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by spaceflunky
2786 days ago
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Your last statement is false for a variety of reasons: 1.) with sufficient research and decrease in cost, we can make it so that electric vehicles can be "refilled" as quickly as fossil fuel vehicles. 2.) for 99% of trips, having 200 miles or more of range is sufficient. across the aggregate of all trips made, it's very rare that people drive more than 200 miles without out a stop of a few hours in between. For those edge cases where people go on long haul trips, you can either elect to have a bigger battery or invest in dc fast charging. 3.) if you are optimizing for times of natural disasters, grid failures, or scheduled/rolling blackouts I would actually pick an electric vehicle. How can you fill up your fossil fuel vehicle when the infrastructure to harvest crude oil, refine it, distribute it, hold it, and sell it has been knocked out? it's easy to forget the massive massive logistics chain that goes into getting you a single gallon of gas. Whereas, I can throw up some solar panels on my home with a battery and have an renewable fuel source completely independent of everything else that is good for hundreds of thousands of miles. Fossil fuel just seems more viable because there is more infrastructure that has been built over time, but that can easily be disrupted. Whereas you could set up a windmill in the middle of nowhere connected to a battery pack that is collecting energy for electric cars that barely needs any maintenance. You're falling into the trap of assuming fossil fuel is "easier" because we have put so much effort behind it over the last 100 years. When in fact fossil fuels is an extremely difficult and disruptable energy distribution system. |
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1) There is a roughly 15-20 year lag time between battery technology breakthroughs and their appearance in retail products. As their are no current battery technologies with meaningful lifespans, sufficient power output, and a recharge time measured in seconds, my point stands that for the foreseeable future EVs simply cannot compete. And that doesn't even take into account the 10-20 years of research into hybrid/fuel cell/NG technology to make those vehicles more efficient.
2) Clearly you've never commuted in Southern California. Commutes of 100 miles each way aren't rare. SoCal is by far the largest market for EVs and other non-fuel vehicles.
3) Clearly you've never lived through a fire or rolling blackout. A pump can be powered by a short-lived battery at the refill site. Moreover, physical fuels have this amazing property called "physical storage" which allows them to be transported and stored entirely without the use of electricity. An electric recharge station is dead without power.
3b) Good luck with that. By the time your solar panels have recharged your car enough to make a trip to the corner market, a fuel cell car could have made a cross-country trip. And back.
3) Windmills are high-maintenance. EVs are almost as high-maintenance as ICEs. Engines are the most reliable parts of a car. The unreliable parts are common to EVs and ICEs. And as Tesla has demonstrated, it's quite possible for EVs to be even less reliable than the worse ICEs.
4) Electric charging would require us to make immense upgrades to the existing electrical transmission grid, which includes finding ways to improve transmission 100fold. That would cost tens of billions. Fuel/NG/fuel cell based distributions systems are far more efficient because there are many fewer "stations" that need to be built/upgraded to handle demand.