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Musk, Others Want Volkswagen To Go Electric Instead of Fixing Diesels (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Volkswagen has put itself in a tough spot. After cheating emissions standards, the company faces billions in fines and repair costs to bring those vehicles into spec and make peace with regulators. But a group of business owners, investors, and environmentalists has a different suggestion. The group, headlined by Elon Musk, sent an open letter to the California Air Resources Board outlining their solution. They want Volkswagen to be released from its obligation to fix cars already on the road, and instead require that the company substantially accelerate its rollout of zero-emission vehicles.
They want Volkswagen's money to go into manufacturing plants and R&D for zero-emission technology rather than to government-mandated fines. (Note that these investments would give Musk, in particular, another direct competitor.) The letter says, "In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change. The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW."
They want Volkswagen's money to go into manufacturing plants and R&D for zero-emission technology rather than to government-mandated fines. (Note that these investments would give Musk, in particular, another direct competitor.) The letter says, "In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change. The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW."
At least they won't waste any on that there highfalutin' edumacation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Greater acceptance and availability of electric vehicles and the growth of electric vehicle market segment would benefit Musk, and it also adds to hi good guy image. It is quite possible Musk appears to be a good guy is because he *is* actually a good guy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Musk is smart. The more competition he has in electric car manufacturers, the less is his share in the infrastructure of recharging stations, battery building, and the research and tech behind it all. The more companies that jump on the electric car path, the easier it is for him to sell cars (though he seems a little more high minded than that which is why I like him).
Everyone talks about how dishonest VW was. But strictly speaking, they followed the letter of the law as it was written.
Well, no. They violated the letter of the law as it was written by introducing a "defeat device", which is a device which alters the behavior specifically for the purpose of defeating the test, or software which fulfills the same purpose. This is expressly prohibited.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most German cars are frequently in the shop. The German manufacturers have cultivated this myth about their engineering but in reality the cars they make are actually on the very low end of the reliability ratings. I inherited a Golf, it was a fun car to drive, very nice interior, but the power steering went out at 50k miles and it was a $1200 repair. This along with a long line of mechanical problems.
I won't ever buy a VW because of that experience. They are overpriced junk that even Chevy beats in reliability.
I imagine cars would be charged mostly over night where there is low demand anyway (non peak). Heavy electrical users are often give price breaks on electricity use during non-peak hours, - sometimes residential users can get those discounts too.
Utilities are all about reducing demand use so they don't have to build and operate as many power plants. We get a break on our summer electric bill because we allow the local utility to cycle our A/C compressor on and off during peak load times. In the 10 years or so since we did that, we've never noticed a difference. So if car charges were a real problem, utilities could offer the same price break and just cycle the chargers on and off.
Already VW and other companies are planning to go way into electric vehicles. And why wouldn't they want to? It's an easier and cheaper way of passing the EPA buck onto someone else. Instead of having to try to meet every stringent reg they can let someone else entirely (power companies) deal with that issue. And will they be able to deal with the issue either? Doubtful.
That would be a management issue, rather than a technical issue.
For decades now there are off-the-shelf gas scrubbers and other technologies that can very thoroughly clean up the exhaust of a power plant, including coal fired ones. It's not cheap or so of course, but there is nothing technical in the way. Add to a small number of sites, all of which are permanent managed, this is the best scenario possible for limiting pollution. Even CO2 can be dealt with this way, but that's getting a lot harder of course.
For cars it's much harder to manage. Many, many small units, often poorly maintained (yearly checkups or less). The sheer number of units makes it impossible to install scrubbers, and catalytic converters go only that far. It's technically very hard to get car exhaust as clean as power plant exhaust, and cars are often spilling their pollution right inside densely populated areas.
For your argument about trucks: well, sure, for now they won't be able to go electric. But that's not an argument to stop electric in vehicles, and even should be an argument to improve electric cars as improving technology there may just make electric trucks a reality, possibly via the hybrid diesel/electric stage where pollution can be kept out of the cities (running electric in the stop-and-go traffic of cities where diesel has a hard time, diesel on the motorways where it can shine). There are already electric and hybrid buses out there, so trucks don't seem to be too far off, either.