Confused about PHEV, Hybrids, etc...

[Someone]

But if you are forced to park on the public street you don't have the same easy options.

People choose to own a car and park it on the street. So many choices! Upsides and downsides to those choices.

[Monkeh]

But if you are forced to park on the public street you don't have the same easy options.

People choose to own a car and park it on the street. So many choices! Upsides and downsides to those choices.

That is not always the case, but it does nicely identify those with the privilege.

[Cerebus]

Cerebus:  I'm not handwaving.  I just know that this is not such an insurmountable problem.  It only requires a bit of innovative thinking rather than not looking past the roadblock. 

Ok, that is what I have said several times.  Many, but not all people from the UK, who discuss this seem to think it is an intractable problem.  I'm willing to bet that in 10 years, solutions abound.

If it just requires "a bit of innovative thinking" then you should be able to provide that if it's so simple. Reducing it to "a bit of innovative thinking" without proposing even the faintest hint of a concrete solution is exactly handwaving.

Of course, it doesn't just require "a bit of innovative thinking" it requires 100s of billions of pounds spent on infrastructure for the UK alone before BEVs for the masses is a practical thing the way ICE vehicles currently are. These are hard costs, not costs that benefit much from economies of scale. Someone has to dig the roads, install a vast number of public charging points where they are convenient for all people to use at a reasonable price* and wire the whole lot to the electricity distribution system. Someone has to make that investment and until they do BEVs will remain not a mass market thing but the playthings of dilettantes with upwards of £30k to spend and a relatively large property with off street parking that they can fit their own charger in.

London currently has around 6000 EV public charge points, mostly 7kW slow AC chargers, a population of 9.5 million people, and currently 2.6 million cars registered to London addresses. One charge point, of the type that needs a whole night to charge a typical BEV, per 433 cars. Say for arguments sake that's one charge per car per week. That cuts the factor to around 62. So we are short 370,000 charge points just for London. If we take your mythical 10 years when all will be solved, that requires the equivalent of 102 off 7kW chargers to be installed in London every day. Or to put it differently, the number of public chargers currently available would have to double in the next two months.

The whole UK has less than 35,000 public charging points in total, only ~5000 are rapid or ultra rapid. If we are going to ban the sale of new ICE cars in 2030 as mooted, a shit load of infrastructure needs building in the next 8 years to support the 2-3 million new cars purchased a year in the UK plus the BEV and PHEVs sold in the interim before BEVs become the only game in town..

* A lot of the current public charge points charge double what you'd pay for home charging without even offering fast charging.

[Someone]

But if you are forced to park on the public street you don't have the same easy options.

People choose to own a car and park it on the street. So many choices! Upsides and downsides to those choices.

That is not always the case, but it does nicely identify those with the privilege.

Who is contractually obliged to own a car and park it on the street. It is a choice.

Don't own your parking? you cant complain about its lack of amenities or convenience. Want to own a vehicle (say so you can conduct business as a tradeperson)? That's part of the costs of choosing to do that.

[Monkeh]

But if you are forced to park on the public street you don't have the same easy options.

People choose to own a car and park it on the street. So many choices! Upsides and downsides to those choices.

That is not always the case, but it does nicely identify those with the privilege.

Who is contractually obliged to own a car and park it on the street. It is a choice.

Don't own your parking? you cant complain about its lack of amenities or convenience. Want to own a vehicle (say so you can conduct business as a tradeperson)? That's part of the costs of choosing to do that.

Ones choices are, I'm afraid to say, often constrained by available accomodations, work, and transit. Many simply do not have a choice about owning a car, nor any short-term choice about where they live. It's very nice that you do, but as I said, it demonstrates your privilege.

[pcprogrammer]

I've been very lucky, my neighbours are considerate, and I get to park in front of my house almost all the time, and so can cobble together charging at the kerb, running a cable under a safety yellow tread strip. But as soon as there are a few people in my street needing to do that you can bet your last dollar that the local authority will ban it on safety grounds, and probably rightly once these become a common hazard to foot traffic rather than a rare one.

Yup. In the city where I live you get a 259 euro fine for putting a cable over the side walk (to charge your EV). Even if it is in a safety strip.

That is so typical of politics On the one hand they push you into buying an EV, but when you do and try to charge it with a cable running from your house to the car over "public" land then you get fined for it.

I have asked about the actual numbers in another thread, but no one seems to know. Categorized per system emitting CO2 what the actual values are. The main focus at the moment is on the car and the households using fossil fuels to run. Some say this only takes up a very small share in the total CO2 emission the human race is responsible for.

So is there a chart that shows how much CO2 a human or other big animal produces by eating and pooping, how much industry produces, how much house holds produce, how much cars produce, etc.

That sort of data is readily available:
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/climate-change-qa/sources-of-ghg-gases
reported in co2 "equivalent"
Private transport is somewhere around 5-10% of total Australian emissions by that measure. Still a bigger opportunity for change than things like LED bulb replacement (and the carbon offsets that were shuffled around on that).

Still only a partial answer, but an interesting take from it: Generating electricity is the number one in producing CO2 emission, and what do we do, switch to EV's which use electricity. Sure there is a big movement to get electricity from "renewables", which I find a wrong term for solar and wind, but that is another discussion.

Through this thread I saw mentioned a lot that overnight charging is the thing, but with solar electricity there is not a lot of it around during the night! So this means wind has to fill in here, but that does not always blow, meaning there still is a large need for conventional electricity. No will many say, electricity storage will do here. With current state of battery technology I doubt that will be feasible. What will, I don't know. Just pointing out problems I see here.

Also something to think about. Do we have any idea of the long term influence of what we are doing? Erecting big wind farms everywhere on the planet. What does this do to the climate. Are we changing micro climates that can have an impact on the big picture? Think of it, a wind mill takes energy from wind blowing, reducing its strength a bit. On a large enough scale, does this change how clouds are being dispersed and with that change rain distribution?

Same question with wind farms in the north sea. All the pillars that stand on the seabed how do they affect current flow and with that temperature distribution through the water?

Solar installations on grasslands, how does that affect the thermal behavior? We know that asphalt has a big impact where it comes to heat. It absorbs a lot during the day and releases it at night.

See the bigger picture here? Do we know about the long term effect of what we are doing to try and change the effects of what we already did?

And don't come knocking with "sure we do, because we did simulations on the computer". These are just simulations based on models that we tune to get the outcome we want. Look at weather predictions. These are based on models and are often wrong, at least here where I live. Has to do with the mountain range in the Cantal. We use three different website to check the forecast and they mostly differ between them and can't even seem to predict it right for the current day.

Take from it what you will, again just my 2 cents worth.

[pcprogrammer]

Oh I see, so it is equal challenge to providing every household with a stationary 3kg box costing 500USD that needs 50W of power from standard (already there) outlet to function. You literally could not have found worse comparison.

I'm pretty sure the 50W figure is in error somehow, but I'm not sure what you're talking about to know what it should be. Surely not 50kW (not available from a standard outlet), but I also can't figure out what you could do with only 50W that's relevant to BEVs. Could you clarify?

He was talking about a computer, reffering to gnuarm his remark that he was typing his message on something that was not available some 30 odd years ago.

[tom66]

Yes, street dwellers will need infrastructure.

NO, it doesn't need to be on the street.

- It can be in town when they visit, or at the supermarket (a bank of 50kW units)
- It can be at a "petrol station" but electric
- It can be at work
- It can be by a mobile service (there's literally a service that drives around in London and gives people 20kWh quickly)

The average driver at 20 miles per day or 140 miles per week would only need a charge about once a week. 

If you look at London then you get a pretty good idea of what the start of on street charging looks like.

As far as I am aware there is no proposal to extend home electrics to the street (some have done it, but it's complicated, messy and a safety engineering nightmare.)  A better approach is to have proper on street infrastructure.  Some have used existing street light feeds, which are often connected to the distribution ring main (through a 20-30A fuse) and so have more than enough capacity.  Others are bona-fide new infrastructure.

For those who wanted to access discounted tariffs like homeowners do, I think it should be possible that a street charger in the same region as your house has the same kWh cost.  A higher standing charge covers infrastructure repair.

[Miyuki]

There will be some offset by this:
"it takes around 2 to 3kWh of electricity and 2 to 3kWh of heat energy (DOE figures) to produce a gallon of gas"
If the numbers are correct then it is a significant portion of the electricity needed for EVs when switched from ICEs

I've looked for substantiation of these numbers and it is not to be found.  The "heat energy" is not particularly relevant unless the source of that energy is given.  The 2 to 3 kWh of electricity is probably more like 0.5 kWh.  If I find the sources of this info, I'll post it here. 

Vanadium flow batteries are around for at least a decade yet is anywhere any working installation?

By "around" you mean they were invented a decade ago.  So?  Why is that relevant?  The application of grid storage is very recent and every technology for that purpose is relatively new.  Lithium ion batteries are only used for grid storage because of the advances in production from Tesla's use in autos.  Now we need similar advances in production for vanadium flow batteries. 

That numbers about gas processing vary widely so it is hard to get any relevant ones

I know lithium batteries had already scaled production. But Vanadium flow was presented as a quick "magical" solution.
And even when some are built recently, they are small compared to Lithium based installations.
So it seems there is some huge technical difficulty in turning them from a lab demonstrator to a commercial scale.

Hydrogen storage might a necessity in European conditions
Because you need to withstand a winter when you have minuscule solar power and wind can stop blowing for weeks (it happens quite commonly)
So to be able to have fossils as a backup for the worst case you need about 1 week of storage (for peak draw power as it happens in the same time)

Sorry, that doesn't make sense.  How does a need for "fossils" turn into storing hydrogen?  If you are going to use fossil fuel, why not just store that?

And to be 100% renewable + nuclear it will have to be at least one whole month worth of energy
There is no way around it. Sahara solar farm is not a realistic approach as it is not a stable region. And you won't be able to transfer energy across Europe anyway.
So some huge chemical storage is a must.
In the US it can be significantly different.

Don't forget that nuclear requires storage.  It has the opposite problem of renewables which are intermittent.  Nuclear is not easy to scale back.  Not only is that uneconomical, but if you try to ramp it up and down for the daily cycle, you end up xenon poisoning the reactor.  So it needs to store energy at the slack demand times so it doesn't get throttled back, then it needs the additional energy reserve to power the peak times.

The US also has political instability issues.  Texas, a very large region, is an independent grid.  So the rest of the US has to operate around them, even though they are an ideal location for wind power.  I'm hoping they will secede so we can treat them as a foreign country, possibly hostile.

Either there needs to be a fossil backup or huge storage of hydrogen, electrolyzed from hugely abundant electricity in times when conditions are ideal
Because if you scale renewable to be more than a few percent of the average load you end up with idling solar and wind for a big portion of the time when will the sun shine and wind blow at the same time.
So you have basically "free" electricity

Nuclear can easily just dump "waste" power to the cooling tower. This is not an issue, just wasteful behavior.

As renewable electricity price is massively volatile even on an hour-to-hour scale, you can use this time when it is so abundant its price fall to zero to things with relatively low efficiency.
Like electrolyzing water and then burning that hydrogen to get power.
Or just wait with high energy demand tasks to this time, not all can be timed, but a surprisingly big portion can be.
For example, in households, most energy consumption tasks like water and space heating and cooling (which can be done with proper insulation without any effect on comfort), clothes, and dishwashing can be easily delayed to the high generation times. Just bill the actual price of electricity to people and most of them will do it. And this is way over 50% of consumption for most houses.

[tszaboo]

But if you are forced to park on the public street you don't have the same easy options.

People choose to own a car and park it on the street. So many choices! Upsides and downsides to those choices.

That is not always the case, but it does nicely identify those with the privilege.

Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?

Also something to think about. Do we have any idea of the long term influence of what we are doing? Erecting big wind farms everywhere on the planet. What does this do to the climate.

Nothing.

See the bigger picture here?

Not really, I see ramblings, which are basically equivalent to the "Solarpanels are going to suck away the energy from the sun and we will all live in darkness"

Look at weather predictions. These are based on models and are often wrong, at least here where I live.

You are either looking at low quality websites doing predictions. Or your expectations are too high, and you want to know the weather more than 5 days in advance. There are weather models that take 27 parameters in a 100m grid, and can predict pretty much how the weather will be for maybe two weeks. The best supercomputers have trouble running the model in real time, plus the smallest observation error, measurement error will change the outcome.

[pcprogrammer]

Also something to think about. Do we have any idea of the long term influence of what we are doing? Erecting big wind farms everywhere on the planet. What does this do to the climate.

Nothing.

That you know of, but you can't proof it. Only in 10, 20, 30 years time we will know the answer.

See the bigger picture here?

Not really, I see ramblings, which are basically equivalent to the "Solarpanels are going to suck away the energy from the sun and we will all live in darkness"

That is your provocative to see ramblings, but your comparison is off base. That is not what I'm saying.

Placing solar panels on existing roofs is no problem, but covering fast planes of land might cause problems we have not for seen. Just think of how deforestation to make room for housing, industry, farming and infrastructure changed the earth and its climate.

But I know it is not a message people want to hear. Just keep believing that everything will be just fine as long as we change to electricity and move away from fossil fuels.

Look at weather predictions. These are based on models and are often wrong, at least here where I live.

You are either looking at low quality websites doing predictions. Or your expectations are too high, and you want to know the weather more than 5 days in advance. There are weather models that take 27 parameters in a 100m grid, and can predict pretty much how the weather will be for maybe two weeks. The best supercomputers have trouble running the model in real time, plus the smallest observation error, measurement error will change the outcome.

No I would like to know if it is going to rain today or not. And when the predictions say it is not and you trust on it, it is a bit of a bummer that your paint job gets ruined because it starts to rain. Or when looking at the radar on weerplaza.nl telling that it is raining and then you look outside and the sun is shining.

[Someone]

But if you are forced to park on the public street you don't have the same easy options.

People choose to own a car and park it on the street. So many choices! Upsides and downsides to those choices.

That is not always the case, but it does nicely identify those with the privilege.

Who is contractually obliged to own a car and park it on the street. It is a choice.

Don't own your parking? you cant complain about its lack of amenities or convenience. Want to own a vehicle (say so you can conduct business as a tradeperson)? That's part of the costs of choosing to do that.

Ones choices are, I'm afraid to say, often constrained by available accomodations, work, and transit. Many simply do not have a choice about owning a car, nor any short-term choice about where they live. It's very nice that you do, but as I said, it demonstrates your privilege.

You imagine there is no choice, while in fact you aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship eliminating all free will (east Germany anyone?). Your choice of accomodation and job are just that, there is no force requiring you to undertake them with no other option.

People get stuck in what they perceive to be optimal situations, that with a narrow/short view may well be the nearest best option, but miss the wider choices that could be better overall.

Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?

... can't tell if serious or joke. Car ownership being a basic human right? Even if it were a right, that doesn't make it mandatory or an essential of life.

[pcprogrammer]

Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?

... can't tell if serious or joke. Car ownership being a basic human right? Even if it were a right, that doesn't make it mandatory or an essential of life.

It certainly is not mandatory, but it makes things a lot easier.

At least when you live out in the sticks. In a big town it might even be a hinder.

[nctnico]

But if you are forced to park on the public street you don't have the same easy options.

People choose to own a car and park it on the street. So many choices! Upsides and downsides to those choices.

That is not always the case, but it does nicely identify those with the privilege.

Who is contractually obliged to own a car and park it on the street. It is a choice.

Don't own your parking? you cant complain about its lack of amenities or convenience. Want to own a vehicle (say so you can conduct business as a tradeperson)? That's part of the costs of choosing to do that.

Ones choices are, I'm afraid to say, often constrained by available accomodations, work, and transit. Many simply do not have a choice about owning a car, nor any short-term choice about where they live. It's very nice that you do, but as I said, it demonstrates your privilege.

You imagine there is no choice, while in fact you aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship eliminating all free will (east Germany anyone?). Your choice of accomodation and job are just that, there is no force requiring you to undertake them with no other option.

People get stuck in what they perceive to be optimal situations, that with a narrow/short view may well be the nearest best option, but miss the wider choices that could be better overall.

Ah, great. Next time I need to go to the toilet I'll take a dump in the neighbour's garden. According to you, I have that choice.

[tszaboo]

Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?

... can't tell if serious or joke. Car ownership being a basic human right? Even if it were a right, that doesn't make it mandatory or an essential of life.

Yeah, it is covered by many many legal systems. Just one below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_an_adequate_standard_of_living
And it's impossible for a country in Europe to ban you from car ownership. They can take your license, if you don't deserve it.
Of course there are always hippies and gen-z living in a city center debating this.
But car ownership is not a privilege. It's not something that is given to you by someone else for any reason, you are born with the right.

[pcprogrammer]

Ah, great. Next time I need to go to the toilet I'll take a dump in the neighbour's garden. According to you, I have that choice.

Oh you do have that choice, but your neighbor won't be very happy and he might kick the crap (Pun very much intended) out of you

[Monkeh]

You imagine there is no choice, while in fact you aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship eliminating all free will (east Germany anyone?). Your choice of accomodation and job are just that, there is no force requiring you to undertake them with no other option.

People get stuck in what they perceive to be optimal situations, that with a narrow/short view may well be the nearest best option, but miss the wider choices that could be better overall.

I don't imagine, I am simply aware that not everyone has the full range of choices you or I have. You seem to be stuck in the optimal situation of having every option available to you at all times with acceptable levels of risk, which simply isn't reality.

Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?

... can't tell if serious or joke. Car ownership being a basic human right? Even if it were a right, that doesn't make it mandatory or an essential of life.

Yeah, it is covered by many many legal systems. Just one below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_an_adequate_standard_of_living
And it's impossible for a country in Europe to ban you from car ownership. They can take your license, if you don't deserve it.
Of course there are always hippies and gen-z living in a city center debating this.
But car ownership is not a privilege. It's not something that is given to you by someone else for any reason, you are born with the right.

All very interesting, but car ownership is not a privilege I was talking about. And yes, ownership aside, the use of a vehicle on the public roads is a privilege, not a right.

[Someone]

Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?

... can't tell if serious or joke. Car ownership being a basic human right? Even if it were a right, that doesn't make it mandatory or an essential of life.

Yeah, it is covered by many many legal systems. Just one below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_an_adequate_standard_of_living
And it's impossible for a country in Europe to ban you from car ownership. They can take your license, if you don't deserve it.
Of course there are always hippies and gen-z living in a city center debating this.
But car ownership is not a privilege. It's not something that is given to you by someone else for any reason, you are born with the right.

Did you read that link? a car (or transport) is not included on the list of adequate standard of living. Quoting the original source:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

25% of UK households have no car, 30% of Dutch households have no car. It's not some fringe thing or solely out of poverty, but a legitimate choice for many.

[Cerebus]

That is so typical of politics On the one hand they push you into buying an EV, but when you do and try to charge it with a cable running from your house to the car over "public" land then you get fined for it.

Yup, if and when it happens to me I shall be using exactly that argument to make a very public, very embarassing, fuss over it.

The particular irony for me is that 1 1/2 years ago my local council introduced payments for permits to park in residents only zones based on vehicle emissions. Prior to that it was free to get a residents permit, now it's only free if you have a very low emissions vehicle (basically PHEV or BEV). Also this year there was road charging (£12.50 per day) introduced in effectively the whole of London for using vehicles with that don't meet Euro 4 petrol or Euro 8 diesel emissions standards, effectively banning older cars with technically lower emissions that are too old to have been homologated to those standards. Which so happens to include my old car.

So faced with those two my hand was pretty much forced into getting a new car, which needed to be a PHEV/BEV to satisfy the parking requirement, when I could have happily run my existing car for several years more and spread its embodied energy/carbon emissions over a while longer.

Through this thread I saw mentioned a lot that overnight charging is the thing, but with solar electricity there is not a lot of it around during the night! So this means wind has to fill in here, but that does not always blow, meaning there still is a large need for conventional electricity. No will many say, electricity storage will do here. With current state of battery technology I doubt that will be feasible. What will, I don't know. Just pointing out problems I see here.

it's probably better to think of 'idle charging' rather than 'overnight'.

There are plenty of opportunities to charge vehicles when idle as long as there are places to plug them in when idle and it's quite possible to modify charging to take place when there is abundant wind/solar power available and defer it when there is enough general demand that non-renewables would be brought on-stream to satisfy demand.

Infrastructure to do this could be cheap and implemented tomorrow if there was a will. Even without infrastructure it's possible for a vehicle or charge point to monitor mains frequency to assess the current whole grid demand today, it would require very minor changes to current AC chargers to implement - basically a mains zero-crossing detector, a stable microprocessor clock, and a bit of extra code in existing chargers.

The first requirement however is to have enough EVs plugged in when idle whenever possible so that they can charge opportunistically when there is low electricity demand.

Currently I try to manage this manually, only charging my car at times I know are typically low demand and have high availability of solar or wind as sources (sometimes even actively checking demand/availabilty on gridwatch.co.uk). I'm sure that it makes bugger all difference, but at least I know that I'm doing my best to not make things worse.

Also something to think about. Do we have any idea of the long term influence of what we are doing? Erecting big wind farms everywhere on the planet. What does this do to the climate. Are we changing micro climates that can have an impact on the big picture? Think of it, a wind mill takes energy from wind blowing, reducing its strength a bit. On a large enough scale, does this change how clouds are being dispersed and with that change rain distribution?

Same question with wind farms in the north sea. All the pillars that stand on the seabed how do they affect current flow and with that temperature distribution through the water?

Solar installations on grasslands, how does that affect the thermal behavior? We know that asphalt has a big impact where it comes to heat. It absorbs a lot during the day and releases it at night.

See the bigger picture here? Do we know about the long term effect of what we are doing to try and change the effects of what we already did?

Yup, we don't know, for a fact, the long term implications of going down those routes. What we do know is how damaging our current/previous energy infrastructure is/was. All we can do is pursue a policy of harm minimisation based on our best current understanding of the science and update our policies as we learn more. As we've already intimated, sound science/engineering and politics are poor bedfellows and as we have to go through the political process to achieve the engineering outcome we stuck with that and all its faults. A cynic might say doomed, if past observation of politics is any predictor of future behaviour.

[Someone]

You imagine there is no choice, while in fact you aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship eliminating all free will (east Germany anyone?). Your choice of accomodation and job are just that, there is no force requiring you to undertake them with no other option.

People get stuck in what they perceive to be optimal situations, that with a narrow/short view may well be the nearest best option, but miss the wider choices that could be better overall.

I don't imagine, I am simply aware that not everyone has the full range of choices you or I have. You seem to be stuck in the optimal situation of having every option available to you at all times with acceptable levels of risk, which simply isn't reality.

No-one has infinite/all imaginable choices available, but at the same time very few have no choice (even incarcerated people have choices). You can try and argue stupid extremes, but they are stupid and do nothing to discredit the basic premise that people make their own choices and are not forced to do anything a specific as own a car or park it on the street (let alone the and condition presented above).

Nothing compels someone to have a car, they choose it...  for one of many possible reasons that they have ranked/valued. If you really can't understand the complexities, perhaps the following might illuminate you:
"Household Car Ownership in The Netherlands
The Changing Influence of Factors Explaining Household Car Ownership Levels in The Netherlands"
https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3Aa33eb3a5-5f30-4744-934e-613644fd14d2
a thesis elaborating on this without relying on hyperbole and nonsense
 

[nctnico]

25% of UK households have no car, 30% of Dutch households have no car. It's not some fringe thing or solely out of poverty, but a legitimate choice for many.

Where did you get those numbers? The report you linked to says 12.9% in 2014 (which is higher compared to 2010; keep in mind 2014 is just after the credit crunch). Since then the number of cars in the NL has grown by more than 14%.

But your whole 'it is a choice' theme is utterly ridiculous. For many owning a car means being able to make more money and thus have a better live. Who wouldn't want a better life? It is stupid to even question that.

In the same 'it is a choice' reasoning you can also say to stay alive or kill yourself is also a choice. It is ridiculous and your trademark method to bait people into endless circular discussions.

[Monkeh]

a thesis elaborating on this without relying on hyperbole and nonsense

If the only work available to you to support your basic living expenses requires travel by car, and the only accomodation available within the budget this creates has no parking, this is not hyperbole nor nonsense. And yes, those conditions exist simultaneously for many, even if you have never been placed in such a position (this is the privilege I have been describing - a lost point to most of those with it).

Technically, one has the choice to have none of the three (job, car, and home) and live on the street where they used to park their car, however very few would consider that a reasonable choice - fewer still who have families.

[Cerebus]

You imagine there is no choice, while in fact you aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship eliminating all free will (east Germany anyone?). Your choice of accomodation and job are just that, there is no force requiring you to undertake them with no other option.

People get stuck in what they perceive to be optimal situations, that with a narrow/short view may well be the nearest best option, but miss the wider choices that could be better overall.

I don't imagine, I am simply aware that not everyone has the full range of choices you or I have. You seem to be stuck in the optimal situation of having every option available to you at all times with acceptable levels of risk, which simply isn't reality.

it's very easy to demonstrate that there are a whole class of people, doing essential jobs, that need personal transport to do them. Any essential worker who works shifts outside of convenient public transportation operating hours: police, nurses, firefighters, utilities workers, transport workers who have to get there first to open up public transport for the day, and so on. There's a sewage works near me, without which most of London would be up to their necks in shit, that needs 24 hour "boots on the ground" workers present - it's not somewhere convenient to 24 hour public transport. It's very easy for the middle classes to completely ignore all those invisible people who make their cities work, often at awkward times of day or in awkward places, who have to live in and get around the cities to do their jobs.

These people don't have a choice of expensive vehicles or expensive properties to live in, not unless we as a society decide to pay them many times more what we do at the moment. To write off their situations as being "choices" reeks of privilege; I'd like someone who takes that attitude try to live without them for a few months. We call these people essential workers for a reason.

[Someone]

25% of UK households have no car, 30% of Dutch households have no car. It's not some fringe thing or solely out of poverty, but a legitimate choice for many.

Where did you get those numbers? The report you linked to says 12.9% in 2014. Since then the number of cars in the NL has grown by more than 14%

Well done crossing different posts to try and make out like I'm being inconsistent, one is an 8 year old set of data with extensive discussion of underlying reasons for car ownership (or not), vs current figures that you could equally try and find disputing numbers and references but hey:
UK 25%
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/adhocs/009922numberofvehiclesperhousehold
Dutch 30%
https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/30-percent-dutch-households-do-not-own-car
or Dutch 26%
http://techzle.com/car-ownership-in-the-netherlands-continues-to-increase
.. specifically noting that more cars per capita /= more households with cars

But your whole 'it is a choice' theme is utterly ridiculous. For many owning a car means being able to make more money and thus have a better live. Who wouldn't want a better life?

Some will be better off and some won't, but they have the choice. Its not ridiculous to say people can make choices about these things, for some the choice will be obvious, but the "reasoning" shown in this thread is laughable.

[Someone]

a thesis elaborating on this without relying on hyperbole and nonsense

If the only work available to you to support your basic living expenses requires travel by car, and the only accomodation available within the budget this creates has no parking, this is not hyperbole nor nonsense. And yes, those conditions exist simultaneously for many, even if you have never been placed in such a position (this is the privilege I have been describing - a lost point to most of those with it).

Technically, one has the choice to have none of the three (job, car, and home) and live on the street where they used to park their car, however very few would consider that a reasonable choice - fewer still who have families.

Choices. Move closer to job, or take different job closer to accomodation. No one is forced with no choice to take a job that they must travel by private car to, they choose because they believe it is in their interests.

do I have to keep repeating this? choice, is for the individual, they make their decision. Owning a car is a choice, working a given job is a choice, living in a particular location is a choice, its a tiny tiny minority who have even one of those "forced" upon them with no choice.