I believe if you actually look at that this was for federal government owned vehicles only and has nothing to do with private ownership or state owned vehicles.
But I will say this about it, some of the media took this and ran with it stating that the government was going to mandate EV’s / ban ICE’s but that is the right wing media that 1: tells you the other media is lying to you 2: then does what it accuses others of doing.
I think this qualified somewhat as an apocalyptic view.
I assume most of these no-chargers available critiques are coming from people who live in Manhattan, where there are gas stations on every corner.
Yeah, that too. And there are multiple components there–even once the engine gets going, it has to reach an RPM that will (if you have a typical automatic) really engage the torque converter. At a low RPMs, there’s almost no torque and the car barely starts moving.
I’ve long thought the same thing. I don’t see why there have to be the same restrictions as with trains, since the amount of energy is so much less. A 80k lb truck going down a 5% grade at 65 mph needs to dissipate about half a megawatt of power. Pretty small potatoes. A train using dynamic braking would need many megawatts in comparison.
0-60mph times are a common metric to judge a car’s performance, and while they’re perfectly acceptable if you’re going to a drag strip, they’re a poor way to judge “every day performance”, since driving around town or on the highway your torque needs are unpredictable and you’re probably not launching from redline at every stoplight. It takes extra time for an ICE engine to spool up to peak power output that simply isn’t reflected in the official 0-60.
Occasionally you’ll see rolling 5-60mph acceleration times quoted instead. While on first glance you’d expect them to be shorter than 0-60mph, but because 5-60 times are taken starting from engine idle/creep (not dumping the clutch from redline), they are often dramatically longer for ICE engines (+1.0 to +1.5 seconds ), especially for high power-to-displacement or turbocharged engines. The 5-60 is much more representative of a cars real world, every day performance.
EVs don’t have to deal with any of this nonsense (full torque is available at 0rpm), so the 5-60 times are actually shorter than their 0-60 times.
It’s sorta weird that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 0-60 time measured from the instant the accelerator is touched. Seems reflective of real-world performance and basically excludes launch modes and all those other ridiculous things that no one uses on a day-to-day basis.
The only downside to instant performance is that if I’m at a light with significant cross traffic, I have to intentionally wait an extra second or two to ensure the intersection is cleared of anyone that entered on a stale yellow (or a red). With an ICE, you kinda get that for free.
On the other hand, I find that when there’s no cross traffic and I don’t have to wait, I’m often through the intersection before anyone else has even crossed the line–and that’s without even mashing the accelerator completely. And of course the performance is a safety benefit when making an unprotected left or when turning onto a high-speed road.
Yeah, what an apocalyptical hellscape. I’d probably kill myself if I’m no longer able to live in a single family detached home with a private yard in the suburbs and drive from my front door to the front door of my destination in a completely private vehicle.
The hatred is due to the suspicion that the government is going to try to ban ICE vehicles before electric vehicles are ready in terms of size, capability and price. It seems most of what’s out there is either small sedans rather than SUVs and pickups, and either costs a bazillion dollars or has very little range.
And this “suspicion” is driven by the FUD being pumped out there by the usual suspects.
It has no basis in reality, but the consumers of FUD dutifully repeat it ad nauseum.
I actually agree with you on this. In addition to your points, we actually have to encourage higher density, mixed use developments. Additionally, if I was King o’the world, I would mandate that municipal taxes would be based on resource usage rather than property value.
For example, as a person who lives in a used house, in an already developed neighbourhood (60 years ago), using used utilities. My taxes, therefore, should be lower than those of someone having a house built in a new neighborhood in which all the utilities and infrastructure have to be installed.
So if people want to live in sprawling suburbs with winding streets that render public transportation inefficient, and encourage private car (ICE or otherwise), that’s fine, but pay the true and full cost, rather than being subsidized by residents closer to downtown.
By swapping one single-occupant transport type for another, there still remain numerous other issues. I do not have a cite for this but I have read that transitioning to EVs results in some users increasing their vehicle usage, due to increased environmental friendliness, and reducing the actual positive impact.
Additionally, if you can de-stovepipe policymaking, better urban design can reduce such things as obesity while increasing overall health. I also suspect that if home buyers are discouraged from having unnecessarily large properties, we might also reduce our negative environmental impacts.
The current climate crisis was created by a million things over many decades.
There is no solution. However, the ever-worsening hellscape that is coming can be somewhat mitigated by doing a million things over many decades. One large one is cutting fossil fuel use.
Sure, denser housing, more mass transit, more work from home, increased renewables, less waste of everything, and 999,995 other things would also help. It shouldn’t be necessary to say that we can do all of those at the same time. Not doing them is not helpful. Preventing the transition out of ICE to other modes of power is also not helpful. Will any one be the solution? No. So what.
P.S. It is more likely that everyone in America will be given a personal rocket pack than the interstates being torn down, so that is not on my list.
Sorry, missed this last time I logged in.
(Big Thinking Sigh)
I’m sure I had A Thought when I posted that but whatever it was eludes me now…hrmph!…probably something not really appropriate the thread generally, not in a good place mentally right now
Except that this is stuff we (or some of us anyway) have known for at least 20 years and, like everything else necessary, we resist, we refuse to change anything and continue to do the same thing over and over. And in a country like the US, in which anything remotely resembling socialism is seen as something almost as evil as Hitler, nothing will change except for a bunch of vehicle technology swaps (and we’re no better in Canada except that we don’t have a problem with socialism).
This bizarre wishful-thinking approach that people will completely transform their lifestyles in exchange for nothing is part of what got us into this mess. It’s half the reason why Tesla is so successful: radical environmentalists thought large, powerful cars were obnoxious and that EVs should be tiny and underpowered to coerce more people to use public transport. Establishment automakers were happy to run with this so that when the products inevitably failed, they could point to their offerings and say that no one wants EVs. Tesla of course decided to make large, powerful, long-range, desirable EVs. They still have to fight through an immense amount of FUD, but once you get a person inside one, their position changes.
I’m all for reducing the subsidies that enable suburbia, but we aren’t going to get through the climate change crisis by revamping society, because that simply won’t happen until it’s too late.
And anyway, personal transport is great and public transport sucks except when circumstances make it the least-worst option (i.e., super high density areas). Not too long from now, all of my energy input will come from sustainable or at least zero-net-carbon sources and I’ll drive without the slightest twinge of guilt.
Occasionally I hear statements to the effect of “you can’t fix societal problems with technological solutions”, but I couldn’t disagree more. Technology is the only thing that ever changed society.
It takes about 5 seconds of my time to “refuel” my EV. I see a 5 minute stop for gas as a waste of time. Why don’t you see it as such?
I don’t know your commute, but if I lived on the 3rd floor, all I’d need is a parking spot within about 10 feet of a 120v outlet. I’d plug in at night, and in the morning, the battery would have way more charge in it than I’d use that day, regardless of weather.
I don’t understand why you think this is difficult. To me, EV ownership is far easier than ICEV ownership.
I see a lot of ICE’er don’t get this. With a EV filling up is something that happens when you are doing something else, with a ICEV it requires an active stop. This is why ICEV’s need a quick way to refuel.
And a slightly more subtle point:
In an ICE car, there’s rarely any reason not to completely fill up the car. But with an EV, there often is.
My car has a 300 mile range, but if I go on a 350 mile trip it doesn’t mean an extra hour of charging. When the car is at a low charge, I can get an extra 80 miles in 5 minutes of charge time. That’s enough to complete the trip, and is no worse then the gas car. Once the car is home, I just do overnight charging like normal and the car is ready to go the next day.
No idea what you’re talking about. EVs will replace ICEs not because people will just do the right thing, but because governments are mandating the end of ICE vehicles (more through fuel averages than by fiat), carmakers are rushing to get in on the huge coming tsumani of sales, and EVs will be better and more convenient than ICEs in a generation.
That’s the way that most of the million changes will operate: a combination of rules and nudges and competition. Technology will play its part as it always has, and social change will play its part as it always has. Only engineers fail to understand this.
So where’s the wishful thinking? Wishful thinking would provide an actual solution. Reality will just mean that maybe we can cut the deaths by a good percentage.