Electric Vehicles – Red Herring?

vonhelmet wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

The most economical and ecological thing you can do car wise is run an old reliable car into the ground. The carbon footprint of manufacturing an old car is a sunk cost, so all you have to deal with is the marginal impact of repairs and miles. The impact of manufacturing new cars is vast. What’s the impact of mining all that lithium compared to running an old Volvo (other reliable cars are available) to 200,000 miles? It’s almost like the car industry is more concerned with selling new cars without regard to their actual lifetime environmental impact.

Don’t forget about the extra air pollution that older vehicles produce.

Do you mean older as in older designs or older as in more worn ie less efficient? Either way, let’s do some back of an envelope maths. Googling suggests a Volvo 240 (very old) has co2 emissions of about 180g/km. Let’s assume we’d got a knackered one and it does, I dunno, 300. Googling suggests an electric car causes 9 tonnes of co2 emissions in its production. You could drive the 240 for another 30,000 miles before the electric car had even been built. I can’t be arsed doing the maths to work out when the electric car breaks even but I bet it’s moon miles and it may in fact be impossible if you have to replace the batteries at astronomical cost before you get there. If you mean other nasty emissions besides co2 then that’s a trickier one, yes.

I meant older designs and specifically the nasty emissions other than CO2 though I do agree with you about the reasons to keep an old car running. From a selfish point of view, I’d prefer the old cars to be off the road to improve air quality which I think is the more immediate problem. It seems that we’re only starting to understand the effects of air pollution – have a look at https://patrickcollison.com/pollution for a summary of some cognitive affects of air pollution.

My view is that EVs are a necessary evil but of course a lot of us cyclists realise that the best answer involves a healthy dose of active travel.

hawkinspeter wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

The most economical and ecological thing you can do car wise is run an old reliable car into the ground. The carbon footprint of manufacturing an old car is a sunk cost, so all you have to deal with is the marginal impact of repairs and miles. The impact of manufacturing new cars is vast. What’s the impact of mining all that lithium compared to running an old Volvo (other reliable cars are available) to 200,000 miles?

It’s almost like the car industry is more concerned with selling new cars without regard to their actual lifetime environmental impact.

Don’t forget about the extra air pollution that older vehicles produce.

If you mean other nasty emissions besides co2 then that’s a trickier one, yes.

Electric cars, hardly a

Electric cars, hardly a panacea. Once you view cars in terms of mass efficiency, you realise they’re not much progress. A typical vehicle carries a single occupant most of the time, weighs 20x that person and has an energy conversion average of 20 percent or less. Electric car can triple the energy conversion efficiency but changes nothing else. The effect of energy inefficiency plus the mass inefficiency means the car is only 1-3 percent efficient at moving your mass.

In the decade that they’ve been available, there has been virtually no efficiency improvement to EV. A Honda E consumes electricity at the same rate as an iMiev did 10 years ago. A small city car that uses 150 watt per km doesn’t impress me, that is 38x worse than my Tern GSD. Quadricycles like the Twizy fare better, but actually carries less than the cargo bike!

The demand for battery material threatens to cause another environmental disaster – there are companies preparing to robotically mine the deep seabed for cobalt, which will create huge clouds of sediment and threaten the survival of marine life. As if pillaging the land wasn’t enough.

I really think the EV comeback is too late. Cars have already broken our cities, and faced with rising urbanisation and pressure to improve liveability our cities are doing away with them. Changing the way we power them makes little difference to that.

vonhelmet wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

The most economical and ecological thing you can do car wise is run an old reliable car into the ground. The carbon footprint of manufacturing an old car is a sunk cost, so all you have to deal with is the marginal impact of repairs and miles. The impact of manufacturing new cars is vast. What’s the impact of mining all that lithium compared to running an old Volvo (other reliable cars are available) to 200,000 miles?

It’s almost like the car industry is more concerned with selling new cars without regard to their actual lifetime environmental impact.

vonhelmet wrote:

vonhelmet wrote:

The most economical and ecological thing you can do car wise is run an old reliable car into the ground. The carbon footprint of manufacturing an old car is a sunk cost, so all you have to deal with is the marginal impact of repairs and miles. The impact of manufacturing new cars is vast. What’s the impact of mining all that lithium compared to running an old Volvo (other reliable cars are available) to 200,000 miles? It’s almost like the car industry is more concerned with selling new cars without regard to their actual lifetime environmental impact.

THIS THIS THIS.

Not only does the world now think that they are saving the earth by doing their bit and buying an EV but us consumers are driven into a frenzy by being told you’ll have to get on a waiting list as they can’t produce the batteries fast enough. We’re all being mugged off. 

Remember the last time the

Remember the last time the car industry really started crying and they had that £2000 of your old car thing. Remember it was because old cars are stinky and dirty (even though there’s an MOT with emissions testing) and you shouldn’t be driving them.

All it did was remove loads of good used stock and if I remember right, put the price of used cars up for a bit.

My car is getting up to 10 years old, still in good condition and I’ll be driving it until the engine goes and if that happens I may stick a recon unit in it.

Rick_Rude wrote:

Car companies and governments are just dragging this idea out like they dragged the diesel idea out. They’ll convince people to buy new cars then eventually you need a new gimmick to sell more cars so no doubt we’ll then get told that mining stuff like lithium and cobalt is bad (bad, naughty consumers, how dare you!). Hold on, we’ve got just the technology to buy you’re way out of environmental guilt.

The future doesn’t look bright for private space. Shared cars and living in pods. Dystopia moves ever nearer.

I’ll have you know that I’m a fan of dystopian fiction – I grew up reading loads of John Wyndham scifi and often wonder why more of his stuff hasn’t been filmed (excepting Village of the Damned, Chocky, Day of the Triffids etc). I reckon it’s about time for a Netflix/Amazon series of The Kraken Wakes.

Alternatively, we could just turn the world into a dystopian nightmare as quick as we can.

Some sensible policy

Some sensible policy suggestions at the end but mostly car hate in tone with a certain amount of BS claims E.g.

“Electric cars are heaver and thus likely to generate more brake dust”, which runs counter to the lived experiance of Tesla owners who are finding that the brakes last the lifetime of the car)

or

Charging infrastructure blah blah, Tesla have shown that around one fast charger for every 150-200 cars is perfectly fine for long distance travel and such a rate of build was easily sustainable from the revenue for those 150-200 cars. Likewise on street charging for the nation puts out some massive numbers but on a per house or per car level spread over 10 years are pretty trival expenses.

Articles of this tone won’t convince drivers and passengers who are pretty much the largest demographic in the country and it won’t convince politicians who mostly practice followership. A more sensible position would be to sell drivers on the positives of EV adoption with cavaets such as:

• EV’s will be cheaper and reduce greenhouse emissions but:
• We’d like you share them rather than own them
• We’d like to pair them with road pricing to drive sharing them, this will mean that you won’t be sitting in traffic.
• To get the traffic flowing better we’d also prefer it if you let the car drive itself
• Since you don’t own it or drive it it doesn’t need to stay outside your house, why not walk to the end of your road to pick it up, this means that your children can play outside and all these suburban roads can be excellent cycle networks. 

With regards off board air pollution, the UK grid was more than 50% low carbon last year it was 20% low carbon 10 years ago. On and offshore wind is currently bidding at “subsidy free” levels (it does get a subsidy in that the grid must take its power which pushes up prices for other providers by lowering their capacity factors) which is why we aren’t building out more CCGT plants.

We will build wind out until we start hitting curtailment (too much wind/solar at peak times), at this point the decision will be between building out more wind and accepting it costs more due to lower capacity factor or adding wind/solar and storage or adding nuclear beyond simply replacing our existing plants. This will be an economic (in the exception of nuclear) decision.

The national grid has sensible plans for a net zero emissions grid by 2050 and they are perfectly aware of electric vehicles.