Author Topic: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?  (Read 458218 times)

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Offline cdev

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #125 on: January 21, 2018, 08:35:13 pm »
It has nothing to do with pollution and everything to do with regulatory capture and enabling hooks for multiple dubious goals such as planned obsolescence and increased access to marketable data and surveillance. The newer a car is the more potential it has as a cash cow to the manufacturer and the various "partners" it may have signed on to. The buyer is buying a hardware platform that to do most of what they want they will have to keep paying. The kind of car that lasted for twenty years with only minimal problems is anathema to modern marketers.

Also, there is surveillance and data mining.  Lots and lots of money in that!



Also, consider the value of keeping the roads clear of traffic Electric cars and privatization of highways is a hook to restrict freedom to travel or at least travel without interruption to just the better heeled.

It has disruptive potential similar to "Cashless cities"  - in its exclusionary effect.

(in case you hadn't noticed, neoliberalism- like any self respecting doomsday cult, almost worships disruption)

Also, how do you decide who is profitable, and who isn't?

If you don't know, who gets the shrinking number of jobs when you're in charge and they are rapidly going away. The "wrong people".

Insurance is a biggie. So are the areas you frequent. Maybe you live near a toxic business thats causing cancer for its neighbors. You dont know that now, nobody does, but in 20 years, the data will stand out like a red thumb. Would everybody who spent a significant amount of time near it - as long as 20 years earlier, become "uninsurables"?

The simple answer is, if the math justified it, and maybe a little more.

They dont want to turn away customers unless there is an actual risk. Some toxic exposures can also be transgenerational, or "epigenetic".  To figure out who is at risk, they need a granularity of information that was never available before. Previously it was too expensive to store all that information also. for example, RTK location data from a cell phone may contain spatial resolution of 2 cm or less and be sampled as much as 20 times a second.  of course, the motion of a car cannot tell potential customers much about its drivers heartbeat. But the amount the car moves downward when he or she gets in can be compared to other similar data to give a very accurate picture of their weight at a given moment in time.

Where you go, how fast you drive. Whose cars park near yours. They can use all that data to build up a profile of the kind of returns they might get of marketing efforts to you.

They wouldn't go to all this effort if the data was not valuable to a multiplicity of buyers.

How do you think they decide who is a good health insurance risk and who isnt, (necessitating they deny coverage, or charge much more for it)  Location has a lot to do with it. Also, by who the owner spends time with, where.

Also, how much money is likely to be spent by person A vs person B. (how much profit is to be made on them)


What they will do is create huge taxes on older cars, or continually require new capabilities in cars allowed on the roads which only the newer cars have.

Perhaps, but for now, and hopefully the forseable future, governments are elected and much as they might like to impose their will "for the long term good of the nation" (or for the benefit of their cronies and / or post government revolving door employment), there is always a limit to what the voters will tolerate. Especially if a large part of the electorate is disaffected by a reversing economy.

Yes, if you replace "corporations" for nations. Corporations are the new people.

Taking away (relatively) cheap but dirty motoring from the masses and restricting cleaner, but not pollution free, electric motoring to the wealthier may seem attractive, or at least an acceptable option to descision makers in cities like London well served by public transport, but it may not be so well received out in the sticks and poorer towns and cities. Think Brexit...

Not knowing about the thing I'm trying to tell you about already caused both Brexit's win, and the 2008 financial crisis, and I can prove that easily in both cases. Its easy to see for yourself, want to know how? in the first instance, look for pictures of a red London bus rented by the UK's "UKIP" party and driven around london in the days before the leave vote, and report back what was printed on it.

The second can be shown by looking on the last page of the last attachment to the last "Specific Commitments" document (Supplement 3) or SC90 Supplement 3 filed in Geneva at the WTO by the US on February 26, 1998 the line about "Glass-Steagall Act reform"

The fact that we still don't know this otherwise huge piece of real news tells us that that information vacuum will be exploited again before this is over, you can bet on it.

The point I am trying to make is that we're all being led into a state of delusion as to our current situation.

We would like to think we have democracy. But do we?

We had it in the past but right now, its at best in the very gravest of danger.

The very idea of a livable, inclusive society and planet, is in grave mortal danger.  Because that dream, that good society we all see as desirable is not the one that corporations want, because its one where their ability to exploit the maximal profits out of every advantage they ca possible get, unfairly - is limited - For example, corporations may not want people who have no money dead, but they dont want them. Its not personal, they just see no value in a person who is not making them money, and the space they occupy if it might be occupied alternatively by somebody who was, they see as a negative.

Because that planet PEOPLE want is NOT - not even close, to the planet MNCs want. For one thing, what happens when people just dont have anything that they want? When nothing that they may be able to do for them has any value. When they no longer have any money to spend and a 50 cent piece of electrovics can do more with in ten seconds than they could in their entire life.

The worst actors - the corporations whose lobbies are bringing about these shifts, can be shown to think completely differently than sane people do.

Do sane human beings see large scale job losses as a gain? No. But, the lobbies of these multinational corporations, and the economics establishment that legitimizes them, as well as the governments that are pushing this system, have all created a alternative reality that selectively builds a value system that bears little or no relation to that held by the rest of the planet.

So, one dirty little secret behind trade agreements is that they frame job losses as 'efficiency gains'. Pretending that those millions of people will simply be freed to do other things. This would be unlikely to be true under the most favorable of economic conditions, but coming as it will during an unprecedented shift in business settings to automation - accompanied by a rapid increase in trans-border specialization, whose acknowledged primary goal is cutting costs, I think its inaccurate to call it anything resembling a gain of any kind, except for those huge corporations which will have created the optimal conditions not just for their own growth but for the creation of a mono-cuture which will likely eliminate many millions of smaller businesses, leaving a vast number of our planets citizens with nothing.

An ideal situation for polluters though, because damages are based on lost wages so unemployed people, the aged and childrens lives are worth - a portion of their lost wages- unless its both an open and shut case, and they have to be given extremely costly care, its not worth a lawyers time taking the case.

This conclusion - that its the definition of insanity to be allowing what they are doing, their stealthy bypassing of the checks and balances we have set up to keep our systems sane and healthy by creation of a global "trading" system to keep the people down and keep the currently up up,. subvert the world's brief experiment with democracy,, is very likely to end in disaster, seems like a logical one to make.

Otherwise, why are they hiding what they are doing? Why do they refuse to discuss its growing list of glaring failures.

What I am trying to tell you is we're being led into a trap that is forcing a cult like mess onto our nations stealthily replacing what people expect with its Doppelganger, or evil twin.


All of the efforts to force corporatism on the planet have a single unifying theme to them all, divide and conquer.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2018, 02:56:44 am by cdev »
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Offline james_s

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #126 on: January 21, 2018, 08:59:06 pm »

Electric cars=hook to restrict freedom to travel to just the better heeled.



You should lay off the drugs, or take off the tinfoil hat for a bit, you seem obsessed with strange conspiracy theories when virtually anything covered by any of those theories could be more easily accomplished without the difficulty of trying to hide the mechanism if there was actually a motive in the first place. Let's say there was actually some sort of motivation for restricting travel, you actually think trying to get everyone in electric cars is even close to the most direct way to do it? That makes no sense at all. Just who is "the man" who wants to restrict travel? Automakers? If I have a car with enough range to get me to the park & ride, bus station, train station and airport, just how exactly is my travel restricted?
 

Offline cdev

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #127 on: January 21, 2018, 09:34:16 pm »
James_s,

You know what a toll road is, I'm sure.

Well WELCOME TO AMERICA where rigid ideology and extreme unapologetic greed "Trumps" common sense every time.

Where the two parties compete over which can be the most obsequious to the unexpressed wish lists of multinational corporations.

Well one thing needs to be said for politicians today. they know where the money is. And isn't.

What percentage of Americans today could not come up with a few thousand dollars to cover a sudden emergency that came up?

In other words, how many of us are living "paycheck to paycheck"? 

More than a third.

We should preserve every job we can, and not trade them away like poker chips in a board (or shell) game is perhaps more appropriate..  And not make decisions that take millions of perfectly servicable cars off the road (or affordable houses and apartments away from families for that matter, by making them "too expensive to heat" and eligible for condemnation as 'blight' under eminent domain.).

A boon to real estate development, to be sure, however.

« Last Edit: January 22, 2018, 03:16:04 am by cdev »
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Online nctnico

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #128 on: January 21, 2018, 11:15:38 pm »
Just build a couple of hundreds of Nuclear plants, electricity price will drop and driving electrical will be cheaper than the alternative.
With the current type of nuclear power plants in use that isn't the case. The costs for dismantling and storage of contaminated materials is huge. AFAIK electricity from wind and solar is starting to get cheaper than nuclear.
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Offline radar_macgyver

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #129 on: January 21, 2018, 11:22:06 pm »
Don't know if anyone else posted this already, but here's a report from UBS about the Chevy Bolt:

http://www.advantagelithium.com/_resources/pdf/UBS-Article.pdf

They bought a Bolt and tore it down to independently figure out how it was put together, costs and profit opportunities. It's long (95 pages!), but I figured it was apropos this thread since it tries to answer questions like cost parity between EVs and ICE cars.

tl;dr: they expect it to reach cost parity with the VW Golf by 2025 in the US (earlier in Europe).
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #130 on: January 22, 2018, 05:28:08 am »
My friend has a Bolt, he bought it used when it was about a year old, I forget how much he paid for it but it was pretty reasonable. I drove it once, that thing is scary fast. At highway speed it's only average but from a stop if you stomp on the "gas" it goes like stink, feels faster than anything else I've driven.
 

Offline radar_macgyver

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #131 on: January 22, 2018, 07:02:41 am »
My friend has a Bolt, he bought it used when it was about a year old, I forget how much he paid for it but it was pretty reasonable. I drove it once, that thing is scary fast. At highway speed it's only average but from a stop if you stomp on the "gas" it goes like stink, feels faster than anything else I've driven.

Yup, I love mine, 260 ft lb in a car that size is fun. Also it sounds like a muted version of the Tumbler from the Dark Knight trilogy ;D
 

Offline gmb42

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #132 on: January 22, 2018, 12:26:54 pm »
Don't know if anyone else posted this already, but here's a report from UBS about the Chevy Bolt:

http://www.advantagelithium.com/_resources/pdf/UBS-Article.pdf

They bought a Bolt and tore it down to independently figure out how it was put together, costs and profit opportunities. It's long (95 pages!), but I figured it was apropos this thread since it tries to answer questions like cost parity between EVs and ICE cars.

tl;dr: they expect it to reach cost parity with the VW Golf by 2025 in the US (earlier in Europe).

I'd posted earlier in the thread with a link to a report on when the crossover between the costs of ICE and EV will happen in the mainstream vehicle categories. The report reckons 2024/25, although it is from an EV leaning site.
 

Offline cdev

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #133 on: January 22, 2018, 12:49:12 pm »
Electric Bikes already are very mainstream in many areas.  And for lots of light personal transportation needs they are just right.
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Offline paulca

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #134 on: January 23, 2018, 08:09:54 am »
I scanned the thread, I'm sure it's come up, but being a little UK centric here...

The public purse has lost most of it's tobacco duty.  They currently don't charge duty on home energy use.

When EVs become more and more popular, I think it's like 5% at the moment, the public purse will lose the fuel duty which is about 80-90% of the price of fuel.

Will we all have to accept the Kwh rate rising rapidly as duty is applied to all domestic electricity?  Will UK electric vehicles start to be fitted with special plugs with special phase that makes them only compatible with regulated approved and taxed sockets?  Surely ebay kits will appear to convert from normal mains.  Do we then get into the TV license debacle with inspectors calling to check your car charging station?

A lot of electric charging points are currently FREE.  EV owners are unbareable in their smugness.  When electric charging points start charging 50p or £1 per KWh how will they feel then?

Worse.  If my electric goes from £0.158 per KWh to £0.80 per KWh when I don't even own an EV I will not be happy with EV owners!  Nor will the little old ladies who will freeze in winter and die before they will be able to afford that.
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Offline Someone

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #135 on: January 23, 2018, 09:10:09 am »
I scanned the thread, I'm sure it's come up, but being a little UK centric here...

The public purse has lost most of it's tobacco duty.  They currently don't charge duty on home energy use.

When EVs become more and more popular, I think it's like 5% at the moment, the public purse will lose the fuel duty which is about 80-90% of the price of fuel.

Will we all have to accept the Kwh rate rising rapidly as duty is applied to all domestic electricity?  Will UK electric vehicles start to be fitted with special plugs with special phase that makes them only compatible with regulated approved and taxed sockets?  Surely ebay kits will appear to convert from normal mains.  Do we then get into the TV license debacle with inspectors calling to check your car charging station?

A lot of electric charging points are currently FREE.  EV owners are unbareable in their smugness.  When electric charging points start charging 50p or £1 per KWh how will they feel then?

Worse.  If my electric goes from £0.158 per KWh to £0.80 per KWh when I don't even own an EV I will not be happy with EV owners!  Nor will the little old ladies who will freeze in winter and die before they will be able to afford that.
Its a common challenge around the world, owing to the challenges of trying to tax electricity predictions are that many countries will turn to simple things like annual odometer counts and scaling registration costs to the km travelled.
 

Offline paulca

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #136 on: January 23, 2018, 10:34:54 am »
Its a common challenge around the world, owing to the challenges of trying to tax electricity predictions are that many countries will turn to simple things like annual odometer counts and scaling registration costs to the km travelled.

That will put another dent in the EV users smug faces.  They currently don't pay road tax either!
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Offline Blocco

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #137 on: January 23, 2018, 04:23:45 pm »
I scanned the thread, I'm sure it's come up, but being a little UK centric here...

The public purse has lost most of it's tobacco duty.  They currently don't charge duty on home energy use.

When EVs become more and more popular, I think it's like 5% at the moment, the public purse will lose the fuel duty which is about 80-90% of the price of fuel.

Will we all have to accept the Kwh rate rising rapidly as duty is applied to all domestic electricity?  Will UK electric vehicles start to be fitted with special plugs with special phase that makes them only compatible with regulated approved and taxed sockets?  Surely ebay kits will appear to convert from normal mains.  Do we then get into the TV license debacle with inspectors calling to check your car charging station?

A lot of electric charging points are currently FREE.  EV owners are unbareable in their smugness.  When electric charging points start charging 50p or £1 per KWh how will they feel then?

Worse.  If my electric goes from £0.158 per KWh to £0.80 per KWh when I don't even own an EV I will not be happy with EV owners!  Nor will the little old ladies who will freeze in winter and die before they will be able to afford that.

Plenty of imaginary scenarios to get annoyed about there >:(. What I think we are most likely to see as electric cars become more popular is a rapid increase in excise duty (currently £0) for electric vehicles and ultimately, road pricing by ANPR cameras for everyone. There isn't a better time to buy a used electric car because, in the longer term, motoring is likely to become much more expensive for all road users.

Edit... Coincidentally; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42792813
« Last Edit: January 24, 2018, 09:22:12 am by Blocco »
 

Offline Galenbo

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #138 on: January 24, 2018, 06:07:28 pm »
AFAIK electricity from wind and solar is starting to get cheaper than nuclear.
Yes I heard that too, after some bankruptcies and subsidized start-through, the neo-renewables are getting cheaper than (nuclear+renewable taxes)
Cheaper average, of course, especially when momentary electricity prices go to zero or even negative.
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Offline fcb

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #139 on: January 24, 2018, 07:00:02 pm »
Its a common challenge around the world, owing to the challenges of trying to tax electricity predictions are that many countries will turn to simple things like annual odometer counts and scaling registration costs to the km travelled.

That will put another dent in the EV users smug faces.  They currently don't pay road tax either!

Road pricing.  And probably toll roads, the time-over-distance cameras that are springing up everywhere will see to that.

They'll never succeed in taxing the energy to charge an EV, it's untraceable (charging at work will become a benefit-in-kind though).
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Offline cdev

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #140 on: January 24, 2018, 10:04:05 pm »
I bet that when you add in the cost of disposing of the waste and especially the risk of possible meltdowns if you don't keep it properly supplied with cooling water, nuclear fission power ends up being the most expensive power source of them all.

AFAIK electricity from wind and solar is starting to get cheaper than nuclear.
Yes I heard that too, after some bankruptcies and subsidized start-through, the neo-renewables are getting cheaper than (nuclear+renewable taxes)
Cheaper average, of course, especially when momentary electricity prices go to zero or even negative.
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Offline paulca

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #141 on: January 25, 2018, 08:09:43 am »
I bet that when you add in the cost of disposing of the waste and especially the risk of possible meltdowns if you don't keep it properly supplied with cooling water, nuclear fission power ends up being the most expensive power source of them all.

With current Rickover reactor design yes.  We have the cold war and the US Navy to thank for the mess we are in.  There are much less wasteful, much less cooling sensitive and fail safe reactor designs which have been tested in small scale, but Rickover reactors produce weapons grade plutonium as a waste product.  You do the maths.
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Offline f4eru

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #142 on: January 25, 2018, 10:16:34 pm »
Nuclear is obsolete. From the cost point of view.
And we will have to clean this mess, and our children will have to suffer from it. ('we' meaning all the people from the concerned nations)

Offline james_s

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #143 on: January 25, 2018, 10:19:51 pm »
Nuclear is going to be around for a long time to come, the energy demands of the world just keep rapidly increasing. I'd like to see some of the older more dangerous and less efficient plants replaced with more modern designs but the anti-nuke lobby has been doing a fine job of keeping the old ones running by blocking the construction of newer and safer plants.
 
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Offline cdev

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #144 on: January 25, 2018, 10:27:01 pm »
If a country goes into economic collapse, all of their assets such as exportable fuels, water, money saved on behalf of social security, etc, can be applied towards their debt.
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Offline SparkyFXTopic starter

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #145 on: January 26, 2018, 12:52:16 am »
That could render much of the planet uninhabitable.

What would be done then?
It´s in the sense of the words already... if things get "out of control" in the future for someone who is responsible, things will be "out of control" by definition. I don´t see where that possibility inhibits anyone today from doing something completely different that is within anyones control.

Regarding nuclear power: for me it is questionable if a nuclear power plant from green meadow -> built -> operated -> decommissioned -> green meadow will be cost neutral or positive. There is no lobby needed, except for small details like leaving a radioactive industrial ruin behind after defaulting on cost.... not poisioning people (related or unrelated to that) or so. If a calculation that takes these things into account does not work, it will not be built, if it would... it would be built (somewhere or the contracts would not be made in an election year).

Ok, admittedly there are things like greenwashing and people that are suspicous probably want that suspicion to be compensated financially, so yes, there is some cost attached to what the public opinion is, but aside from that there should be a fixed cost to do this in a safe and legal way. It is imho too simple to blame the public opinion if the calculation did not work out in the first place.

OTOH big projects this scale always have skyrocketing costs and build times... which always makes me wonder how safe that piece was in the planning stage and can be in operation if the plan needed to be changed e.g. 100 times - under the premise of "being a proven and safe design".


Ok, back to topic:
The personal car is a decentral mode of transportation, relatively diverse, maintainable by people with mediocre mechanical skills and a small set of tools. Nothing of that changes when talking electric cars. They have brakes and other wear parts that do need maintenance too.

Imho such systems are more resilient than centralized systems as they have different weaknesses. It´s like comparing bus drivers (of well maintained busses) going on strike (you are screwed and its their fault) vs. not maintaining your car (you are screwed and its your fault :-) ).

« Last Edit: January 26, 2018, 01:07:35 am by SparkyFX »
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Online nctnico

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #146 on: January 26, 2018, 08:35:46 pm »
Imho such systems are more resilient than centralized systems as they have different weaknesses. It´s like comparing bus drivers (of well maintained busses) going on strike (you are screwed and its their fault) vs. not maintaining your car (you are screwed and its your fault :-) ).
Yes. Public transport is highly unreliable as I noticed last week and yesterday. It takes a bit of wind or a person jumping in front of a train to cause utter chaos.
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Online coppice

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #147 on: January 26, 2018, 11:09:47 pm »
Imho such systems are more resilient than centralized systems as they have different weaknesses. It´s like comparing bus drivers (of well maintained busses) going on strike (you are screwed and its their fault) vs. not maintaining your car (you are screwed and its your fault :-) ).
Yes. Public transport is highly unreliable as I noticed last week and yesterday. It takes a bit of wind or a person jumping in front of a train to cause utter chaos.
Not everyone's public transport is highly unreliable. That's kind of a national choice. Some people have public transport that fails them less often than major road incidents cause car driver's journeys to fail.
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #148 on: January 27, 2018, 12:57:52 am »
When I worked downtown for a while I took the bus almost every day, it was more reliable at getting me to work on time than my car as traffic made the car trip take anywhere from 25 minutes to nearly 2 hours, the bus was pretty consistently about an hour.
 

Offline Fungus

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Re: When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?
« Reply #149 on: January 27, 2018, 10:15:08 am »
Nothing of that changes when talking electric cars. They have brakes and other wear parts that do need maintenance too.

They do a lot of braking by running the motors in reverse as generators, that doesn't wear brake pads out at all.

Nuclear is going to be around for a long time to come, the energy demands of the world just keep rapidly increasing. I'd like to see some of the older more dangerous and less efficient plants replaced with more modern designs

Yep. Those old ones were designed for making bombs. Electricity generation was just how they sold it to the public.

If (eg.) the USA spend the price of a couple of F35s on energy research instead they could solve most of the world's energy problems.

but the anti-nuke lobby has been doing a fine job of keeping the old ones running by blocking the construction of newer and safer plants.

Yep. That and the fact that electricity has been privatized throughout most of the world. Private funding makes power plants hundreds of times more expensive to build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Capital_costs
 


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