Using consumption instead of efficiency does tend to produce more intuitive figures. For instance, most people wouldn’t guess that improving a truck from 12 to 15 mpg saves more gas (per mile) than doubling a 35 mpg car to 70 mpg. Using consumption makes the difference more obvious.
Absolutely. It makes more sense to electrify trucks if possible than small cars for that reason. If the F-150 Lightning and EV Silverado can gain market share, it would be much better than getting people to trade their gas Corollas for electric cars. When you are already getting 35mpg, the impact of electric is much lower.
Back in the 90s, my sister’s first car was a Geo Metro, that got something like 60 MPG, and that was with a straight ICE. Of course, it was also a tiny little car.
More like “if they can produce them in volume”. You still have to multiply by the number of units produced.
Really, the better way of thinking of it in an EV context is “how many cycles will one cell go through in its useful life?” Every full charge-discharge cycle saves roughly the same amount of CO2. A vehicle with half the natural efficiency as a car will need twice the cells for the same range. Which means that building two cars or one pickup truck with those cells is (roughly) a wash.
Some uses, though, go through many cycles–commercial trucking being a big example. So I’m excited about the potential for EV semis, not because semis are big, but because those cells will go through many thousands of cycles during their life. A car may only go through hundreds of cycles. Every cell that comes out of the factory will save more total CO2 when put into a semi than a passenger car (or a pickup used for putting around town).
For this reason, my country operates a hybrid transit fleet. I don’t mean hybrid as in gas-electric power plants, I mean in terms of a mixture of vehicle sizes. They’ve spent a lot of time modeling typical usage, and they have a variety of vehicles they can put on different routes depending on volume. If you use transit to get to your workplace during the morning rush, you’ll be on a double-length accordion bus. But if you’re going from neighborhood to neighborhood in the late evening on Saturday, the vehicle that stops for you will be more like one of those airport-to-hotel shuttle vans. It’s pretty smart and they have described a significant increase in efficiency having been achieved.
Sounds like you have a more rational council than my city has. They responded to that problem by canceling the low-utilization routes. The nearest bus stop to my house is now about 1.5km away. We used to have a stop around the corner.
At the same time, they are trying to push everyone into taking the LRT, but since many more people drive to the LRT station out of necessity, the parking lots at the stations are full by 7 AM. Everyone else is out of luck.
It’s certainly vastly more capital-expensive to have 3 sizes of bus for each route. Even if the smaller busses partially pay for themselves by burning far less fuel than the big ones.
As alluded to above I think that weight is a significant factor, and I think a lot of this depends on what you are willing to call a car. You could, for example, take a recumbent bicycle and add two additional wheels, a second seat, a small ICE, and a lightweight fibreglass, plastic, or even a fabric, body. Is that a car?
And the capital expense also has to be weighed against the fact that, since each size of bus is used less often, they’ll last longer (though probably not three times longer, since some ways a vehicle wears out depend on time, not mileage).
It’s also probably not three times as many buses, either. There are probably a few heavy-use lines that manage to fill up large buses all the time, and some lines that have their peak usage at different times than others, and some lines that justify a small or medium-sized bus at peak times but that just shut down completely in the lower-demand times, and so on.