In other news: water linked to wetness. EVs are so much more pleasant to be around for both acoustic and particulate emissions. Anyone who's dined outdoors next to a busy car intersection in an ICE-centric location knows this.
And it is easily 10x worse to me in places that have a lax approach to auto emissions and safety. Where I live now there are zero safety or emissions inspections for auto vehicles (zero!) and it feels like every tenth car going by on the major roadways has an absurdly loud modified or damaged exhaust system. I yearn for the day I can eat outside at the restaurants in my neighborhood without that disturbance. At the current rate of social change in this US state I will probably be very old, or dead before then.
> And it is easily 10x worse to me in places that have a lax approach to auto emissions and safety.
What surprised me was how noticeable the difference in emissions were even ICE vs. ICE, just getting around by bicycle all summer visiting family in Illinois vs. what I was breathing riding in traffic once back in California. IL exhaust is noxious in comparison.
Then when Russia invaded Ukraine I learned CA fuel is an entirely different blend from the rest of the nation targeting better emissions with lower sulfur and particulates. So apparently CARB and all those frequent smog tests and spending more on gas actually makes a QoL difference, surprise!
I fully expect many confirmations of auto emissions-caused disease/death once the nation pivots to electric. It can't happen soon enough. I don't even care if the electricity is produced via fossil fuels away from where people live. Having such large numbers of ICEs constantly spewing exhaust adjacent to where we breathe is categorically DUMB. And we sure have far more ability to clean the exhaust in a large-scale immobile power plant installation than little portable ad-hoc propulsion-as-a-30%-efficient-byproduct rube goldberg machines.
> Then when Russia invaded Ukraine I learned CA fuel is an entirely different blend from the rest of the nation targeting better emissions with lower sulfur and particulates. So apparently CARB and all those frequent smog tests and spending more on gas actually makes a QoL difference, surprise!
I recall reading somewhere that California's geography means they have to be super-diligent about emissions or their major cities will have a severe smog problems. I think it was something about mountains trapping the emissions and keeping them concentrated.
Los Angeles in particular is really bad. You've got like 20 million people (a number higher than the individual populations of 45 US states!) all living in flat area mostly hemmed on 3 sides by mountains and on the fourth side by the ocean. Winds tend to blow in from the ocean, and don't tend to pass over the mountains. This tends to trap a pocket of air over the city.
This wouldn't be so bad if car usage wasn't so necessary to get around there, however car ownership in the LA metro is something like 80-90 percent, with around 1.6 cars per household on average. (Compare to about 32% and 0.45 per household in Tokyo, a very similar place in terms of geography and population) EVs represent about 1% of those cars, so, conservatively you've got about 15 million cars filling up that one air pocket overhead with combustion byproducts.
It gets worse! Traffic in Los Angeles is so bad that a lot of those cars are in stop and go hours-long commutes every day which is a particularly inefficient regime for fuel use and emissions. On top of that this bad traffic has an interesting side effect: over half of all car trips in Los Angeles are less than 3 miles. This is also bad for emissions because the catalytic converter may not get to heat up and achieve full efficiency.
False; most modern cars aren't very loud. At city speeds, the loudest part is the tire noise. At highway speeds, the wind noise. You only really hear the engine in ICE cars under heavy acceleration or if the car is designed to be loud (e.g. a sports car).
I've certainly heard modern ICE cars where the engine noise was minimal. At the same time, I can scarcely recall sitting in a drive-through fast food line with my window open to order and NOT being annoyed at the level of engine noise from other cars making it harder to hear and be heard at the speaker. It's definitely not tire or wind noise when we're all just idling in line.
Yea, that's true. But I can walk around plenty of cities with cars driving within feet of me and not hear much noise besides the road noise at all. I suppose the design of the city makes a difference, e.g. are there sound-reflecting bare concrete walls everywhere (like many drive throughs).
I'm sitting beside a very, very loud street as I type this. My apartment faces onto a four-lane stroad, that climbs up a hill right in front of my building.
Cars have to throttle up to climb hills. This is also "city driving." People seem to forget that many cities are not flat, but instead are quite hilly, or even mountainous (when a city is built a narrow valley, getting to most places often involves going up or down the sides of the valley.)
Also, it's not just cars. Frequently, semi trucks go by my apartment, hissing and wheezing their pneumatic brakes as they recover them going up the hill, or expend them going down the hill. And this isn't even an arterial road in my city!
And then there are the local motorcycle clubs that use this stroad to caravan together to places...
At the 10:15 mark in this video, different types of vehicles are measured for noise output.
It would be pretty amazing if we could get around on e-bikes a lot more than we could today. Quiet, easy to ride… but in places that are not hospitable to bike riders, less safe than a car, which is likely why they won’t be adopted en masse.
- In most of the city shots, you can clearly hear that road/tire noise and honking are by far the loudest noises. EVs won't change this.
- In the Delft segment, a train was the most significant source of noise so they removed it. Yes, public transit is incredibly loud, much louder than cars.
- The video specifically says that road/tire noise is louder than engine noises for most cars at certain speeds. EVs won't change this.
- Cars are not at all the loudest vehicles he measures, and heavy cars were louder than lighter ones. EVs are significantly heavier than equivalent ICE cars.
- He specifically says that EVs are probably worse noise offenders at higher speeds due to being heavy and having wider tires.
- He specifically measured passing Teslas and they were the exact same loudness as ICE cars.
Hence the arguments make my point for me: EVs are not going to improve city noise levels much if at all. I dislike noise too. But EVs are not the solution here (and if you've ever listened to most public transit, neither is that).
Even ignoring the sound, which is definitely louder than an outdoor speaking voice, I can feel my neighbor start his truck every day, it’s completely stock and was made ~2015. Cars are loud as hell, and most new cars sold in the US are trucks.
I mean, if you just ignore a bunch of they key elements of pickup truck construction (i.e. lie but with some plausible deniability) then sure.
Transverse engine FWD based drivetrains, unibody construction, shared floorpans, key dimensions and platforms with sedans/wagons hatches, all the things that are characteristic of a modern crossover are very much mutually exclusive with the things that are characteristic of a truck or truck based SUV.
The fundamental problem is that people conflate air quality and carbon emissions. It’s two separate problems with two separate solutions.
Diesel emissions cause cancer, but burning those emissions off takes additional energy. If you have a semi-truck without a diesel particulate filter going down I94 in rural North Dakota, getting 15-20% better fuel economy than if it had one, there’s an argument to be made that this is a net positive for the planet overall. Nobody is getting cancer from the long-haul semi trucks that spend most of their time on the interstate, and the reduced consumption is a better deal for the planet. Even with the NOX. (Citation needed).
Likewise, a semi truck that exists doing short runs in urban Illinois, sitting next to a coffee shop waiting for his trailer, probably should have a DPF.
The main problem I have with EVs is that we’re forgetting reduce-reuse-recycle. A 2005 Corolla is safe, it’s production emissions are already accounted for, and gets decent fuel economy even by modern standards. The correct choice for someone that cares about the planet isn’t to buy a luxury EV (and they’re all luxury cars), it’s to live a simple life and to make the least consumptive choice you can. There’s a total lack of nuance when it comes to climate change.
Is anyone advocating for nation-scale forced replacement of 2005 Corollas with EVs? Most of what I see are pushes, starting in the 2030s, to limit the sale of new gas/diesel cars, not to force anyone to replace one they already have. The gas/diesel cars will continue to be used until they reach their end of life, which is typically once they hit the point that they cost more to repair than they're worth.
Some European cities have announced plans for this.
Paris and Amsterdam have announced that from 2030 onwards, only zero-emission vehicles will be allowed to drive in those cities. Depending on your definition, Paris is a nation-scale settlement. (The population is larger than many countries.)
Petrol/diesel vehicles will be traded away from such cities as time goes by, and their resale value will decrease. This is already happening for the largest goods vehicles and buses in similar European cities. Mostly, older large diesel vehicles have been banned from large cities, but this gradually extends to all large diesel vehicles, then diesel vans, etc.
> The correct choice for someone that cares about the planet isn’t to buy a luxury EV (and they’re all luxury cars), it’s to live a simple life and to make the least consumptive choice you can.
Okay, but why focus on individual choice when it comes to climate policy? That's the same myopic "fix the visible symptoms" thinking that causes voters to demand offices enforce recycling policies on employees, but then does nothing to push for preventing those same companies from dumping 10000x the mass of industrial waste into the nearest river.
Think like the civil engineer who must design the next pre-fab pre-densified /r/UrbanHell development to sit beside an existing factory town somewhere in rapidly-urbanizing China. What type of cars do you want that engineer to design their city to accommodate? What policies, enacted by other countries, would influence their choice?
The point of global climate policy, is to influence the choices that those people make — choices which entirely swamp out (by five or more orders of magnitude) any choice you as an individual commuter will ever make.
The average age of a car at the time it is given up for scrap in the UK is just shy of 14 years. Cars exist in a paradox where they wear out and become uneconomical to maintain; the counter point being enthusiasts who can keep cars on the road practically forever. Doing this relies on a steady stream of parts from the same model being scrapped and sold for parts, limited exposure to the elements (slowing the rate of decay) and eventually expensive bespoke replacements.
I thought that keeping an old car running was better for the environment but last time I googled it, I was proven wrong, even for my very modest yearly mileage.
EVs are not all luxury cars. There are multiple cars available under 40k. I purchased my Chevy bolt for 28k after minimal rebates and am quite happy with it.
“Most emissions from modern vehicles these days comes from things like tire dust rather than tailpipe. What would be best for local street level pollution would probably be something like a lightweight rickshaw over a multiton EV.”
That is not a discordant take. Pedestrians and cyclists are obviously the most pleasant transportation option to be around in an urban space acoustics/particulates emissions wise.
Unfortunately, some places have gone all-in on cars and it is literally impossible to live a full life without using one. This is where EVs slot in nicely. Further, EVs that fit into the micromobility space are an excellent option for many places-- e-bikes, scooters, Renault Twizy, etc. (Which aligns with what you were told above)
$2000 for a set of all seasons? I thought I was spending a lot of money when I dropped $1100 on a new set for my Model X. That works out to about $0.024 per mile for me if they last as long as the last set of the same make and model. (About 48k)
So, maybe that poster meant $0.015 per mile, not $0.15?
The tires on my last EV needed replacing at about 25K miles, and those were the OEM tires which tend to wear out quicker than retail tires. I think I spent about $700 replacing all four. That's about 3 cents per mile. If the replacements lasted their 70K mile warranty, that'd be only a penny per mile.
> I yearn for the day I can eat outside at the restaurants in my neighborhood without that disturbance.
I had the unfortunate displeasure of eating at a downtown restaurant in California’s Central Valley during a family visit on a Friday evening and every 5 minutes conversation would be interrupted by a lifted diesel truck revving their engines while they cruise up and down the streets. Same trucks. Up and down the street. All dinner long.
It’s an impossible situation that will only be solved by these individuals being treated like the children they are and having their vehicles impounded until the modifications are scheduled to be removed.
You are assuming that every city allows cars into dining areas. There are many examples in Europe where this is not the case. The whole electric vs combustion car argument is predicated on the fact that we need cars in inner cities at all.
Mmmmm, I don't think I assumed that. I'm pretty sure I described my current scenario, and the scenarios of others who live in similar places. I know how loathsome this scenario is because I have lived and traveled in those places in Europe you mention.
The sad reality is that cars are so thoroughly stuck into the urban areas in so many places and it will take longer than my lifespan to unring that bell here in America and fix mobility in urban centers. However, we can potentially unring some smaller bells a hell of a lot sooner with EVs. It's a really valuable transitional tech in that regard, in my eyes. I don't think ICE will ever truly go away, due to the huge power density of the fuel. But, if we just replace say, half of the passenger fleet within say, 10-100 miles of american cities with EVs as they age out by like 2035, life will be much better here from that point until I die. Of course if we can increase the portion of those cars that age out and are not replaced, especially in a 1 mile radius of the city center, that's a much larger win than swapping an ICE SUV for an EV SUV.
This makes sense but I don’t put a ton of faith in the analysis. EVs grew over the past few years, but Covid also cut down on a lot of urban activity over the past 1000 days, so it’s hard to separate the two.
They compared the EV registration rates and asthma-related ER visit rates by zip code. Presumably COVID and its related effects happened pretty much everywhere, not only in zip codes with more EVs.
I'm not sure I buy this. Isn't most of the pollution generated by a small % of vehicles. e.g. diesel trucks and maga pickups tuned to burn oil. In short, all the sedans on the road can be electric, but the pollution levels are largely unchnaged.
asthma rates for residents of this building would not be affected until all trucks and buses went electric.
In inner London, driving a car from before roughly 2005 incurs a charge of £12.50 per day.
Driving a heavy truck or large bus from before roughly 2014 anywhere in London incurs a charge of £100 per day, or £300/day if it's even older.
Of the public buses, "There are 3,854 hybrid buses, 785 battery electric buses, and 22 hydrogen fuel cell buses operating in London, as of March 2022, out of a total bus fleet of 8,795 - this is around 53% of the bus fleet".
New York seems to be aiming for something similar for buses (not trucks), but is about 5 years behind.
("The New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) operates the world's largest fleet of buses -- 4,373 public buses" -- well, maybe the largest in the world in America. I'll leave it to a New Yorker to find figures, I don't know enough about how NYC transport is structured.)
Hello, real commies don't think cars should be required for existence at all. Trains, trams, buses, cycling, walking are the socialist methods of transport and are like 100-1000x more affordable than any car to the poor.
Cars on the whole are generally an albatross around the neck of the working class financially.
Depends on your circumstances. I live in Central Europe, a bit outside a major capital and commuting there for work. This is a place with excellent public transport by any measure (metro travels on time every 2-3 minutes during the day, for instance).
Total commute time in one direction: train + metro + walking 1.5h, car 0.5h.
At this point, even if public transport were offered to me for free, I would not use it. 3h of commute per day is just too much.
(Yeah, I could theoretically move closer to work... and what do I do when the workplace changes? move again?)
Switching lines, waiting on connections, and coordinating, of course.
This is true of all public transit systems, even the best ones. Unless you live directly at the source station and have a direct shot to your destination station, you're going to waste a lot of time changing buses/trains and waiting and coordinating.
And not everybody can live near every transit hub, not even near _a_ transit hub, by definition.
Cars are point-to-point. The very best public transit can do is match it in terms of pure speed.
Public transport has a much higher bandwidth at the expense of individual travel time. It's a trade-off. Naturally there's a limit to how many cars can dive at any given time in any given city, but I'd definitely expect the average public transit time to be 2-5x the equivalent individual transportation (bicycle if possible/car) transit time.
My friend, I don't mean to offend, but these takes seem unnecessarily hateful and indicative of a worldview where people are "out to get you." I encourage you to think collaboratively on these issues and perhaps travel to a place where socialized transit and bicycle infrastructure are the norm. It is a form of individual and financial freedom that is difficult to appreciate until you don't have a car in your life anymore.
My personal experience tells me that reactionaries literally are scared. Scared of change and things they don't understand. Probably a controversial opinion but oh well
Some studies back this idea up with data, such as "Conservatives Anticipate and Experience Stronger Emotional Reactions to Negative Outcomes
Samantha Joel et al. J Pers. 2014 Feb." [1]
This is why it is more important than ever to be empathetic to others - we live in a crazy ass world with overwhelming amounts of both tragedy and beauty. The way each one of us perceives that endlessly complex environment is wholly unique, and it is the only reality each of us has ever known.
We've banned this account for political flamewar and personal attack, which are not what this site is for and destroy what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> The French Revolution gave the English language three politically descriptive words denoting anti-progressive politics: (i) "reactionary", (ii) "conservative", and (iii) "right". "Reactionary" derives from the French word réactionnaire (a late 18th-century coinage based on the word réaction, "reaction") and "conservative" from conservateur, identifying monarchist parliamentarians opposed to the revolution.
We've banned this account for political flamewar, which is not what this site is for and destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I mean this genuinely and without insult: based on this impersonal and short interaction I wish for you to open your heart and mind a little bit. I believe it would be a happier and healthier way to live and I want that for all of humanity.
Environmentalist everywhere have been fighting mining industry for ever, often confused and co-opted by NIMBYs. Yes it is an inconvenient truth that all consumption hurts us. A car is still a car even if it is electric, we are of course better of with no cars at all. Very few people are actually arguing that.
I want to point out you started this quagmire by connecting into a broader narrative. The linked article simply says "we think localized emissions go down when EV adoption rates go up in a particular area" which says nothing about this larger discussion about the net social effects of EVs. Personally I believe we can discuss this until the end of time without a conclusive answer until someone has completely documented and analyzed all the relevant supply chains end to end for every new ICE car and every new EV car.
I really don't have any qualms about posting unpopular facts and truths.
Localized or not, we live in a globalized world and it's a fact that lithium ion battery production is dangerous and dirty work on par with the petroleum that it is trying to eliminate. EV fanatics don't like hearing this, but it is true.
Agree to disagree to agree. One thing that's particularly dangerous and dirty right now is cobalt. (Used primarily in rechargeable batteries, and airbags, jet engines, etc) Unlike some other exotic materials, it's currently a supply chain that cannot prove which materials were obtained using modern techniques and heavy equipment, and which ones were obtained by hand through brutalized labor practices.
I caught an interview on NPR recently[1] with the author of "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives"
The claim that lithium ion battery production is as bad as petroleum production is ridiculous.
The scale of mining required to produce a lithium-ion battery and the solar panels to charge it is far lower than required to produce and refine the petroleum used over the lifetime of a vehicle.
The other little secret about mining is that nasty as it is, the impact of non-petroleum mining on the environment is miniscule compared to farming, which is far more damaging but has much better PR.
It’s on a completely different order of magnitude. And actually, yes, pollution far away from major population centers is much better than pollution within cities- regardless of what country it’s in.
The US has just committed to billions of dollars per year in incentives to bring that pollution to the US. Between the IRA's 10-year expansion of incentives for buying cars with US-manufactured batteries and US-mined minerals, Section 45X, the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit, is the reason billions of dollars of battery manufacturing and associated supply chain investments on US soil were announced in 2022.
1. And what happens when EVs become 30,40,50, or even 90% of the automobile fleets around the world?
You're going to need to ramp up the otherwise dirty and disgusting production of LiOn to meet demand. LiOn production is as dirty if not worse than petroleum distillation and drilling.
EV batteries aren't disposed of, they're reused as stationary storage, then recycled, with over 97% of the raw materials recoverable to put into new batteries as of 2021. Redwood Materials recycles over 60 tons of them per day, and has another facility opening in 2023 that can handle an additional 125,000 tons per year. The materials are too valuable to throw out, so a market for reusing and recycling them has existed as long as li-ion electric cars have existed.
Whenever I spend time abroad I think about the EVs back home and wonder how the hell this will ever see widespread adoption. The sheer number of motorcycles, cars, people, lack of infrastructure for batteries and charging systems is totally overwhelming. There doesnt seem any realistic way for these tools to be adopted by the majority of the global population. It doesnt make it useless. But I just cant see a realistic path forward to eletrification of transportation on a global scale.
Most places have electricity, and electric bikes are already very common in Asia. It seems like a lot easier problem than even just building enough gas stations to keep up with growing developing worlds demand.
Fwiw the U.S. emits the largest volume of CO2 emissions from road transportation worldwide, followed by China. So I think if we can start there, it'd be a huge improvement.
And it is easily 10x worse to me in places that have a lax approach to auto emissions and safety. Where I live now there are zero safety or emissions inspections for auto vehicles (zero!) and it feels like every tenth car going by on the major roadways has an absurdly loud modified or damaged exhaust system. I yearn for the day I can eat outside at the restaurants in my neighborhood without that disturbance. At the current rate of social change in this US state I will probably be very old, or dead before then.