A fascinating thing we’ll all have to navigate as electric vehicles become more mainstream is charging station etiquette, as our own David Tracy recently encountered himself. But I think any reasonable person would agree it’s not cool to deliberately block an EV charging station with a gas car. Extra not cool? When a cabinet-level government official does it for a photo-op.
We dive into that as I return to morning roundup duty this week with news about the recent Munich and upcoming Detroit auto shows; the potential United Auto Workers strike that looms over the latter; and Germany has a fascinating solution to the problem I describe above. Happy Monday, let’s get started.
Jennifer Granholm Gets Heat For EV Road Trip ICE-Ing
America, we're listening. With historic investments in our electric vehicle manufacturing supply chain, the Biden-Harris Administration is investing billions to make EVs more affordable and practical.
Check out our NEW EV Investment map and more: https://t.co/isXXrfVDGg pic.twitter.com/iCGxhsSgXY
— Secretary Jennifer Granholm (@SecGranholm) July 6, 2023
Here at The Autopian, even though we believe cars and politics (policy, more specifically) are inextricably linked, we’re not in the tank for any political party or ideology. We’re pro-car, pro-cat and pro-good engineering solutions. That’s why I have no issues with calling shenanigans on something that happened during Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm’s recent EV road trip.
In a story framed around the usual “electric charging is still bad!” angle, NPR — who rode along with Granholm — reports on a drive that she and her staff did from Charlotte to Memphis (which is nine hours, or as we call it in Texas, “a quick trip to the HEB for a sixer of Lone Star and That Green Sauce”) in a caravan of EVs. But it’s not that simple, because, per NPR, this happened:
But between stops, Granholm’s entourage at times had to grapple with the limitations of the present. Like when her caravan of EVs — including a luxury Cadillac Lyriq, a hefty Ford F-150 and an affordable Bolt electric utility vehicle — was planning to fast-charge in Grovetown, a suburb of Augusta, Georgia.
Her advance team realized there weren’t going to be enough plugs to go around. One of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied. So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy.
In politics, the job of the “advance team” is to clear any such obstacles for the VIP in question. But I think we’d all agree is a shitty move. In doing so, you’d block some driver who needs to get electrons—and if they’re doing it at a fast charger, they have somewhere to be, vs. the folks who can slow-charge when they’re shopping or seeing a movie or something. And that’s exactly what happened, according to NPR.
In fact, a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle — was so upset they decided to get the authorities involved: They called the police.
What the hell, man!
The sheriff’s office couldn’t do anything. It’s not illegal for a non-EV to claim a charging spot in Georgia. Energy Department staff scrambled to smooth over the situation, including sending other vehicles to slower chargers, until both the frustrated family and the secretary had room to charge.
At least one Granholm critic likened this situation, correctly, to an episode of VEEP; now I’m wondering if this was more of a Richard Splett move or a Jonah Ryan move. Either way, Granholm’s getting plenty of criticism for this, particularly from the right, and if this Reuters report is accurate, I don’t think it’s undeserved, actually. The Biden Administration’s top officials are under a lot of pressure to paint a rosy picture of EV adoption amid his various pro-electrification initiatives, and that was probably the goal of this road trip. But it’s also being used as more ammo against EVs, which are increasingly a political punching bag ahead of the next election.
As pro-EV as I am, I don’t think sugar-coating the situation is helping anything here; our charging situation sucks, period. My recent road trip from New York to Martha’s Vineyard in a BMW iX (my wife and I like to do Fancy Person Cosplay once or twice a year) worked out mainly because that car has a nearly 400-mile range; every fast charger we encountered, every single one, was either broken or running at partial speeds.
At least Granholm’s being realistic about the challenges here. And as that story notes, they never got stranded, a risk that many early EV adopters had:
Where chargers are in short supply, drivers sometimes have to wait — like Granholm’s team did in Grovetown, Georgia. The experience could get even worse as the number of electric vehicles on the road increases in coming years.
“Clearly, we need more high-speed chargers, particularly in the South,” Granholm told me at the end of her trip.
Hopefully, the companies that make them can step up. And to their credit and out of fairness, I do believe the Biden Administration is doing a lot to tackle pollution, stimulate battery and EV technology growth here so we don’t get rolled by China and lay the groundwork for a future with less gas use. I just don’t think they should be in the habit of ICE-ing folks out of charging spots.
Germany Mandates EV Charging At Gas Stations
I gotta tell you, though. I was just in Europe and I’m amazed by the degree to which they’re Not Screwing Around when it comes to climate stuff. You see the effects of that everywhere there, from hotel air conditioning to political signs and beyond. In Germany, the IAA Munich auto and mobility show was last week and it highlighted the many ways that nation’s car industry is crafting a lower-emission future—not always happily, mind you. But they seem to get the reality of what they’re facing more than we do.
So last week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz unveiled a bold new regulation that would probably make Granholm jealous: a requirement that gas stations carry EV chargers, and fast ones too. Here’s Reuters:
Scholz said that the coming weeks will see Germany become “the first country in Europe to introduce a law requiring operators of 80% of all service stations to provide fast-charging options with at least 150 kilowatts for e-cars”.
It’s unclear what the timeline is, who pays for this—I have to assume incentives will drive it—or how it tracks with a previous goal unveiled in 2020. But I do think this is a good move. If you want to transition people to EV ownership, helping them maintain their similar habits and is a good way to do it, at least for now. I’m eager to see how this plays out.
IAA Munich Felt Like A Chinese Auto Show
IAA Munich felt like a big celebration of Germany’s auto industry, with huge activations throughout the city for all the big brands—BMW had this kind of EDM-festival vibe going in the center of town, and Mercedes erected this giant red glowing cube thing. Gas cars were there, but they were basically an afterthought. Nobody brought up the d-word. Everything was e-mobility, as they call it.
No wonder they need to do this with both barrels loaded. The Chinese automakers are coming and they’re coming in force. This was my first time seeing, in person, some offerings from BYD, XPeng and HiPhi. (The latter in particular looks like a Mobile Suit on wheels and I kind of love it.) I will tell you that China is not screwing around here and these cars, by all appearances anyway, seem extremely impressive; nobody’s making jokes about these cars.
Here’s the New York Times on the fear the Germans have about China kicking ass on their turf:
BYD, an all-electric Chinese carmaker that overtook Volkswagen as China’s best-selling brand this year, unveiled a sleek, new sedan and a sport utility vehicle to applause from a packed crowd.
“I think the Europeans are just pretty much petrified of how the Chinese will perform in Europe,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent analyst of the electric-car market based in Berlin.
The show arrives at a precarious time for the German auto industry, the largest in Europe, and for the German economy more broadly. Once a critical driver of the country’s economy, German automakers have instead become a drag. In June, production in the auto industry shrank by 3.5 percent compared with the previous month, weighing on the country’s overall industrial production, which declined by 1.5 percent.
That, and energy prices skyrocketing with the war in Ukraine (a frequent topic of conversation everywhere I went) underscored the moment of transition we’re in. The German automakers already dropped the ball in China; they don’t want to lose ground back home.
The Detroit Auto Show And A Likely UAW Strike In The Same Week
Finally, speaking of auto shows, we have one here in America this week: the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, now in vastly warmer September instead of the frosty start of the year as it was for a long time. But this show won’t be the powerhouse news event it once was; in fact, it’s going to primarily be attended by the U.S. automakers (including Tesla, interestingly enough) and smaller in scale than in its glory days. The Autopian crew will be there during press days Wednesday and Thursday.
Which is also when the UAW’s contracts with the automakers expire, and Vegas odds put a strike as pretty likely at this point. Here’s The Detroit News:
Compensation for temporary/supplemental workers and the “tier two” workers at the Detroit Three automakers are a focus of the United Auto Workers’ demands for a new contract whose “deadline,” says UAW President Shawn Fain, is 11:59 p.m. Thursday. Without a tentative agreement in hand when the current contracts expire, those companies’ workers will go on strike, Fain said last week.
Addressing the conditions under which the company can use temps, decreasing the grow-in period to the top wage and securing the same retirement benefits for all workers are key pieces of what autoworkers see as alleviating concessions made during the Great Recession and the bankruptcies. They feel it’s time to win what was negotiated away after years of major and even record profits.
“We don’t want to tip the companies so that they’re in trouble,” said John McKissack, 53, of Brownstown Township, a 28-year UAW member and pipefitter at Stellantis NV’s Trenton Engine Complex. “We just want our fair share.”
Fain said he’s seeing progress but has called out the latest proposal from Stellantis, which is probably the least labor-friendly automaker in play here; he has a trash can labeled “Big Three Proposals” he uses as a prop during his many social media broadcasts about the situation.
Either way, this is about to be a really interesting auto industry week, and not because of new car debuts, necessarily.
Your Turn
What government policy would you like to see to cut emissions and move in a more Earth-friendly direction? I wish we were doing more to mandate turning more ICE cars into hybrids, but everyone but maybe Toyota and a few others deem dead-set on “skipping” that step.
I’d remove the rule that allows larger wheelbase vehicles to have less mpg, killing small trucks and rewarding the current crop of giant ones, and stop treating trucks as a separate category, look at Ford, besides the Mustang everything they have is a truck/suv.
The bloating of the American passenger vehicle is a direct result of bad policy, mostly at the behest of big gas/oil and the big three.
The American consumer is complacent, but can you blame them when the incentives are all geared toward them buying big, gas guzzling, polluting land boats.
The American consumer is a shrinking minority. Most of the population lives paycheck to paycheck and doesn’t consume much of anything besides rent/mortgage, junkfood, healthcare, sweatshop-made clothes, 2nd-hand appliances, and used clunker cars that are barely being kept operational.
If you can afford the home you live in without hardship, can eat fresh/real food, don’t ever have to worry about an accident or random illness causing a medical bankruptcy, have nice clothes that were made with 1st world labor, bought your household appliances new, own even the cheapest of new cars, AND you have money left over for vacations, and/or to save/invest, and/or for retirement, and/or for hobbies? Well good for you, you’re in the upper 20% of the U.S. population regarding access to money/resources!
It’s difficult NOT to be complacent when one works multiple jobs just to stay afloat and never has the freetime to think.
The complacency will end when the basics are no longer tenable or within reach. That day is approaching, for better or for worse. When it comes, the dealer lots are going to be full of unsold cars, both new and used, because only a small minority of the population is going to have the money for either purchasing or operating them, even if priced for pennies on the dollar, and many of them will be repos from people who pretended they could afford them using debt.
> good for you, you’re in the upper 20% of the U.S. population
I dont have any numbers but I’d wager that’s top 10%.
Either way, that is what used to be called being middle class, and was a living standard accessible to greatly more people in the past than today. This demographic peaked by percentage of the population in the early 1970s, and has been on the decline since, rapidly so after 2008 during what was supposedly the greatest economic “boom” in U.S. history. Grocery store clerks, librarians, teachers, roofers, warehouse workers, butchers, orderlies, and such used to be able to afford this sort of living standard in the U.S. but they’ve fallen back into the working class or even working poor. I’m an engineer and I could only “afford” such a living standard if I went into debt the next 30+ years of my life, and I’m doing better than most, when 50 years ago I’d basically have been set for life with less than a decade of work if I was frugal enough.
This is in part how the new car market came to be what it is today. It is no longer driven by people of normal economic means, but by the well-off and wealthy, who value showing off their access to capital in the form of largesse and as many features as possible more than practical traits like reliability, low operating cost, or reparability. The new vehicles produced reflect their sensibilities, while those who only have the means to buy used have to make due with what eventually gets cast to the used market, and what they purchase tells a totally different story of what traits the masses of people value in a vehicle by what vehicles retain the most secondhand value: practical vehicles that are reliable, get good fuel economy, and cost little to repair, without much concern for the electronic features available. All of today’s touchscreen-laden teched-out abominations are going to be a nightmare for the working class when that is all they can find, and subsequently can’t afford to keep them operational as things break.
It’s not just wheelbase, it’s the axle track as well, which is why even new “small” pickups like the Ford Maverick are so damn wide.
The rule you’re referencing is the Footprint Rule.
Yes, that’s it! Terrible policy.
The footprint rule was written by and for lobbyists. Big trucks, CUVs, and SUVs make more money, and are what the auto industry wants us to buy. Thus, these vehicles have been pushed on us collectively and we’ve been manipulated into purchasing them. Go to any dealership lot, and odds are greater than not that there will be a dearth of alternatives to these bloated vehicles. That’s on purpose. Can’t afford it? They’ll “work with you” and give you a 96-month payment plan at 11% interest…
A government policy I’d love to see implemented is one similar to is an incentive to report blatant emission tampering (looking at you coal-rollers). Allow citizens to directly contact local/state personnel with evidence of tampered emissions or other Clean Air Act type violations, and give those citizens the 25% cut of the fine like in NYC. Pair that fine with a fix-it or crush-it mandate, and some of the grossest illegal over-polluters will be taken off the road.
It’s not fair we have to lose the manual Golf GTI over a 1% difference emissions when diesel bros can spit out hundreds of times the legal level of emissions because they “want to own the libs” or some other uninformed nonsense.
For those curious about the NYC policy, see here: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/31/make-87point50-in-3-minutes-by-reporting-idling-trucks-in-new-york-city.html
Emissions on cars got so good that the air was mostly cleaned of automotive emissions in the U.S. by the early 2000s. Any new regulations since have mostly been the result of control freaks, probably in effort to increase the barriers of entry into the auto industry, and aren’t necessary. In time, EVs will take care of most of the rest, while classic cars, modded vehicles, and motorcycles will account for almost all of them from road vehicles by that time, and what emissions remain from ground vehicles will be a drop in the bucket compared to everything else generating pollution into the air.
No need to ban ICE lawnmowers, gas or wood stoves, and modded cars. The real 800 lb gorillas in the room regarding non-CO2 pollutants are factories/refineries/chemical plants, airplanes, cargo ships, and freight haulers.
Now if you want to reduce CO2 emissions, you MUST reduce fossil fuel consumption AND manufacturing of goods. Products need to be built to resist planned obsolescence, to be repairable without specialized/expensive equipment, and last as long as possible, and this includes electric vehicles. Food needs to be locally grown and sourced. What’s good for inflating GDP numbers and keeping people buying crap they don’t need is the exact opposite of what is good for the environment and for reducing GHG generation.
Oh, no, they HAVE to roll coal! Don’t you know that’s the only way to have a reliable diesel?! They could never afford to maintain the truck that they paid significantly more for the diesel option on if they had to pass emissions like everything else!
Why is it my and your responsibility to buy a new car for the government to fight climate change? Single person automobile transport is still incredibly inefficient way to transport large groups of people no matter energy source propels them there. If we were really serious about climate change the government would promote higher density cities that are desirable and easy to navigate via mass electric transport. This problem is created by consumption, it’s not going to cured with more consumption. The fact is, most persons in the US have one option to get to their destination. People use what you build. Diversity of choice is easier than mandating everyone buy a 50k EV. That would require addressing a systematic social issue.
Like they could have just Zoomed all these meetings, then said “Hey, we lowered are emissions by just not unnecessarily driving somewhere!”. But that doesn’t sell new F-150s.
Single person automobile transport could be 100-fold more efficient, if we designed vehicles to transport just one person, as efficiently as possible.
There is a tricycle called a Milan SL. Unmotorized, athletes can reach over 60 mph on flat ground in them for brief periods with their own legs propelling it, and hold rolling averages of 30 mph for multiple hours on end. The world record for a fared human powered vehicle on flat ground is 89 mph. It’s a specialized machine called the Eta and a team has to hold it upright while the rider gets inside, then assembles it around the rider. My Milan SL is usable on a daily basis. I reached 89 mph in my Milan SL once, careening down a very steep hill, but that’s a far cry from flat ground and I was pedaling my ass off.
If you gutted all the bicycle drivetrain, and built a sports car out of a Milan(installed stronger mechanicals all around, used more carbon fiber for the monocoque, had a stronger suspension with more travel, had more ground clearance, hydraulic disc brakes with DOT hubs/wheels/tires, ect), you’d only need a 5 horsepower lawnmower engine and some sort of rudimentary manual transmission to perform like a low-end new 4-cylinder car. You’d be able to top out at triple-digit speeds with this meagre amount of horsepower, and probably do 0-60 mph around 12 seconds. Math suggests about 1,000 mpg at 70 mph if the engine gets 20% efficiency. When you go electric, you then increase that efficiency 3-4 times over, and regarding performance, the sky’s the limit for dirt cheap with no transmission needed. And by skys-the-limit regarding performance, you’d be fucking around with Hellcats at only 25 horsepower in such a light vehicle if you had AWD, and there exists technology to put 150 horsepower into such a microvehicle…
As a proof of concept, I built a 8-10 Wh/mile @ 30-35 mph one seater EV out of a custom built trike that is much LESS slippery than a Milan SL. 4 horsepower was enough to do donuts. It now has 13 horsepower and takes off faster than most cars.
This is WAY more efficient than any mass transit. Plus you get the convenience of a car. Plus you can use existing road infrastructure and you don’t need to build more rails. I carry groceries in mine, run errands with it, visit job sites, use it for travel, ect. Functionally, it’s a microcar. Any collectivist who tells you you must give up individual transport to save the planet is gas-lighting you, and selling you a less-efficient “solution” that will give large institutions more control over your life. Reject that, always. Screw those control freaks.
The only problem with the aforementioned individual transportation is that your sub-150 lb car will currently be sharing the road with 5,000+ lb rolling cod pieces. I do it every day, and it’s not safe nor pleasant. But eventually, reality regarding resource availability is going to smack us all in the face, and those 5,000+ lb rolling cod pieces won’t be feasible to use anymore. When that happens is difficult to predict. Probably in my lifetime, and not without a lot of pain.
“Plus you get the convenience of a car. Plus you can use existing road infrastructure and you don’t need to build more rails. I carry groceries in mine, run errands with it, visit job sites, use it for travel, ect.”
I do a number of such things on a $50 vintage bicycle and panniers sometimes pulling a $100 trailer.
Granted it’s practical radius is but a few miles with weather, terrain, time and road safety becoming more of a factor but for those few miles it uses no gas or electricity (other than the energy input used to feed me) and it improves my health and well being. It also puts no wear on the roadways, is silent (other than my music played in part to warn dogs), does not pollute, puts others at little risk, and does not add to road congestion nor take up a pump/charger spot.
I find for such short (0-3 mi) errands its often just as or more convenient than driving a car since with it I can use routes forbidden to cars and I can always find parking right up in front. That’s also about the distance my FF powered cars are least efficient/most polluting to use which adds more incentive.
A used bicycle is IMO by far the biggest bargain in personal transport WHEN you can make it work.
Much agreed. In my case, I couldn’t(at least for the long trips I needed to be able to make), so I built the microcar. I used to have a Raleigh Technium before that was built, bought used off Craigslist for $80.
I can fit a week’s worth of groceries in the trunk space, and hang with V6 Chargers and 4-cylinder Mustangs at stoplights up to about 25-30 mph with my fire-breathing 13 horsepower steed. 91 lbs unladen weight and having over 200+ lb-ft of torque on tap with no transmission losses will do that… Its operating cost is very bicycle-like, perfect for a fellow cheap bastard like myself.
Well there’s always e-bikes too. 😉
Technically, my microcar is an ebike. But it could provide weather protection like a car when fully enclosed with windshield and roof. It is possible to develop a lightweight air conditioning system suited for the small volume inside, although I haven’t gotten around to that yet. If I were to remove the bicycle drivetrain, install rack and pinion steering, and have foot operated accelerator/brake pedals, it would literally be a car.
I blur the definitions a lot in order to get around various laws and regulations. To any police officer, my vehicle is legally a “bicycle”. I’m not paying property taxes, insurance, registration, or any of that crap. And thus far, there’s nothing they can do about it. And since it doesn’t account for any road wear or pose a risk to anyone else, I shouldn’t be paying for these things anyway.
“It is possible to develop a lightweight air conditioning system suited for the small volume inside”
No doubt. A secondhand mini fridge for example. You could probably pick up a few such fridges for free.
This is another option. I own several cars, however mainly take my bike to work. It’s five miles down pleasant country roads with a stop sign. It’s a more enjoyable commute, so I do it.
However a large scale adoption of velomoblies, though likely the most efficient form of transport, seems like a hard sell.
I also don’t think anyone is trains or death like your collectivist strawman. The reason people bring up building public transport, is because people use it when you build it.
Velomobiles may not ever see large scale adoption, but microcars built like velomobiles have the potential to go anywhere, if someone were to produce them. There’s a unique value proposition with that, offering the potential of supercar performance for a moped budget and less-than-car horsepower, while being about as cheap as a bicycle to operate.
In the circles of political power, that “collectivist strawman” is a very real thing. There really are people in NGOs and other unelected and elected positions of power, as well as billionaires, that don’t want the common people to have mobility any longer, in order to “save the planet” while they continue to squander limited natural resources living in mansions, partying on megayachts, and flying around in private jets. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out as the disparity between the rich and poor widens.
Higher density cities and public transit and bikes take a generation and we need change now.
So yes, let’s do that, but let’s also not kid ourselves that public transit covers all use cases, such as:
Taking grandma or limited-mobility person to doctors’ appointments
Taking cats to vet
Bringing DIY stuff home from home depot
Bringing a Costco grocery load home
Going to work on different sites regularly where you can’t really plan a route, especially if you’re lugging boots and hard hat and a change of clothes and tools (e.g. construction, farming, light repair work, etc)
Biking 5 miles to work in the rain or snow, with a change of clothes and hopefully a shower at your destination because working all day in sweaty clothes is gross
Lots of very real, very common use cases that simply can’t be achieved with public transit in a country as large as the US.
Dense cities with public transit are a great step, but they’re also a relatively small and privileged sliver of the issue.
I’m all for taking one for the team and affecting my quality of life for the greater good, but I’m not turning back into a frontier pioneer just to get to work.
This is really just returning to pre-war America. If we take the Dutch model, that took about 20 years. And America is significantly more dense than people seem to realize. 17% of America lives on 2% of the land. Including the Great Lakes, Texas, California and Front Range metroplexes. Most of America lives in a dense pocket of urbanization. If we develop options for people to willing take, they will. This fairly strawman, grandma, guy who works multiple places and cats can still exist and use whatever car in. They can use less energy, because they will be free to move though roads with minimal traffic.
The problem remains that the State went “okay, you solve it” about climate change. We rightfully only think of what we can control, so we look at doing individual transport, but differently. Ignoring that parking lots, roads and infrastructure to handle automobiles is equally devastating to the environment as combustion itself. In any serious model of reduction we need a significant infrastructure revision.
That’s not a strawman. It’s what constitutes well over 50% of my needs for a car in a dense-ish urban environment with good public transportation.
There are a lot of ordinary people doing ordinary stuff where public transit is not an option.
So yeah, by all means do the dense city, public transit stuff, I’m 100% for it, but it’s far from a panacea.
Nuclear. All the nuclear. Run the country on it. If humanity actually has any serious ambitions for a grand future, it will require energy on a grand scale. There is exactly one source of power that can scale to that extent.
Queue arguments about cost- stop. Every single argument about the cost of nuclear power in the US is based on reactor designs from the 60’s and 70’s, and more importantly their attendant regulatory regime. Back in the day, a nuclear power plant was a bespoke certification for each location, and that took more than a decade, and is directly responsible for something like 70% of the actual cost to build the stupid things. Things have changed in the half century since, and modern nuclear engineering is quite a bit more advanced. The solution to this cluster-f is modular reactors: design a reactor, certify that design, and then make a bunch of identical copies of it to be installed at different locations. In essence, deal with it exactly like we do with airplane certification- a single certified design with serial production of that certified design.
“But Wuffles, that’s an incredibly bold step forward into the unknown with so many attendant unknown risks, who knows what could happen?”
Wrong- the US government already has this scheme in place. Has run it actually since 1953. Do you know who runs a fleet of modular nuclear power plants, numerically the largest reactor fleet in the world, and despite using weapons-grade fuel rather than the much tamer commercial grade fuel has not once had a single radiological incident in 70 years? The US Navy. There is three-quarters of a goddamn century of experience in safely running and certifying modular nuclear reactors that has been essentially completely untapped because of “national security concerns.” Fuck it- I humbly submit that energy security is the preeminent national security concern of the country, tell the DoE and the glacially-slow troglodytes at the NRC they have three years to brain-drain everything the Navy knows about reactor operation and then two more years to certify the first modular reactors for commercial use. They don’t meet that deadline, everyone who makes a credible design application gets certified automatically, no matter how much the NRC whines.
It still blows my mind how willfully ignorant much of the general public is with respect to Nuclear power, and not just within the US. Even including all major international nuclear meltdowns, Nuclear still has fewer deaths/lifespan impacts than even renewable energy sources, and is a massively space effective way to generate the entirety of the base load of a countries energy needs, and allows plenty of space for renewables to take up the peakier loads without nearly as much energy storage needed as would currently be the case with a very limited nuclear base load and a large switch to renewables with highly peaky and inconsistent generation
I’m not sure “willfully ignorant” is fair here. The media and even the government have tarred and feathered nuclear power repeatedly over the years. This isn’t QAnon where 5 minutes of research would tell you it’s BS, there’s a lot of nuclear fearmongering from reputable(or at least reputable-sounding) sources.
If it’s just the general member of the public, sure. But mostly I find the biggest opponents of nuclear energy are the clueless wing of the environmental movement who love to wax rhapsodic about wind and solar solving all of the issues and how the evil nuclear plants are worse than coal based on the most ridiculous cherry picked numbers ever. The German Green party is the best example of the worst offenders. They’ve done enough research to justify their own preferred means of power generation (never mind the fact that virtually all political movements that advocate for solely solar and wind power have a great deal of financial backing from firms also heavily invested in those forms of generation), but have never bothered to consider what benefits modern nuclear plants offer, nor even consulted with anyone with a nuclear engineering degree- it’s just bad because feelz. Those assclowns can happily own the “willfully ignorant” label, and eat the consequences when shit like this happens:
https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157364
To be fair, wind and solar could solve MOST of the issues if it was coupled with conservation. But in a crony-capitalistic system that relies upon a paradigm of endlessly increasing resource/energy consumption to sustain itself on a planet of finite space and resources, that concept called “conservation” is a no-go, at least until it all blows up in everyone’s face…
I don’t think so. For example it would take the ENTIRE renewable energy capacity of the US, all its solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, trashgas, etc – to supply just the energy content of the world’s industrial (not transport) hydrogen. Not the energy needed to MAKE that hydrogen, just the energy it contains leaving no renewable energy left for transport, residential, commercial, retail, etc.
As it is most people in the world already live deep in energy poverty. As we conserve their energy use will increase (e.g. China, India, Vietnam, etc) as will the global population so over time global energy demand is going to increase regardless of what austerity measures are taken here.
This is why it is foolish to waste our natural gas producing electricity. It is where most of the world’s industrial hydrogen comes from. Cracking the hydrogen from natural gas directly is greatly more efficient than using the natural gas to produce electricity. Wind and solar doesn’t solve this particular issue, and it would be wasting wind and solar energy to even try, since the majority of the energy contained within the natural gas isn’t exactly consumed as the hydrogen is extracted.
“Cracking the hydrogen from natural gas directly is greatly more efficient than using the natural gas to produce electricity.”
I assume that electricity is then used to produce hydrogen?
I’d prefer that NG to be used for transport, especially heavy transport. IMO NG makes much more sense as a transport fuel than hydrogen. The first use of any hydrogen should be earmarked for industry as to use hydrogen in transport rather than industry is just robbing Peter to pay Paul – with interest.
I’m all for legalizing DIY thorium reactors. I think nuclear would be well suited to small-scale with this technology. Imagine being able to plug all of your household appliances into a device the size of a shoebox, buried in your back yard, with no risk of contamination or fallout.
The nuclear tech of ye-olden-days was the byproduct of manufacturing nuclear weapons, and was designed with nuclear weapons in mind. Such a colossal waste of resources, yet the leaders of this society is still pursuing this colossal waste of resources, and should they ever be used, it will likely spell the end of the human experiment on planet Earth…
“Imagine being able to plug all of your household appliances into a device the size of a shoebox, buried in your back yard, with no risk of contamination or fallout.”
AFAIK fission reactors don’t scale *quite* that much. Are you thinking of a pile?
I’m thinking more along the lines of “nuclear battery”. Prototypes have been made by people at various times and places. Some of them have been thrown in prison for it.
Those are REALLY inefficient, 7% TE on a good day. To run a household of appliances you’d need much more than a shoebox and that bigger box would be a whole arsenal’s worth of dirty bombs. The core is radioactive enough to cause severe burns should you handle one:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)66759-1/fulltext
If you’re going to have it in your backyard you’re going to want it well shielded, maybe under a lead bottom swimming pool. That would make it harder for evildoers to get their hands on it too.
OTOH no moving parts and lasts for years even in deep space.
Er, when nuclear engineers talk about small modular reactors, they’re talking about things in the ~100-300 MW class, which is comparatively small scale to current plants. Even accounting for the (still theoretical, undemonstrated) greater efficiency of the thorium cycle, this is still way, way, way bigger than something you could put in your house, or even neighborhood. Sure the reactor itself might be shipping-container sized, but the generating, cooling, shielding, safety, control/monitoring equipment is going to take up a lot more space, and thats without getting into the massive power distribution infrastructure you need (hence why the best proposed use is to slot these things in place on an existing fossil-fuel burning plant, so you don’t have to build an all new distribution network). So you shrink your plant down to maybe a few city blocks instead of the few square miles current nukes take up, but it’s still a fairly large chunk of infrastructure.
While I would love to live in the Fallout universe where you could have your own household nuclear pile, that’s a really inefficient use of limited materials and also dangerous as hell.
I’m considering something on the scale of a few hundred watts. There are multiple ways to go about it, not exclusive to thorium. It may not be enough to power your average home, but for someone like me who uses very little electricity, it would be quite useful.
David Hahn had the right idea stripping Americium from smoke detectors. It’s a shame what happened to him.
There was also that Swedish engineer who was arrested for going through the proper channels to get permission to build a DIY thorium reactor in his home, which his government immediately frowned upon.
This is IMO much less dangerous than having mid-20th-century boiling water reactors that have the potential to blanket the Earth with radioactive dust if for whatever reason we all stop maintaining them. The fallout from those would be even worse than that from nuclear weapons.
Gone are the days when childrens’ chemistry sets has uranium in them, unfortunately.
Just some flunky doing his/her job as best they saw fit, and winding up getting thrown under the bus for it.
Agree, very bad look for Granholm and unnecessary. If they need to wait for chargers due to inadequate numbers, demand, or broken equipment, these are all great data points to learn from and to share. We have some local Level 2 chargers in our small town and they are always ICE-d out. The local police don’t know what to do about it, so it just continues.
Regarding IAA. I remember 20 years ago when the Chinese companies first started showing up. My German colleagues were quick to point out how unacceptable these early cars were for the European market, but I think there was already some uneasiness that there would be a future tipping point. I guess we all knew this was coming…and I think will eventually reach us here in the USA.
Seems inevitable since all mainstream companies have given up on the cheaper end of the market. Not everyone can afford to spend 50k on a new car.
1) nuclear, solar, wind subsidies
2) an effective, punitive carbon tax on everything emitting carbon. do it at the source and then everyone can pay. no exceptions
3) a major reconstruction effort to support urbanization and density in areas less likely to be terribly impacted by climate change so walking, biking, and trains are actual effective options.
4) nuke Florida
As a Florida resident, I wholly agree with 4.
Ditto. Starting with Tallahassee.
Living next door to that shit hole, I applaud suggestion 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW7CkbQ_3vQ
Bugs was really onto something 74 years ago…
But what what about the manatees?!? Ohh the huge manatees!!!
You had my star after 2 and then 4 hit me and I wanted to give infinite stars.
I have never owned an EV and probably never will because of my age (76), being locked into a car loan that will run another 3 years and finally my geographic location in southeast Kansas (my hometown of 20K residents) which has zero charging stations.
I would like to have been part of the EV revolution driving a nice Lyriq instead of my CT6. All the signs are on the wall; EV is the way of the future.
Stay green!
I’ll believe an administration actually cares about emission went the stop demonizing cars as if they are the only contributor.
Cars are several notches down on the priority list, yet it’s the first thing everyone thinks about when they think of ‘green’
How many efficient modern gas cars do you have to replace with heavy BEVs to equal shutting down a single coal power plant?
Stop the subsidies. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Stop subsidizing EVs. Stop subsidizing the trucking industry. Stop using the military to steal resources from other countries. Stop interfering in other countries’ political affairs to secure aforementioned resources. Stop wasting taxpayer dollars. Make companies account for the externalities. Remove most barriers to producing vehicles so that startups can increase in number and steal marketshare from established industries. What’s good for GM is *not* good for America, and is leading it off a cliff. Do something about the lopsided distribution of wealth and income, so that the super rich no longer have money to squander on private jets, multiple mansions, and parking garages full of supercars.
Do these things, and the real cost of gasoline would be well over $10/gallon. Everything would get more expensive, but EVs would become far cheaper relative to everything else, and the incentive would be there to make EVs as inexpensive as possible even when accounting for the environmental damage/pollution associated with producing them, opening up the possibility to vehicles, that even in spite of such a changed landscape, would be greatly cheaper to run than what is available today at today’s prices on a per mile basis, and due to economic constraints, most of the 5,000+ lb rolling codpieces on the road today would remove themselves in short order.
There would be a lot of short term and medium term pain, but in the long term, we’d be greatly better off.
But what do I know? I’m just a dude with an electrical engineering degree who built a proof of concept that only consumes 0.008-0.010 kWh/mile cruising around town at 30-35 mph and gets a range approaching 200 miles on all of 1.5 kWh. Theoretically, if I had a powerful enough charger and access to an appropriate outlet, I could recharge that pack in SECONDS, not minutes.
There are a LOT of very real costs in transportation and energy that are at best borne by (some) consumers indirectly, with many ignored completely. Give people accurate and actionable information, and let us decide for ourselves.
Unfortunately, that’ll never happen. There’s too much sketchy lawmaker money to be gained by keeping control of subsidies and dangling carrots for special interests.
I’m thinking mostly about the cost to the biosphere and to future generations, as well as to the people in the 3rd world who have to extract the materials and build the vehicles. Those groups are getting hosed. I’ve concluded that we’re not going to get a solution to any of this through politics, and that in all likelihood, Ted Kaczynski will be proven correct in the long term regarding the fate of industrial civilization. For now, enjoy the shitshow I guess. I love watching the local Hellcats take over intersections and do donuts around where I live. 🙂
I appreciate this take. Gonna go buy an old R13 fridge to keep my beers cold while I watch the world burn. Stop by, I’ve got extra lawn chairs!
Maybe one day, when I have the electric GT6 ready, I’ll take it out to such an event and join them. 🙂
Smores?
As long as you don’t mind a little bit of fallout in them.
Uranium sprinkles are my favorite. Go down heavy though.
One hurdle is that most folks aren’t willing to sacrifice safety and comfort as I (we) are, nor would current regulations allow it. I’m also an E.E. and my project cars are all around the 2000lb range, but producing these cars new would not be feasible given the current demand for safety and comfort. Only weirdos like us are willing to make these sacrifices to the gods of sport and efficiency.
The current gen Miata passes existing regulations at about 2,300 lbs. The Mitsubishi Mirage was another 300 lbs less.
Compared to the 1960s, safety was dramatically improved by MY2000. Instead of things being allowed to level out, vehicles kept getting more massive, necessitating more stringent standards on smaller cars. Because of 9,000 lb Hummer EVs and Silverado EVs, small vehicles are increasingly being regulated out of existence. The arms race in increasing vehicle size in the quest for manufacturer profits is really the problem, and the lopsided distribution of income/wealth has made the new car market in the U.S. almost exclusively the domain of the upper-middle-class and wealthier, where conspicuous consumption is valued above all else and this demographic is happy to oblige the wishes of the manufacturers.
It also won’t last. Those who put all their eggs into that basket are going to be in a world of pain. When that day comes, I sincerely hope there are no bailouts.
I’ve never understood the rabid focus on road tripping EVs.
I don’t know why the message hasn’t been focused on replacing one vehicle with an EV in multi-vehicle suburban/exurban households for commuting, errands, etc., and another ICE vehicle for longer trips. Just that would make a huge dent in emissions as well as air quality in larger cities.
I know this isn’t an affordable option for everyone, but I was at a suburban Chicago mall this weekend and if the sea of luxo-barges in the parking lots is any indication, a lot of people can afford to have a 50:50 ICE:EV garage with absolutely no range anxiety.
I’m a huge EV proponent, but I’m the first to admit that road tripping an EV in the midwest is a one way ticket to anxiety.
Unfortunately in today’s polarized environment, policymakers believe they can only push one simple idea. There is no room for subtlety. Hence “All vehicles must be converted to EVs as soon as possible to save the planet.”
Most of those luxobarges were bought on credit, because the people who operate them really couldn’t afford them. More often than not, the owner lives paycheck to paycheck. Miss a few payments, and the real owner, the bank, takes it away.
What we really need are affordable, economical EVs with long ranges. None are currently on the market, because “nobody wants them”, except none have ever been made available in the U.S. The closest thing to it, the Tesla Model 3, is selling extremely well, if that is any indication as to the potential. If the monthly cost is less than the amount of money saved by not using gasoline, then it will be a no-brainer for anyone comfortable enough to carry the debt-burden. Such a car is technically possible, but no one in the OEM space wants to build it right now, likely for fear it will cannibalize the sale of higher-margined vehicles.
“Most of those luxobarges were bought on credit, because the people who operate them really couldn’t afford them. More often than not, the owner lives paycheck to paycheck. Miss a few payments, and the real owner, the bank, takes it away.”
I’ve been hearing such doom and gloom since Reagan’s first term yet the only actual wide scale comeuppance served I’ve seen has been on those who lived frugally and saved.
The consequence of endless taxpayer-funded bailouts and bailouts of the banks when it blows up in everyone’s face. Eventually that can won’t be able to be kicked down the road anymore. When that is, I don’t know, but the day will eventually come, as a simple mathematical certainty to anyone who understands exponential growth. Humans are consuming the Earth like yeast in a petri dish, and in the case of the petri dish, it is only a single generation between it being half consumed, and entirely consumed.
I know and I expected that day to have arrived long ago. 1993, 1999, 2008 especially. But it hasn’t and I dunno if it will in my lifetime because those bailouts just keep that can moving down the road. Moral hazard? Not in this new paradym!
Grasshoppers win, ants lose. Till everyone loses.
It really does feel like something out of VEEP, but, thankfully for Granholm, things in the real world rarely play out in such n exaggerated fashion – the show would have had someone on their way to a dialysis center missing their appointment and having to be rushed to the hospital, and then become the number one trending topic on X within 3 seconds of the ambulance leaving the parking lot
I read the NPR story and I was appalled. By traveling in an entourage with ICE vehicles for support, scouting, and backup, Granholm managed to confirm all her opponents talking points.
This one gets me the most. Advance team? Get the frick outta here. Guaranteed recipe for an out of touch clueless politico. There is an entire infrastructure devoted to making sure the “elite” never come into contact with regular people, and hence have no clue what their actual challenges, struggles, hopes, and fears are.
Have you met most “regular people”? Yikes!
Address the infrastructure and/or address how EVs are currently built, and the first point will be taken care of. Massive battery packs are the reason for the long charge times and massive queues of vehicles. We can get the same range on batteries 1/3 the size if we built aerodynamically streamlined low-mass sedans and hatchbacks instead of multi-ton rolling codpieces, yielding 1/3 the charge time using the same fast charger.
The latter two points, I don’t have a solution to that. The hypocrisy is very much bi-partisan.
Are we at a point where smaller packs actually help that much? In my limited battery experience maximum charge rate is usually limited by how much damage you’re willing to do to your battery rather than battery capacity. This is obviously assuming that we have the infrastructure to put out 2C+ charge rates (which realistically we don’t so smaller batteries would help there)
It really depends upon the battery you are using. There exist inexpensive batteries on the market today that can charge from 0-80% in 5-15 minutes depending on what you get. It’s that final 20% that is really the bottleneck, although for certain types of LiPo, LiTO, and LiFePO4 batteries that last 20% is also not an issue. Some of them are dirt cheap for what you get on a per kWh basis, like the Hobbyking LiPos, but you need a damned good BMS and thermal management system to make them work, and they are fire hazards when something goes wrong(but aside from LiFePO4 and LiTO chemistires, of the lithium-based chemistries, aren’t they all fire hazards?).
For OEM EVs available, yes, the specific make and model of battery used is generally a bottleneck regarding charge time. That’s the consequence of choosing an extra 10-20% gravimetric energy density versus increasing the power-density 10-fold or more. Got to be able to advertise those range numbers…
Thanks for your response, power density vs energy density is an interesting trade-off. I’m guessing it’s hard to sell “our car has less range but charges faster”
Two of them come immediately to mind (though I think it’ll take a good, cohesive set of policies). Incentivize nuclear power and electrified trains.
Nuclear power is obvious. It has minimal environmental impact, enormous power potential, and most of the anti-nuclear sentiment is based on fears that are overblown and/or outdated. It doesn’t require batteries and can maintain appropriate load as needed.
Electrified trains may not seem as obvious, but running on fixed tracks means they could be supplied power and not rely on massive batteries. Ideally, we could have both cross-country shipping and travel, but I’m not so sure Americans are going to use trains for travel for mostly cultural reasons, even if we created a workable interstate rail network. But freight is pretty doable.
Of course, maintenance of existing track is rough, so there would need to be some sort of certainty that any new or improved rail network gets proper maintenance. And that is a big ask, especially in our current political climate. But you asked what I’d like to see, not what I think is realistic.
Realistically, it’s hard to say. A carbon tax could be helpful, but I can’t see it being successfully implemented. Restrictions on private jets would be great, but unlikely. I think the best we’ll get is a push for more solar and wind, maybe some additional EPA restrictions on industrial pollution, and perhaps some more efficiency requirements for new construction.
You know, we haven’t seen much movement on the non-car front. In a cold weather climate, how much could be saved by moving everyone to a high efficiency furnace? What about prioritizing replacement of hot water heaters and old air conditioners? Hell what about just windows?
Maybe I just travel in car-centric circles but I can’t help but think it would be really good to encourage efficiency elsewhere a lot more than we’re doing.
There actually are some decent incentives in the IRA for efficient appliances.
But yes, cars are absolutely overrepresented in the discourse about climate change.
“But yes, cars are absolutely overrepresented in the discourse about climate change”
Not when they’re just sitting there, big V8 engine idling, windows open, A/C blasting, waiting for the kids to be let out of school.
It’s worse than that. We spent tons of money moving people from oil furnaces…. to natural gas.
Cars for personal transport are 15% of our carbon emissions. We focus on cars because for a lot of people it’s not just about the climate.
I agree with you, but also according to this transportation and industry blow residential/commercial energy usage out of the water.
https://www.bts.gov/us-consumption-energy-primary-sources-sector-metric
IMO we need to focus more on reducing industrial/commercial transportation emissions, but industry has way too much political power so that’s not happening anytime soon.
For example, it’s ridiculous how much of our freight tonnage is moved by truck:
https://www.bts.gov/content/us-ton-miles-freight
Transportation includes a lot. The politics focuses on cars. Cars are a fraction of transportation. Less than half.
We need the category broken down.
I’m sure there’s a breakdown somewhere on a .gov site.
Polictics are so screwed up.
There isn’t, actually. The law says how the EPA is allowed to break it down and that’s how they break it down. It’s actually hard to find the more granular data.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transportation.php
This doesn’t break it up by personal/commercial use because of the light truck category but it’s not a bad breakdown.
If you assume light trucks is all personal transport – seems a stretch – that’s still a lower number than I expected…
Though mostly because I thought the overall transportation number was higher.
Gotta stop wasting money on EV subsidies and spend it on geothermal heat!
Clearly we should all be driving military vehicles because they only account for 2% of transportation energy usage.
Sure, but short term gains are also important. If we upgrade the furnaces/insulation/etc of homes it’s going to do a lot more immediately than replacing the current fleet with EVs, which also demands infrastructure investment.
I’m not saying transportation efficiency isn’t important, I’m saying other stuff is also important and has been relatively de-emphasized.
We have seen lots of progress in other areas, they just don’t make the news much. Some years ago an efficient furnace was 80% efficient (meaning 20% of the energy was wasted). Current requirements are a minimum of 95% efficiency. It’s extremely hard to get better than that, so there are now incentives for heat pumps. It usually takes less energy to move heat than it does to produce heat. Air conditioners have similarly gotten a lot more efficient.
Minimum insulation requirements for new construction keep getting stricter, and there are tax rebates encouraging homeowners to improve insulation in existing homes.
I agree that there are a lot more places we can save energy. However, I think we have seen quite a bit of movement there.
I think actually promoting some of those incentives would be valuable since I don’t see them very much.
It would also be valuable to look at upgrading older buildings too.
Must be a regional thing. My local utility company is constantly sending out flyers about incentives for upgrading old equipment to more modern, efficient versions.
I wonder, do you live in an area that doesn’t get much cold weather? Because my utility company actively advertises rebates and offers a free “home energy audit” where they’ll send someone out and make customized suggestions on how to best improve your building’s energy efficiency.
Oh I live in a place with the ultimate cold weather – Saskatchewan – and while there are rebates they aren’t pushed hard.
Ah, interesting! I’m in the midwestern US, it’s interesting to hear the differences.
It’s pretty icky seeing a government emplyee doing stuff like that. So much for “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Kinda makes it worse that it seems like the whole point was to “test” the infrastructure.
In reality, our govt. is “of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations”.
It’s totally a VEEP move.
They would get a far better representation of the challenges of EV charging and our infrastructure if they actually experienced it the way a “normal” citizen does, without advance teams to make things go smoothly. Then perhaps they would have a chance of attacking the problem in a meaningful way, or realizing there actually is a problem.
How do we expect politicians to address problems if they have teams of people in place to make sure that they don’t actually see that there is a problem?
Further demonstration of why I am on my second PHEV instead of going full EV.
In the last few decades, especially with the rise of social media, we’ve started treating politicians/government figures as celebrities and it doesn’t work very well. It’s all a massive joke and seems like it tends to promote absolute airheads getting in positions of power.
Celebrity airheads who parrot back whatever message the LCD of their base is promoting on social media that week.
They don’t want to solve problems, they simply want to maintain their celebrity status with sick burnz on
TwitterX.RE chargers, I thought this was a great idea. Basically, spend less effort on proprietary fast chargers and more effort on NEMA-14-50 chargers, which is the standard for RV parks and such. You get 9.6 kW/hr, which is half of the max most cars can do, but still 50% faster than many Level 2 chargers.
The key is that it’s bog standard technology: it’s essentially what a lot of houses have for electric ranges or dryers. You want something that every gas station could install, this is it. No apps, no bullshit. Yes, you’d have to solve the payment problem, but that’s secondary to solving the actually-functioning-charger problem, which nobody but Tesla has done shit about.
It would be a good thing, but it’s not really solving the problem. These types of plugs at hotels, parking garages, campgrounds, or any area where someone might spend an hour or more certainly helps – but in my experience with EVs is more of a nice to have.
Like, if I’m on a longer drive and can stop for lunch and charge – great. But it’s only adding 30-40 miles of range…so it helps, but likely doesn’t stop you from needing to stop again at a high speed charger.
Most EV owners will charge at home, so the current gap in infrastructure is high speed charging for longer trips. These don’t really help with that.
They DO help EV owners that can’t charge at home, which is important too.
I daily drive an EV and I disagree with this completely.
The worst thing about EV ownership is the lack of destination charging. I don’t want to spend a half hour at a “fast” charger. If there were a charger at the place I’m going I get to be with the people I want to be with or doing the thing I want to do rather than waiting around at a stop contrived to deal with the limitations of the infrastructure.
Every. Single. Time. That I’ve used a high speed charger in the last year / 15k+ miles of EV ownership it’s been because I couldn’t charge at my destination. Be it a hotel, or a family member’s house, or a ski resort, or an airport….
There are chargers at work, but they don’t help me because I have enough range to get to work and back. Same at any shop I need to go to.
I also don’t want to stop for “lunch” or to use the bathroom, or browse a WalMart or whatever on my way somewhere to kill some time charging. I want to be where I’m going.
It’s road-trip destinations that need chargers.
If you live within 250 miles of everywhere you ever want to visit, then yeah, your point makes sense.
I don’t want to spend 30 minutes at a fast charger either, but my parents live 500 miles from me. If the government will someday force me to drive an EV, there damn well better be plenty of fast chargers (or greatly increased range offerings).
Good news though. There are probably already enough fast chargers for that. And they would be even less likely to be full if the people there could have destination charged instead.
Also, If you have a 250 mile range EV and your parents live 500 miles away, do you want to stop to charge up for an hour twice? Or would you rather one stop and then plug in when you get there?
Obviously the second is preferable, but the fast charger is still a prerequisite because I wouldn’t buy an EV at all until the journey can be made in the same time as a gas car. My parents also live in a suburban home, so adding chargers at “destinations” is not relevant to me visiting them.
I’m not sure where you live, but I assure you that fast charger density away from the coasts is not nearly high enough to accommodate any significant fraction of road trippers driving EVs.
I’m not following the logic – destination charging is great in certain uses, like work, hotels, campgrounds, or the other places you mentioned. But for your scenario of a 250mile range EV and a 500 mile trip, you’re either fast charging 1/2x, or destination charging for like 8 hours along the way.
For most daily driving, EV’s have enough range to cover it – then you just charge at home at night. Destination charging just doesn’t give you enough range to make a difference in most cases – unless your commute is like 200 miles away.
It’s like saying we’d be better off with destination gas stations then gas stations along the route.
Destination charging is useless at work unless you’re one of the extremely few people who work more than 100 miles away from home. You don’t need to charge at work. You can charge at home.
You don’t need a destination gas station because it only takes a minute or two to gas up. The gas station on the corner or up the street is good enough.
You don’t “destination charge along the way.” You destination charge at your destination. It’s right in the name.
You need a destination charger because you drive a couple hours to see your friends or family or some attraction, and instead of visiting what you drove to visit, you have to stop at a charger for an hour and kill time first. You need the destination charger so you get that charge time out of the journey. Until we get fast charging down into the single digit minutes, destination charging is essential.
it seems like your issue is with the current state of fast charging, which is certainly reasonable.
I don’t see how you get to that…
I mean… If fast charging changed to a 5 minute fill up like a gas pump, sure. But when people talk about improving fast charging they tend to mean the current tech. More of those won’t help with my problem at all.
Is there a reason these EV chargers are always broken? I feel like the human race has a decent enough understanding of electricity at this point to design a charger that doesn’t immediately kill itself. Are they made cheaply to begin with? Are they poorly maintained? What kind of maintenance is there even do to on one of these? I want a deep dive of why these things can’t stay up.
It’s also amazing to see how other countries are handling climate change.
In the US
would quickly devolve into “THE LEFT IS COMING FOR YOUR HOTEL AIR CONDITIONER”. I’m sure those people exist in Europe too, but maybe just less than here? How do they manage to pass this legislation?
We were in Italy for 2 weeks in late June. At each hotel, the room A/C only turned on if you had your room key inserted – no waste while out of the room for the day. Most public establishments that had A/C were warmer than typically found here in the States. We got used to it pretty quickly, frankly many public places here are too cold.
Yeah, I would love if they turned the AC down at work and let me wear some damn shorts.
Yeah, do not understand the need to air condition everything down to 68 degrees here. That’s not even comfortable. I’ve spent years living/working in Europe with no AC and it’s fine. You get used to it pretty fast. As a nation, we could save a tremendous amount of energy just going from 68 to 75 and taking off our sweaters.
Yeah, during summer at work it’ll be 90+ outside and I’ll be wearing a sweatshirt inside. Silly.
Even here in the land of Satan’s buttcrack, we never drop the AC below 75 and that’s at night. People are nuts.
I find 78F perfectly doable…as long as I can walk around just in my boxers.
EV chargers are occasionally broken, and whenever one is broken it comes with an army of people willing to bitch about it.
There are a lot of chargers where somebody just installed a charger to feel good about it or check a box on a form, and then left it unmaintained forever.
On top of that, some fraction of the time it wasn’t really broken – it was somebody being an idiot, or doing some weird shit to try and get an extra discount, or trying to use some shitty charging app on their shitty phone. And somebody pulls in after them and charges up just fine.
Generally the big commercial for-pay chargers tend to work just fine.
Any policy at all would be a start. The IRA and BIL aren’t pieces of environmental legislation. They’re a political favor to undecided, white, suburban, blue-collar voters in Midwest swing states. That’s it. Which is why these policies stop making total sense when examined as a cohesive whole, especially from a climate angle. Because they’re not climate policies. And they’re not foreign policy. They’re an attempt at creating a long-term jobs base for a very small but arbitrarily important subgroup of voters.
This is the part where I suggest some grand plan that puts the climate first, but V10omous mostly beat me to it. Go read their comment. It’s a good one.
OK, this is driving me nuts: what is the PHEV in the top photo? There’s no badging, even on the wheels, and I can’t see enough of the grille to ID. I thought maybe BMW or Audi, but all of them have fussier bodywork below the bumpers.
I think it’s a skoda octavia
Excellent, thank you. I had a feeling it was something Euro.
Yeah, I only got Skoda from watching WRC clips.
They can go on strike at the Detroit auto show?
The government of Quebec just announced that they’re funding 116000 chargers in the next 5 years. Including street side ones for apartment dwellers who don’t have parking for their building.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9945768/quebec-government-investment-electric-vehicle-charging-stations/
That’s $4,400 per charging station in Maple Money, which translates to about $3,200 in Freedom bucks.
Now, if the incentive is simply a subsidy – “Install a $40,000 charger and get 10% back” – then this is going to crumble on what is likely to be a lack of personnel and equipment to actually install them. For comparison purposes, an L2 charger might only have a hardware cost of around $1500-3000CAD (and this goes up, a lot, when we’re talking commercial chargers that need to accept payment and provide telemetry, as opposed to in-home L2 chargers that can simply be pulled from an extant breaker box), but installing them curbside is going to require running power from wherever it is to the curb, providing monitoring, and so forth. With an L2 charger, you’ll get about 20 miles of range per hour at the charger in a typical-case scenario (that’s assuming 8-10kwh per hour and 2-3 miles of range per kwh in battery storage), so they’re not going to turn over very quickly; you’ll be able to charge approximately 200,000 cars per day on a network like this, which is nowhere near their goal state of 2MM electric cars.
L3 chargers are about 50-100k apiece, and will have to provide much greater telemetry, monitoring, etc.
So to say they’re “funding” is likely a bit misleading. Something that went undiscussed in this article is the complete lack of Tesla presence in the motorcade/performative EV trip. Tesla understood that the car is just part of a system that includes energy, ego, and culture, and even though I’m no fan of Musk, this seems to be something that eludes many politicians. If you incentivize building out charging stations, they’ll get built, but there’s no guarantee they’ll continue to work or function optimally. Which is – sad to say – where I think this Quebec policy is going – they can built out a bunch of not-ready-for-commercial use L2 chargers at this price point, and they’ll turn over very slowly or end up broken within 5 years.
Automakers should be allowed to sell whatever they want, consumers should be allowed to buy whatever they want. All state level EV mandates should be declared illegal.
Climate externalities should be dealt with by a carbon tax, the proceeds of which are distributed 50-50:
Half to a flat dividend paid to every citizen. This addresses affordability concerns with poorer people and incentivizes lowering emissions. Drive an EV and own an efficient furnace? You might just get a check from the government higher than your energy expenses each year.
The other half to funding moonshot research and critically, development. Fusion, affordable fission, carbon capture, geoengineering, and so on. Not just theory in the lab, but implementation at scale.
I’m not against efficiency or lowering emissions. I am against gas car drivers being the only ones to pay for the bill.
Yep, this is pretty fundamental environmental economics: price the externalities, then redistribute the income from that pricing to compensate for its resulting inequities. But I think instead of a carbon tax, you actually want what Alberta calls a “price on pollution.”
Burning a gallon of gasoline costs society about $1. Of that dollar, only about $0.25 is due to the costs of climate deterioration from greenhouse gas emissions. The rest of the cost is due to the resulting poor air quality from exhaust gas; respiratory health conditions cost society billions of dollars due to lost productivity and healthcare costs. This is also why it doesn’t make sense to push EVs everywhere: the greenhouse gas emissions of burning a gallon of gas is the same wherever you are, but the number of people affected by the resulting air quality degradation is way higher (and costlier) in higher-density areas.
Anyway, now you’ve ended up with a gas tax of about $1. Great, what about EVs? Well at this point we understand pretty well what the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions are for the manufacture of a traction battery on a per-kWh basis. So throw a tax on every vehicle MSRP–hybrids, PHEVs, full EVs, whatever–that scales linearly with battery kWh. Now you’ve covered the pollution related to EV manufacture. Except you haven’t, because CO2 emissions are one of just 10 environmental quality indicators used to analyze the life cycle sustainability of a product (at least according to the TRACI environmental impact method. There are others). So do you put a price on the others, like eutrophication and ozone? And I guess we need to tax the electricity as well, so you’re looking at higher taxes in places like Wyoming and virtually none in places like Washington state.
And let’s add the Autopian peanut gallery’s favorite monster that prowls through the dark night: weight. Vehicle weight absolutely has unpriced externalities. It’s proportional to higher levels of pedestrian fatalities and to higher levels of road degradation. The construction equipment used to fix those roads burns plenty of diesel too. So maybe you throw an exponential weight tax onto the MSRP of all vehicles to cover that externality.
This is all just to say that when you get into the details of pricing externalities, you end up with some complicated policies and arbitrarily-drawn lines. Which might be OK! But as much as I (and most economists) appreciate a carbon tax, they aren’t necessarily trivial to implement in an equitable way.
Agreed, and as I’ve said in other comments, there is often a fundamental non-alignment between maximizing equity and maximizing emissions reduction. At some point I predict the Democrats will be put to the test over which they care about most.
You can probably do both by un-fucking our zoning laws so that housing stock can keep up with demand and people can actually afford to live where they want to live (and where they work). Cutting your transportation-related emissions by 50% can be accomplished either by selling everyone a PHEV or by just enabling people to drive 50% less, but only one of those makes money for the shareholders.
The idea that we can save the world through zoning is bullshit.
Stop sucking all the jobs out of the smaller cities into contrived economic districts that exist to justify transit projects that only make sense at certain density levels and then we have plenty of housing stock. Ask most of those people who can’t afford to move to where their job is what they really want and you’ll learn they’d rather their job was close to where they already live rather than be able to afford to move to where their job went.
Except their government moved their job to the big city, so they have no choice but to either commute from their small city on the outskirts or pay big bucks to move to the bigger city.
Sincerely,
– A person who lives in biking distance of 10,000,000 square feet of office space that’s now empty because the state paid all the companies to move the jobs to Boston; so he commutes 3 hours a day by car instead
It almost doesn’t even matter in Eastern/Southeastern MA anymore. It’s ALL expensive. I work in Southcoast, my job is near where I grew up. While it hasn’t moved, the housing process have skyrocketed. I looked at real estate prices the other day, the cheapest single family home (900sq/ft) in the town I work in is just under 400K and the mortgage would be 90% of my take-home, and I do “okay” for the area. It’s an issue everywhere of course, but I also blame Boston for this. For years people who work in Boston have been moving to Southcoast, and now that stupid commuter rail is making it even worse. I commute 60 miles a day from RI I’d like to live closer, but I can’t even afford an apt in this area anymore. I like the town where I live, but it’s mostly tourism jobs that don’t pay anywhere near COL for the area. Most people that work there commute in from somewhere else. Only reason I can afford it is because my landlord is a saint who hasn’t raised my rent in years.
They think they’re going to fix it with high speed rail to Springfield. Like people would be happier in Springfield if they could just get to work in Boston faster.
How about if you do some economic development in Springfield? Let Lowell have some jobs back. Or Andover. Or Marlborough. Or Worcester. Then we don’t need a fucking train to fucking Boston. Or cheaper rent on a closet away from our home towns.
-sigh-
Right? Spread that shit out. Why do all the jobs have to be in the Boston area?? I can’t imagine anyone actually WANTS to live in the Boston area.
I absolutely hate Boston, if for no other reason that I can’t just get in my car and head north when I want, I have to plan my departure/return times around *hoping* to not get stuck in Boston traffic.
Providence isn’t nearly as bad, but still sucks balls too. I HATE living so close to two major cities. In RI, the entire state has become completely unaffordable.
“Yep, this is pretty fundamental environmental economics:”
What you go on to describe after this is the standard bullshit about making something that isn’t actually a market sound like a market in a misguided effort to get buy in from opposition that you didn’t bother listening to.
The worst part about it though is that it ends up being a lie in it self because the policy invariable ends up being a pile of favors to politically connected interests that are billed like a farcical “market based” solution to constituents who think they’re pulling a fast one on their idiotic capitalist peers.
One thing to consider: Germany tried your proposed approach with home solar and it caused a death spiral.
At first, it worked. Costs were lowered for home solar, it got the ball rolling. Eventually, it hit critical mass where the wealthy could install solar and keep their cheap energy but people who couldn’t afford it were burdened with subsidizing more and more of it. The government had to step in to keep electricity affordable for people that couldn’t afford to install solar.
Point being a carbon tax can have unintended consequences where it could penalize people who can’t afford EVs. My personal opinion is the carbon tax is a great idea, but it has to predict the side effects like this.
Source: Planet Money podcast episode 965 released 1/17/2020, “Das Green Old Deal”
If implemented economy-wide, it seems to me the tax would be protected from effects like that, as some things are easier to electrify right now than others. If the tax needs to adjusted up or down based on technical realities, it should ideally be able to do so.
In any case, it’s the same tradeoff I mentioned below between “fairness” and faster emissions reductions. The wealthy emit more, so any “pay to reduce” type scheme will benefit them disproportionally. If it’s politically impossible to give incentives to rich people, the cost for that will likely be more emissions for longer. For some, that may be an acceptable tradeoff.
Did they happen to mention the impact of the loss of nuclear and the stranglehold of Russian gas?
“Automakers should be allowed to sell whatever they want, consumers should be allowed to buy whatever they want. All state level EV mandates should be declared illegal.
Climate externalities should be dealt with by a carbon tax”
Sounds like a coal rolling utopia.
If people want to contribute to an environmental R&D fund by needlessly burning $6/gallon diesel, I am in favor of letting them do so.
$6/gallon diesel is no deterrent. That’s still just pennies per victim.. The YouTube clicks alone are worth more.
Meh