This is true but I’ve wondered how much of the dynamic is because Tesla offers a limited number of models.
As others have said, Tesla is a status symbol. Meaning people often want one just because it’s a Tesla. For someone who is set on a Tesla, they have five options. By contrast, someone set on a Toyota has 20 or so. Meaning, if I want a Tesla there’s a reasonably high probability my choice will be a Model Y because I don’t have many options. 66% of Teslas sold are Model Y while only 15% of Toyotas sold are Camrys.
I feel like that lack of standardization is part of the problem. Some manufacturers may pick different times to avoid nuisance braking, but that translates to higher risk to the driver. I’d like to see some core parameters like this standardized (whether by an industry body or regulator).
The environmental aspect I rarely hear discussed is how much carbon would be saved by maintaining your existing vehicle instead. The existing car is already a sunk carbon cost and manufacturing is a huge emitter. It’s more nuanced of course, but it seems to me that it’s always been a status play falsely veiled as a virtuous environmental decision. We humans are great at rationalizing our emotional decisions.
For the rich people who can even consider a tesla, there are no old cars. The average tesla owner would not be seen in any car more than a decade old. They lease. Older/used cars are someone elses domain. This is a shame because cars today can easily last 25+ years. If manufactuers wanted to, they could even biuld them to last much longer. But the new car market is dominated by people who lease and dump cars, not people who keep them around once the shine is gone.
I've heard that argument long ago pushed by totally-not-oil-industry-marketers. If I recall correctly math worked out as 'pays for itself in three to five years'. If you are of the practice of getting a new car every two years it wouldn't help, but if you are doing so already just keeping your cars until they die/it becomes more expensive to repair would be the easy environmental improvement that would also save money.
Yep, at least using numbers from an LLM, the break even emission standpoint seems to be about 3-4 years.
For people who use leases to get a new car (average lease is 36 months) they’d be doing more harm to the environment, but for people who hold onto their cars longer, they’d be reducing CO2e.
Those are just rough generalizations, and of course it depends on driving distance, grid emissions, etc. For example, if you get your electricity primarily from coal, the break even is closer to 12 years. But as others have said, the EV market tends towards the type of people who don’t hold on to cars very long.
>expensive to repair would be the easy environmental improvement that would also save money.
This line of thinking seems to miss the financial reality of the vast majority of Americans. Most people aren’t choosing between an $1800 repair vs a $50k new EV for environmental reasons, it’s because they can only afford one of those options.
Its an optimization problem, the embodied energy of the new car vs how much you save driving it, as it's more fuel efficent than the old one. But in most cases you would need to drive the new car for decades before you break even.
It really depends on the grid emissions. If you’re charging your EV in Vermont (mostly hydro grid) vs West Virginia (mostly coal fuel), it can be orders of magnitude different.
>and the crash involves a vulnerable road user being struck or results in a fatality, an air bag deployment, or any individual being transported to a hospital for medical treatment.
This is the same attitude that people used to try and avoid any culpability for Boeing in the 737-Max crashes. Even if they was a technical way to avoid a crash, it doesn’t avoid negligent or blatantly bad engineering practices. There’s a reason why engineers are expected to have an ethical duty to the public. Automakers get an industrial exemption on the assumption that the internal processes are sufficient to address the risk…What are we supposed to do when they aren’t?
This feels like it’s similar to the priming issue in humans. Our answers (especially when under stress) tend to resort to heuristics derived from context. Time someone to identify the colors of words like “red” when written in yellow, and they’ll often get it wrong. In the same sense, they aren’t reporting the colors (wavelength) they see, they’re reporting on what they are reading.
I wonder how much better the models perform when given more context, like asking it to count instead of priming it with a brand.
>I don't think they would propagate as well as the sound of church bells. Heck, I could identify church bells from miles away, nothing else carries like that.
As with most discussions, the nuance matters. Anecdotal evidence is trumped by science.
Drums tend to have lower frequencies than church bells. All else equal, lower frequencies generally travel farther because they have longer wavelengths (less diffraction means they can go around objects better), less attenuation, and less absorption.
As an example of the application of low frequency long distance communication in nature, elephants use sub-sonic (to humans) frequencies to communicate many kilometers away.
As others have said, Tesla is a status symbol. Meaning people often want one just because it’s a Tesla. For someone who is set on a Tesla, they have five options. By contrast, someone set on a Toyota has 20 or so. Meaning, if I want a Tesla there’s a reasonably high probability my choice will be a Model Y because I don’t have many options. 66% of Teslas sold are Model Y while only 15% of Toyotas sold are Camrys.
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