Or, reality. Wait till things really start getting hot globally and the battery manufacturing is sold to the lowest bidder for more ceo profit. I personally have no issues with Evs, but knowing how batteries fail…Esh…it’s a very spicy pillow
All but the highest end EVs will likely switch to a LiFePO4 battery chemistry, this chemistry is much more stable under destructive conditions and are less prone to combustion and thermal runaway.
And the only penalty is about a 10% energy density loss. The chemistry also charges / discharges on a very flat curve, which means it’s not sufficient to monitor voltage levels and temperature to know the current charge state, you have to also monitor power-in / out and time and make a best guess, which requires semi regular calibration.
The upside is that you can always charge to 100% and it has almost triple (I think) duty cycles compared to traditional liOn
I have issues with EVs. People are acting like this is the cure for climate change when they’re almost as bad for the environment as conventional cars when you include the environmental cost of manufacturing and the energy mix of the grid that powers them.
Why can’t we be sensible and invest in trains, trams, subways and bicycle infrastructure rather than engaging in techno-fetishism?
Threy don’t assist in producing smog so improved air quality and are much quieter.
Besides, all of those things are already being produced where they will be profitable.
Tampa just dropped their tram line project because they couldn’t save enough money. They’re replacing them with buses.
Brightline is getting ready to open their Orlando line & planning one to Jacksonville & Tampa.
Like hear me out: what we need is Full Self-driving ride sharing so ppl don’t have to own a car to get anywhere they want. Just call a self-driving taxi & go to work. This would make trains more convenient too (would always have a cheap “rental car” ready at each stop so people are less-incentivized to take the highway) and significantly decrease the amount of cars overall.
While I do agree that smog reduction is a legitimate and major plus, the point about profitability is weird. Are highways profitable? If yes due to increased economic activity, then I can make the same argument for other infrastructure. It’s not about profitability, it’s about political will.
Self-driving taxis might work if city run, but if privately run it’s going to be Uber all over again, where they come into the market cheaply to kill competition and then spike the price as high as it can go. That would kill any incentive to use the service rather than own your own, for those that can afford it.
With full self driving, there’s still major legal hurdles involved. If a self-driving car kills someone, who’s to blame? The driver not driving? The programmers? The company? It’s a serious issue that I think will kill the whole concept.
First, to highways. Tell me, is rail maintenance profitable? How about for maglevs or retrofitted bus networks?
It’s an expense, it will always be an expense. That’s an expense that will just have to be paid (as if it would disappear anyways, semi-trucks aren’t about to disappear).
The service would open up thousands of dollars to people who no longer need to pay for cars & allow those who were economically disadvantaged by not being able to afford one to be able to take advantage. After all, you could pay for a $120 pass per month (no insurance, maintenance, etc.) Or if you drive comparatively little per month like 15 miles (I looked up the info & did some math), they’d be able to do $60 a month or get this: $0.13 cents per mile.
Another thing, profitability is one of the greatest determinants of political will. Innumerable projects have died once the political will was burned out by the hefty price tag. If uber has shown anything, that will would not die in my idea.
Second, much regional travel would now happen via train and buses as train networks expand to inter-city lines and buses take up high density locations. The logic is simple: Why do you drive the highway in the first place? It’s usually to drive 45 minutes to 1 hour to a job site or college/ school or that rare shopping trip or even friends correct? Some trips may only take 5 minutes, some may have to go 2-3 hours. My idea allows for more greater carpooling. If the uber computers saw that a location had many people coming together to go to a single location, the vehicle used could swap to a bus of various sizes and the app or via phonecall or whatever menhod of communication, you could choose the carpool option which would allow you to walk up to 5 minutes to a hailed bus which would allow the riders in and take them to a list of nearby destinations. Of course this bus would be manned by a driver, but that would be more than offset by the extensive amount of people taking that bus to the designated area. Unlike uber, the bus driver would be a worker for the company & paid for managing the travels, not usually having to drive themselves if ever. A pretty nice job no?
As for actual cities (Cape coral is not a city, nor is 90% of the USA), they are going to go the way of ebikes, bus public transport, trams, trains, etc. as before as the place densifies via infill development like today and everyone who wants their suburbs will be happy and those who want dense cities will be happy.
As for the legal hurdles, that would be easy: Uber would have to pay if their vehicle fucked up, but that would just be another small expense as uber could sue hundreds of thousands of people who would drive like idiots and crash into their FSD vehicles. A FSD car would have a MUCH lower chance of causing an accident versus a human afterall.
If the car was proven to be in human control mode at that time, it is the responsibility of the driver of the FSD car. They are the one who crashed it afterall.
If the crash was proven by something like a black box in the car or the log to be because of a software error, it’s the cost to the company who wrote the software.
Poor maintenance? Uber.
And to those who own a car? They’d have to share the cost of all the people crashing into FSD cars via insurance fees which would discourage direct car ownership for all but the rich much further.
That question had very little thought put into it.
This made me think about people puking in the car, the app & car itself could offer a button to state if the car would be in good condition, needs cleaning, awful, something like that. AND NOTHING WOULD BE CHARGED. This would discourage people to lie, and could even incur a “lying fee” if the vehicle is heavily damaged before the person says the car is good via app to disincentivise lying.
Finally, to answer your centralization question: the era of easy cheap loans is over, killed by Covid. The old days of deficit spending until the next venture capital investment are dead.
Regardless, there are 2 directions this could go in my opinion: 1 is being treated like public transportation. The other is apps like Expedia which centralize various local & regional services for travel.
Yes, there would be big companies that form over all this, but it feels like it would take a lot of capital to enter but it would be in the hundreds of millions, so regional companies could compete in many places alongside the heavyweights for ridership & approval.
Long story short: Highways are an expense, but they will not be expanded by charging people for taking them, saving lots of infrastructure money and encouraging train usage. From the next city, you could just hail one of the uber cars afterall. The system would save each individual person by giving many of the advantages of a car and allowing buses a chance to regain popularity while socializing maintenance costs and the like to all users of the service. This would make car ownership an expensive luxury item versus the necessity it is today for many people and give opportunities to those economically disadvantaged without them having to move. Best part? Cities would not need it. They would focus on trams, buses, subways, etc to manage their local density while not needing the additional parking.
A North American solution to a North American problem
A North American solution to a North American problem
Sorry to be so blunt, but I think that handily sums up your entire comment. US and Canadian city and infrastructure planning seems ridiculously bad, from what I’ve read.
And believe me, if is, it bloody effing is, but there are many people who just want the suburb way of life to be accessible to them & hate the cost, while others want dense cities.
This is a way to help both sides get what they want and saves everyone here individually thousands of dollars and as a nation (looking at the USA) potentially 2+ trillion dollars a year while throwing away additional money.
With full self driving, there’s still major legal hurdles involved. If a self-driving car kills someone, who’s to blame? The driver not driving? The programmers? The company? It’s a serious issue that I think will kill the whole concept.
The same entity that is responsible when an industrial machine malfunctions and kills someone. The same entity that is responsible when a light falls from the ceiling and hits a member of the audience, or a plane’s engine falls off and lands in someone’s house. Responsibility could fall on the engineer who designed the machine, or the installer who put in the lights, or the maintainer who failed to perform required inspections, or the operator of the facility, or the owner of the equipment.
It really isn’t a complicated issue, it just hasn’t been investigated and brought to the courts yet. The plaintiffs will be pointing the finger at the entity with the most money; the defendants will be pointing at the plaintiffs if they can, and at their co-defendants if they can’t.
Um they are not almost as bad as ICE vehicles. Even including emissions during manufacturing it still only takes a handful of years for most EVs to be more environmentally friendly than an ICE vehicle.
Exactly. It depends on your local energy mix, but I think it’s better after like 4 years worst case scenario. Here’s a video we with more info. youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM?si=tNZr23eRFk41jQ7a
Cars will still have more emissions than busses or trains, especially electric, so we should invest in those.
It takes at least decade for the carbon from manufacturing to be offset by the lack of emissions from the ev’s daily operation.
Assuming zero carbon electricity generation used in the ev. Local electricity mix will adjust that number up.
If you really want to have a bad time: we don’t have enough lithium to replace even half the cars currently on the road, not counting all the other uses for it aside from ev batteries.
The only two ways out of this are fewer cars or fewer people. When someone suggests the latter path, be sure to ask them who and why.
It depends on your local energy mix, but I think it’s better after like 4 years worst case scenario. Here’s a video we with more info. youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM?si=tNZr23eRFk41jQ7a
Cars will still have more emissions than busses or trains, especially electric, so we should invest in those.
There is nothing hot under the gas tank. Just the exhaust, which is not hot enough to ignite the gas. Also, the car in the picture seems like it was stationary. Please tell me, how anything in a combustion engine vehicle could be hot enough after about an hour.
I’ve worked on too many crappy old cars to belive this. First of all, the gas tank is on the other end of the car from the engine unless you’re driving a Trabant. It’s possible to have a fuel line rupture in the engine bay, but if that happens basically every gas or diesel car has this magical thing that happens - turn the key off, and the fuel pump stops running, so you’re not spraying an entire gas tank on a fire. If the gas tank itself is punctured, you don’t get a fire unless you’re literally lying under it with a lit match.
I’ve had two motorcycles break a fuel line while running, and one of them had a gravity fed fuel system - so the gas DID keep flowing out of the tank. It didn’t catch fire, and I only noticed when the engine stopped. Another one DID catchtank, when the gas spilled on the hot exhaust (and it was a 24 year old bike, not a nearly new Tesla) and I put it out with the contents of an outdoor ash tray. (sand and rainwater)
So gas won’t ignite when you puncture the tank without an ignition source. But stick an ice pick (or part of the car you’ve hit) through the battery, and it will light off on its own. I want more EVs, I’d like one myself, but people like you posting easily disprovable things about EVs just look silly and hold everyone back.
Fire departments across the US have the tools and chemicals on hand to deal with a gasoline fires.
Electric cars are fairly new (that Baker from 1910 doesn’t count, because it had lead-acid batteries and nobody drives one) and aren’t as common as ICE cars, so fire departments haven’t all caught up. Outside of huge cities I imagine a fire department doesn’t have the equipment to deal with a battery fire.
This is already happening in Florida after the hurricane flooded some Teslas. Apparently lithium ion batteries don’t like salt water.
An aside: I support EVs and a renewable future. It’s important that we acknowledge and address these issues in this early stage of adoption. Also, call your senator and have them support the Motorcycle Parity Act so I can afford a Livewire S2.
No, they do not spontaneously combust. They just burn differently. They electrolytically produce very large quantities of flammable vapors and oxidizers. Because they are not entirely reliant on atmospheric oxygen, it is extraordinarily difficult to extinguish them.
It takes 10+ times as much water to extinguish a battery fire as an equivalent petro-fuel fire.
No. In fact they are typically quite safe but there are some edge cases that pop up given the size and power of the batteries. E.g. Recently it was reported in Florida that some EVs had similar battery issues as a result of hurricanes flooding them with salt water. Thats not a normal occurrence. It makes sense that salt water and batteries aren’t totally simpatico, but more importantly for this to happen you had to leave your car by the ocean in a hurricane, not a spontaneous thing.
Conversely I had a friend driving a brand new ford fiesta and one of the front wheels just came off at speed on the highway…
I can see flooded EVs susceptible to electric shorting. But I haven’t read or seen any reports of combustion simply due to exposure from salt water. Maybe those vehicles were pierced by some object during hurricane?
Do you have a source?
Also modern ICE vehicles not immune to electrical shortages due to heavy water exposure. Most if not all have ECUs and other electronic equipment that is sensitive to water exposure.
It’s fairly common for ocean-front condos in Florida to have parking garages that are below sea level. If the surf rises enough to breach the seawall then it will flood the garage levels and not the condos where people are likely sheltering. This is most likely where those Teslas were parked, so it’s unlikely that they were subjected to the hurricane force winds.
EVs don’t combust spontaneously. If the battery of an EV is compromised or battery pack is pierced and lithium is exposed to air. Then that violent reaction (lithium oxidizing the air) will produce the fire you see.
I think this is from a training exercise though. Suspiciously empty lot. Some branding on vehicle might indicate test site. The idea here is that by covering the vehicle with the fire resistant blanket, the fire will consume all of the oxygen and eventually put it self out.
Yeah but air doesn’t cause gasoline to just combust. You kinda need some sort of ignition to ignite the fuel. Batteries just need to be Chinese made, or some air.
Also good luck putting it out. You just have to watch it burn.
Fuel is very pressurized coming out of the fuel tank pump, and 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 pressurized by the time it gets to the injector rail. When it comes out it will be atomized, and to a stoichiometric mist EVERYTHING is an ignition source.
And yet we rarely have uncontrollable ICE fires despite an overwhelming heavy use but a larger portion of EVs ends up dunked in water tanks for days because of lack of training. FFS 🤦♂️ realty is lost on you people.
Cool, evs are still dangerous and you can’t stop that fire. At least the gas will explode and can be dealt with unlike batteries. I never once said gas is not a danger, but that EVs pose a worse threat WHEN they fail because of the extreme heat or floods etc…
Watch the news once more and more of these time bombs are on the road. It’s only going to happen more and more especially once they start sitting around in junkyards and people leave them in their driveways to rot.
Unlike gas cars, which every single fire department in the US has been dealing with for over 100 years, electric cars need different equipment to put them out. Not all fire departments have the stuff on hand for battery fires. In 20 years this will probably change.
Please try to ignore the facts and pretend like it’s not significantly harder to contain a fucking gas fire and significantly less dangerous. Disingenuous bullshit.
Haha okay. I was confused as shit for a second and reread the thing a few times trying to figure out why I was too stupid to understand what was happening.
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