[trhway]

>New ways of wasting energy in maximum comfort, all around.

"Over the course of 267 miles (430 km) and 8 hours, the car used 2.6 miles/kWh (23.7 kWh/100 km), bearing in mind that those miles were all driven in Germany and include running at the car's top speed of 140 mph (225 km) on derestricted autobahns."

ie. around 100 mpg. It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

[WA]

> It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

It is 100 % waste and you don't "save" the planet. Saving the planet = no car. Yeah, an EV is less wasteful than an ICE. Just don't think you save the planet.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Plus the break-even for an EV vs ICE car is around the 100,000k mark, if I recall correctly, due to the energy required to build the battery in the EV.

So: it’s complicated. It’d take me over ten years to do 100,000 kilometres, so probably the best car is the one I already have.

[tashbarg]

This [1] claims 21,725km for the US and only 13,518km for Norways energy mix. The 100,000km number is quite old and was corrected down and down again several times due to more efficient battery production and changing energy mix.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Excellent, thanks for the update :)

[TacticalCoder]

> Saving the planet = no car.

Saving the planet = maximum one kid per couple.

[tashbarg]

While we are a lot of humans, we are nowadays far away from having too much kids.

Worldwide, we are already close to the replacement rate and projections see us falling below by 2070.

Most of the population growth is actually not "new kids getting born", it's "folks getting older than the generations before".

So, if population growth is your concern, don't tell people to have less kids. Tell them to stop getting so old.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...

[TheSpiceIsLife]

You might enjoy this book, in which philosopher Ken Wilber humorously suggests we should tax incentives euthanasia for the elderly:

Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free is a polemical 2002 novel by American philosopher Ken Wilber, principally designed to explain Wilber's integral theory and to explain his concept of "Boomeritis". Wilber characterizes this as the deadly combination of a modern egalitarian worldview with a deep unquestioned narcissism commonly held by Baby Boomers and their children in the green meme of Spiral Dynamics, as opposed to Wilber's universal integralism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomeritis

[imtringued]

Saving the planet = every human commits suicide

Do whatever you can. The most effective strategies are often the least interesting.

[trhway]

that is a fallacy. Passenger vehicles are responsible for 10% of global emissions - so whether to drop it 4x (100mpg instead of 25mpg) to 2.5% or drop it to 0% wouldn't matter much. And using renewables for electricity we basically drop emissions to the rounding error around 0.

[adrianN]

Using global emissions is a neat trick here, because globally almost everyone can't afford a car.

[morsch]

Emissions will have to be reduced across all sectors, so if you merely manage to drop it to 2.5% of current emissions, that'll be a larger percentage in 2030 and 2050. If the trend continues and more people get more cars and drive them more (saving the world all the while), the share will increase further.

Of course an infinite supply of green energy would solve everything, but unfortunately that's not available. We're not supplying enough green electricity to cover current demands, much less enough to cover the roughly doubled demand if we were to shift all transportation to EVs.

[tonyedgecombe]

>It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

It's less wasteful than the ICE equivalent but in no way can it be described as saving the planet. If you are really serious about saving the planet then you buy a bicycle.

[trhway]

>If you are really serious about saving the planet then you buy a bicycle.

bicycle is 100miles/kwh. Human body is 25% efficient, so it is just 25 miles/kwh for the energy coming in the food - so for all the bicycle disadvantages (low speed, open to elements, no meaningful cargo capacity) it is only meager 10x difference with that 2+ tons BMW i4 (and only 7x difference with my Prius Plugin).

The kwh in human food is much dirty than kwh for electric car, especially when electricity comes from renewables. The food requires tremendous expenditure of energy to produce it as well as it causes tremendous impact on the planet ecosystem due to agriculture.

[morsch]

I think the implied assumption is that you don't spend 6 hours a day riding the bike you just bought. Though conveniently, the obesity rates are high enough that even this wouldn't require an increase in calorie intake in the top polluting countries and would in fact be an overall improvement to national health. And you'd still produce much lower emissions.

On a sidenote, >10% of conventional fuel is made via agriculture, and seemingly around 5% of electricity production in the US, 10% in EU28[1].

[1] https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/zahlen-und-fakten/europa/751...

[gitanovic]

As other people have pointed out, the efficiency should be calculated over the car lifetime, and including the average efficiency at which the electricity is produced in the areas where the car test was run... Germany produces a LOT of electricity from COAL, so we are replacing benzin and diesel with coal... not very smart in my eyes.

[imtringued]

Germany produces a LOT of electricity from renewables as well.

If you include nuclear then around 60% of the generated electricity was produced with low CO2 emissions.

[jnsaff2]

That top speed part must have been very short as seen from a recent modelY video keeping that 220ish km/h takes about 110kW of power.

As opposed to about 15kW for 90km/h.

[morsch]

This new ice cream is low fat, I can eat as much of it as I want!

[lmm]

100mpg in non-city driving is an improvement over the average driver but not a game-changing one; that's maybe 40% better than a small car, and significantly worse than a light motorbike. When you take into account the increased road wear and space taken up it might even be a net negative on the whole.

[zucker42]

A fairer comparison would be emissions over the car's lifetime. The electric SUV would still almost certainly come out on top, but it's probably closer than the 100 vs 15 MPG would make it seem.

[thow-58d4e8b]

> Battery manufacturing life-cycle emissions debt is quickly paid off. An electric vehicle’s higher emissions during the manufacturing stage are paid off after only 2 years compared to driving an average conventional vehicle, a time frame that drops to about one and a half years if the car is charged using renewable energy. Approximately half of a battery’s emissions come from electricity used in the manufacturing process

From https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

The important takeaway is that greener electricity grid will help both the emissions from manufacturing, as well as emissions from usage

[leoedin]

Electricity made from fossil fuels is about 40% efficient (depending on method) - so that 100mpg in the car turns into 40mpg overall.

The big benefit electric cars have is obviously that they can use renewable energy to charge, which reduces the carbon intensity of their electricity. But that's not a given - it depends hugely on location.