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New York State To Launch Electric Vehicle Rebate (foxnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an AP report: New York state will soon launch a rebate intended to make electric vehicles more price competitive with traditional cars. Officials said they'll launch the initiative by April 1. The rebate of up to $2,000 will be available for zero-emission and plug-in electric hybrid vehicles. It's part of an effort to reduce automotive carbon emissions, the state's largest climate change contributor. "We want to make electric vehicles a mainstream option," said state Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Westchester County Democrat who leads the Assembly energy committee. "They are becoming more affordable and we need to encourage them." Environmentalists supported the rebate when it was approved by lawmakers in 2016 and have been eagerly awaiting the launch.
>> They are becoming more affordable and we need to encourage them.
Well...which is it?
The working man now only owes $38,000. Environment and affordability problems solved. Praise the lawmakers.
It's projected that the average car or truck will be cheaper in the fully electric or plug in electric long-range hybrid mode by somewhere between 2020 and 2022.
An easier way of doing this would be to remove the fleet vehicle deductions and expensing for business if they aren't all-electric.
However, since the time horizon is just a few years, a short subsidy will help.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Taxpayers should not be subsidizing other people's new cars.
I would love to own an electric car. However, I'm not going to kid myself and say it's helping the environment. With current processes for extracting Lithium from the ground resulting in 0.02% lithium and 99.8% dirt that is now contaminated by the toxic chemicals used to extract the lithium and the resource depletion on local water sources as water is shipped to lithium mines in salt flats, plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway, I'm going to guess the net environmental impact of an electric vehicle over the course of its life is only nominally better than a combustion engine. People have this idea that if the pollution isn't directly coming out of their tailpipe, they aren't causing it.
This is the Google Glass of the automotive world. A solution looking for a problem that's already solved better by something else that's cheaper. Electric cars are a rich person's toy. Is the price difference less than a lifetime's worth of gas yet? Have they solved the range/long charge time problem?
I got mine (a 2014) used with less than 10K miles for a really good price. It's probably the nicest car I've owned. The instant torque of the electric drive is fantastic for city driving and commuting. I've had a series of four cylinder commuter cars over the years and the electric drive is by far the best "solution" to the typically gutless four cylinder engine I've found. My last car was turbocharged and while that was fun after the thing spooled up, it was by no means instant response. It was also not all that efficient in the fuel consumption category. I've taken the Volt on long road trips a few times and saw 40ish MPG on those drives. Generally I only needed gas for the long highway drives, and I'd charge at my destination from the 110V charger.
When things like fast charging and range get really figured out, the Volt is going to be a kind of weird chimera, but for the place we are at now where charging is still mostly slow and nowhere near ubiquitous (I have charging at work and a garage at home) it's a really nice compromise. Making EVs work for true urban dwellers who park on the street or in a parking garage of some kind is a different challenge altogether.
We tried it in the Netherlands. The TCO supposedly got lower than for normal cars, shitloads of people got a hybrid company car, employee didn't have a loading outlet at home, and generally couldn't be bothered anyway, so just drove the thing on gas which was also payed for by the company. Result: more gas usage because the hybrids are much heavier and all that weight had to be dragged around.
In other news. ... Electric cars now cost 42,000 dollars
Like most major cities I imagine cars cause a great deal of air pollution and noise. An electric or even a hybrid I imagine would help that situation as less oil burned means less localized pollution which does a great deal of harm.
This is how money is transferred from the lower classes to the upper classes. Buy an expensive car, get a check from the state. That's not going to help poor people, but it'll help people who already have money.
Do you have ESP?
Neither. Why: 1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
Half true. Points to consider:
(1) "most" is not "all"
(2) electric power is capable of transitioning to solar, and in fact car charging is a good application for solar,
(3) there is economy of scale. Large power plants are more efficient in producing energy, even from fossil fuel sources, than small engines (like car engines). This should be obvious: if car engines were more efficient than gas turbines, a power plant would consist of a million car engines. Large converters can use bottoming cycles to utilize the low-grade waste heat. Cars, on the other hand, just reject the waste heat; it's not worth the effort to do a bottoming cycle on such a small engine.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source.
Nope, not even close. You are right that methane is a better infrared absorber than carbon dioxide, but cows just don't produce that much methane. Methane-- all sources-- produces about 15% of the anthropogenic contribution to greenhouse warming, and cows produce only a small portion of that.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/cours...
The rest of the post consists mostly of unsourced assertions.
It is way easier to mass produce clean energy in a power plant (if needed in future swap a coal plant with clean energy plant) than replace all inefficient engines in all cars (ask Volkswagen).
1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
While at the same time, there are detailed analysis (google is your friend) concluding that :
- Even in countries that mostly produce electricity by burning fossils - like TFA's US - electric cars still have a better carbon foot print simply because this "moved away giant tail pipe" is much more efficient that the "original small one" attached to an ICE.
In other words: yup, us power plant also produce carbon. BUT us power plants produce less CO2 per km than would an ICE, simply because the are optimised mostly for their efficiency, whereas the ICE is also optimised for size and for peak acceleration.
- In country that don't burn fossils that much for electricity (e.g.: lots of central or northern european countries), carbon foot prints are even better than the above.
- Very few countries like China, India, Australia and a few african countries (so nothing to do with NY) are so much reliant on dirty electricity that, electric cars and ICE don't differ that much in their emissions.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source. Buying basic goods made abroad also contributes significantly to the problem.
Yes the industry (including agricultural industy) also produce greenhouse gasses, and in bigger quantities than cars.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use electric cars, that only means that you *should also* try to recude the industry's greenhouse gaz emission.
(Which is beyond the point of TFA. Also, I don't know in the US, but several countries in Europe are also working toward lowering industry/agriculture emitted greenhouse gazes. e.g.: encouraging local grown food. So it's not as if electric cars were at the detriment of fight emissions in the industry)
3) The manufacturing of batteries in electric and electric hybrids is an incredibly dirty process.
4) The batteries in these cars aren't recyclable at all and will have degraded significantly after about 5 years of use. ICE cars don't need a new fuel tank every 5 years.
Yeah because ICE cars grow on tree. Organic trees.
Not.
Check detailed studies, most of the serious one also take the battery manufacture into account.
So again, in anything but the few top most fossil heavy countries, the production of the battery is still offset by the reduced emissions while driving.
That includes the US (even if it relies more on fossils than others and thus the advantage is less visible).
6) ICE cars can actually be carbon-negative. Boeing developed a workable method to grow ethanol in the world's deserts. Think about it: the Sahara Desert turned into a carbon sink. (Link: http://energypost.eu/exclusive...). With such a fuel, it would actually be better if everyone drove a gas guzzler until we meet an agreed upon level of carbon in the atmosphere.
Nice story, bro. But :
- It's still only one of those dozens "soon, new technology will make everything better..." over-hyped big media spin on some scientific advance. (I don't want to denigrate the scientific advance, but it takes a lots of steps between the lab and actual mass production). It's still only a story in some news paper.
Whereas electric cars are currently available from several manufacturer. And low-emission electricity is also a reality in lots of countries.
Until Boeing starts producing and selling huge amounts of their bio-fuel, it makes sense to support electric cars.
- Carbon foot-print gets negative *only if* this production method consumes more carbon than the bio-fuel releases at the end.
(e.g.: if only the fruit of a plant are used for fuel, and the rest of the plant stays keeping its carbon
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
With current processes for extracting Lithium from the ground resulting in 0.02% lithium and 99.8% dirt that is now contaminated by the toxic chemicals used to extract the lithium and the resource depletion on local water sources as water is shipped to lithium mines in salt flats, plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway, I'm going to guess the net environmental impact of an electric vehicle over the course of its life is only nominally better than a combustion engine.
According to studies (google is your friend) it all depends on the country.
- In countries that rely very little on greenhouse gazes-emitting power production (e.g.: lots of central and northern european countries) : pollution generated by the manufacture of battery and production of electicity is still a lot smaller than the pollution generated by the production of fuel and burning it in ICE.
- In countries that rely more on greenhouse gazes-emitting electricity generation (e.g.: US - so including NY mentioned in TFA) : pollution of electric car is still a little bit cleaner than pollution of ICE cars.
- Only in countries with the most catastrophic power generation (e.g.: China, India, Australia, some african countries) are electric-car and ICE cars equivalently polluting.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Here's a study discussing mortality rate effects of the various forms of vehicle power: http://www.pnas.org/content/11...
Two highlights: Battery production does cause some mortalities, but charge the battery from a natural gas power plant and your total mortality rate is less than half the mortality rate of a gasoline vehicle. Charge with Wind, Water, or Solar, and you cut the mortality rate 80%. Charging from a coal plant would be a poor choice, however.
"We want to make electric vehicles a mainstream option,"
Make a land yacht - something about the size of a Crown Victoria - that is within the reach of ordinary individuals. Get it to start around $20-25k and you have an option that people would want.
The only way the golfcarts are attractive is that they're all but forced into existence.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If you are driving total electric car you aren't paying fuel/road tax. A gasoline vehicle has to pay every time it fills up for road repairs bridges etc. It comes out of the tax received from tax at the pump. If you never visit the pump how are you paying your share of the road tax? If you get your propane to run your car from the big storage tank out back of your house [using a wet leg device] you are paying no road tax. Ask the farmers caught at the local livestock auction caught by state revenue people for having the wrong color diesel in their truck. Off road diesel is colored differently than road taxed diesel. http://www.treehugger.com/econ...
A subsidy for you is a tax on everyone else. It's not like the Government of NY produces money, everyone else in your State pays for it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
phev rebates are a joke. they cause just the phev system to be subsidized. due to how cars are now taxed in most of the world by co2 tests, the phev gets cheaper as well.
the thing is, pretty much nobody plugs them in and the added weight causes them to have worse mileage than a 1995 honda civic making it all kind of silly and pointless.
yeah the phev is mostly popular due to it dropping the co2 in the test. it's the ultimate circumvention device really. for the consumer it's pretty much +- zero.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Huh? Why? Most of the cars I see on the road are either SUVs or small cars. Who drives a large sedan, old people?
US citizens. The only reason golfcarts get driven is that they're the only things around in a price bracket - thanks to overzealous environmentalism.
Swap the small cars out for larger US-sized models, and they will drive them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You could probably make this work in downstate urban NY where it is more temperate and the distances are closer. It does not seem to work too well for the rest of NY where commutes are longer and brutal battery draining cold can be the norm for a longer part of the year.
ICE cars, and their engines, are made from recycled and recyclable materials. {...} And again, Lithium Ion batteries are nothing but toxic landfill when they've outlived their ability to hold a meaningful charge.
And again, over the whole lifetime of the vehicle from manufacturing, through using, to decommissioning, the numbers in current report tend to show that even when factoring everything in, electric cars are still a bit (US) or some (EU) better. (Unless your country is China. Then it's basically the same).
(Don't forget that over their lifetime, ICE will release a significant of poluant too. It's a slow trickle, compared to decommissioning a car battery. But it builds up to very large total quantity. You just spread it more geographically and across time. Which might make it even more difficult to process).
And again, cars don't really make up a huge part of greenhouse gases.
Sorry, no. *THEY DO*. (I'm nitpicking at your usage of the word "huge" vs some superlative like "top contributor").
At 26% (EPA numbers) they are not the *biggest emitter* (that crown goes to power generation according to the same source).
But they are still a significantly big chunk of it. Significant enough they deserve to be considered and also addressed.
Our time and effort is better spent elsewhere.
That would have been the case if cars only contributed to say 4% of emissions.
That's not the case.
Again, even if they are not the *top* emitter, it's still worth spending effort on cars along with all the other emitter that still emits significant chunks of the pollution, even if they are not number 1 position on the ordered list.
Oh, and never mind that on a road trip you're stuck at a charge point for 30 minutes in order to recharge your car enough to drive another 2 hours.
Yeah! Let's drive 8 hours straight without a single break in it! Yay for safety! We human absolutely have no single problem to keep concentrating after hours of driving in a row!
Yup, maybe you're highly organized, doing all your road-trips in teams having at least 3 drivers and driving in shifts between drivers seat, passenger seat and sleeping in the back, while an AI supplement the passenger in their role of helping the driver watching the road.
Or you're one of those guys pretending that he can drive 12hours straight like a machine, only stopping to pee. Simply because up to now they happen by luck not to have had an accident. Even if there are massive study with numbers showing that this is a huge risk, actually.
As battery swapping stations haven't caught yet up, your and your co-driving friends' specific use case isn't well served by vehicles that can only rack up to somewhere around 400-500kms between 30-45min breaks. (And please tell me you're actually of the "taking shifts" variety, not the "Hey, I've driven 12hours only stoping to pee, and I'm still alive, so nobody ever needs to rest !")
You fail to take into account all the other uses cases :
- People who actually take 30min break each 2hours because that's the current recommendation to avoid being to distracted/tired/etc.
- People who actually drive less than 300km per trip (in fact, most of the trips done with cars tend to be under 100km in Europe. Even the cheapest battery option at my local car-sharing covers it without problems).
etc.
Finally, the tech described in the Boeing link isn't a "nice story, bro." It's real and Boeing is actively ramping it up.
But still, there's no gaz station where I can tank my car.
So for now, electric car are still having a better impact on the environment.
(Even when you factor everyting including the battery in).
That might change one day. But we still aren't there yet.
and the production method described does exactly what you describe -- use more carbon than it releases.
Well, that's good.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Don't believe these government lies! They're just hunting down people who do their own electric conversions, pay the cheapest possible car tab fees, and avoid paying their gas taxes.
Trust me. It's all about money and has nothing to do with environmental conservatism. If the government was truly serious about this, they would start a subsidy, like they pay farmers to reduce the cost of food, and buy every household a new electric car.
But these damn lies come from those same damn government liars who won't even acknowledge the last mile problem even exists, much less do anything about it, because fixing the problem would reduce their income streams!
They're the same damn government liars whose wars on cars and whose failures to build and maintain roads have resulted in traffic that's so bad that hardly anyone ever gets pulled over for speeding anymore. Their income from traffic citations has dried up and they're looking for new sources of income. Don't believe their lies!
Lies! Lies! Lies! Lies! Lies!
Oh, and surveillance! Everyone knows electric cars collect vast amounts of information about their "owners'" driving behaviors and travel destinations. That's the other thing the government lives for. Remember Vault 7! Remember the Alamo!
Surveillance!