You have to be awfully enamored with your personal narrative to take that as the moral.
Before I noticed what community this was in, I didn’t even realize this was a jab at electric cars. I though the poster was talking about how abandoning electric cars would be the mistake we shouldn’t repeat.
That would be a more legitimate moral to take from it.
Ah yes electric cars weren’t good in the 1920s therefore can’t be good in the era of “stop using fossil fuels or go extinct”
But really, 100 miles on a charge was probably a pretty big deal in 1910
Yeah I’d say that sounds pretty great tbh. I had no idea the range was that useable way back in 1910….
Imagine if we would have continued to improve that technology for 100 years, instead of abandoning it for the ICE
Yeah exactly I am very angry about this. Not happy about it at all. Very bad no good. ☹️
We might have had shipstones by this point.
AFAIK it was generally agreed that electric cars were better, but building the infrastructure for gas cars was easier.
I’ve seen one of these at a private museum in Arizona. It was pretty small but for it’s day I could see it being useful in relation to what was avaliable then.
There’s the more recent example of GM’s late 1900s EV1 with the last gen model having a range of 160 miles from NiMH batteries.
There’s various reasons why GM recalled all of the leased units and crushed most of them despite protests by customers that wanted to keep theirs. Some point to big oil, others to costs of the units and a lack of parts sales parts and service not needed for the units. I suspect dealers and oil would not be happy with the product.
The cars for their time are revolutionary due to being a non retrofit built from the ground up. They were among the first to use aluminum and plastics. They didn’t really dent.
One famous movie director hid his EV1 from GM and eventually they allowed him to keep his leased unit. The remaining ones that were not crushed had their drive trains disabled or removed before being donated to museums or technical institutions.
So we have been struggling with this lesson more than once. Unfortunately it’s not a matter with only one concern involved.
More recently the emotions of many have been stoked against electric cars with social media. I don’t think I’ll own an electric anytime soon due to my type of driving but I’m not out to get them either in my daily life like some are.
You have to think those that roll coal, park in electric charging spots with their lifted ICE trucks, and vandalize electric cars, don’t have much going for them in their lives for this to be a focus. It’s hard being a mouth breather I gather…
You misunderstand, being a mouth breather is incredibly easy. You don’t have to think for yourself or care about anyone but yourself. What’s difficult is being intelligent and empathetic.
Ignorance is bliss.
Electric vehicles aren’t the problem, the fact that they are really expensive large computers with wheels that phone home constantly and track your every move, can be disabled remotely by the manufacturer, require mobile apps that track you and phone home constantly is the problem.
And they need OS updates to patch potentially fatal bugs.
This is a modern car thing and not in the least bit specific to EVs.
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Modern fossil fuel cars are unfortunately no different…
But you can buy an old fossil fuel car.
Well you could probably buy this old electric car too!
There are old fossils?
They’re all old, silly
For now. In twenty years time the current fleet of newish cars will be the old junk.
My family drives 20 year old cars daily.
I like old cars, but the point is there will be a point at which getting a car that is as uncomplicated as a 1990s Japanese sedan will end. In 20 years time you’d have to deal with all sorts of electric and software issues.
It used to be that you could just take out the cassette player and insert a Bluetooth radio, for instance. In modern cars everything is integrated software and it sure as hell won’t be maintained by car manufacturers after 10 years at most.
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Just a reminder that for the most part a car with an electric motor is very much powered by the combustion of fossil fuels. A grid without fossil fuel inputs is still a pipe dream.
Kind of a red herring when even 100% fossil fuel power is far more efficient than a car engine. Many US states are projecting <5% fossil fuel reliance for the grid within 15 years.
From what I’ve read it’s about 50% emissions pound for pound based on the fuel mix in the North American grid. Which is fucking great! It’s a bit of an issue that the best selling EVs in the US weigh more than twice what a small ICE vehicle weighs. Which, washes out all the advantage. but the grids gets cleaner over time so perhaps they end up on the right side of things by the time the vehicle is retired.
It’s not a red herring, it is a fact and forgetting it is why the fucking EVs got so damn big. TODAY, a compact ICE, is about a wash with a big ev truck in North America and a hybrid drive or small EV is the way you actually cut your carbon output.
Doing some back of the napkin math, that sounds about right. The problem with saying, “don’t forget EV power comes from fossil fuels too”, is that it implies an equivalence between the two. They aren’t equivalent, a 50% reduction in carbon emissions is fantastic. Moreover, as you mentioned, EVs will improve their emissions in lockstep with improvements in the grid.
forgetting it is why the fucking EVs got so damn big. TODAY, a compact ICE, is about a wash with a big ev truck in North America and a hybrid drive or small EV is the way you actually cut your carbon output.
I agree we should move towards smaller cars on average. However, I think this is simply the car buyer preferences of today. The most popular ICEs are also big heavy SUVs and trucks. People who are shopping for big EV trucks want big trucks regardless of the powertrain type. They were never going to buy a small compact car, so it doesn’t make sense to make that comparison. You have to compare like-for-like.
With a like-for-like comparison, EVs aren’t nearly as dramatically heavier as many people say. Some examples:
- A Model 3 Performance weighs 4050 lbs. The most direct competitor, the BMW M3, weighs 3930 lbs.
- A base model Hyundai Kona in the US is 3000 lbs. the base model Kona EV is 3400 lbs
- A Chevy Bolt is 3700 lbs. A Mazda 3 is 3100 lbs.
Average out a ton of models, and it comes out to 10-15% heavier for an equivalent EV model. Add in that most EVs are more aerodynamic and EVs require a very similar amount of energy input to push them around.
Unfortunately true.
But even then, a fossil fuel power plant is more efficient at capturing the energy in the fuel than a car engine. So an electric vehicle still emits less CO2 per mile driven, even when the power used to charge it is entirely generated from fossil fuels.
My “old” 2017 Ford Fiesta weighed around 1100 kg, and could drive around 17 km per liter of gasoline. Gasoline has about 9.5 kWh worth of energy per liter, so that’s 0.55 kWh/km. My new Hyundai Ioniq 5 weighs around 2300 kg (yes about twice as much) and drives 5 km per kWh. So that’s only 0.2 kWh/km. So a car weighing twice as much expends less than half as much energy per km…
Luckily there’s many places around the world where fossil fuels are rapidly being phased out.
For example, Scandinavia, where I live: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-share-energy?country=SWE~NOR~FIN~DNK
It depends greatly on where you live, even by country isn’t specific enough.
In Canada, Ontario is about 6% dirty. If you go west you’ll see that Manitoba is about 0.3% dirty, Saskatchewan is about 81% dirty (41% coal. What millennium is this?), Alberta is about 90% Dirty, and BC is about 5% dirty.
So if you live in Manitoba, and you live somewhere that requires a personal vehicle, then electric is a decent option. If you live in SK or AB, an electric vehicle might be worse than an ICE.
You’re not wrong, but it does depend a lot on where you live.
Illinois is over 50% nuclear, and 10% renewables. We also have solar panels that generate significantly more electricity than we use for our Nissan Leaf.
“Moral of the story is that if you don’t understand anything, you’re doomed to making the same stupid comments like you did before.”
FTFY
Is this a negative comment by that guy? I take it as, “don’t half-execute ideas”. But it appears everyone agrees he’s saying electric cars sucked then and will now.
I just find that hard for even dummies to fall for, we all know how much technology moves in a decade, nevermind a century.
Unless it’s a satirical page, it’s called “car enthusiasts suck”, so I’d read it as “we got out muscled by big oil once before, let’s not let it happen again”.
Edit: In comparison, the famous Ford Model T went up to 42mph compared to the 25mph of this electric car.
It had a 10 gallon petrol tank which I can’t easily find the fuel economy stats for. Needless to say I expect the range of the Ford to be much higher than the electric car.
For a lot of people, I imagine it would mostly have came down to the same arguments as today: range, size, and upfront cost.
The Model T was a humble 20-25 MPG, so it had a decent range of up to 250mi iirc
A model T didn’t beat those numbers by much, and in 1910 you had to start them with a crank which gave a nice element of danger to the whole thing.
Would have been cool to see 100+ years of improvements in electric cars instead of gas cars.
Are these still for sale? Just install some hazards and stay off the highway!
It’s pretty much a golf cart
