stop to that. More recent example from Berlin: the current extension of the A100.

You can find enough examples of highways cutting through existing neighborhoods in the US if you look around a little. To cite [1]

“ Planners of the interstate highway system, which began to take shape after the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, routed some highways directly, and sometimes purposefully, through Black and brown communities. In some instances, the government took homes by eminent domain.”

[1] https://text.npr.org/984784455

>In what way were they demolished? Cars allow for urban sprawl. People now have homes in places where they rely on cars to get to work.

Highway construction demolished a lot of neighbourhoods in cities. In the U.S, the demolished neighborhoods were also disproportionately low-income and majority non-white neighborhoods.

>I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it’s just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don’t need to be there in person, it dominoes. There’s no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form.

This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it’s not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise.

This efficiency is somewhat obscured by a plethora of reasons right now - car-oriented infrastructure subsidised by people not utilizing that infrastructure is one of the higher ones on the list.

> Highway construction demolished a lot of neighbourhoods in cities. In the U.S, the demolished neighborhoods were also disproportionately low-income and majority non-white neighborhoods.

The space a highway or other road takes up is nowhere close to the space it allows to inhabited, though. LA County is the perfect example of an area that has grown via roads to become non-viable for trains. It’s just too spread out. Without the roads, tons of households would be cut off from jobs they commute to, again the low-income ones. I’m not justifying the original construction of the highways, just saying what would happen if we went back.

> This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it’s not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise.

Regular cities make sense for that. You get two of each kind of business in proximity, and most people are good with that. Dense cities go beyond that point and get to where less scalable resources become strained, like housing. It’s a clear sign when people are commuting from outside that something is wrong. Yes, some people still prefer the excitement, but usually just the young and single. SF pre and post tech boom, and during/after 2020, gives you an idea of how many people are just there for the work.

>In what way were they demolished?

See: the cross Bronx expressway

On a personal note: in the 1970s an entire city block of very old homes in my city was taken via eminent domain to make room for a parking garage.

At a minimum, because there is very little political appetite for it (apart from left-wing urban professionals) in large part because it’s an insanely inefficient way to meet climate goals (compared with building out clean energy sources and electrifying fossil fuel applications like cars), but also because it’s insanely invasive (it requires pushing everyone into a lifestyle they don’t want).

Is that a bicycle pedaled by a human, i.e., who converts calories into work at about 25% efficiency?

Does it take into account the farming and supply chain costs of that food it’s about 15% efficiency by calorie, compared with gasoline which is close to 90% efficient IIRC. Or is it just food/fuel energy -> work?

> gasoline which is close to 90% efficient IIRC.

Common gasoline engines have an efficiency around 30-40%, assuming modern high-efficiency designs. For older designs this is closer to 20%.

Ah, my mistake. Your number matches gasoline refinement (I see 85% quoted), but that’s only one part of the gasoline supply chain.

That article explicitly states that it doesn’t account for the energy or emissions required to produce the fuel.

The lifecycle emissions of an EV depend on how the electricity was generated, and the total emissions of cycling depends on the diet of the cyclist - even though the energy per distance is the same regardless.

Gasoline isn’t 90% efficient. But yes, there’s a study showing that a bicyclist with a meat-heavy diet is overall contributing more CO2 per mile than a modern ICE car. Electric bike is way more efficient.

I’d love to see that study and see if it takes into account how much energy was expended constructing the car vs the bike and the roadway required for the car. CO2/Mile on a basis of marginal energy invested for each extra mile is not a valid comparison.

There are other places I. The world where this is not true. For example, more than 50% of all households within this S-Bahn ring in Berlin (let’s call that the extended center) do not own a car. The bike may also replace a second or third car. Not counting the cost of manufacture is just sloppy.

They also picked a car that is twice as efficient as the average car for comparison and the most meat-heavy fiery possible (essentially meat only). That’s interesting as a though experiment, but not as a basis for policy- which is exactly what they state in their preface.

Yeah, it’s not for policy, otherwise it’d have to target a particular jurisdiction too. It’s for individual interpretation. If you eat a lot of meat and own a car and a bike already, maybe think about biking more as a healthy exercise than a way to help the environment, or think of meat as a bigger problem for it.

Paved bicycle paths require a fraction of the size and an even smaller fraction of the upkeep, on account of bicycles being so light, and road tear being an approximate function of weight to the fourth power.

If you want everyone to bike, you’ll need larger bikeways than what exists now.

Also, you’ll still need the roads for logistics.

Bicycle infrastructure accomodates far more people per area of infrastructure, as cars scale really poorly while bicycles scale really well.

My point about maintenance also still stands.

This reminds me of the classic “if you wash recycling with water heated with electricity generated with coal it’s not very carbon efficient”.

Yes, that might be true, but it’s the “coal” that’s the issue, not the recycling. It says so little useful about recycling that it’s basically a lie. But it does suggest we should phase out coal, not just to make recycling cleaner, but for everyone that uses electricity.

Similarly, I assume this study looked at red-meat reared in a GHG callous manner. Which says basically nothing about bicycles, but does tell us that we should take the obvious steps we’re already aware of to decarbonize food. Not because it helps cyclists be more efficient, but because it’s a smart thing to do for everyone who eats.

> Indeed, the use of fertilizers, methane gas released from livestock like cattle and massive food waste all contribute to the vast carbon footprint of food production. Since land is both a source and a sink of CO2, land-clearing for new agricultural terrain in tandem with deforestation drives harmful emissions, equating to approximately 26% of the global total.

This only really matters if cyclists eat more than motorists. And you might as well include other lifestyle factors at the same time.

Well I’m not sure. Refining is over 90% and so is extraction by the looks, but combined and add transport and yeah maybe it’s more like 80%, in any case it’s around an order of magnitude more efficient than western food production isn’t it?

You got me wondering: how will Boring Company’s Loop and Hyperloop faire in this same regard?

Hyperloop being near vacuum to remove/reduce friction from the area, while vehicle likely on floating MagLev skate, accelerating up to 1,223 kmph should certainly beat all current technology?

That would probably be quite efficient from an energy-standpoint, but we’d need too much rails to make it work at scale.

Cool as hell, though. When going to visit one of my grandparents, I usually pass by a decommissioned railroad that now does bicycle draisines for tourism-purposes. I really should go ahead and ride that some day, it seems like a lot of fun.

Couldn’t agree more, but if car owners get to vote in politicians who then force non-car owners to subsidize their new EV, it’s going to be very hard to get them to understand common sense.

Its natural and easy to find the bad parts of a new solution. EVs are not perfect. EVs definitely have problems. There are better solutions if you maximize for energy efficiency. People didn’t buy ICE cars to be energy efficient, and they won’t buy EVs to be energy efficient. They buy them because having a car is an integral part of a certain lifestyle. That lifestyle may not be equitable or sustainable; handling that problem is a different challenge.

- but -

We lack an intimate and personal understanding of the byproducts of ICE cars. We use a liquid fuel that we rarely actually see. The emissions are almost completely in gas form that we don’t see. You don’t have to “unload” bricks of CO2 and particulate from your vehicle.

But imagine what it would be like if you did. Imagine if CO2 was sludge that you had to handle. For every 10 gallons of gas you put into a car (approximately 70 pounds) you would have to unload approximately 200 pounds of CO2 (not counting water or other byproducts). You would have to find a place to put that. Do you drop it off at the filling station? What do they do with it? How many trips would you have to make to unload it? A 5 gallon bucket of water weighs about 40 pounds, if our sludge had that density, it would be 5 of those 5 gallon buckets. Many people struggle to carry a 5 gallon bucket (not you dear reader, other weaker people).

I don’t think CO2 is actually toxic sludge, this is a mental exercise. I do think CO2 is a pollutant. I think if we had to personally and physically deal with CO2, no one would bitch about the minerals used in EV production.

I think the nuance is important here. If CO2 was toxic we would have handled it already. Obviously CO2 is an asphyxiant, but so is nitrogen and that’s 70% of our atmosphere. No one complains about atmospheric nitrogen. Our bodies handle CO2 continuously as a product of metabolism.

I view CO2 like I view processed sugar - if you have an energy deficit or energy balance, it’s probably fine in small amounts; if you have a surplus, it’s not ok.

I’ve been thinking about the industrial miracles of the 19th and 20th century. Steel, Aluminum, Concrete, Gasoline, Natural Gas, Plastic, Glass, Integrated Circuits, Artificial Fertilizers, Air Conditioning, Automobiles. If you only look at the positive side, all of these are truly miraculous - they’ve provided humanity with incredible increases in productivity and happiness. They’ve let people live longer and in less hospitable places. They’ve supported a higher population level than people expected was possible.

But those miracles have terrible side effects. I won’t list them, it’s too depressing.

This is a rip-off of freelancer Karin Kirk’s original article[0] on Yale Climate Connections. Her primary sources in that article are federal agency websites[1-4] and address the points of mass energy production & vehicle consumption by type. And going solely by that math, it’s a slam-dunk.

The problem–same as with any other modern system–is that there are far more variables to consider to arrive at total system-wide costs, many of these are “trust me” trade secrets of various manufacturers, and the feds themselves (thanks to regulatory capture) have also been known to fudge numbers in the favor of one private interest over another, so even those numbers aren’t above cross-examination.

This is not a pro or anti EV post as much as a humility one. I see a bunch of web developers nerd-sniping each other over personal recollections of industry PR (everthing in the media, pro or con, is somebody’s PR, BTW).

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. TCO is going to be a fairly good approximation of overall system-wide efficiency. Companies can only loss-lead for so long before going bankrupt, and they can only externalize costs for so long before being sued into oblivion. If EVs truly are this superior, nothing is going to stop them.

[0]https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/08/electrifying-tran… [1]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml [2]https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/data/browser/#/?v=9&f=A&s=… [3]https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=107&t=3 [4]https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_02.html

What I don’t understand is how we didn’t have these efficiency numbers in terms of kwatts/mile with an ICE/EV hybrid drivetrain, and why we haven’t had them for decades already.

Why aren’t hybrid drivetrains in Semis, RVs … everything. Within 5 years of the Prius there should have been legislation mandating PHEVs for practically all consumer transport.

With a hybrid you can run an engine in the Atkinson cycle which (apparently) enables diesel-level mileage out of gasoline. You get the regen braking that dramatically improves city driving.

Every five years after the Prius is another travesty that we didn’t have this legislation coming down the pipe.

By now in 2022, 25 years after the Prius and Insight, we should have had 50% or more of new cars being PHEV hybrids with 50+ mile all-electric range. It would have brought Russia to its knees, the Saudis would be an afterthought in policy, and we’d be so much more resilient.

And hybrids in addition to atkinson should enable other tricks for efficiency gains besides carnot output to reclaim heat from the engine and exhaust, like turbochargers do. Gas turbines at the utlity scale are at 60% efficiency.

Oh well.

You are completely right, for 20 years most of the automobile industry built cars that used more energy and especially polluted more than it would have been necessary if they had copied the technology of the Prius.

Our environment would look much better now, if they had.

But in my eyes, the time for hybrids is over, any new car should be pure electric as it is simpler and way more efficient.

Hybrids are really complicated to build.

F1 engines have something called an MGU-H which recovers thermal energy from the engine (turbocharging) but can also spool up electronically etc.

They can reach something like 50% thermal efficiency, but these are truly complicated machines.

I’m obviously not an automotive engineer… but…

1) electric motors are very high torque

2) electric drivetrains aren’t really that complicated.

3) the hybrid battery isn’t that large, so it’s not the space for that

4) all the engine has to do is recharge the battery. Mazda could have probably done a rotary or honda done a miraculous small engine to do the recharging.

Sure I get that the early hybrids were complicated, they probably had both the electric drive and the engine delivering power and balancing things. But with skateboard design EV platforms (and that is over 10 years old at this point), the industry would have produced a very efficient and likely cheaper than a traditional big engine ICE platform with incentives and regulations by now.

It probably is moot now. 200 wh/kg at pack level LFP is coming into mass production, and 150 wh/kg sodium ion is coming next year. But for midwesterners, long haul truckers, RV drivers, and other long distance frequent drivers, the 50 mile PHEV with 200 wh/kg LFP should have a ten year lifespan and deliver carbon emissions savings.

But… oh well.

> By now in 2022, 25 years after the Prius and Insight, we should have had 50% or more of new cars being PHEV hybrids with 50+ mile all-electric range.

The problem with PHEVs is that so many people never plug them in, unless the automaker does something to them like with the BMW i3 REx, in which case said people wouldn’t want them.

It’s also a practical difficulty. Small batteries in PHEV mean they charge slowly (makes public chargers less useful, EV road trips impossible).

Their tiny EV range requires them to be charged daily, which makes at-home charging a necessity in practice. But having such a good access to charging is also a thing that makes BEVs convenient. From this perspective PHEV a poorly-performing BEV with a baggage that reduces its performance, range, and efficiency, and occasionally is a less-efficient ICE to potentially save 20 minutes of time after 2-3 hours of driving at highway speeds.

I agree that PHEVs are fundamentally a flawed BEV. I was pretty strident in the belief, until someone pointed out that when you consider the scale of moving consumer transportation to batteries with current battery production scale (even with the scaling of battery production over the next five years) is SO BIG…

The best use of available battery supply is to do PHEVs. For city traffic you get a huge gain in all-electric driving.

But really, this would have required forethought about 10 years ago to push car makers to have the scaled production ready for hybrid drivetrains. They don’t, and so what I think is that all-BEVs will transition in.

What really sucks is that if we had hybrid drivetrains in mass production ten years ago in most consumer transport, then the used car market would now be full of them.

As it stands, BEVs will come in the new cars, but dirty ICEs will stick around for a decade at least.

It would have been so nice for that used car market to be PHEVs.

Essentially like if every car was a ICE BEV hybrid, but the ICE in some power plant somewhere.

The reving and idling or low power output of the ICE can be avoided if it is in some power plant somewhere.

Eh, it’s more like… exactly what the title says: EVs are just more efficient.

1 gallon of gas contains 33.7 kWh of energy. [1]

The average ICE car goes 24 miles on 1 gallon of gas. That’s 0.7 miles per kWh (24/33.7 ≅ 0.7).

The Tesla Model 3 goes about 4.1 miles per kWh. That’s 5.8x further per kWh, or 5.8x more efficient!

Most of the difference is because ICE engines are inefficient. They waste energy. Just like the article says. :)

The point made by the article about the source of electricity from power plants was simply that EVs are more efficient even when charged from coal fired power plants! Your point about the “ICE in some power plant somewhere” is temporarily true… as the grid de-carbonizes there will be fewer and fewer emissions from grid-scale generation. (Nuclear + renewables is my personal guess for where we’re headed.)

It’s kind of sad that several threads here are playing devil’s advocate. Unless some dramatically better tech takes the world by storm in the next 2-3 years, EVs are going to completely take over the market. Economies of scale should dramatically drive down costs over the next 5-10 years, and then all new cars will be EVs. No one will want the old, expensive, dirty, loud ICE cars. And this is really good news for everybody!

  [1] https://www3.epa.gov/otaq/gvg/learn-more-fuels.htm
  [2] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310
  [3] https://ecocostsavings.com/electric-car-kwh-per-mile-list/

And even this comparison is lenient towards the ICE. That one gallon of gas doesn’t just poof into existence into the gas tank of the car, there’s a certain kWh requirement of energy to go from not having that gallon of gas, to having it.

Obviously the same is true for the electricity in the EV, but that’s dependent on the energy mix in your area. If it’s primarily renewables, this is another efficiency increase in favor of the EV.

> 1 gallon of gas contains 33.7 kWh of energy. [1] The average ICE car goes 24 miles on 1 gallon of gas. That’s 0.7 miles per kWh (24/33.7 ≅ 0.7). The Tesla Model 3 goes about 4.1 miles per kWh. That’s 5.8x further per kWh, or 5.8x more efficient!

Doesn’t this ignore how the fuel was produced, and delivered (refineries, fuel trucks, power plants, charger losses)? Are those losses negligible compared to the 1kWh once inside the battery or fuel tank? If so, then the comparison is fair

It feels really satisfying to read being said clearly what you would think should really be obvious to everyone, rather than the constant FUD and waffling about EVs.

> Eh, it’s more like… exactly what the title says: EVs are just more efficient.

The articles point is also that BEVs are more efficient even if a fossile plant is used, since the plant can operate at better efficiency than a small ICE that also need to idle and rev to bad rpm ranges. Which was what I was trying to convey.

Which opening could you pour gasoline in a Tesla Model 3 to achieve anything else than a fire hazard? Any amount of those “33.7 kWh” gallons will get you exactly zero miles – how is that more efficient?

It’s alluded to in the article, but the energy extraction from combustion in power plants is also more efficient than the combustion engine in your car (almost double in the case of natural gas using combined cycle).

Diesel electric systems are highly efficient ~85%. This is practical now in power plants, trains and shipping.

The same could be achieved on a small scale if someone would simply make it

Diesel engines, like all internal combustion engines are limited by the Carnot Theorem. The maximum theoretical efficiency for diesel is in the low 80% range.

No actual diesel engines can muster up much higher than 60%.

> Diesel electric systems are highly efficient ~85%.

That’s 85% of the crankshaft energy moving the wheels. Once you multiply in your ICE efficiency which will be around 30% for anything that fits in a car or truck you’re looking at 25%

Burn the same deisel in a big turbine and chemical->wheel efficiency going via power lines and a battery will be in the 30-40% range, but with the advantage of being able to mix in solar.

Moving a giant metal and plastic box for each individual human is still a gross waste of resources though and we should subsidize mass transit and active transport infrastructure rather than spending vast amounts of common money on roads and parking lots.

Wasn’t that sorta the premise of the Chevy Volt? Though I think most HEV still include a direct drive from the ICE.

Personally I’d be interested in a pure electric drive HEV with a high efficiency diesel generator. Give me just enough battery for around town (100 miles maybe?) and just enough generator to extend my trip to ~300 miles. The generator doesn’t need to be large (and expensive) enough to be capable to drive from directly at highway speeds, but just enough to extend the range when needed.

Heck make the power units “modular” in 3 ft x 4 ft boxes and let me mix and match power sources. I’ll start out with a 1 battery and 1 diesel setup, but could upgrade to 2 battery power packs later if I drive around town a lot. (^_^)

I was joking but actually modular “power packs” would be cool.. You could replace one at a time vs a full $20k battery. Or take one out and plug it into your home. Maybe even rent a extra diesel pack for that coast-to-coast trip. Hmmm, wish I had the energy to start random companies. ;)

I’ve seen talk before about EVs with gas range-extenders as a possible design. But in a rough sense, we’re at that point with all the new PHEVs on the market. Usually they have 20-45 miles of all-electric range, and then have normal regeneration beyond that. I understand that the power/weight/efficiency trade offs of a PHEV are not the same as having a range extender, but I wonder whether it doesn’t matter, that the economies of scale of current PHEVs and iterative improvements will provide most of the benefit at lower cost.

A nice thing about current PHEVs is that they have smaller batteries than full EVs, which could matter in a battery-constrained market.

> The generator doesn’t need to be large (and expensive) enough to be capable to drive from directly at highway speeds, but just enough to extend the range when needed.

So you would need to park and let the generator slowly charge your car? Why not just charge the car at a charger at that point?

Make the generator large enough so that it can generate enough power to directly run the electric motor for highway driving.

A car only needs 10kW or so on average to do highway speeds, but you need peak power around 30kW at minimum (or about 70 to satisfy most people’s expectations).

You only need the generator to be able to extend the driving time to around 8 hours to cover 99% of use cases, so if your battery can do 2 hours then the generator only needs to produce 3/4 of the energy in the minimal case.

What you are proposing would require the generator to be 3-20x as large as the alternative.

Sorry, maybe I was not clear. Assuming you are correct, I am saying the generator should produce 10kW of power, and OP is suggesting that the generator would generator < 10kW. I’m saying the generator should keep up with the energy demand of cruising on the highway.

You can get a range multiplier even below that.

A car that uses 10kW average and has a 50km range is usable with a 7.5kW generator and stopping to charge every 200km. Knowing you have the ability to stop and charge or limp at 3/4ths speed to the next charger would allow more confidence pushing the boundaries.

A small battery means a 15 minute break to charge every 2 hours is viable and not a deal breaker for someone who only needs range infrequently.

Yah I figure use a super charger. Maybe refill gas too. If you could save $20k I’d say it’d be worth the hassle on the occasional road trip.

The main reason would be cost and weight. Full EV card are still too expensive for many. I’m guessing there’s a sweet spot that’d be much cheaper than either but would provide more range when needed. But as the other commenter points out the ICE + 20 mile pack might win out on efficiency of scale.

But why include the gas engine at all if it doesn’t extend your highway range? Keep your small <100 mile battery pack, skip the extra cost and weight of an engine.

The problem with the generator is it’s more cost, weight, and maintenance. But it still makes sense in many scenarios, which is why many cars do something like this, like the BMW i3.

I wonder how reliable the portable diesel generators are. The huge ones in datacenters are known to have trouble starting up sometimes, so they’re tested frequently.

Much more reliable than gasoline and the added benefit of always operating in the peak performance range as a generator.

Diesels require higher compression than gasoline and must be built stronger as a result. Which explains the higher cost of diesel engines in general.

The BMW i3 comes with a petrol range extender. Not sure how much that adds in practice.

This number is implausibly high. Combined cycle natural gas is only 65-70% with a large amount of engineering put toward capturing waste heat

Yeah, it is.

But heat recovery is also paired with diesel, depending on the usage, with nearly complete conversion efficiency.

All the calcs for electric are bullshit. Every engineer that isn’t a bleeding heart acknowledges this. They have either fudged the production cost or disregarded the recycling cost or ignored the mining expense, drive like a puritan with no climate control… on and on.

Well then how about an electric car driving full out in freezing temps? Or with the A/C max?

I can take nearly 100% of the waste heat from a diesel genset working at maximum efficiency with 42% conversion

i am no mechanical engineer, but i believe there is a practical limit to size of a turbine. I dont think you can have combined cycle engine in a car

Except building mild hybrids to avoid that problem might be more efficient than us building the mass production of lithium metals needed to make mass BEVs.

If we are battery constrained today, we need to consider the most efficient use of our limited battery supply. Start/stop idle technology is much cheaper than 1000lbs of lithium batteries in each vehicle.

-———

It looks like the most efficient solution involves like 50lbs of batteries, rather than the gross 1000+lbs of batteries that BEV fans want to use per car.

These are downright lazy arguments at this point. The F150 ranges 4000-5800 lbs. The F350 ranges 5900-7700 or more. Similar numbers for the Silverado to the F150 I think. And where I live at any given time in any given parking lot a random rock/cinder block is more likely to hit them than any other model. The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.

Yes and we need to end the weapons race of ever increasing car sizes. It makes accidents much more deadly, uses much more energy to move people and takes up unnecessarily large amounts of space in our cities.

Agree, but probably inappropriate to expect EVs to end that weapons race alone. Perfect not being the enemy of the good and all that.

And the comparable GMC Hummer EV is 9,063 lbs, 2,923 pounds of which are batteries.

> The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.

The metals thing comes from Russia (nickle) and Congo (Cobalt), and Argentina/China (Lithium).

The steel thing is *already* solved, with 88% of USA’s steel being composed of recycled steel. You’re hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn’t right now.

Nickel is mostly produced in Indonesia and some pacific islands. Most growth of new nickel is in Indonesia. Its refined in China.

Lithium is mostly from Chile, Argentina and Australia but its mostly refined in China.

> You’re hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn’t right now.

The amount of lithium even if 100% recycled isn’t nearly enough to cover what is needed. We know how to recycle it, in fact we have far more recycling capability then we have material that we can recycle. Everybody invest in recycling but there is not much to actually recycle yet.

Saw a new GMC Hummer a few hours ago for the first time, it was pretty strange to see because I thought it was a “new Bronco” at first or something (from the front). Then saw Hummer and GMC and was even more confused, but least knew what it was.

Seeing your comment above made everything make sense; it’s pretty dang “not my style” but whatever floats (or tows) your boat

> The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.

There’s lots of things the markets haven’t “solved”.

Also, getting a lot more nasty things out of the Earth will also most probably mean more dead kids in the mines of Africa, but I’m sure the market won’t advertise that. At least the Saudis don’t directly kill kids in their oil-fields explorations (they kill them only indirectly in Yemen, with the guns they’ve purchased from the West using the money they got from the oil-fields).

Yes, and you have to go even further and more general. The solution is actually urbanism. You can’t just build trains and hope everything is gone be fine.

Living in low or high density urban environments is far more efficient in pretty much every single way that we can measure. CO2, energy, land use, water use and so on, and not just by a little but by a huge margin.

Transport can be electrified trains, trams, trolly buses, metros. This uses very few battery materials and essentially no new technology. All technology read to deploy in large numbers.

This would also ‘solve’ the housing crisis as increasing density around transportation with mixed use is what leads to much cheaper living cost (housing and transportation need to be seen together).

This talk by famous City Planner Peter Calthorpe is really good and goes into detail. He and his teams were charged with making a few projection plans for California and have really good numbers on all of these things (except the nuclear I mentioned):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4

He has other great talks about his work in China as well, this is a bit more academic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqldZhxl86I

Like Berlin and Munich and Prague and Düsseldorf and Warsaw and Amsterdam and The Hague. I lived there, without a car. I rented a few times when not on train or flight out of town. It’s not for every city, though switch out trams for busses (Stockholm) and it could work in many places.

specifically, hybrids that have at least 20 miles of range and are plug in. this is an amount that allows the majority of commutes to be fully electric.

That, or drastically smaller vehicles such as e-bikes. Especially if you can take them on a larger vehicle (i.e a train) for part of long commutes.

i wish we had proper cycle storage on all trains, it is extremely awkward to place them on transport.

U also wish EU didnt have the silly 25 km/h limit on ebikes, I can pedal faster than that myself

For taking a bicycle on the train, may I suggest the Brompton folding bicycle? Electric version also available.

Also, did you know about the EU speed pedelec category L1e-B? It gets classified as a moped with maximum speed of 45 km/h and maximum 4 kW power.

Electric “unicycles” seem much easier to transport on trains than a bike. Though I wonder if they’re considered “e-bikes” in the EU.

they are banned on the london transport network, supposedly due to danger of lithium battery fires. But self-built ebikes are not banned

we have these vehicles that are really wfficient at moving people, called busses. they should all be electric.

and use overhead cables

We had trolley busses like 100 years ago

Next your gone tell me you could replace the plastic wheels with once made out of steel. Crazy stuff.

For this to work however you need to change far more then just the buses, you need to change the whole development pattern. I put some great links in my other comment.

The most efficient solution for 80% of trips is 10lbs of batteries and a wire for 19%

But sodium batteries are very nearly in mass production so while we’re continuing to insist that petrol is 100% of the problem cars cause rather than 50% I guess that will do.

Much idling could be avoided if traffic engineers would design roundabouts instead of 4-way stops. Nevertheless, some newer cars shut off at intersections and are designed for that.

Roundabouts have a failure mode that 4-way stops don’t, akin to starvation in computer science. Consider a roundabout in a right-hand traffic country with connections in the 4 cardinal directions. If at a given time of day, there’s a constant stream of cars from the west that want to go east, and virtually no traffic from the north or east, then a car trying to enter the roundabout from the south will be waiting a very long time.

> Roundabouts have a failure mode that 4-way stops don’t, akin to starvation in computer science.

Putting roundabouts onto streets is not a binary decision: some intersections could be roundabouts, some could be lights, and others could be roundabouts with lights.

There was such a roundabout constructed by my prior job just outside the 4k factory parkinglot entrance.

Almost everyone were going from the highway to the parking except me.

I had to wait for a bus that was going straight so you could enter or two cars going straight in a row.

It got so bad that the workers started to give way to those coming from the starved road so it sorted itself out I guess.

If there’s that much traffic, a four way stop will be even worse than a roundabout. You’ll need a turbo roundabout, traffic lights or grade separated intersections in that case.

Four way stops are one of the dumbest inventions of man kind that are way over used in North America. Everyone has to stop all the time and it leads to scary situations at 2 way stops because people don’t expect those anymore.

Here is a great video about life without stop signs in the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/42oQN7fy_eM

And here are some infinitely better alternatives:

Low traffic + low speed: raised intersections where right goes first.

Medium traffic + medium speed: priority road with yield signs on side streets and roundabouts

High traffic + medium speed: traffic lights

High traffic + high speed: grade separated intersections

> a four way stop will be even worse than a roundabout.

Maybe for people coming from the west, but it’d undeniably be way way better for people coming from the south.

A single “pause” (traffic light, roundabout, stop sign, even just a speed camera or change in speed limit…) in the stretch of the east-west road leading up to the roundabout can usually solve this. You only need occasional breaks in traffic to allow the secondary traffic to join.

Large UK roundabouts often have traffic lights that are only operational at peak times, to counter the effect you describe.

Small roundabouts don’t have this problem.

It’s very common in major French cities. The workaround is to stick a traffic light on the input lane that gets too busy

A lot of walking would be eliminated too if you actually completely got rid of perpendicular intersections. You kind of need cars to stop sometimes to make it possible for people not in vehicles to get through safely.

There are still crosswalks which are distributed around the circle. Rarely there are pedestrian tunnels to get inside the doughnut, like in Paris to visit the arch.

Those crosswalks tend to be -in my experience - some of the most stressful to interact with. If they’re controlled then you’ve just made the whole thing even worse than they were before. If they’re not then you’ve got a much harder time as a pedestrian to figure out when it’s safe to cross (because of the curve) and the traffic all wants to free flow.

I dunno. Maybe I just haven’t experienced the right ones, but my experience is that the most pedestrian friendly urban spaces have mostly (roughly) straight lines and right angles and lots of natural or man made barriers to free flow of cars to prevent them from going too fast. I don’t know how you can square that circle.

I definitely like the idea of this but it seems like the tendency is always the opposite because it’s much cheaper to build a pedestrian overpass than a car one, even though they’re also an accessibility nightmare and usually kind of a terrible experience and aesthetic blight in their own right.

That’s really awesome, but you need a tremendous amount of land to make that possible.

Most roundabouts of that type I know have replaced similarly sized all asphalt intersections. Now there is more green. When planned ahead there really isn’t that much extra real estate required if you are willing to have steeper grades for pedestrians only for example.

Oh wow, years ago I randomly came across that place upon once when I was in Arnhem and was very confused about it, interesting to see it here!

Oh wow never knew this had a name and have been curious on the origins/history of the “diagonal crosswalks” for a long time - have only seem them in specific districts/neighborhoods in Oakland/SF.

Thanks for the link, a bit sad to read to following(!)

> later fell out of favor with traffic engineers there, as it was seen as prioritizing flow of pedestrians over flow of car traffic.

Mathematically speaking I am not sure why they are not all like this. It means one pedestrian phase in the sequence (so sequence is quicker) and everyone is a winner. There is one near me it is a joy to go diagonal!

It’s only better if the intersection has high, consistent pedestrian traffic. Unfortunately, many cities aren’t built to be pedestrian friendly so those criteria are rarely met outside of busy cities, downtowns, and college towns.

But if the intersection allows pedestrians at all it needs two sets of allowing pedestrians across.

Unless it does that awful hybrid “turn if no one is crossing” crap that I hate as both a driver and pedestrian.

It’s not the idle at the stop sign that matters, it’s the slowing and and re-accelerating afterward. Idle itself uses a trivial amount of gas - equivalent to around a tenth of a mile for a 15 second idle.

10th of a mile at 15 seconds is the equivalent of doing 25 mph. I’d not call that trivial considering you’re not doing 25mph.

Then my math must be off. 60 miles/hour at 15 miles/gallon = 4 gallons/hour.

Idle is like 0.15 gallons/hour. There’s no way 25 mph uses that little gas, if 60mph uses 26 times as much.

> 60 miles/hour at 15 miles/gallon = 4 gallons/hour

What 1960s car are you driving? :) Should be getting 50-80mpg at 60mph.

Have you ever tried to navigate a busy roundabout? I’ve been at roundabouts backed up at least a quarter mile. There is plenty of idling.

While partly true, it is important to note that improving efficiency of a single large energy source is easier to do than improving energy efficiency of a million cars.

Also, with solar and wind in the fray, and increasing renewable energy share, having an all electric energy consumption economy is better logistically and environmentally.

Even if current power generation for the grid isn’t optimal (or clean), the move to EVs is the only way to allow for a cleaner system to work at all. That just isn’t possible with ICE cars.

I dunno about about that. There’s no reason ICEVs can’t run on methanol, the production of which can actually be carbon negative. This is likely where shipping will go, so no reason cars couldn’t do it. You can even convert modern cars over fairly cheaply, so you don’t need to produce an entirely new vehicle.

Yeah, the only reason the EV doesn’t obviously win without any calculation is because of the battery loss. And turns out it still wins.