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Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Why is everybody so erect for EVs? They save you gas and some maintenance, but that's about it. They increase tire wear for sure, and weigh a heck of a lot more which wears the roads down quicker (roads wear with the cube of weight). They use less gasoline at the expanse of the poor third-world countries which front the environmental cost of mining and battery production, not to mention their archaic worker's rights.
In 20 years, we'll realize that EVs were probably about as bad as gasoline vehicles--what we should be focusing on is public transportation and updated city design to reduce our need to travel in the first place.
Sure, a split of electric and gasoline vehicles is beneficial, but they're not the environmental panacea they're being pushed as. So please keep the whole picture in mind when you're telling people to suffer and sacrifice to give up a cheap, convenient gasoline vehicle.
I mean, I'm a nut for EVs, but they are correct. EVs are likely better in the long run, but producing them still produces a ton of greenhouse gasses and other environmental concerns. The best bet is to encourage people to drive less, build better infrastructure so fewer people have to buy cars, and focus on reduction of reliance on driving as a whole.
Hell, even for me, my whole plan was to drive my EV into the ground, using it as long as possible to offset it's upfront environmental costs, but my battery failed after 38k miles. I got a lemon :(. Thankfully, it's covered under warranty and they built me a new battery, but now my car has the battery environmental cost of two EVs so it'll likely never be as efficient as if I'd just bought a damn Honda Civic. Admittedly, I'm a statistical outlier, but it still sucks :(
They can both be bad, even if one is less bad. I'm all for EV adoption. It's better in the long run. However, less driving altogether would be more impactful.
Tell that to the child slaves mining resources for first world consumers. Unfortunately, the citizens of less developed countries' opinions don't matter if their government is corrupt.
You're right, so we might as well exploit those less fortunate than us because they were unlucky enough to be born where they were born.
Okay, cool. I wasn't saying you shouldn't ever buy any batteries. I have an electric car in my driveway right now.
The whole point of what I initially said was to recognize that, although one is definitely worse than the other, there are environmental costs to both ICE vehicles and EV vehicles and to reduce our carbon emissions we should focus more on being less car dependent in general.
You've gone off about how you don't care about other people or your downstream effects on them and I don't really know why I've engaged with this pointless conversation.
How's mining lithium and moving 6 tons around all day help with it?
Change needs to be made somewhere. Gas isn't the answer, so sticking with it... Kinda stupid. The "saves on maintenance" part is actually a really big deal that was just glossed over. You don't need oil changes. You don't have a transmission. You don't need radiator fluid. With regenerative braking, you're not wearing down brake pads anywhere near as much. Not to mention the gas emissions reduction. These are all highly toxic materials that are not being consumed and distributed into the atmosphere. And which mines are being operated in third world countries? If you're referring to lithium, the largest producers are Australia, the USA, Chile and China. You know, some of the wealthiest countries on the planet.... And Chile.
Understandably, hand waving "public transit" as the answer does make sense. Designing urban centres in such a way to make public transit preferable makes sense. The problem is that these changes are slow. In 20 years, you'll have a few new suburbs built with these practices in mind. The majority of everything else will still be the same, because it's not feasible to bulldoze existing infrastructure to replace it. It'll need to be aged out, and climate change isn't gonna stop for 100 years and wait for us to get our road placement juuuuuust right. Further, adding more public transit is expensive, with a high up front cost, plus a high maintenance cost ongoing. Unless you dump enough money into it such that it completely replaces the need for private vehicles, there will always be private vehicles regardless.
But the greatest benefit to EV is the pollution is centralized. Making vehicles will always suck for the environment, full stop, but EVs allow the production and majority of the pollution to occur at a relatively small number of places, which can be contained much easier.
To be absolutely clear, I don't disagree with your point, but the answer won't come overnight, and we're on a time crunch. We need lots of innovation, and early adoption of incremental gains. One day, public transit and better cities will be part of the solution. But until then, we need solutions, and this is the direction to progress.
I'm not against change, and I encourage it. But We also can't put all of our eggs in one basket. I am glad people are buying EVs, but we can't let a market for an inherently disposable item dominate over another option (ICE vehicles) that will outlast an EV a substantial proportion of the time. The automotive producers are licking their lips at the thought of getting us all into vehicles that will be be effectively unusable in 10 or 15 years--batteries age with use and also time, unlike steel and aluminum.
I am an environmental engineer and I have worked on remediation projects for oil and gas, as well as other types of natural resource exploitation such as mines. The damage caused by mining metals from the ground is extreme, and it will last decades, if not forever. "Centralizing" pollution isn't a good thing--we're best off distributing our pollution so that the Earth can have a fighting chance of repairing it piece by piece, which may never happen in areas that have undergone certain types of mining and other industry. Look at an old oil and gas site, and you would never even know it was there after 10 or 50 years. CO2 is a problem, for sure, and so is methane, but methane degrades in the atmosphere after just over a decade. Mining causes damage to the air, ground water and surface water, and to the nearby wildlife. Look up Tar Creek in Oklahoma, the Questa Moly Mine in New Mexico, and do you remember what happened in Colorado when the EPA accidentally released an entire mine full of acid drainage into the nearby river? Nothing but dead marine life for miles and miles. Mines take some of our most beautiful natural areas and destroy them.
If you think modern mines are going to circumvent all of these issues, they aren't. They're going to have accidents and cause damage just the same as the fossil fuel industry--some ways, even worse.
I see it like that too. The enshittification of the automobile. I am not putting my money down to bet against that just yet.
If this take was true the headline would be the opposite. They're not living their lips, they're trying to not sell any because they want money from expensive ICE maintenance.
That's on the dealer end. The manufacturer end wants to keep selling cars. They can both be happening at the same time.
Building a carless society will take time but we need to get rid of gas right now. The difference of emission for the use and manufacturing of an EV is absolutely not close to the cost of use and manufacturing of an ice vehicle PLUS literally burning gallons just to move it.
Oil companies, their assets and the assets of the barons who own them should be violently seized and used to offset the cost of what they created. Until that happens, we will have to suffer a bit or we will be stuck suffering so much more probably sooner than we think.
People already have ICE vehicles, and they're going to last for decades to come. I have a diesel Mercedes from 1980 that still runs and works just fine. No battery is going to last 40+ years, and the move to battery powered vehicles is unwittingly entering us all into a "subscription" based transportation society, much like literally every other device in the world that takes a battery. Oil and gas emissions aren't ideal, but neither are the environmental issues that originate from mining. Mining causes massive amounts of environmental damage to wildlife and the surrounding natural ecosystem, watersheds, and has its own brand of air pollution. Read up on the Questa moly mine is Northern New Mexico if you wish. We're talking rivers that turn blue, depleted salmon populations, -permanent- groundwater contamination, acid ponds, and heavy metal dusts blowing into nearby towns and exposing people to lead, uranium, and cadmium, among whatever else. Why are people so eager to attack oil "barons" nowadays when the health, tech, and banking industries are bleeding us dry at every corner? At least we've got remote work options nowadays--can you say the same for your home loan?
Disposability and lack of proven reliability are massive factors in my late adoptor attitude. When a 10 year old EV sells for $10k, I'm in. I'm not going to pay a $20k premium for a car that needs a $??k battery replacement (or it's scrap) every 10 years.
How much money do you spend in gas every ten year? Do you really think it's less then a new battery? Not to mention the price of batteries are dropping like a stone.
I can budget for gas because that's a known. I have no fucking clue what a battery costs, do you? I'm not interested in paying a premium for an unknown. I'm in the wait and see camp. Some internet strangers throwing comments at me will not make me change my mind. I've listed my reasons many fucking times in this thread.
The cheapest Tesla battery is 5k. The average American spends 2k a year on gas. You have to budget for gas for 3 years to have the price of your battery. Gas will keep costing you forever. The batts are rated for 200 000 km, and there are warranties if they start losing their charge too early so it's very hard to have to pay for a replacement before you come into your money.
Its impossible to not come out on top if you factor in the gas, it just seems like a no brainer to me. I haven't seen your other comments, I just now the reasons you listed under mine simply aren't valid.
If you can't afford or need a new vehicle, that's completely fine. The used market for EVs is just not good and keeping your old car is always better than getting a new car, regardless of how it runs.
Ice vehicles still need mining to produce. The one time cost is practically the same and quickly becomes unimportant when you compare the cost of running them. It's fine if you want to keep using your old vehicle or if the only vehicle you can afford is the cheapest ICE, but buying an ICE vehicle when there are evs at the same price literally means you are part of the problem. Whatever extra cost there is after that in terms of battery replacement pales in comparison to the constant cost of gas so it isn't a valid reason.
Do not minimize the effects of constantly burning gas. It is more than not ideal, it is leading to a complete collapse of our ecosystem.
Do you close your eyes every year whenever a new spill happens, or another thousand acres get burned? Call me when the tech industry is causing shit like that. Not that they aren't doing bad things, but saying "what about them" when the crimes of the oil barons is soo much greater is farcical.
I'll cop to that. My sole motivation for going EV was to minimize the potential maintenance burden in the long term. In my experience, the internal combustion engine was the single largest maintenance cost, for both money and time, that wasn't a wear part (e.g. wipers, tires). The sheer number of moving parts and subsystems in an ICE vs an EV is staggering. I'm taking a bet here, but there's just less to break down on an EV and until that's the standard, it's a convenience I'm willing to pay for.
This sums it up pretty well. Battery powered EVs are still a luxury item both financially AND in terms of lifestyle. Most people don't have the finances or the ability to accommodate one, and I think the people who own them forget that as they spout tone deaf positivity about the virtues of owning an electric vehicle. But tbh, I am not even sure what maintenance you're talking about that's such a big deal. You've still got tires, brakes, suspension, and steering components to worry about. All that's missing over the typical <100k mile life of a vehicle are fluid changes every now and then. My understanding is that if you own a Honda, you can do basically nothing but oil changes and tire/brake maintenance and the car will still last forever lol.
This is true. From my perspective, I'm buying time and peace of mind. Not having to bother with oil changes, water pumps, belts, O2 sensors, emissions subsystems, emissions checks, and gas stations with ad-encrusted pumps, amounts to fewer maintenance intervals to track, less mental anguish, and less transactions to fuss about. And I've had rock-solid reliable ICE vehicles before, and still have been routinely burned by sketchy people in the auto industry. I get that things are better compared to even 20 years ago, but I think we can still do better.
Ultimately, I want a tool, not a relationship with a mechanic or dealership. Everything I can do to move the needle in that direction is worth it.
I'll add that I got a corded lawnmower 7 years ago and it's still going strong. No messy oil changes, no clogged air filters, no pulling muscles trying to start the thing, no smelly gasoline stinking up the garage, no last minute runs to the gas station just to do yard work. I just plug it in and get to work. And even with that, I'm looking into getting rid of the grass entirely... somehow.
What a dumb regressive take. Just because you can point out some problems with the solution doesn't mean it's not in the right direction.
Lithium is plentiful on earth. Yes we can't extract it cleanly now, but you know how we get better at that? Higher demand!
Electric cars and batteries are expensive, you know how we fix that? More production so we can leverage economies of scale. More production so that more research investment becomes profitable.
Electric cars can't yet cover all the use cases that ICE can do. That's not actually a problem at all. If we can cover even 75% of all transportation emissions that's a big step.
People having a "hard on for EVs" and paying a little more for a luxury product is exactly what we need to get to the next phase on EVs and to start phasing out ICE for general public transportation. I don't know why it makes you upset, but you can't pretend this isn't part of the solution. You'd have to be blind not to think electric transportation is part of the green future that's going to reduce global warming and keep the earth livable. Sure EVs aren't enough now, but EVs will be and passenger ICE vehicles are NEVER going to be enough EVER.
I'm with you except for the "all we need is more production" point. That's like the city planner who says all we need to solve traffic is one more lane, one more overpass. We are not going to manufacture ourselves out of the climate crisis.
Technology and infrastructure don't work the same. Look at solar panels and electric batteries. Early adopters got expensive low quality products. But these early adopters drove the demand that is making both of these products dozens of times cheaper and more powerful than they were 2 decades ago.
Investment drives progress for young technologies.
I've said before, I'm not interested in personally financing innovation. Perhaps that's selfish, but here we are.
I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. I don't think it's more or less selfish than other climate aware choices like driving a reasonably efficient car into the ground, driving less overall, producing less waste, etc....
Everything you spend money on is what you personally want to see more of in society (because at the very least you want to have it yourself). I don't think it's virtuous to buy into immature technologies per se. I'm just happy there are people right now who are doing it for EVs as early adopters because it means more investment into electric transportation technology.
One day you may buy an electric car, or use electric transportation as your main mode of transport because it will be a mature technology that meets your needs. If you do, it'll be in part thanks to early adopters paying a relative premium at time.
Actually, your response is a dumb take, and I don't know why you're acting so offended about facts--lol. Let's just look at your comments one by one:
Higher demand makes energy exploitation cleaner? Is that way oil and gas and strip mining is so clean nowadays? Lol.
Yes, batteries are expensive. Higher demand does drive more production, but lowered price of goods is only a textbook theory nowadays. Or is that why food has gotten so cheap lately? Is that why vehicles are so cheap post-COVID, because demand is so high? Lol.
I'll be waiting for your miracle battery, but it's still a leap away--we're not going to see exponential gains in battery capacity like we saw with computer processors. We literally cannot cover "75% of transportation emissions" because less than 60% of transportation emissions are derived from light road vehicles, most of them being trucks and SUVs: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-06/420f23016.pdf Sure, we can see that 58% shrink, but it'll be picked up in part by electrical generation and industry with more frequent vehicle replacements. But the corporations will be happy with your purchase. Lol.
People paying for luxury goods isn't what made cars take off back in the day. It was Henry Ford demanding his company produce a car that anyone could afford. As long as people keep buying expensive luxury EVs, they will always be out of reach of the regular person. You've been brainwashed. Lol.
Besides--I'm not against electric transportation. Bring on the electric powered buses and trains. Instead of morally pressuring people to make expensive purchases, why don't you lobby your government to invest in city infrastructure and design to reduce the need for personal transportation in the first place?
Now are you going to stop acting so upset now that I've set you straight, or are you going to come back with another unwarranted, unnecessarily snarky remark?
Oh another "this solution won't solve the problem so we should stop trying" take.
Electric transit can remove 75%+ of transportation emissions by definition. I never said personal electric vehicles will.
Investment in electric transportation technologies will drive the innovation we need to cut greenhouse emissions in the transportation sector.
Not investing in electric transportation, and sticking with the ICE status quo will NEVER help reduce emissions. A view that discourages investment in electric transportation is regressive because the current default fallback is ICE. If the fallback was electric trains I would agree with you.
No one is morally pressuring you into buying an electric car, people are getting excited that there are finally electric car offerings that meet their needs. If you can't find one, don't buy one. Stop discouraging people from doing something good just because it's not yet perfect.