Electric + Human-Powered Vehicles

[stylofone]

I always get a wry smile from those sorts of things, where exactly does she think the exact same stuff used in her phone comes from if not child slavery? Now I do agree there is too much child slavery (more than zero is too much of course) but this sort of thing won't stop it, developing tech that doesn't rely on stuff that's dug out of the ground in 3rd world countries may very well do, and the drive to develop different battery tech is driven almost solely by EV development. Phone and laptops alone wouldn't have driven the huge battery tech developments we have seen in the last few years, they could easily have gone on for another 10 or 20 years using the same battery tech. Some people are just idiots.

My assumption is that it's a cousin of QANon, you just add child abuse to any conspiracy theory and it generates outrage.

[Irrev-Black]

I always get a wry smile from those sorts of things, where exactly does she think the exact same stuff used in her phone comes from if not child slavery? Now I do agree there is too much child slavery (more than zero is too much of course) but this sort of thing won't stop it, developing tech that doesn't rely on stuff that's dug out of the ground in 3rd world countries may very well do, and the drive to develop different battery tech is driven almost solely by EV development. Phone and laptops alone wouldn't have driven the huge battery tech developments we have seen in the last few years, they could easily have gone on for another 10 or 20 years using the same battery tech. Some people are just idiots.

My assumption is that it's a cousin of QANon, you just add child abuse to any conspiracy theory and it generates outrage.

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Eggs Zachary!

[Irrev-Black]

Hydrogen buses given low mark by professor.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... -announced

[joele]

Hydrogen buses given low mark by professor.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... -announced

On that point, well adjacent to it maybe, I have been noticing more and more buses with "this bus has been converted to run off electricity" around Melbourne. Less billowing black exhaust smoke can only be a good thing.

Edit, ahh this is why...

https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/trial-in ... -bus-depot

[Irrev-Black]

Vic govt will repay electric vehicle taxes (with interest) to drivers forced to pay the levy

This follows the High Court ruling that the state's tax was invalid

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-19/ ... /102994460

[stevebrooks]

News from the US, the biggest impediment to EV sales isn't availability of charging stations, manufacturing cost or anything like that....what is it then? It's car dealers, they don't want to sell them! EV's take longer to sell than ICE cars, a lot of the time because the people selling them know nothing about them, so they try to discourage people from buying them. Also ongoing profits are lower because EV's don't need as much servicing as ICE cars and the dealers lose out on that income. So what do they do to discourage people? Here's a selection;

First, simply don't stock them so buyers if they want a car soon have to wait for for the backorder;

Some dealers, however, don’t seem to want to offer electric cars: According to a survey that the Sierra Club conducted at the end of 2022, 66 percent of dealerships did not have an EV available for sale. That was at the height of EV supply chain problems, but 45 percent of those dealers — or 30 percent of all dealers surveyed — said they wouldn’t offer an EV even if they could.

Initially, Richards was hoping to buy an F-150 Lightning, but the truck was back-ordered. The salesperson could only get him an expensive trim that came with a high dealer markup. That markup added “insult to injury,”

If that doesn't work, just lie;

As news started coming out about electric cars in early 2016, Michael Young, a self-described “car guy,” knew he wanted to try one. One afternoon, he strolled into his local dealership and asked to test drive the BMW i3, a small, sporty car with a range of up to 150 miles. The salesperson stopped him. “You can’t drive that car on the highway,” Young recalls the salesperson saying, explaining that the car couldn’t go over 45 miles per hour.

Or just be unable to answer questions;

Frustrated customers told The Washington Post that dealers tried to redirect their attention toward gas cars, or gave incorrect or unclear answers to questions about charging and day-to-day electric vehicle use.

And even go to the extent of trying to place bogus charges on car sales that are irrelevant to EV's;

Maya Batres, a 34-year-old adviser for an environmental organization, bought a used Fiat 500e from a dealer in February 2022. The dealer, she said, didn’t know much about EVs but was happy to make the sale since she and her husband came prepared. But when it came time to sign the paperwork, the salesperson offered her a plan for oil changes and an extended warranty for a gas-powered car. “I knew we didn’t need that,” Batres said, laughing.

How do they get away with this? Well there are laws in the US that restrict sales of cars to dealers only, factory direct sales or sales through manufacturer owned shopfront are banned. In the end it's all about the money, they have a monopoly and they aren't willing to give that up, but EV's don't produce as much profit as ICE vehicles in the long run, so the incentive is to either not sell them, or to mark them up, sometimes as much as $10,000 over manufacturer RRP thus making them expensive, and at the same time negating the government tax credit people get for buying them;

At the same time, car dealerships make most of their overall profits from providing service for vehicles — not selling new cars. According to an analysis from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 16 percent of dealers’ gross profits came from new car sales, while 43 percent came from parts, labor and service. (The rest of the profits come from used car sales and financing and incentives.)

How did this happen and why is it so different for car manufacturers and dealers than for other goods and products that the manufacturer can sell direct to consumer, as I said all about the money of course!

Car sales are unlike any other commercial transaction in America. For most products — everything including shoes and iPhones — you can buy directly from the manufacturer or in dozens of other stores. Cars used to be the same: Before World War II, people bought personal vehicles at big-box department stores, from the manufacturers themselves and even at gas stations.

But in the 1940s and 1950s, dealerships — which were mostly single-family businesses — argued that the powerful automakers could undercut their sales and drive them out of business. Over the next two decades, dozens of states passed laws to protect dealers; many of them prevented manufacturers from selling directly to consumers.

So if EV's are overstocked and not selling in the US it really isn't because of the consumer, even with all these disincentives EV sales are at 7.9% of the total sales in the US, and that's a huge market, give the ability of manufacturers to sell EV's at RRP direct to customers without all the dealer bullshit and those number could go sky high very rapidly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... -ev-sales/

[pipbarber]

I must confess that i have a degree of antipathy toward EVs. Putting aside the teslas, which produce in me a strange compulsion to crash into them, i just can't quite make it passed their greenwash. Of course they're better than combustion engines but they're still a disaster environmentally - electric cars are not going to be the difference between climate apocalypse and a equitable and sustainable future. They are also really fucking expensive. No disrespect to owners here, but it is the richest people on this earth, and the richest people in Australia, who have completely fucked it for everyone else, and yet it seems that they're the only ones that can afford to buy an EV? When EV ownership correlates with socio-economic status, which it most certainly does here, and probably everywhere...i mean fuck...we're meant to not only be aspiring to buy one but to support those that do?

(I wonder how many EV owners vote for the coalition? Judging by how many are on the roads in Melbourne's richest suburbs, i'd say a very high percentage).

Remove that signage, is what i suggest. Advertising the fact that you are driving an EV is like walking around with 'vegan' tattooed on your forehead, it's the ultimate road traffic virtue signaling experience. Basically, if you can afford to buy a new EV you are part of the problem. Having got all that out of my head, i'd buy one myself if there was a cheap small nondescript model available, but mostly that would be because i can't afford the price of fucking petrol! (And yes, they're better than petrol cars environmentally overall).

I don't think it is a certainty that EVs will ever outnumber petrol cars due to market resistance (for multiple reasons) and societal apathy to climate disaster. In any case, there is only one environmentally sustainable car and that is no car! (Or at least no privately owned car). And the sooner bell-ends like Musk get the fuck out of the industry the better.

[stylofone]

I must confess that i have a degree of antipathy toward EVs. Putting aside the teslas, which produce in me a strange compulsion to crash into them, i just can't quite make it passed their greenwash. Of course they're better than combustion engines but they're still a disaster environmentally - electric cars are not going to be the difference between climate apocalypse and a equitable and sustainable future. They are also really fucking expensive. No disrespect to owners here, but it is the richest people on this earth, and the richest people in Australia, who have completely fucked it for everyone else, and yet it seems that they're the only ones that can afford to buy an EV? When EV ownership correlates with socio-economic status, which it most certainly does here, and probably everywhere...i mean fuck...we're meant to not only be aspiring to buy one but to support those that do?

(I wonder how many EV owners vote for the coalition? Judging by how many are on the roads in Melbourne's richest suburbs, i'd say a very high percentage).

Remove that signage, is what i suggest. Advertising the fact that you are driving an EV is like walking around with 'vegan' tattooed on your forehead, it's the ultimate road traffic virtue signaling experience. Basically, if you can afford to buy a new EV you are part of the problem. Having got all that out of my head, i'd buy one myself if there was a cheap small nondescript model available, but mostly that would be because i can't afford the price of fucking petrol! (And yes, they're better than petrol cars environmentally overall).

I don't think it is a certainty that EVs will ever outnumber petrol cars due to market resistance (for multiple reasons) and societal apathy to climate disaster. In any case, there is only one environmentally sustainable car and that is no car! (Or at least no privately owned car). And the sooner bell-ends like Musk get the fuck out of the industry the better.

It's a vexing situation, people are being sold poison, and the remedy is that they drink a slightly diluted form of poison, it's only 90% poison. Huzzah! They all love this 10% reduction in poison, but if you say "hang on, that's not what you should be doing", they shout you down before you get a chance to tell them you have a fantastic idea to drink NO poison at all.

For my part, I have given up on the idea of getting an EV as a sort of individual action on climate change. I'm trying to think of ways to make my next car NO car. It's a bit more complicated for me because of disability and mobility issues. I'd almost certainly have to sell my house and move, pretty hard for me, but I might be able to find a way eventually.

In the meantime, there are a few things that make the situation ever so slightly less shit. One of them is that the march of technology and industry is such that electric cars should overcome all the barriers and they will overwhelm fossil fuel cars in the market. The BYD Seagull is a step closer. With fuel and maintenance savings, I think it is getting close to being the same price, or cheaper to run than an equivalent petrol car. Improvements in battery technology will add to that soon. Give it a few years, and EVs will be the poor person's choice. So at least it won't be deluded self-righteous rich Tesla and Porsche Taycan fuckwits causing us all to vomit from a different kind of carsickness.

[stevebrooks]

I must confess that i have a degree of antipathy toward EVs. Putting aside the teslas, which produce in me a strange compulsion to crash into them, i just can't quite make it passed their greenwash. Of course they're better than combustion engines but they're still a disaster environmentally - electric cars are not going to be the difference between climate apocalypse and a equitable and sustainable future.

Oh I agree the cars themselves indeed won't do that, but it's what the cars represent.....without removing the general populations reliance on fossil fuels for transport the fossil fuel industry will continue forever just like it is now. Even if a lot of other industries transitioned to renewables, even if we managed to finally solve the problems of fusion power and managed to create an era of free energy for everyone, without electrification of personal transport the fossil fuel industry will just keep on as it is.

So no, electric cars aren't the solution, electric cars are, however, a necessary step in the process of removing our reliance on fossil fuels, and that's where the eventual solution will come. Forget carbon sequestering, CO2 trapping and etc, they are just fantasies at the moment, the only long term solution is to remove fossil fuels from the energy mix, and you can't do that while everyone still relies on ICE cars. Yes it might be nice to ban cars altogether, but that's wishful thinking at the moment, in the future maybe it will be possible to eliminate the idea of people personally owning car-like vehicles, there are many possible models that could achieve this, but here and now....nope, none of them will work.

[stylofone]

the only long term solution is to remove fossil fuels from the energy mix

I think what's emerging is that that is not actually a long-term solution, because there is NO long-term solution, there is only a short-term solution. We either have shock therapy and immediately stop burning fossil fuels, or we cause such a climate catastrophe that there will be a broad scale collapse of ecosystems which will result in a catastrophe of massive proportions... I mean billions of people dying from famine and economies collapsing.

The need for the immediate end of fossil fuels is what I keep reading in the scientific reporting. The political and economic discussions happen downstream of that, but they don't change the science. I expect something that looks like a the beginnings of science fiction level of climate disaster to happen in the next ten years, I think it's possible any time. Of course I don't know, it's only an educated guess.

I get what you're saying about what people will accept, e.g. the "reliance" on ICE cars is hard to break. But the reliance to do what? It's not worth it, modern life is rubbish.