89
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
89 points (94.1% liked)
[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
3213 readers
56 users here now
We have moved to:
A community for the sharing of links, news, and discussion related to Electric Vehicles.
Rules
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, casteism, speciesism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No self-promotion.
- No irrelevant content. All posts must be relevant and related to plug-in electric vehicles — BEVs or PHEVs.
- No trolling.
- Policy, not politics. Submissions and comments about effective policymaking are allowed and encouraged in the community, however conversations and submissions about parties, politicians, and those devolving into general tribalism will be removed.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Such is the cost of progress. Considering how much of an established supply chain ICE cars have, it's amazing that a zero CO2 output EV has higher efficiency, and reliability. Think about it: after more than 120 years of optimization, 40% thermal efficiency is the best we've got. Considering how energy dense gasoline is, that's a crazy waste, global warming concerns aside.
The weakest point in the whole strategy is the battery pack, which it's likely we'll soon discover some alternative to with this much market pressure and scientific interest being focused on it.
For the record: you can ship of Theseus anything. But do people? Not unless it's a critical problem, so you have a degraded vehicle with higher emissions than designed for at the factory. Secondly, who wants to invest that much downtime over and over? I don't mean to sound rude, but that whole first part is an admission of Stockholm syndrome 😋
The point still stands - unless EVs become cheap enough for the average buyer, they will be a nearly useless novelty item for the wealthy. And they will never be enough of them to solve any issue with emissions you don't like.
And that "better" and "cheaper" battery is still most likely decades away - despite all the pop media articles talking about all those incredible laboratory "breakthroughs" that are supposedly ready to be unleashed. The gulf between the lab and the production line is very large.
And you are correct that few people are willing to keep repairing anything forever unless forced to. And that is precisely why an inexpensive entry level EV is so important. And those high end cars far less so........
That's the point I'm agreeing with. The wrong market is being focused. I think the horse has been beaten into glue at this point.
As for the rest, it's gotta be done. If it were a simple problem, it'd have been solved by now. Worrying about quick returns on investment are what destroyed the world around us as we know it. I work in R&D, progress is incremental... Until it isn't.