I'm on the fence whether I should just flag this and move on.
On one hand, there's an interesting discussion to be made: EVs are heavier, which means (while they cause less CO2 emission) they may cause more pollution in other areas. I think in the grand scheme of things EVs are clearly better than ICEs, but that doesn't mean we can just say "Oh we have EVs now, problem solved!" and go back to "business as usual."
On the other hand ...... I have a hunch why this was posted to HN, and it's probably not to have a balanced discussion about different ways vehicles pollute the earth and what we should do about it.
You seem to be torn between open discussion (do EV's have negative effects?) and ideological purity (EV's must be only prestented as positive regardless of facts).
You know what you should be thinking (adhere to the Party line) and you are afraid that taking part in free discussion might lead you to conclusions that are at odds.... So you would rather self-censor your thoughts and avoid any discussion.
But relax and think about why tire emissions of heavy cars are brought up with EVs in particular, when the same point can be made with SUVs vs. smaller cars.
Going further, who stands to gain, multi national oil conglomerates who are known for manipulating public discourse in favor of cars vs. public transport and right of way and on the other side, the bad bad people trying to act on a very inconvenient and annoying scientific consensus that we need to alter our behaviour.
1984 indeed, but who is the powerful oppressor here, especially when you are a child, witnessing the destruction of what your parents were still able to enjoy.
The problem is that the range of your new EV will only decrease with time. A car with 350 mile range will become much lower after 5 years.
> According to Geotab, a transportation connectivity services company, an average EV loses 2.3% of its battery capacity each year that it's in service. An EV that has a 300-mile-range would have a 293-mile-range after a year. After five years on the road, you could expect a range of 266 miles on a single charge.
> Why does that matter if I only need 50 miles of range for my day to day?
Because, as a practical matter, short range vehicles suck. I don't want to have to charge my car every five minutes. And if you want to tow with a pick up truck EV there's just no getting away from the practical reality that you need many kilowatt hours in your battery pack.
>I don't want to have to charge my car every five minutes.
What kind of range are you envisioning here?
>And if you want to tow with a pick up truck EV there's just no getting away from the practical reality that you need many kilowatt hours in your battery pack.
But I don't have a pickup. Should I buy a pickup for this chance?
>And you need those kWhs for towing
Well yes I obviously need the power to tow my groceries home.
My personal benchmark is 400 miles real world highway range. The Lucid Air achieves 500 miles real world highway. The Mercedes EQS is almost there at 395:
It might not matter for you. It does matter for the people making a trip across the country. Some people need cars for more than just a 50 mile daily commute.
So why does your car have to be able to handle trips across the street to cross continental trips? Why are we buying the same exact cars? Because one day I should be able to travel cross country with the car I use to get groceries?
We don't need to own the exact same car. However, unless it is absurdly cheap a car with 100 miles or less of range is unlikely to sell in sufficient numbers in the United States to be viable to produce.
A car is an expensive enough purchase that most consumers want a vehicle that will cover as many of their potential use cases as they can afford. This is why you see a lot of suburbanites buy pickup trucks. They don't need it for 99% of the year, but it comes in really handy for that 1% of the time where they are buying lumber from Home Depot, throwing an already put together barbecue grill in the bed (because why not, it costs the same as the one in the box with the barely written in English instructions), or going off the beaten trail to go deer hunting with your buddy from college.
What percentage of overall miles driven are accounted for by cross-country (or lets just say multi-day trips) out of the total number of miles driven? The stat I can find states that for single-trip journeys 98% are under 50 miles, with those over 70 miles being 1%. Obviously "single-trip" is doing plenty of work there, but you can go surprisingly far in a day of driving and those are still pretty small numbers.
Maybe at the end of the day the car is just not the best way to go across a country as large as the US.
It doesn’t matter what percent of trips that represents, a lot of Americans won’t buy EVs that aren’t capable of making these trips when they want to make them.
Nobody wants to take a Greyhound bus to see their parents that live 4 hours away in the next state over.
The thing is we know already that single-trips like that are less than 1% of all miles driven, and 4 hours is definitely a single-trip. I'd add that even with an EV and needing to stop for a charge, that's still very much a single trip affair. I'm sure that some people won't buy a car on that basis, but I suspect the vast majority will. The more people buy them, the more the infrastructure caters to it, the more the technology is funded and advances, and the remaining holdouts will eventually be sufficiently incentivized.
I’m not arguing against EVs at all, just making the case that 350 miles of range isn’t excessive by any means, especially once you account for battery degradation over time.
Personally the absolute minimum range I would consider for an EV is 250 miles with 300 or more being ideal.
The existence of right off highway gas stations, rest stops, motels, and fast food restaurants caters to road trippers. As much as I wish we had a robust inter-city train network people expect to be able to drive 400 miles in a day, stopping only every 1-2 hours for 10 min. As opposed to waiting for one of four charging spots to become available and taking 30 min to get another 100 mi of range.
From 75 to 150 kWh that's a doubling of energy content in the same physical pack dimensions, and the 150 kWh pack has only a 20 kg weight increase versus the 100 kWh pack.
A 75 or 100 kWh pack with the same WeLion chemistry would weigh less than Nio's existing 75 and 100 kWh packs. Once production scales up Nio may well switch all the packs to the WeLion chemistry if the price is right.
That's not achieved through magic. It's achieved through better battery chemistry.
1. batteries contribute a lot to EV weight, which in turn contributes to tire dust,
2. people overbuy on range for 1% of long-range trips, and
3. batteries degrade by some percent every year
So why not do the following:
- allow battery packs to be swappable including
- having battery bays for a range up to something like 300miles, but composed of smaller batteries with 100miles range each?
Then you could:
- add batteries when you need them (longer range, higher wear), and
- remove batteries when you don't need them (lower range, lower wear), and as added benefit:
- because batteries are swappable, they can be replaced easily, and range extensions could even be rented for the two weeks of holidays (range as a service)
This could follow a similar model to how winter and summer tires are swapped regularly in many countries.
If batteries were standardized, then they could even be shared between different vehicle types to account for seasonal need (farming, holidays, other machinery).
On one hand, there's an interesting discussion to be made: EVs are heavier, which means (while they cause less CO2 emission) they may cause more pollution in other areas. I think in the grand scheme of things EVs are clearly better than ICEs, but that doesn't mean we can just say "Oh we have EVs now, problem solved!" and go back to "business as usual."
On the other hand ...... I have a hunch why this was posted to HN, and it's probably not to have a balanced discussion about different ways vehicles pollute the earth and what we should do about it.