[HN Gopher] The lost history of the electric car - and the futur...
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The lost history of the electric car - and the future of transport
Author : prostoalex
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-08-08 02:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| virwheeler wrote:
| If we can properly manage the traffic, I do think that we can
| slowly reduce the pollution produced by cars. One of the best
| alternatives is to go EV, but it is not yet heavily adopted by
| the public; thus, we can utilize our public transportation to
| reduce carbon emissions.
| jdofaz wrote:
| Decent article but doesn't mention the NiMH battery and the EV1
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| Maybe the author resides in CA? Not sure how you could also
| omit the Prius or how the other automakers are addressing
| sourcing concerns. It is a shame because the start of the
| article was engrossing.
|
| Going forward, I image that MDS is much less of a concern than
| the power grid and clean energy generation
| mprovost wrote:
| The New Yorker writer James Thurber mentioned electric cars
| several times in his 1933 autobiography "My Life and Hard Times".
| (If you haven't read it, it's a real classic!)
|
| In the chapter "Draft Board Nights" his grandfather, who is a
| Civil War veteran, is trying to enlist in the Great War and takes
| his grandmother's electric car to go find General William
| Tecumseh Sherman. "[A] man who (or so he often told us) had
| driven a four-horse McCormick reaper when he was five years old
| did not intend to be thrown by an electric runabout."
| jokoon wrote:
| road transport is responsible for 12% of CO2 emissions.
|
| so electric domestic cars are not going to do a lot...
| Someone wrote:
| Nothing in itself is going to do enough. We have to decrease
| emissions significantly, so that has to happen by making lots
| of small cuts.
|
| I think we have to make cars more efficient, make them smaller
| _and_ decrease their use.
| NonContro wrote:
| It will still remove a significant amount of noise and air
| pollution from the ground-level of cities.
| soperj wrote:
| If you've ever listened (from the outside) to an electric car
| going 50km/hr even, they're not quiet.
| hiddencache wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? Warns pedestrians...
| soperj wrote:
| Previous comment talks about reducing noise pollution.
| jeromegv wrote:
| I live next to a boulevard, 5th floor. The amount of black
| stuff that gets onto my balcony every day is absolutely
| insane. And to think that we are breathing that! I would
| fully embrace a full conversion for electric vehicle for
| that alone, this isn't just CO2, this is our air quality in
| cities.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Keep in mind that electric cars still have tire and break
| dust. Its not all tail pipes, tho clearly it'd be great
| to eliminate that.
| blendergeek wrote:
| Due to regenerative breaking, electric vehicles (well at
| least Teslas) rarely use the breakpads, so less break
| dust.
|
| Tire dust will still be a problem.
| beefalo wrote:
| They are even louder than fuel burning cars over 50kph due
| to the extra weight. I would still rather hear loud tire
| noise than breathe exhaust as a pedestrian though
| asdff wrote:
| Due to the extra weight you also breath in more tire
| dust.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Do you have numbers to back that up?
|
| I can hear ICE engines accelerating roaringly from miles
| away. I do not hear the same from electric cars.
| jokoon wrote:
| at 50km/h air friction with tires etc is half of the noise,
| and it goes from there.
| asdff wrote:
| They still contribute a good amount to localized air quality
| since there is still tire particulate at play, and these
| vehicles tend to weigh more than a given ice car of the same
| class.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| So, your argument is that double digit percentages are not
| worth it? I'd say that's low hanging fruit. A no-brainer. Get
| it done and then worry about the rest separately.
|
| By the way, it's not just cars. Basically most forms of road
| transport can be electrified. Everything from the largest
| mining trucks, long distance trucks, short distance delivery
| vans, garbage trucks, delivery vans, etc. Viable products
| already exist in each of those categories. We just need more of
| them. Making more will make them cheaper and even more viable.
| The main bottleneck here is production capacity.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'm not sure where you got the 12% number from as I've seen
| other numbers. But regardless it's an AND game, not OR. We
| should be minimizing everything simultaneously, as all those
| gains add up. It's also not like all changes will be a step
| function either, so as things gradually change we absolutely
| need the addition rather than waiting for certain CO2 sources
| to become 0%.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| A friend of mine has a Henney Kilowatt
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henney_Kilowatt. Its neat, but that
| thing is a death trap. Early electric cars just had to compromise
| too much to even work.
| mikestew wrote:
| I would think the "death trap" feature to more a product of it
| being based on a Renault Dauphine[0] than of it having an
| electric drivetrain.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Dauphine
| neartheplain wrote:
| >Some men may have liked that electric cars' limited range meant
| that the independence granted to their drivers was tightly
| constrained.
|
| This kind of gratuitous editorial speculation, based on precisely
| zero evidence in an otherwise factual article, is why I tend to
| avoid The Guardian.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't cherry-pick a provocation from an article
| and then rush into the HN thread with it. This is how we get
| tedious flamewars. Indignation plus sensationalism (a.k.a.
| flamebait) reliably gets the most upvotes (this was the top
| comment before I marked it off topic); the idea of this forum
| is to try to dampen that if we can.
|
| There are plenty of interesting things in the article, and we
| should be focusing on interesting things, not maddening things.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| musicale wrote:
| I think focusing on the interesting points of an article vs.
| maddening bits is a good approach.
|
| Certain topics still seem to incite flame wars and
| upvote/downvote wars; I'm not even sure how to address the
| latter, though the HN guidelines (such as evaluating the
| argument rather than the speaker) seem sensible and may
| mitigate the former.
| publicola1990 wrote:
| This is such a journalistic dark pattern, throws the
| credibility of the whole article through the window.
| [deleted]
| papito wrote:
| Saw an electric car from the 1920 at the Chicago Museum of
| Science and Industry. Really, until then - I had no idea.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Thermodynamics is why electric was buried by gasoline in the 19th
| century. That reason hasn't changed! Only people who have zero
| STEM knowledge seemed to think otherwise.
| ciarcode wrote:
| Could you please argument your POV?
| wolfram74 wrote:
| My guess would be they're thinking a that running an engine
| to move the wheels of a car will always be more efficient
| than running an engine to move the wheel of a generator,
| transmit the electricity, charge a battery and then move the
| wheels of a car.
|
| Neglecting that power plants can run at temperatures small
| car engines can't, getting better carnot efficiencies, or
| using non-combustion methods of generating electricity.
| choeger wrote:
| Not to forget the gained efficiency of distributing huge
| amounts of fuel to a single location vs. small amounts to
| many locations
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| There are a couple of reasons gasoline won.
|
| While cars are nice in dense 19th century cities. Not strictly
| needed when you had street cars and walkable neighborhoods. And
| delivery services. They are more useful in rural America which
| was 60-70% of the population. And Rural houses didn't have
| electricity. No electricity no way to charge a car. Even city
| houses had very limited service, 10-20 amp was common.
|
| No power semiconductors which meant inefficient motors and
| chargers.
|
| Lead acid batteries have a quarter the energy density and
| output power that modern lithium ion batteries do. Which meant
| range sucked. And horsepower sucked.
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