Range will always be an issue for people who have long trips on secondary routes. OTOH, I have seen very few people who push a 'nothing but EVs' line. Electric-driven hybrids, (like the Volt), will have a strong niche for a long time.

>and charging technology (the latest rev SuperCharger can now recharge
>a Model S from flat to 100% in about 45 minutes, I believe) will be
>important and relevant - and I suspect we'll continue to see
>improvements.

Also, the core of the charging time 'problem' is looking at the issue the way we currently 'recharge' our cars: Running them until they are almost empty and then going somewhere to quickly refill them. This is actually a strange way to handle the issue, can you imaging a smartphone that you had to take back to the store once or twice a week to recharge?

For most people, the effective recharging time for an EV is 0. Why? Because they aren't doing the recharging when they are running low, they do it every time they get home, (and, ideally, when at work). Who cares if it takes 4-6 hours to get back up to a full charge if it's happening while you are spending 8 hours working, or 4 hours making/eating dinner, watching TV, playing games, etc. followed by 7 hours of sleep?

>Fuel cell is a great solution, too,

Not really: It means either using a hydrocarbon fuel cell, which are tricky to design so that they don't turn themselves into hopelessly gunked-up scrap and still have the whole carbon emissions problem, or hydrogen, which _sucks_ as a fuel.

Well, it's not so much that it's hard to use hydrogen. That part's easy, it's handling and storing the stuff that's a dangerous PITA. When you combine something that burns with an invisible flame, can detonate when mixed with air, will leak right through just about any tank material and has a lousy energy density, (thus requiring either cryogenic or high-pressure storage), you get something that I seriously don't want random people handling at gas stations.

"Improved mass transit" is kind of an entertaining phrase to me, given that mass transit is an inherently dreadful experience. It's like talking about "improved gastroenteritis". Which one might have a chance to be exposed to on public transportation! So it all ties together. :)

"Don't want to be on time or anywhere near where you actually need to be? The train station's your next left."
- James May

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Compared to driving in any major city, tho?

Mass transit doesn't have to be inherently dreadful, it's just badly implemented a lot, especially in North America. The London Underground is excellent. So are the systems in most Japanese cities, although I've not been personally. NYC isn't as good as it should be (and it's primed to get worse since they killed plans for a second tunnel under the Hudson and have been dreadfully underinvesting in the LIRR) but it is pretty damn good, and even Toronto manages to be pretty okay.

And realistically, we've tried to make cities car-friendly and it hasn't worked out well, because it turns out that density and cars do not mix. The Robert Moses methodology of punching enormous freeways through the hearts of urban areas and mandating that every building have a legally mandated minimum level of parking spaces has been a colossal failure on almost every level, as has been designing sprawling urban polities that simply smear the mess over a wider area. (I'm looking at you, Los Angeles and Houston.) My own city is actually dismantling a large part of the freeway running through its heart because it turns out that the damn thing is a major impediment to actually living and working downtown, which is sort of what a city is for.

This isn't to entirely denigrate Moses as a planner and builder. His bridge-building, crooked politics aside, was utterly necessary for NYC to survive and thrive. But thank god they killed the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, as well as his numerous other plans to pave over Manhattan.

... this went off on a tangent. I'm an enormous fan of cities as social, political, and architectural constructs and will talk about them for hours if you let me. Ask about the history of viaducts! I dare you.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Well, y'know, don't go by me, but I've never caught the stomach flu or been felt up by a stranger in a traffic jam.

Fair enough, though. I will acknowledge that I hate public transit in large part because I hate the public. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That's not true. You love people. Just, you know... maybe with some really thick glass between you and them. :)

(Thought about writing a thousand words here about the surprising amount of overlap between people who are enormous fans of the human spirit and people who look at a crowd of actual humans and go "fuck this noise." Thought about it. Decided against it.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

"I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another; and I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that!"
- Tom Lehrer, "National Brotherhood Week" (1965)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

In less than a thousand words, speaking only for myself:

When I spend so much time imagining humans at their highest potential, I find that dealing with humanity as it is becomes somewhat less enjoyable.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Or, in still fewer words,

"This is why we can't have nice things."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals." As it were.

Still, from that, to the subject of electrical vehicles, noting in particular that I don't have either a car(at the moment) or a license...while they might be a dead end, I can't see how I see they ARE, at the moment.
Might turn out to be, yes. Are, not so much.
And if no-one makes even the attempt to try making them into something useful, then it won't turn out well. Making them into something useful seems to be what Tesla does...that is to say, making a CAR, and not a plasticy novelty item in bright colors, not for children under three, some assembly required, etc.

Long and sorta rambly, but...

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

It's the old bit of: They currently can't 100% replace everything we currently do with the old technology while operating under the standing paradigm, therefore they will end up as a failure.

The reasoning is wrong on two points:

You don't drive EVs until they are almost out of charge and then stop to recharge them. (You recharge them when they would be parked anyway.)

It assumes that pure EVs are intended for long distance driving off of main routes. (That's a niche which will likely be handed off to things like electric-driven hybrids.)

You do if you live where I live, assuming you actually want to get anywhere. Which brings us to point 2:

>It assumes that pure EVs are intended for long distance driving off of
>main routes. (That's a niche which will likely be handed off to
>things like electric-driven hybrids.)

... So in the future I'll be expected to have two cars, because one can't go anywhere except to the store and the other is Ethically Unacceptable for doing so? Uh. Who decides which trip is suitable for which vehicle?

It's just... like virtually everything else that's considered "modern" these days, the whole concept is optimized for city living to the point where it's worse than useless to those of us who don't. One gets tired of that drumbeat after a while. A very short while.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

No, you'll have a different car than I will. Nobody is saying that the Tesla is the best car for everything, but for my (and many others) use case, (Move me and a backpack 30 miles in relative comfort, stop for 10 hours, repeat) it's pretty much ideal. But for my next door neighbor it's a horrible car because he needs to shift a bunch of cargo around.

Then again, my current, gas powered, car is useless for his use case as well, and I wouldn't dream of telling him that he's Ethically Unacceptable for not using one.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

On a point of order, loads of people are saying that, that's why I'm so annoyed by the general outcome of the whole "culturehacking" angle of their marketing approach. Just not necessarily in this thread. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

He, personally, is not, but it may in fact not be ethically acceptable to structure a society around the relentless burning of hydrocarbons, which is sort of why things like Tesla Motors exist in the first place.

It's sort of like needing to move house in order to get your kids into a better school. It's ethically acceptable to do that; indeed, it may even be an ethical obligation. It may not, however, be ethically acceptable to structure a society that encourages all the people with money and spare time to clump up in one area with lavish schools while leaving the folks who have neither time nor money in another place with deeply shitty schools.

Re: Ben's point on modern developments (it seems more sensible to thread it here than one post up in this instance):

>It's just... like virtually everything else that's considered "modern" these
>days, the whole concept is optimized for city living to the point where it's
>worse than useless to those of us who don't. One gets tired of that drumbeat
>after a while. A very short while.

To be fair, for decades nearly everything that was considered "modern" was relentlessly optimized for suburban living. If you didn't feel like living in a detached single-family structure surrounded by loads of appliances with two cars in the garage, a lot of the wonders of the jet age were sort of "Okay. Sure." So, you know. Turnabout.

Really, this speaks to a deeper issue. For decades public policymaking was (still is, really) heavily focused on subsidizing, either directly or indirectly, both car culture and suburban living. Predictably, many of our consumer goods oriented this way as well. It doesn't hurt that that lifestyle is legitimately attractive to loads of people, of course. It sure as hell is to me; I love being able to hop in a car and get to a variety of wonderful places in comfort and privacy in under twenty minutes. It's quarter to midnight right now, but if I wanted to make a nacho run I could do it.

But for the past fifteen years or so, a wave of "No, this isn't sustainable, we're headed for an awful crash at some point" has been building among people who take this sort of thing seriously. Nobody is proposing Soviet-style mass relocations, but there's a lot of focus on shifting the things we subsidize from suburban or rural living to city living, and then trusting that people will react accordingly, the same way they did when the suburbs were (are) emphasized. A lot of bright-eyed futurists who want to save the world (which is a laudable goal! that's what technology is for!) are trying to get ahead of the curve, relentlessly pushing modern technology and conveniences that are optimized for a much more dense mode of living.

Basically we live in an era of massive transition in how we live and work, in the same way our grandparents did after WWII but with a lot less certainty. It can be exciting but also very uncomfortable.

-Merc
Keep Rat

So, I've been keeping an eye on this sort of thing for a while now, and there's some interesting confluences happening around the car industry.

Please bear in mind that my perspective on this is primarily concerned with information security, so if it sounds somewhat paranoid....well, there's reasons.

(tl;dr if you want to skip the rationale: various pressures will denormalize auto ownership amongst city folk; will be more expensive for country folk; freedom of movement is going to drastically shrink)

There's several different car manufacturers (and some tech manufacturers) who are making noises about autonomous vehicles, some of which are intended to be electrically powered. There have been demonstrations of several classes of such vehicles, including (recently) autonomously-controlled semitrucks.

There's also some tech firms that are more interested in selling car-rides-as-a-service rather than cars, per se. Uber and Lyft, for instance. They fit in the previous category as well - they're involved in developing autonomous vehicle capabilities, as they are interested in reducing the cost of driver payments.

There's also quite a few folks in the insurance industry who are beginning to see that autonomous vehicles are safer than the typical driver.

The tech firms and insurance firms are extremely interested in collecting data around the kinds of rides taken in various vehicles - Uber, for instance, is particularly notorious for the collection and use of such information.

There are already car rental firms that are including mandatory telemetry reporting in their rental cars. There are also several insurance firms that offer "reduced" rates if you install a telemetry recorder in your car that reports to them.

There are also governmental factors at work here - not just lobbying by the auto, tech, and insurance industries, but the increasing pressure on states to fund their transportation budgets. The increases in gasoline efficiency (as demanded by EPA guidelines) and the increase in electric car usage (which doesn't -use- gas) has resulted in a drastic loss in revenues from gasoline taxes; these gas taxes are generally earmarked for DOT budgets.

Further, there's been, for the past few years, an overall reduction in the number of teenagers getting drivers' licenses - the articles that talk about that cite a lack of interest, costs that are too high to run a car, etc.

Add to this the increase in "anti-terrorist" surveillance, which is in the news everywhere.

With all these factors in play, there are several potential outcomes, but from my particular perspective, the most likely one is this:

As autonomous vehicles become more normalized and capable, insurance companies will offer 'discounts' for vehicles with autonomous capabilities (because they're safer) but, needing to make up the costs to maintain revenues, will hike the rates for manual-control vehicles.

These costs will cause older, used vehicle insurance costs to skyrocket, further impeding the likelihood of drivers' license acquisition amongst teenagers.

Normalization of "ride summoning" apps (and the associated ease of being able to order a ride to your location, as well as the comparatively cheap costs of maintaining an autonomous vehicle fleet rather than paying drivers) results in a further loss of persons with driving capability, and increased use of by-ride purchases rather than automobile ownership in cities and in the attached sprawl.

These rides will end up having taxes added to them by length, to fund the departments of transportation.

The data concerning who takes what ride where will, of course, be thoroughly sold by the ride providers (as the autonomous vehicles will have to report telemetry anyway as a normal part of their usage), and will be provided to various law enforcement agencies on whatever pretexts they want.

At this point, I suspect we may well get various cities implementing Shadowrun-style traffic-control grids to manage autonomous vehicle flow, so at least this cyberpunk dystopia will have -some- cool bits.

Rural persons will presumably have to gain special exemption for vehicles that do not travel under fully autonomous guidance, much as exemptions exist today for, e.g., children in farming families with tractors and the like.

(Though there's already plenty of pushback there, given that semi-autonomous tractors are already being pushed as a way to increase farming efficiency.)

We end up with movement being controlled by a set of autonomous-vehicle-fleet companies who thoroughly monitor and control access to transportation, with only a comparatively few rich or eccentric people actually owning vehicles - people buy rides, not cars. There are several outcomes that result from -this- but those are out of scope of the 'car' theme of discussion.

So in the future, you will have -no- cars, and will order a small vehicle or a large vehicle depending on whether you have a lot of shopping to do, and will pay whatever rate the local infrastructure provider cares to charge.

Right now there are about 3.5 million commercial truck drivers in the US. It is also, crucially, one of the few remaining well-paying jobs available to people without a college education.

What are those three and a half million people going to do if they're told to go pound sand over the course of about five years? What options are available to a forty-year-old trucker with a GED and the beginnings of a bad back?

-Merc
Keep Rat

For example, consider the new Tesla - when that vehicle comes out, there will have been several years of incremental improvements in Tesla-brand autonomous function from the existing vehicles, all of which are rigged to report telemetry back to Tesla and receive updates to their algorithms.

As for the truck drivers - many of them will be relegated to what amounts to 'stockyard' jobs, shuttling trucks around delivery yards and the like. We're probably going to get a lot of very nasty labor actions, strikes, protests and the like.

It's going to get extremely ugly, I agree.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Like I said, this comes from my perspective in infosec, where the thought process goes "What's the worst that could possibly happen? OK, now how could someone make it even worse?"

And that's why I like reading your stuff - it has that tinge of optimism, of "We can build a better future" that I don't find very often these days. Gives me something to aspire to beyond "keep things from getting even worse."

If your regular daily usage, (or trip distance if there are chargers at each end), is longer than the range on batteries then a pure EV isn't the right choice.

>>It assumes that pure EVs are intended for long distance driving off of
>>main routes. (That's a niche which will likely be handed off to
>>things like electric-driven hybrids.)
>
>... So in the future I'll be expected to have two cars, because one
>can't go anywhere except to the store and the other is Ethically
>Unacceptable for doing so? Uh. Who decides which trip is suitable
>for which vehicle?

No, if your typical usage is going to require the longer range you have a single car that isn't a pure EV. Such as the mentioned electric-driven hybrid: For short trips, these are slightly less efficient, (due to the extra weight), or somewhat shorted ranged, (if the weight of the generator is made up for by having fewer batteries), than a pure EV. For longer trips the generator activates and supplies the electricity to continue driving.

Now, if the long trip is the atypical one then you would use two different vehicles but you still wouldn't own two. However, this is a bit of analysis people should have been doing for years, (cost of a vehicle that does everything you need v/s the cost of one that does most of it and renting for the rest<1>).

>It's just... like virtually everything else that's considered "modern"
>these days, the whole concept is optimized for city living to the
>point where it's worse than useless to those of us who don't. One
>gets tired of that drumbeat after a while. A very short while.

If you are trying to solve the "carbon emissions from transportation" problem then the place to start looking is at the use cases which are more common and easier to deal with, (i.e. the low-hanging fruit). One of the big use cases that fits into that is the daily commute in urban/suburban/exurban areas with running errands in those same areas another one.

<1> Most people do do a crude version of this in that they don't buy something that is enough to move a house's worth of stuff and instead rent a truck, (possibly with driver).

Last I knew, they also had a nasty habit of exploding sometimes. But then, so do lithium ion batteries.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It could always be worse- one idea I keep seeing pop up when it comes to storing energy in an electric car is the flywheel system, because when I think of things I want around me in a crash, a tremendously heavy object containing ludicrous amounts of angular momentum is right at the top of the list.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Large gyroscopic forces are great for handling, too! Ask any Sopwith Camel pilot.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Really, the problem, such as it is, is that oil and the other combustible hydrocarbons are goddamn miracle materials.

We don't really conceptualize them that way, but they are. A gallon of oil can be stored at room temperature nearly indefinitely, and by merely burning it in a way that is, frankly, not all that efficient (although the humble internal combustion engine is, after a century of optimizing, also something of a little miracle), it releases enough energy to propel a ton of metal thirty to forty miles.

And that's crazyface. It's a literal wonder of the natural world created by nothing more than millions of years of heat and pressure. When we drive a car or fly a plane, we're propelling it using the force of the geologic history of the planet contained in a little tank.

It's amazing, but it isn't easily replicable, or at least not cheaply. We keep trying, but it turns out the universe isn't any eager to bow to our engineering whims now than it ever has been.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Though, I suppose if we wanted to totally wean ourselves off gasoline, we could pull out and dust off those plans for nuclear-powered cars. I'm thinking of naming mine "Tsar Bomba."

--------------------------
CdrMike, Renegade Time Lord

I think this is why there's been such a big focus on plug-in electrics, because power outlets are everywhere, they're easily built out even in places they aren't, and the grid is... the grid. It's already there. This is, shall we say, a rather different proposition than needing to turn every gas station in the country into a hydrogen refueling station.

>The infrastructure that is built up around the
>extraction, transportation, distillation, and distribution of
>petroleum and the substances made from it is the work of decades of
>investment and innovation.

And also, this is key, of political decisions. That investment often took the form of Uncle Sam cutting some big'old checks and writing highly preferential regulations. You can't build an oil pipeline, or a power plant, or anything else of that nature without political actors on your side.

That's the real fly in the ointment that a lot of the people approaching this from a technical standpoint either don't want to or aren't equipped to deal with. The engineering challenges are enormous but straightforward, because it turns out that, for monkeys with delusions of grandeur, we actually really are clever as fuck.

Only it turns out that there are a lot of people in the world, and not all of them agree all the time, and in order to stop us from murdering each other we've established a system where you can't just ignore the people who tell you "No, that's dumb. We won't be doing that."

>It actually says a lot that there's more research money and time put into
>renewable methods of creating hydrocarbon fuels than there is into replacing
>them altogether.

And whether you think that's a good idea or not depends on if you approach this issue from the standpoint of "oil isn't an infinite resource, you guys" or from the standpoint of "even if it were, we should really stop burning it unless you want to find out what Miami looks like under five feet of water." Those are two extremely different first principles.

>Though, I suppose if we wanted to totally wean ourselves off gasoline,
>we could pull out and dust off those plans for nuclear-powered cars.
>I'm thinking of naming mine "Tsar Bomba."

Are you sure you don't mean... Car Bomba?

(I regret nothing.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

The idea is sound and in fact in use in a growing number of subway systems around the world. I think the MBTA have been experimenting with them on the Red Line recently.

But passenger cars? No.