cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30007963
Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30007963
Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea
Genuine question but how are any of the workers supposed to cart around a ton and a half worth of tools and equipment up and down the country to keep infrastructure actively providing the residents with power, water and prevent sewage flowing through their streets, if not for a car?
I know that cars are horrendous things in both sociological and environmental impacts, but if you don’t give a useful alternative, then what are you arguing?
(I know electric vans exist, but if you’ve ever used one professionally then you know just how bad they are for anything that isn’t inner city short hop driving. Without even mentioning the impact of producing an electric vehicle in terms of mining the rare earth materials for the batteries and electricity, or the added mechanical strain due to increased vehicle weight)
A commercial-use van is entirely different from a personal-use car. Conflating the two is disingenuous.
And comparing a car to a diesel generator isnt?
Especially in the context of calling it a bad way of powering your home in the same way a car is a bad form of transport, considering that there are entirely valid reasons for having both.
No one would argue to just destroy all cars, but a lot of the daily transportation is just people going to work or to the store or to the cinema or to see friends/family etc. and these car trips can be replaced with proper public transportation.
Or by having amenities within walking distance.
I’m not arguing against public transportation, I’m saying that making a comparison between owning a car and using diesel to power your home is daft, considering that there are multiple cases where people use fuel oil to power their homes, and there’s a lot of use cases for both (especially if you look outside the first world countries or outside of the internet bubble)
The point is exactly that, there are people using diesel generators, but the technology doesn’t scale that’s why we have electricity grids. The same way public transportation scales much better than cars.
Or as the comments in the main post discussed, one is individualistic approach while the other is collectivist.
What do you mean the point is exactly that?
The technology does scale, not only are there national sized diesel generators that power the grid, there are diesel generators that run on the gas that landfill and farming make (That would normally escape into air as raw methane.)
In your original post you’re suggesting that that a car is a poor choice of transport the same way a diesel generator is a poor source of power for a home.
It ignores the point that there are specific use cases for both diesel generators and personal vehicles e.g. where there are no alternatives in rural areas or areas where the infrastructure is limited - mountainous regions, out in the bush in Aus, the scottish Highlands, the Swedish archipelagos and almost everything north of the arctic circle require both a reliable source of electricity and a personal vehicle.
My personal argument against this kind of thinking, even as someone living in a developed country, was that almost every blue collar worker requires a vehicle to work, which cannot be replaced by public transport, given the nature of them travelling between jobsites and the requirements for carrying cargo and tools.
I’ll agree, when living within a city that has full infrastructure, easy access to amenities and everyone who works in the city lives in the city this makes compete sense as an argument, why put a diesel generator in when you’ve got power hard wired into your house, but scale your point of view past America, and you’ll see it’s less black and white.
curious how this argument isn’t made for fossil fuel cars which have the same problems…
also, electric vans can drive further these days, about 450 km on one charge.
the goal is primarily to reduce car dependency overall.
I’m making the argument as a comparison to traditional fossil fuel cars, which are by their nature lighter, with greater reliability, lower maintenance and lower manufacturing costs.
Also saying vans have a 450km range ignores the fact that this is a maximum, unladen with nothing but the engine running.
I’m not saying cars are all good things and nothing can be done about it, I’m arguing that “public transport can replace all cars” requires a massive caveat of “not including freight and commercial vehicles”
Considering the environmental impact of worldwide shipping,where you can have fruit picked in one country, shipped across the world to be packaged then shipped back around the world for sale, the impact of people having personal vehicles is negligible.
EV range doesn’t drop much with weight. Especially on the highway.
In town, you’re predominantly hit by rolling resistance and the start/stop nature of driving in town. Rolling resistance does increase by weight, but when you have 450km of range, anyway, it doesn’t really matter. The start/stop nature of in town driving is also mitigated by regen braking. The weight there isn’t free, but regen chops its effect way down.
On the highway, you’re predominantly hit by aerodynamics. This is a problem when adding a trailer for a truck, but in an enclosed van, nothing changes. There is a slight drop from rolling resistance still, but it’s not the biggest factor on the highway.
Putting more batteries on trailers is also an option that hasn’t seen commercial use yet. We could hypothetically increase total range with a trailer.
https://evdances.com/blogs/blog/understanding-the-impact-of-vehicle-load-on-electric-vehicle-range
Does it?
https://www.amateuraerodynamics.com/2024/12/the-problem-of-ev-sizing-weight-battery.html?m=1
Does it really?
https://www.acebattery.com/blogs/electric-car-battery-weight-per-kwh-what-to-know
Love to hear what you’re basing your assumptions on (and why you think adding a trailer with more batteries, more weight and more drag would help)
Those numbers largely align with my claims. Though the first and third smell of AI generated articles that might be hallucinating numbers, but I can work with it.
Consider my claim:
In town, you’re predominantly hit by rolling resistance and the start/stop nature of driving in town. Rolling resistance does increase by weight, but when you have 450km of range, anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
The numbers on the first article suggest that adding 1000lbs would drop range by 15%. So instead of 450km, you have 380km. If you’re staying in-town, that’s still more range than you’re going to use in a day’s work. You plug it in at night and it’ll be all set by morning.
For highway driving, consider these results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmKf8smvGsA
Particularly the numbers starting around 11:50. This test compared no trailer, an unladen trailer, an unladen trailer with a big piece of wood on front to make a sail, and then that same plywood setup while hauling 4k lbs.
The aerodynamics of the sail cuts range in half, but adding 4k lbs barely moves it at all.
I’m assuming you already need a trailer, so the aerodynamic cost is there regardless. Adding batteries there won’t change the highway range much. It does reduce the total weight of stuff you can haul, so there is a tradeoff there.
While regen braking is a bonus towards range, there’s a lot to be said for how the increased weight of larger batteries (that are required to provide that range) cause an increase in tyre and brake wear, increased damage to the roads themselves, and increased drain on the power network that the people use to charge these cars.
Additionally, excluding the higher range rural, long distance highway, and everything outside of a city where you’re only ever doing short trips is missing the point of my argument, since I’m not talking about short trips and ‘just going about town’ im talking about the people who have to drive around the country to keep their equipment running.
I will concede that electric Post vans/inner city couriers/milk+weekly grocery trucks/city taxis is 100% perfect use case for electric vehicles, considering exhaust pollution in heavily residential areas and the like, but there’s no escaping how much the battery drain, tyre and brake degradation increases with weight.
Considering this bit “Towing heavy trailers drastically increases weight and drag. For example, towing a 3,000-lb trailer can reduce range by 40–50% depending on terrain and speed.”
If you’re assuming you already need a trailer, just to carry enough batteries to increase the range, then you’re chasing your own tail by reducing your overall carrying capacity for minimal gains in range; bigger batteries have diminishing returns and only ever increase the price.
Not to mention the development cost of building a trailer that has A) High enough strength and safety standards to be legal on the roads or even remotely safe to tow. B) An adequate way of connecting to the car itself (would require a whole redesign of the electric car itself to account for an external power source for use while driving) C) Any capacity at all for storage when taking the batteries into account (think of the weight of the frame and tyres required for a trailer to not only contain the batteries but the storage space, it would be like towing a caravan just to get the same capacity as a transit van, but with double the weight.
This isn’t even remotely accounting for the material cost of the “just add more batteries” (“Why don’t they don’t just add more fuel tanks to orbital rockets?”) method of thinking, given the amount of rare earth metals that are already being dug out of open pit mines by machines that exclusively run on fossil fuels, transported by fossil fuel machines and processed using fossil fuels.
My stance is still along the lines of “Why go after personal combustion vehicles while there are entire industries polluting more each month than every peronal vehicle does in a year?”
It’s the same as the argument for “Reducing your carbon footprint”, which is a campaign made up by BP to deflect the blame for their actions onto their customers - saying electric cars can solve the issues of internal combustion while ignoring their downsides.
The impact of personal vehicles is bigger than numbers compared to other industries. People lose their lives to careless drivers, emissions cause local air quality conerns, road maintance destroys city budgets, parking lots destroy city density, and a whole slew of other economical, environmental and social impacts. Many of our major societial issues today of consummerism, failing infrastructure, housing costs, and disease can be linked in part to car dependancy.
Ok, now compare the effect of cars with the Shipping industry, their engines run on one step above crude oil, so any shipwreck is an environmental disaster even if the cargo is something innocuous like whichever new source of micro plastics the internet has decided is the new blorbo to buy from china.
The estuaries countries build their docks in often require trawling and dredging to reach the draft required for the boats to float, massive areas of coastline get turned into docking areas and cranes /areas for storage of containers, and then they still need waiting areas for lorries to take the containers inland.
Not even mentioning the political manoeuvring where countries will “sell” a developing country a port under the premise of more jobs and economic stability, all for the low low cost of national debt and a developed country owning a segment of your land
But I’m sure you’re right and that cars are worse, because they’re polluting the cities! Won’t someone think of these poor urbanites.
Pisstaking aside I would love to see the numbers you’re thinking about, especially in terms of the impact compared to other industries such as, you know, power stations, land freight, commercial aircraft, shipping, construction, and my personal favourite target of ire: data centres (why are you arguing against cars when Zuck and Bezo are directly polluting peoples groundwater, directly drawing fresh drinkable water from the area’s municipal supplies (imagine four bottles of cola being used for every single gpt query), and drawing more power than some countries.)