prices are not where an average person could go out and buy one in the usa $7.25 is still the minimum wage not to mention rising costs of insurance and property taxes and some states tack on extras fee for certain things and some insurance companies are leaving states making the cost jump even more
cheaper gasoline vehicles are barely affordable if at all for most even used ones
what about the battery and materials having to be mined and what have you
are the workers from material gathering to the final build paid a fair living wage
in some places such as tennessee the charging stations for electric are shutting down
It does, because the batteries for electric cars have a reliance on rare earth metals.
Lol the downvotes are hilarious. We will not solve climate change with electric cars. Public transit in walkable communities with niche uses for cars and trucks are the only way forward.
As seen in the Wikipedia article, sodium ion batteries also require rare earth metal anodes, or toxic materials like mercury which is also bad. Better than lithium ion, but still generally not great. The best option would be aluminum air batteries, which should be easily accessible and are extremely recyclable
perhaps you’d be interested in the fact that I grew up in a very rural area. The nearest city was Rochester, MN, roughly 30 minutes away if you were going 70 in the 55 on US 52. I agree that rural areas will need cars to go from their houses to towns and cities, but I’ve thought extensively about public transit in rural areas, and I think it’s far easier than folks think.
The battery tech is starting to move away from rare earth, with LFP not using cobalt and sodium-ion not using lithium. And in any case, emissions are by far our most pressing problem compared to issues with rare earth extraction.
Am German, can confirm. Parking garages do indeed exist here. Germany is very car centric, but fortunately not as bad as the US. Our cities do also have mostly working public infrastructure that makes it possible for lots of people to get to the Christmas market and drink several mugs of mulled wine without the need for overly huge parking garages.
It seems rare, that the whole train station was closed (probably not one of the bigger cities) and you must have stayed rather late, while christmas markets usually already open in the afternoon (or even earlier) and the sun sets early in their season, so there’s plenty of time to enjoy them while they are most beautiful (at night) and still make it home by train in a lot of places.
That being said, in more places than you’d expect, you won’t find convenient train connections after midnight, if at all. That makes using public transit almost useless for partying. I remember living in a somewhat rural area as a young partygoer and if I wanted to go to the city for partying, the choice was to either go home before the city folk even really started going, or keep partying until the clubs closed and then hang around with the punks at the railroad station to wait for the first train in the morning. Having a designated driver and going by car was the usual option.
While its nice to take holdlidays, I dont think its reasonable to shutdown necessary public infrastructure on holidays. Imagine if the electricity and water systems also shutdown on holidays.
I can imagine them being cheaper and I only would use people to transit other people when you can have 40 people or so. Where security on big vehicles like bus or train need more caution. A person driving a single person feels like a waste of time or smth. Driverless cars could also be more efficient in routing.
Yes! And you know what, at that point, given the size of a minimum viable car, we could use some kind of algorithm to match people that are going similar places, and put them together to be more efficient. And I bet we’d find that a lot of the large scale transit patterns are common large parts of the population, so we could even use some kind of segregated, higher speed, more frequent vehicle for that.
While we’re at it, we might as well just warehouse some of these vehicles around places where the common cores end and start, and then we would only have to match one end of the trip.
I think that the solution is automated rail transit. Being in a dedicated place with lower likelihood of encountering people removes nearl every issue that self-driving cars have. Being automated means that 24/7 schedules are possible. If there are enough trains and high enough saturation, need for cars and even taxis is removed.
One train transports 100s of people, the driver is a fairly low proportion of the cost. And there’s other members of staff that are required even in a fully automated system. (network monitoring, security). Removing the driver is a nice step, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the economics of rail transport. If a route is uneconomic, that’s going to be the case without a driver too.
Removing the driver mainly removes barriers to running late - meaning things like drunk driving can be significantly reduced since transit in the US is virtually non-existant at drunk’o’clock, effectively pressuring people into bad decisions when their judgement is the poorest.
If a route is uneconomic, that’s going to be the case without a driver too.
Infrastructure is vital to economic and other activity. It needs to be treated as an investment or necessary cost, not a business. Doing otherwise inevitably results in collapsing bridges, toxic spills, and other symptoms of neglect as corners are cut to maximize profit.
We’re in agreement that night trains are a good thing, but you should push for them whether or not your trains are driverless.
You misunderstand my use of economic. Everything has a cost and a benefit which can theoretically be calculated, with infrastructure like transit that benefit extends beyond fares. Typically governments will do this calculation when deciding whether to pursue a new project, they include all the planning, construction, running costs, and externalities e.g. climate impact, and all the benefits from fares, economic activity, new opportunities for industries and development, ect. This produces a cost benefit ratio. In my research with transport, the best value projects are local safety improvements like cycleways, sometimes the ratio is as good as 10. Large public transport projects are maybe 1-2, and large motorways are usually less than 1. My point was a train driver is a small cost that isn’t going to significant affect this. Of course, this analysis often gets ignored and the overpriced motorway gets built anyway.
In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they’ve considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.
We’re so used to ICE cars that they’ve contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.
They already do this in Europe and other countries where mixed car/pedestrian environments are more common. Electric cars must have some form of audible signature, usually a quiet whirring sound.
I’m sure this is unpopular this community but I feel like “fuck cars” folks are either living in a dream world where public transport can answer everyone’s transportation needs. If you live in a city with all the amenities you need where public transport is good and economically viable sure, “Fuck cars”, but if you don’t…
I’m not a farmer, my nearest grocery store is 8 miles away. It’s rural and the cost of living is extremely cheap. it also snows a ton and often drops to sub zero temps.
It doesn’t. But that’s okay, because nobody gives a shit about special snowflakes way off the tail end of the bell curve like you – solving the problem for the 80% of everybody else, for whom reasonable solutions do apply, is plenty good enough!
Demanding that any solution be perfect enough to solve it for literally everyone including you is just bad-faith reactionary bullshit.
Bad example that you provided. I do not lease or make payments on my car. I may be on the end of the been curve but you save assume every person ever pays what’s in the articles headlines.
Using the calculator literally provided in the article you are citing my monthly cost for my car is $120. A lot less than the $1000/month they say as an average.
I’m also saving way more than that per month in rent by living where I do outside of a town or city.
Not a bait. I guess I belong to a small group of people who decide to make life-changing commitments in order to minimize their impact on the environment.
You assume your proposal is an “easy” solution. The main reason I live here in the first place is because the surrounding cities, that do have amenities and public transport, are much more expensive to live in. Is not that the town I live in is large in area, it’s quite walkable, it simply doesn’t have much.
It also reminds me of a guy I used to know who said he didn’t need a watch. Claiming he didn’t need to know the time that often. But what did he do? He asked everyone around him what the time was instead. Quite often. Oh and he was usually late to class.
Why am I telling you about him? Because it is the same sentiment as “I don’t need a car, if I want to see my friends (and relatives) I simply ask them to travel to me.”
You are clearly pointing one if the real solutions to individual motorized transportation, which is shared motorized transportation. In my area, people constantly borrow vehicles, equipments, tools and so on.
If you only have the option to drive and it looks like it will never change where you live, then yes, driving electric is better than driving an ICE car. You’re not the problem for needing to live your life with the limited options you have access to. However, that does not mean the intrinsic problems with cars disappear the instant they become electric, and this meme is mainly meant to respond to the techbro people who think just because electric cars exist now it makes transit obsolete or it solves literally everything wrong with cars in general, and use that to actively resist public transportation or attempt to turn public opinion against it. I should have added additional context to make that clearer.
Well I do drive electric now but I could not get by without a car. Honestly I would love it if public transport were viable for everyone. In London and Zurich I have experienced public transport that worked. Where I live a 1 hour car journey can mean a 3 or 4 hour trip by public transport and only if you are travelling at the right time of day. Unfortunately I don’t necessarily get to choose when I make some of those trips because it is part of my job. Unfortunately here, public transport is slow, expensive and unreliable here.
I know electric cars don’t solve everything, and maybe this meme is not exactly what I’m responding to, but for a lot of people, public transport is just not a viable alternative.
Like I said I know it’s not going to be a popular sentiment here.
Someday I am going to get a used adventure bike, and modify it to be a hybrid capable of electric only at low speeds / low acceleration, and charge that with solar panels.
Why not an electric bicycle?
Theyre astoundingly overpriced for what they are.
Why not public transportation?
Well obviously use that whenever possible, but I like the hybrid concept because if you run out of fuel, you can do electric running, or if power goes out, you can charge batteries or run important equipment via the gas motor going through a transformer into a battery yada yada.
That and it’ll be useful to be able to cruise around on said motorcycle when our modern american civilized society finally collapses into chaos.
I am all for urban redesign projects and locally sustainable diverse economies and all that, but i dont have faith enough of that will happen quickly enough to basically make it totally safe to just stay in one particular metro area.
EDIT: I suppose maximum utility apocalypse bike would also be capable of running on ethanol, and maybe even somehow whatever the proper name for the fuel refined from fast food restaurant grease is, forget the name. Ive heard it makes your vehicle smell like french fries though lol.
Ebikes aren’t actually overpriced. Unless you buy them from Specialized. All those components are actually just that expensive. I can tell you this for sure because I compared the cost of building my own electric bike and buying a prebuilt one and I ended up going prebuilt.
I agree with you from the perspective of actual parts costs.
I probably should have specified this a bit better, but when I say they are overpriced for what they are, this is more what I mean:
(disclaimer I do not have total comprehensive knowledge of the entire ebike market, please correct me if I am wrong)
Generally speaking I see ebikes going for something like $1k to $3k, and generally speaking you get a top speed of about 20 to 25 mph, and a fully electric unassisted drive of about 40 miles, unless you pay a good deal more for bigger batteries/more advanced drive train, basically.
Sure, this is neat amd useful for people who do not need to move long distances.
But I guess you could say I dont fall into that use case demographic.
And I can get a used motorbike with significantly greater speeds, range, and greater off road capabilities in that same price range.
That’s fair. I live in a city of 100k people with bike paths or lanes to ~70% of where I’d want to go. So my life is on an ebike. I truly believe they are an important part of the solution to the problems car dependence caused.
I can tell you for sure that my ebike is cheaper in 3 years than a motorcycle in 1 because I first, don’t pay for gas, second, do all my own repairs and maintenance (I can’t do this on a motorcycle - I learned about my bike after getting it), and third, no secret fees like registration, insurance, or licensing. I paid 2,000 upfront for my ebike and with the price of my bike and all of my owning costs combined it isn’t even hitting 3,000 altogether. I’ve been able to save MASSIVELY because of this. Ah, and I take it out in the winter time as well. There’s been a lot less snow this year for us but I still don’t see motorbikes out when I’m on my ebike.
So I will unironically shill for ebikes because I believe in them as car replacements, since I live that life.
Our ebike takes about the same amount of time as driving for most of our trips and nearly halves public transit time to some places we go. It was about 2k, and for that price it has been an actual steal. I think we put about 1.5k miles on it in the first year, and cost wise I think it’ll break even at about double that.
It doesn’t sound like ebikes are overpriced, it sounds like you don’t find value in what an ebike does. And that’s totally ok, especially if you’re advocating for making your community more healthy and doing your best to live that way too.
It is a real shame that ebikes weren’t subsidized like electric cars are, that would have changed the equation a lot for folks who are more on the fence and could have started a shift where more people want safer places to use their new bikes.
Edit: just read your reply to the other folks, you get it. I gotta wake up more before I start commenting
Ebikes are great for a lot of people, but my particular desired use case for a vehicle makes them less than ideal.
That being said I am the kind of person who would also just enjoy the challenge of actually hybridizing some kind of motorbike on both a conceptual amd mechanical level, as well as the skills I can learn from that, and probably a lot of people just want to buy something that more or less just works, which is of course entirely reasonable.
You forgot about the material extraction and carbon emissions for manufaturing a new electric car. Can someone link the data for it please?
Edit: The article in below reply says it best. Lithium extraction and manufaturing emissions for electric cars are bad for the environment but still dozens of times better than ICE cars lifecycle emissions
It heavily depends on the battery technology used in that particular vehicle and the economy of scale. The emissions reduce as the build batches increase
Dunno, in Lithuania and around they are getting bigger, not sure about the western Europe though. But seeing every car brand making bigger versions of each car (Yaris cross, Peugeot 2008, Volkswagen t-cross and many more)makes me think they probably are getting bigger there as well.
it’s already hard to fit a small car to park in the city, i don’t understand how people can even think to buy a car that’s longer than 4 meters. Roads and houses were built during the baby boom when cars weren’t used by everyone, so for example in my area there are 0.8 car parks per family.
Then i see my cousin, living alone, single, no family buying a huge 5,5 meters SUV “because in the next three years i plan to move, bigger space is useful”. Could rent a van for 100 euro a day instead of spending 10k euro extra for a monster…
I mean when it burns it burns, it’s a total either way, it just blocks traffic longer than a normal car, with the upside of not leaking burnable liquids that can do damage in larger areas.
Car fires from ICE's are magnitudes more common and cause more damage every year because of this. If you spent half a second to search this you'd find that reports indicate that per 100,000 vehicles sold in their respective powertrains in their lifetime, 25 electric cars catch fire, and 1,530 gas vehicles catch fire. While searching this, something that caught me off guard and surprised me was that hybrids are even higher, 3,475! The more you know.
Public transit would be great if you didn’t have to ride with other people. That’s my real problem with it in America at least; there are always loud and gross people aboard. My town has phenomenal bud infrastructure, but people drive because it’s faster, and because you don’t have to be around undesirable people.
Maybe public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod, which would be publicly owned. That way you could still go skiing/hiking/etc, since mass transportation to those places is very difficult due to low volume.
or you could bring in headphones to public transport like the rest of us
also lmao “public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod”, you’re either advocating for taxis or straight up segregation
Emission standards are based on size and weight. Bigger vehicles have less strict emission standards so rather than giving a fuck about the environment car manufacturers found a loophole by just making everything bigger.
Something people overlook when the word “loophole” is used in federal regulation. Mot of the time those loopholes are intentionally put there so that the industry that is the target of regulation doesn’t have to do anything. And since congressmen don’t actually write regulation, understand what they are regulating, nor give a fuck about anything besides getting paid, they all vote for legislation that has those “loopholes,” and can shrug their shoulders when the “intent” of the regulation is ignored.
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