Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Lone Cat wrote:
There's a megatrend suggesting that the Electric Vehicles (like Elon Musk's Tesla) will completely replace the Internal Combustion vehicles within the next decade (or even THIS decade)....

0% chance. Anyone who genuinely believes this is out of their mind and has no concept of reality.

Gas is here to stay. I don't expect to see it going away in my lifetime. I do see Hybrids getting more popular though, but there will always be a need for a powerful truck that's only gonna run right on gas.

I like the idea of electric cars, but like others said the infrastructure isn't there and in my area anyway, a tesla is just another range rover or benz, people buy em because they need to show off their salaries. For EV to be mainstream, it's gotta be the same price as a regular gas car, if not cheaper. It's gotta be easy to recharge it, getting a full charge in 5 minutes like gas, or like solar panels in the roof to charge as you drive, but solar power isn't good enough for that.

My daily commute is around 65 miles round trip now. I'd love to get better gas mileage, but I don't want to pay extra up front for a hybrid where I won't see a return on the gas savings by the time I trade it in for something new. Until hybrids or electric can actually be cheaper and as convenient or more convenient that gas, I don't see them taking over at all. Would be nice though.

 d-usa wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

2) Lack of charging stations. You can only travel on routes where there are charging stations, and those just don't exist in all places yet. So an electric vehicle really limits where you can go currently. There are gas stations everywhere. It also takes much longer to recharge a car vs just refilling a gas tank.

It's worth noting that a lot of the reason gas powered vehicles work in any real capacity is that we've invested an inconceivable amount of resources into structuring our society around supporting them.

Which present another problem because a lot of our funding mechanism for maintaining our road network is based on the internal combustion engine. If people don't use fuel, which is taxed to fund the roads, then nobody is paying for the roads.

So then you have to figure out how to tax electricity to make up for lost fuel taxes, which doesn't help when people charge at home.

Yup.

We will likely have to move road maintenance taxes to a flat rate per vehicle tacked on to registration. At the very least, this needs to be done with Electric vehicles right now which currently contribute nothing to road repair.

Vehicle charge stations at least could have some taxes placed on their use, but as you say home use would be trickier. We'd basically have to have the electric companies all add a tax meter onto any electric vehicle charging stations.

Until they can charge as fast as a petrol car, have similar ranges and have a long battery life. Aka more than 10 years.

Then no.
Until that point then the petrol engines are gonna be here to stay.

I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

In the future, cars will run on nuclear fusion. You will never have to worry about fuel again!
Nuclear power is the future, it is clean (unlike energy from fossil fuels) and efficient (unlike 'green' energy). We just need to make it more safe.

And besides, what is cooler than a car powered by a nuclear reactor?


Also, just as an aside I want to mention that cars aren't really a problem when it comes to pollution. It is ships and aircraft that are the big polluters. Modern cars are already relatively clean. I read somewhere that 15 large cargo ships produce more pollution than all cars in the world combined. And there are thousands of large cargo ships... That is where real gains are to be made

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

Though combined with some of the projected numbers on accident reduction (90%!) from self-driving cars, it might still be safer! Provided all cars are self-driving of course.

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

Nah, it's being comfortable and excessive size that makes road going vehicles heavy more than crash structure. People love their comfort more than they care about fuel consumption.

I'd rather have an accident in one of the 250 to 400kg race cars I helped build than most street cars (granted they are only designed for 1 person, the larger ones can probably transport 2 comfortably with a little modification, the smaller ones could transport 2 uncomfortably with a little modification ).

I understand people want big cars for the times they need big cars, but the absurdity when you look around in peak hour traffic and see most vehicles in the range of 1500 to 2000kg with 1 occasionally 2 people being transported.

As much as I love driving and hate the idea of self driving vehicles, one advantage of them will potentially be the ability to really cut down on the huge amount of mass currently required to move people, and if we can combine that with roads that those self driving vehicles can navigate without stopping all the time the power required to move people could be a fraction of what it is currently, making the choice of powerplant far less important.

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

It isn't, but you don't need the monstrous cars that populate the roads in the cheap-petrol parts of the world to keep you safe, either.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

Though combined with some of the projected numbers on accident reduction (90%!) from self-driving cars, it might still be safer! Provided all cars are self-driving of course.

Yeah. And that is why we will never get to the point where we have all self-driving cars. Self-driving cars, in order to reduce accidents, will require all other cars on the road to be self-driving and be able to communicate with each other.

This however will not be possible during any transition period. During which time you'll have a massive increase in accidents caused by the self-driving cars blindly following their programming around human drivers. Which will lead to outcry against self-driving cars and eventually a ban on self-driving cars.

Thats why self-driving cars are a bad idea. The transition period will kill any possibility of them getting accepted.

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

You cannot have both.
Unless there a huge change in materials, so that a material can be strong as modern cars with a fraction of the weight.

Modern metal structure is weight, engine blocks, etc. All weight.

To make a super light car requires somthing new, new materials, new designs, but retain the same strength.?
That's a big ask to achieve.

Even electric cars can be heavy.
They need alot of batteries to store power.

Best trade off is likely hybrids, that utilise new tech and lighter but stronger metals to make maximum efficiency out of a petrol engine combined with electric moters and advanced batteries to help store maximum power.

nfe wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

It isn't, but you don't need the monstrous cars that populate the roads in the cheap-petrol parts of the world to keep you safe, either.

As an American who has been to many parts of the world where they drive "little" cars, I have seen many first hand accounts where our "big lumbering" American vehicles allowed us to walk away from an accident, while those "light weight fuel efficient" cars were death traps.

Sorry, but I'll take my tank any day of the week.

 djones520 wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

It isn't, but you don't need the monstrous cars that populate the roads in the cheap-petrol parts of the world to keep you safe, either.

As an American who has been to many parts of the world where they drive "little" cars, I have seen many first hand accounts where our "big lumbering" American vehicles allowed us to walk away from an accident, while those "light weight fuel efficient" cars were death traps.

Sorry, but I'll take my tank any day of the week.

It would be interesting to see any stats or research regarding which is better (safer).

European car manufacturers and NCAP seem to do a good job and have steadily improved safety on our little cars.

Anyway.

Interesting to note Chinas recent moves. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41218243
If Europe and Asia steadily move forwards where does the US go?

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

Though combined with some of the projected numbers on accident reduction (90%!) from self-driving cars, it might still be safer! Provided all cars are self-driving of course.

Yeah. And that is why we will never get to the point where we have all self-driving cars. Self-driving cars, in order to reduce accidents, will require all other cars on the road to be self-driving and be able to communicate with each other.

This however will not be possible during any transition period. During which time you'll have a massive increase in accidents caused by the self-driving cars blindly following their programming around human drivers. Which will lead to outcry against self-driving cars and eventually a ban on self-driving cars.

Thats why self-driving cars are a bad idea. The transition period will kill any possibility of them getting accepted.

Only because people are dumb.

I certainly hope the science and technology education improves to the state of countries like some of those in Europe, where the outcry isn't against self-driving cars but rather against the humans who blindly held to their own erroneous fuckups and wouldn't upgrade to an autonomous vehicle.

As battery costs drop - electric car ranges increase. Right now the goal is to make an affordable EC that can go 200 miles without recharge. In 10 years it will 400 miles. Then it will be making batteries that charge faster. In about 20-30 gasoline will be rendered obsolete and we will tell our children how we used to destroy the planet to dig up a limited resource when all the energy we need to run the planet falls on a 1 square mile section of uninhabited deserts in death valley. In europe it's already cheaper and more efficient to do a solar start up than a coal one. The future is already here.

 djones520 wrote:
Within a decade? Not even a chance. 50 years? Sure.

UK/France have proposed banning conventional internal combustion sales by 2040 (23 years away), and to be honest I doubt there will be many after about 2030. By that point it'll make so much more sense to go for an electric/hybrid. If I was buying new, I'd be getting a hybrid (Mitsubishi Outlander - reasonable sided UK SUV with a 2.0 petrol engine to charge the battery or power the wheels).


The biggest issues are charging time and range, but they are improving dramatically with each generation (obviously we'll hit a point of diminishing returns).

For instance, the Nissan Leaf, a small hatchback, last generation had a quoted range of up to 155 miles, but the 2018 generation has a quoted range of 310 miles. For us, that's a lot (my diesel SUV doesn't get much above 300 miles from a tank), and even on long road trips, that means I'd need to stop every 4.5 hours @ 70mph for a 20-30 minute charge. Realistically, I'd be wanting to stop before then for a pee and a snack, so it's a non issue. That's the only time charging would be an issue - otherwise electric charging is a lot more convenient (I can plug it in at home / work / stores / train station and have it charge whilst I'm doing something else, rather than having to make a trip to a petrol station.

Sure, with electric cars you need electricity to run them, but in disaster situations you're quite likely to run out of fuel anyway. Potentially it's easier to charge a car (slowly) via solar panels, instead of trying to ship fuel in.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Necros wrote:
there will always be a need for a powerful truck that's only gonna run right on gas..

Why? Electric gives you much more torque across the entire rev range - an electric motor should be better than diesel when it comes to power. Tesla and someone else have already announced electric Semi's within a few years, with a fairly low range - about 200 miles IIRC, so ideal for the "last mile" delivery stuff between depots and stores, rather than cross country hauling.

Hell, performance electric cars are giving performance combustion cars a run for their money too.

The only thing letting electric down currently is the recharging time.

 djones520 wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd like to think the future is efficient super-lightweight vehicles designed to last longer, then who gives a feth what powers it because it'll use almost no power.

Of course that probably won't happen, people love their absurdly large complicated vehicles that amount to probably an average of 1500kg of vehicle to transport each person.

That's a nice theory, but crash protection isn't free. Your hypothetical "use almost no power" vehicle would almost certainly be suicide on a real road.

It isn't, but you don't need the monstrous cars that populate the roads in the cheap-petrol parts of the world to keep you safe, either.

As an American who has been to many parts of the world where they drive "little" cars, I have seen many first hand accounts where our "big lumbering" American vehicles allowed us to walk away from an accident, while those "light weight fuel efficient" cars were death traps.

Sorry, but I'll take my tank any day of the week.

Were these modern small cars with good safety ratings?

In many ways light weight vehicles are easier to make safe because the intrusion zones are often smaller, you can wrap the crash structures closer to the occupants and there's less energy involved for the same vehicular speed. The one accident I've been in where I had a high chance of being killed was in a modern Renault and the only reason I'm alive has nothing to do with the size of the vehicle but rather the crash structure the manufacturer put in place, the accident in a bigger car lacking that crash structure and I'd be dead.

As I said earlier, I'd rather be in an accident in one of the 250 to 400kg race cars I've helped build than most street cars.

The challenging one is impact with a heavier vehicle.... which makes the "I'll take my tank" a self perpetuating problem because it only applies when your car is heavier than the one you're crashing in to. Note that I'm saying "heavier" rather than "larger", because a lightweight car might very well be on the large size with that size taken up by lightweight crash structure. Crash structure only has to be heavy when the vehicle it's protecting is also heavy.

Surely I'm not the only one that sees the absurdity of 1500kg of vehicle being required to transport less than 100kg of person. Especially when these days we have engines that can reliably output 100hp in the under 60kg region.

Future is in hybrids.

Pure electric is nice but too slow to recharge.
Hybrids give advantage of easy fill up and such, with fuel efficient and clean driving.

With next gen materials saving on weight the savings only go up.

Internal combustion engine vehicles are here to stay.

Even when all the drillable oil is gone there will still be a market for biodeisel, or if we manage the tech, synthetic oil.

Electric car tech will improve and has advantages, but oil powered cars will likely outperform them as tech will develop in parallel.

It may be that in time oil burners are for museum pieces, the rich and privileged and government purpose.

Rescue vehicles, and long range vehicles will be oil burners even in a world without oil sans biodeisel, the military will also have access.

In time laws might restrict everyone else.

Biodeisel is a poor solution for everyone as it takes up precious arable land feeding cars when there is barely enough to feed people, and that will only get worse as humans continue to pollute and breed.

I think it's unwise to think of this as just a vehicle upgrade. We will need to generate a lot more electricity and send a lot more electricity to a lot more places while simultaneous dismantling an enormous amount of existing infrastructure. Where are you putting the new power plants and what kind of power plants are you building? Good look getting all that past the NIMBY regulations. We would need to massively expand and upgrade the power grid as well. Then there is all the gasoline infrastructure to remediate, every underground tank at every gas station and private sector commercial fuel depot needs to be dug up in an environmentally friendly manner. Then everybody, literally every person and business needs to purchase a new electric vehicle not because their old ones no longer work but because we're banning fossil fuels. Where does that capital and disposable income come from?

I don't think so. At least not in it's current configuration and capability. First, the source of the electricity is largely coal fired or other power plants. The are substantial technological limitations. People tend to forget the industrial applications of internal combustion engines. I drive a ladder truck for my fire department. As the technology is currently is, there zero chance of it effectively performing to our needs. Electrical cannot perform over the road trucking, it lacks the endurance. Could it as some point, probably. I think hydrogen is the best option, but 50-75 years out. I don't think corporations are inherently evil. The auto industry isn't inherently evil, they are profit driven. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their stock holders, which often times are average people with 401K or other retirement investments. They will jump to renewable means for transportation win it is profitable. Just my thoughts, echoed by many others. I do think Tesla is good for the automotive industry.

I think people probably aren't realising the timescale for something like this. Benz built the first fuel driven car in 1885. Ford put the first real consumer car on the road in 1908. That's a 23 year gap. But even by the end of WW2, another 37 years later, the horse was still an essential part of transport.

Electric cars have been around for more than 100 years, but they were always novelties at best. But now with Tesla's recent cars we've reached more or less reached the Model T step of the process, we have a product that suits a small but reasonable number of consumers for their purposes. Petrol and diesel are still way better for most of the market, both in terms of price and functionality, but no longer for all of the market. The horse was more practical for most people, in terms of price and functionality in 1908 as well.

But most people don't see the timescale, the process in which a new product incrementally takes ground from the old product, over decades. What happens from here is technology improvements, consumer uptake and infrastructure all go hand in hand, feeding each other. New tech makes the product more appealing and gets more people buying in, that growing consumer base encourages more tech development and drives both private and govt infrastructure, which makes the product more appealing to consumers and so on.

This is standard template for all disruptive tech - establish a niche, then refine and grow and steadily take more market space from the old tech. Nothing is ever certain in tech or economics, but electric cars taking over the market from petrol and diesel over the next 30 odd years seems the most likely transport shift.

 djones520 wrote:
So... the government has to install monitoring devices in everyones home?

It's really weird that people got to the point of theorising government monitoring systems that tracked your cars every movement, or tracked home energy use for car recharging seperate from domestic use... before they considered that revenue for road maintenance might be decoupled from road use. Just fund road maintenance and expansion out of general revenue.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
In the future, cars will run on nuclear fusion. You will never have to worry about fuel again!
Nuclear power is the future, it is clean (unlike energy from fossil fuels) and efficient (unlike 'green' energy). We just need to make it more safe.

And besides, what is cooler than a car powered by a nuclear reactor?

Things that actually make some kind of sense are cooler.

Sometimes there are bits of nonsense that are actually more revealing than sensible things. This is one of those cases. Because here Iron Captain has happily just dreamed up all the tech developments needed to make nuclear operate in a car, so incredible reductions in size, near zero maintenance, safe fuel access and dumping, and just assumed they can all happen. Despite none of them being forseeable or even being attempted.

But just above that he said green tech wasn't efficient, and happily assumed that was always going to be so. Despite wind and solar efficiency improving by an order of magnitude in the last decade.

So the question then is why would someone assume a tech with a recent history of enormous improvement would suddenly stop improving, while a tech that's been even looked at for providing power to cars would suddenly be developed and rapidly clear enormous hurdles?

I think if we could come up with the answer to that we'd probably gain a lot of insight in to why so many economic and tech questions are approached so terribly by so many people.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
This however will not be possible during any transition period. During which time you'll have a massive increase in accidents caused by the self-driving cars blindly following their programming around human drivers. Which will lead to outcry against self-driving cars and eventually a ban on self-driving cars.

Thats why self-driving cars are a bad idea. The transition period will kill any possibility of them getting accepted.

You're raised this complaint in previous threads of self-driving cars. It was explained to you then that self-driving cars aren't built on automated programming. They are driven by sensors that detect surrounding objects and react accordingly. Just like humans are.

You ignored this then, and now you're back repeating your mistake again. Please stop doing this. Please read, and learn.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Orlanth wrote:
Electric car tech will improve and has advantages, but oil powered cars will likely outperform them as tech will develop in parallel.

It's a weird assumption you're making that a mature tech will advance in tandem alongside a new tech. The bow and arrow and gunpowder weapons are not in equal use today, because the newre tech advanced well past the limits of the old tech.

Biodeisel is a poor solution for everyone as it takes up precious arable land feeding cars when there is barely enough to feed people

That doesn't really work. About 30% of the food produced today is wasted, not even inefficiently used, but just straight up produced, stored, and later dumped. And then if we get in to efficiency there's vastly more improvement, if we want to go that way. And beyond that there's vast amounts of land still able to be turned to farming, if we choose to commit the infrastructure. There is no hard cap, where converting land to biofuel will take food out of mouths.

Of course, if the number of vehicles that require petroleum get reduced down to rescue vehicles, some industry, and some military, then there'd be no issue using dead dinosaur sources for that small remainder.

 sebster wrote:
It's really weird that people got to the point of theorising government monitoring systems that tracked your cars every movement, or tracked home energy use for car recharging seperate from domestic use... before they considered that revenue for road maintenance might be decoupled from road use. Just fund road maintenance and expansion out of general revenue.

Especially because cars aren't what destroy roads - trucks are. One eighteen-wheeler does as much damage as ten thousand cars, so you might as well just monitor commercial traffic and ignore the cars.

Prestor Jon wrote:
I think it's unwise to think of this as just a vehicle upgrade. We will need to generate a lot more electricity and send a lot more electricity to a lot more places while simultaneous dismantling an enormous amount of existing infrastructure. Where are you putting the new power plants and what kind of power plants are you building? Good look getting all that past the NIMBY regulations. We would need to massively expand and upgrade the power grid as well. Then there is all the gasoline infrastructure to remediate, every underground tank at every gas station and private sector commercial fuel depot needs to be dug up in an environmentally friendly manner.

You are right that a transition to electric cars will have to go hand in hand with massive changes in electricity generation. Going to electric cars is a step backwards if the electricity is generated by a coal plant.

I think solar is the key. And in particular solar generated at the home, and stored in local batteries. The dream really is to get home at night and plug the car in, recharging with power you generated yourself, for free. This is still a long way off, particularly economically viable home power storage, but its not for nothing that Tesla's three big consumer products are electric cars, solar panels, and home batteries.

Then everybody, literally every person and business needs to purchase a new electric vehicle not because their old ones no longer work but because we're banning fossil fuels. Where does that capital and disposable income come from?

That is a bit of a false concern. There is no flat ban on fossil fuel vehicles being talked about by anyone who counts. The focus is on getting electric cars to a point where the consumer prefers them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlexHolker wrote:
Especially because cars aren't what destroy roads - trucks are. One eighteen-wheeler does as much damage as ten thousand cars, so you might as well just monitor commercial traffic and ignore the cars.

That's a really good point, so the 'user pays' argument doesn't even really work.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Sure, we will eventually have to move to electric. Or possibly just keep hybrids once we genetically engineer some plants to make renewable combustibles(which has actually already happened) in a practical fashion.

And more efficient methods to make biofuels for those vehicles become available.. which means biofuel plantations can become smaller. (and more lands can be allocated to food cultivations)

Eventually, we'll have to realize that Nuclear is the only real clean option for power generation that can also keep up with consumption.

Dr. Micho Kaku predicted that Nuclear Fusion powerplant will become practical after 2050.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 djones520 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

2) Lack of charging stations. You can only travel on routes where there are charging stations, and those just don't exist in all places yet. So an electric vehicle really limits where you can go currently. There are gas stations everywhere. It also takes much longer to recharge a car vs just refilling a gas tank.

It's worth noting that a lot of the reason gas powered vehicles work in any real capacity is that we've invested an inconceivable amount of resources into structuring our society around supporting them.

True, but now that infrastructure is there. Good luck just tossing it out. Petroleum is a HUGE part of our economy, we're not just going to completely phase it out in a decade.

or even two... while some countries have already planned to completely replace combustion vehicles with EV WITHIN 2025!

 sebster wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
Electric car tech will improve and has advantages, but oil powered cars will likely outperform them as tech will develop in parallel.

It's a weird assumption you're making that a mature tech will advance in tandem alongside a new tech. The bow and arrow and gunpowder weapons are not in equal use today, because the newre tech advanced well past the limits of the old tech.

No, you are not thinking clearly. Electric cars is not a case of a newer technology, its a technology that caught on later.
The torsion vs gunpowder analogy doesn't match here, instead its closer to VHS vs Betamax.

The assumption that oil powered cars will improve is sound, because this is what is happening. Engine technology is still improving, as is fuel technology. Electric vehicles will become more prevalent for ecological reasons but there will be room for specialist vehicles and luxury vehicles with liquid fuel.

To put it another way steam turbines are still with modern technology the way to go for efficient support for power stations and large ships. Those are essentially steam engines, a technology left behind by the internal combustion engine, but still valid, even optimal, in niche roles.

 sebster wrote:

Biodeisel is a poor solution for everyone as it takes up precious arable land feeding cars when there is barely enough to feed people

That doesn't really work. About 30% of the food produced today is wasted, not even inefficiently used, but just straight up produced, stored, and later dumped. And then if we get in to efficiency there's vastly more improvement, if we want to go that way. And beyond that there's vast amounts of land still able to be turned to farming, if we choose to commit the infrastructure. There is no hard cap, where converting land to biofuel will take food out of mouths.

It would be 'nice' if we didn't waste 30% of food (I didn't know the statistic) but clawing back that is like asking for true justice or world peace. Its a sentiment, even a goal to inch towards but not a realistic goal for universal application.
Biofuel farms currently exist and it has the same effect as other cash crops, except that it hardly contributes at all to local food subsistence. 85% of biofuels in the UK is imported, much from the developing world, for a start it is not a green solution, it may be renewable but the carbon footprint is horrible.

 sebster wrote:

Of course, if the number of vehicles that require petroleum get reduced down to rescue vehicles, some industry, and some military, then there'd be no issue using dead dinosaur sources for that small remainder.

This is where we will end up, It is also better social control, oil is readily portable, electricity requires an infrastructure source for direct input. Dissidents can lump around oil cans, but electricity can more easily be controlled centrally. Plug your car into the national grid and readers can determine your current legal status, log location and if necessary refuse service. I can see this being appealing to most governments.

Fossil fuels will still exist in a trickle, from yet unviable wells, oil prices will be very high and its usage will be restricted to those who can afford to run 'classic' transport and niche roles. I can even see such devices being highly taxed and regulated to keep them out of reach of the common man.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Interesting timing for this thread, as I just read an article that China is working on eventually banning new gas and diesel vehicles. That may be what it takes to kick the car industry into high gear on working on improving electric vehicles.

Some analyst suggested that China simply wants to 'extort' foreign investers (the likes of Toyota) to retool their automotive productions into EV. yet the Chinese automotive manufacturers will still make combustion vehicles.... a sort of bargain I think.

 Lone Cat wrote:
And more efficient methods to make biofuels for those vehicles become available.. which means biofuel plantations can become smaller. (and more lands can be allocated to food cultivations)

Once again, there is no meaningful shortage of arable land. We straight up throw out a huge portion of the food we produce, make the rest inefficiently, and can increase farming land considerably if we're willing to invest in the infrastructure to do it.

There are plenty of arguments against biofuel, but needing the land for something else ain't one of them. Hell a lot of biofuel projects right now are happening because govt and farming groups want lower production, and it's politically easier to move to biofuel than to just pay to cut production.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
In the future, cars will run on nuclear fusion. You will never have to worry about fuel again!
Nuclear power is the future, it is clean (unlike energy from fossil fuels) and efficient (unlike 'green' energy). We just need to make it more safe.

And besides, what is cooler than a car powered by a nuclear reactor?


Also, just as an aside I want to mention that cars aren't really a problem when it comes to pollution. It is ships and aircraft that are the big polluters. Modern cars are already relatively clean. I read somewhere that 15 large cargo ships produce more pollution than all cars in the world combined. And there are thousands of large cargo ships... That is where real gains are to be made

And because those who own and run Airlines and Freight ships are large, (and usually) multinational corporates with HUGE bargaining power. who's gonna blame them for all air pollution problems? (The Freightships are obivious because contemporary freightships are all run on No. 6 Fuel Oil (sticky... yet combustible petroleum products that must be preheated with steam so the fuel can become usable, also not easily to burn out completely within the combustion chamber, I'm not sure if there's a focus to improve combustion efficiency of any combustion engines that burn Bunker Fuel Oil?)... and sulfur contents aren't to be picked off easily). Not sure about how clean any Jet / Turbine engine can burn (Aviation grade) Kerosene though.

Interestingly enough. Industrial facilities that powered by dirty fuels (coal and aforemented Fuel Oil) took more blames than Airlines and Freightships.