Nothing is getting shoved down anyone’s throat. They can’t make enough EV’s to meet demand.
What needs to be done on a national level is to ensure upgrades to the electrical grid in order to meet demand. EV purchases are, IMO, going to accelerate in growth and popularity like cell phones did.
I know! Do try to get more conservatives to understand that.
And what a pity that so few Republican politicians are willing to support infrastructure upgrades to the electrical grid, isn’t it?
Especially in Texas, where the electrical grid has a few additional problems as well.
No kidding. We’ve already had requests on 3 separate occasions this year to reduce usage during peak hours due to record usage from the heat.
EVs have much bigger batteries, so much bigger that they need their temperature managed. This makes spontaneous combustion much less likely.
I don’t know their political views, but some have posted their fears on this thread about being forced to buy EVs.
Yeah, I know they’re much more carefully designed and manufactured than your average made-in-China hoverboard. It’s more like a phobia of mine than any rational opposition. OTOH, there’s the Dreamliner fires, and one would have thought the designers there would have been even more conservative than automotive engineers…
I’m sorry what are you asking for a cite for here, because it is not clear at all from your post?
And only a portion of light duty vehicles are personal transportation.
You mean like ever-increasing CAFE standards, increased adoption of hybrid and EV cars? Not exactly pie in the sky stuff. We can make ICE cars right now that get 45mpg pretty easily, it would be a big deal if that was the average mpg of an ICE car on the road. That’s something attainable (over time) with policy, not even any extreme feat of engineering or huge technical rollout.
As a point of reference the average of a vehicle on the road right now for passenger vehicles is 25 mpg. If it was 45 mpg that 12-15% or so (assuming that is correct), could be reduced to something like half that in % terms if the other modes stayed the same or increased.
Given its importance, and the fact that even among transportation most of the emissions are coming from industrial and commercial transportation, I think it is questionable given the high political cost of going after people’s personal lifestyle, that more attention is given to personal transportation than other modes. My understanding is this is a deliberate strategy to make people feel environmentally responsible on an “individual” level, as a means of converting them to the “cause”, or what have you. But I also think it tends to shift a lot of rhetoric from big polluters onto people, and leads to mindsets where you have environmentally conscious Americans spending a lot of time and money on things like recycling which do almost nothing positive for most materials other than metals, instead of maybe spending time donating to and fighting for political solutions that target large scale polluters.
The whole mindset of preaching personal responsibility for the environment is just misplaced in my mind, and the “war on cars” is all part of that.
You’ve not been following Boeing lately?
The remark of yours that I quoted: “Endless advocacy for ultra-dense housing”. I think maybe I should be asking for clarification or greater precision rather than, or in addition to, a cite. That is, what particular “advocacy” for “ultra-dense housing” do you have a beef with, and in what specific ways do you consider it excessive and/or misplaced?
Because it seems to me pretty obvious that there are some urban contexts in which increasing ultra-dense housing is entirely appropriate, and I have never seen environmentalists advocating for replacing all housing with ultra-dense forms. So what particular point of advocacy between those two extremes are you complaining about, and can you provide a cite documenting that it is in fact a significant (“endless”) plank in environmentalist advocacy?
But it’s stuff that Republicans tend to hate on the grounds of “government regulation”, as we saw when the Trump administration rolled back Obama’s CAFE-standard increases. Remember, this thread is ultimately about anti-EV and anti-environmental popular sentiment, and most of that is concentrated among conservatives.
I agree with you that more environmental efforts should be focused on federal government policy and the uniform adoption of stricter standards and regulations, rather than on just exhorting individuals to make greener lifestyle choices. But if that’s your “plan” for “pushing down the numbers” on climate pollution, how do you propose getting conservatives in general to accept it? (And/or how do you propose to keep oppositionally defiant anti-environment conservatives out of power long enough to get the plan implemented?)
Spinning it as a personal responsibility thing has always been a great distraction used by corporations (and their buddies in government) to deflect blame:
Environmentalists: Plastic pollution is out of control.
Corporations: It’s your fault for not recycling enough. [Even though plastic recycling is a scam we invented to deflect blame.]
Environmentalists: Water use is not sustainable.
Corporations: It’s all of those grass lawns you have, stop watering. [Even though our agricultural and industrial water use is vastly more than your residential use.]
EVs are a bit different though.
Corporations: Buy our hybrids, EVs, and PHEVs to save the planet!
Environmentalists: Sounds good, but any one person buying an EV isn’t going to make much of a difference, we need to stop burning fossil fuels, which means replacing the entire fleet over time. Please make more and better EV options, and also stop doing the other things that are causing problems.
So yeah, any one person buying an EV is only fixing a very tiny part of the problem. Of course if nobody buys an EV, then none parts of the transportation problem are fixed, so it requires both large scale action on the parts of governments and corporations, and personal actions.
I have absolutely no delusions that my personal EV does much of anything to save the planet all by itself. However, for my use case (no giant trailers, no 9 hour non-stop trips where I pee in a bottle) the EV is simply a better vehicle for me than any ICE alternative.
It’s not much, but it’s more than zero. Aside from one less ICE vehicle burning fuel, you make EVs more visible (and hence acceptable) and increase the demand for a charging network.
Bikes rule supreme as the most efficient form of transport (it is not even close)
I am using numbers from the bike ride I just finished- not a typical ride, a fast and inefficient one
My Garmin tells me I burned 1037 kcal over 41km.
(Let’s stick with metric ‘cos I’m not smart enough for imperial.)
rounded that is 100 kJ/km, but let’s stick with your 200. (Yesterday I did the same distance with 800 kcal, “normal” cycling would be considerably less.)
My ID.3 has a stupid kWh/100 km number for energy consumption that hovers around 18.
(I think energy should be expressed in J, but that is a different thread)
18kWh = 64800 kJ or 648 kJ/km : also in the ballpark of your numbers.
All of those calories are 100% plant mass (I’m not a vegetarian, but I didn’t eat any meat today and yesterday. Do you think that there is a more efficient (simple!) way of generating energy than digesting plant mass?
Are you going to argue that all the stuff you need to put energy in the car is “free”? That building a car (1725 kg) vs. a bike (10 kg) is something the car will magically overcome during its lifetime?
Never mind that car infrastructure is very, very inefficient compared to a bike path and that cars are not very kind for roads. I “park” my bike over my workbench or under some stairs at work — the surface that I use to park my car would be almost enough to grow enough food to power my bike.
(I do both, so this is a wash in my case 
)
You can only make the 10x number work if you assume food=meat. That makes your post more a condemnation of meat than an endorsement for cars.
On the EV sites that I frequent, this is pretty much repeated over and over and over again. “They” are shoving EV’s down our throats! “They” are banning ICE cars. “They” are doing this to US. And it is always, always, 100% political, as it’s followed by blaming Biden for everything. Except on Canadian sites, where they blame Trudeau for everything.
Ironically, they also follow this up with “Nobody wants EV’s”. This is the 2nd most repeated comment. Even though, as you said, manufacturers can’t make them fast enough to keep up with demand.
Yes, it probably helps a lot that you’re vegetarian. The 10x was a ballpark based on overall US food consumption. This page gives a figure of 7.3x:
However, it notes this:
A 2002 study from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that, using our current system, an average of three calories of energy were needed to create one calorie of edible food. Some foods require far more, such as grain-fed beef, which requires 35 calories for every calorie of beef produced. However, the study did not include the energy used in processing and transporting food. Studies that do include such factors estimate that it takes an average of 7 to 10 calories of input energy to produce one calorie of food.
So it’s 35x for beef! There is some variability in the figures. It also seems to be getting worse:
https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2013/07/18/counting-calories-the-energy-cost-of-food/
In the United States in 2002 it required just over 12 Calories of energy inputs to produce one Calorie of food once waste and spoilage are accounted for, and this figure has been trending upwards. By 2007 it took just over 14 Calories of energy inputs to produce one Calorie of consumed food, and if we extrapolate to the present day it’s likely around 15 Calories. As high as these figures might seem, the food system study from which they’re derived left out the energy costs of waste disposal, research and development, water procurement, and governance, among other important components, leaving even our 15 Calorie calculation a guaranteed underestimate. A more thorough assessment would probably put the energy cost of food in the United States in the range of 15-20 Calories per Calorie of consumed food, or higher.
So in the present day, with an even more thorough accounting, it may be close to 20x.
I doubt that a pure vegetarian diet, unless home grown, would get better than 5x, though. That’s the threshold where human-powered bike and EV are close to equal.
At any rate, the lesson here should be obvious: get an e-bike. That gets you the natural efficiencies of a bike while avoiding the inefficiencies of using food to power it.
I’m having trouble parsing these numbers.
I think I see averages (including meat). Is that correct?
Yes, all of that is a US average, including meat. But note that according to the first link, the actual production is only about 1/5 of the total. Transport is 14%, processing 16%, and home prep 30%. But vegetables have higher transport costs due to their bulk, and have more waste. It’s still much better than meat, but probably not by as much as you think once all the other factors are considered.
I read an article recently that gave some numbers in (g CO2:eq) it found that most wheat was produced/processed with 1g CO2:eq/kcal while beef came to 53g.
This lead me to believe that comparing modes of transport including human powered ones based on “average” food is a bit useless.
It noted that if you power your bike solely with beef you are more environmentally damaging per mile than a Hummer.
Thankfully I think it is fair to say that most cyclists will not get their extra energy from beef, rather from more healthy and more environmentally friendly stuff. (Pasta seems to be a go to:) )
So IMHO it is not fair to do these sums with “average” food numbers.
So? Seriously, So? Why do you give a fuck about what some people post? Believe it or not the world doesn’t rotate around a handful of anonymous internet opinion. The EV market reflects this.
Car manufacturers are shifting their research and production away from ICE cars. It’s happening NOW. If someone doesn’t like it then they can buy their favorite soon-to-be-classic car and be buried in it when they die. Their opinion DOESN’T MATTER.
I’ve already purchased my vintage toy for retirement. In a couple of years kids will look it like it’s a Model T. And if someone comes up with an EV motor swap that works with a 6 speed manual transmission then I’ll probably upgrade my other project car to EV. And please, don’t anybody post that it doesn’t need a transmission. I want a lesser hp motor mated to a stick shift transmission. I don’t want a 1000 hp car. I want a 300 hp car and some gears to play with.
I don’t particularly give a fuck. However, what others are posting in multiple sites and what people out there in the world are saying pertains directly to the topic at hand.
There is a concerted effort out there to produce, distribute and repeat FUD when in comes to electric vehicles. Their opinion DOES MATTER when it is used to confuse people, to instill doubt, and to influence political decisions that will impact EV adoption. There are areas where politicians are being convinced by these morons (and the morons who believe the FUD) to actively prevent charging stations from being installed, to prevent cars from being sold by entities other than brick and mortar dealers, and to put higher taxes on EV’s in order to make them less attractive to purchase.
Morons spewing moronic stuff actually DOES impact policy sometimes.