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China, Europe Drive Shift To Electric Cars as US Lags (reuters.com)
Electric cars will pick up critical momentum in 2017, many in the auto industry believe - just not in North America. Tighter emissions rules in China and Europe leave global carmakers and some consumers with little choice but to embrace plug-in vehicles, fuelling an investment surge, said industry executives gathered in Detroit this past week for the city's annual auto show. From a report: "Car electrification is an irreversible trend," said Jacques Aschenbroich, chief executive of auto supplier Valeo, which has expanded sales by 50 percent in five years with a focus on electric, hybrid, connected and self-driving cars. In Europe, green cars benefit increasingly from subsidies, tax breaks and other perks, while combustion engines face mounting penalties including driving and parking restrictions. China, struggling with catastrophic pollution levels in major cities, is aggressively pushing plug-in vehicles. Its carrot-and-stick approach combines tens of billions in investment and research funding with subsidies, and regulations designed to discourage driving fossil-fueled cars in big cities. The road ahead for electric vehicles (EVs) in the United States, however, could have more hairpin curves.
That's a fallacy, what difference does it make how far you need to travel? Unless you are driving 10 hours a day, an electric car will get you as far as you can possibly drive without stopping. And the best part about electricity is that the infrastructure for electricity is massive compared to gasoline.
How can you possibly drive far enough to get to a gas station and not far enough to get to an electrical outlet? Doesn't make sense, cause that gas pump is electric.
Certainly the technology needs to advance, but this seems like one of those arguments that can be summarized with "same argument was had about the horse and buggy"
We still don't have batteries! I'm serious I forgot to buy some at Safeway the other day.
No well seriously, we don't have batteries that can enable us to replace gasoline. We need to improve capacity at least 4x, if not 10x.
Some say the answer is Lithium-Air batteries .. but then hardly anyone is doing any research on order-of-magnitude battery technology improvement .. let alone Lithium Air. Whoever is doing research on new battery concept has virtually no funding. The ones getting slight funding are the people working on incremental updates.
We need companies like Tesla, Google, Apple, Samsung, Panasonic to get serious in funding a foundation or institute that researches advanced battery concepts. Battery research funding budget should be in the billions not thousand.
If you switch to electric, though, you can change the back end. improve the battery technology, replace coal with solar, but with ICE you pollute 24/7 .
an electric car will get you as far as you can possibly drive without stopping
What range do you think EVs have on a single charge, anyway? I can drive upwards of 3 hours without a break. With an average-priced EV, that's not even near possible.
That's only logical if there isn't some other reason to switch from fossil fuels. As it turns out, the overwhelming majority of experts in atmospheric and oceanic sciences happen to have a reason why we should encourage the transition to vehicles powered renewables sooner rather than later.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Even if you are using coal-power to generate electricity, said power plant is stationary, and because it is generating very large amounts of power, the amount of pollution you would be producing at such plants would be substantially less than the total amount of pollution produced by millions of moving vehicle. It is comparatively easier for governments to legislate environmental controls on companies that produce power in that way than it is on private individually owned vehicles as well. Plus, if there is already a good electric vehicle infrastructure. cleaner energy production measures can always be employed as they become more cost efficient, and the heavier polluting systems phased out, resulting in a *far* greener and more sustainable vehicle technology.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I live on Vancouver Island. The distance to the nearest large urban center is an hour's drive, and it's a drive I make maybe every three or four weeks. In fact, to get to Vancouver, in actual "driving" terms (ie. not riding a ferry) is about an hour and a half. Yes, if you live in Prairies, the drive between, say, Edmonton and Calgary is pretty long, but really, what percentage of the Canadian population do you imagine makes that trip on a regular basis?
Once again we see people trying to argue against EV's based on driving patterns that only a pretty small fraction of the population actually partake of.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Average commute times in the US are 25.4 minutes. Just how many people do you think your scenario cover as a percentage of the population of the United States?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You can drive 250 miles in two hours?
It must really suck when reality just completely fucks over your moronic claim. I'm going to be generous and assume you're just a fucking idiot ignorant of just about every fact on climate change, and not in fact a dishonorable immoral liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So what you're saying is that transportation and energy use policies should be based upon a pretty infrequent set of scenarios. With that logic, why not build thirty lane highways to wine country, or fuck it, have a helicopter standing by?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In other words, you want to keep the term pretty nebulous because you intend on basing your argument on indefinite semantics.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And somehow, those five people always have enough time to be available to poo-poo on any Internet thread discussing EVs :-)
No one is actively taking your gasoline driven car away. If you really need it, keep it. But for the largest part of the population, it might make sense to drive an electric car most of the year, and only for the few long trips into sparsely populated regions, they can rent a gasoline powered one.
Your argument is akin to arguing that cars are not usable for anybody, because there are some people living on small islands who need a boat to get somewhere else, or because once in a while, you need to go by airplane, because it would take too long to drive from New York City to Seattle. Yes, there are special cases, when a car is not a good solution. For those cases, we have other solutions. But that doesn't mean that we have to abandon cars. People living on small islands will not be frequent car customers. So what?
The same can be said for electric cars. Yes, there are special cases where they aren't a good solution. But for most people in most cases, they are. And for special needs, there are special transportation means you can use -- be it a gasoline powered car, a train, an airplane, a boat or a bicycle. It doesn't mean that you have to own all of them.
Fine - cancel all oil subsidies first please. They outstrip EV subsidies by a large margin. Add in the cost of pollution and damage done to people, and determine the new price at the pump. Then see how much you like paying for gas.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
The existence of people who have that driving pattern was never a question. The issue is whether the percentage of people who rarely if ever commute beyond their own metropolitan areas is great enough that a shift to the majority of the population driving electric cars is economically and practically feasible. Pointing out that counterexamples exist to a trend in an attempt to question the existence or magnitude of the trend is fallacious and dishonest.
He is. Hence the boycott.