Author Topic: Electric cars in bus lanes?  (Read 12478 times)

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #25 on: 23 October, 2019, 10:01:16 am »
Stupid perk for rich people.


Really? I am rich? Goes off to check savings account.... oh, it seems rich is four figures now days (I'll leave you to decide whether that includes or excludes the decimal point).
Simon has an electric car himself. And he's a rich person. Well, I've no idea the state of his bank account but in terms of earnings. And definitely middle class. Perhaps these barbs aren't really aimed at other people. But hey.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

ian

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #26 on: 23 October, 2019, 10:01:44 am »
No, a bit of a twat.

Could someone please delete my account. I no longer wish to post on here.

Thanks for all the fish but thats me out of here.

See this is part of the problem, the moment people's views and prejudices are challenged, they run to their own little, self-defined safe space.

The choices we make have an impact not only on ourselves, but on others, and those of us privileged enough to live in the first world, well our choices are amplified on those less privileged than us. I think we should all at least be willing confront that. Otherwise, we're stuck with relatively meaningless gestures.

If that's worthy of throwing an insult my way (and in no way did I personally single you out, so thanks) and flouncing, then I'm sorry, that wasn't my intent.

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #27 on: 23 October, 2019, 10:27:50 am »
Free parking, hmm. yeah ok.

Use of bus lanes? Piss right off! It's only a temporary perk for the early adopters until the increased uptake makes it as slow as the main carriageway. So all you're doing in the end is making bus travel & cycling EVEN MORE unattractive to the masses than it already is.


Pedal Castro

  • so talented I can run with scissors - ouch!
    • Two beers or not two beers...
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #28 on: 23 October, 2019, 11:14:19 am »
I like coming here BECAUSE the views I read are often the exact opposite to my own beliefs. Stepping out of your internet filter bubble is important but I do realize that most people don't understand that and do get upset if not everyone agrees absolutely with their opinions.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #29 on: 23 October, 2019, 11:39:08 am »
Electric cars are a huge resource sump, where do you think the lithium comes from

A big hole in Australia, mostly.  And remember there's a lot less lithium in a lithium-ion cell than a lithium cell.  And you can get it from scrapped batteries, if there were any scrapped batteries to recycle[1].  (AIUI there's a company in the Netherlands who have a commercially viable industrial process, but a limited supply of raw materials.)

The rare earths in permanent-magnet motors are as much of an issue.  Those mostly come from China.  But there are other ways to build electric motors.


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all the other components and their constituents?

The same places they do for combustion-engine cars.


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Even if we pretend all the electricity is made by in a completely renewable fashion by cuddly creatures, the impact is huge.

But no huger than the current status quo, and electricity functions as an abstraction layer.  You can power an electric car on petrol, diesel, coal, natural gas, uranium, wind, solar, geothermal heat, pixie farts or quantum foam without modifying the car, and it's approximately five times more energy efficient.  That's an improvement.


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What about end-of-life.

In general the batteries get a retirement in a static application and then recycled.  The car gets a new battery and goes back on the road, until some fuckwit writes it off, then it gets scavved for parts to retrofit a combustion-engine vehicle.  (Currently, a written-off Tesla is almost worth more than a working Tesla.)


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I'm sorry, but electric cars are Marlboro Lights of driving. The let us keep our vehicle-dependent lifestyle and the majority of the costs and impacts, while avoiding reflecting on the impacts of that lifestyle.

Absolutely agreed.  But vehicles, where used, should be powered by something less wasteful and harmful than burning stuff.  We need this technology for buses and vans and fire engines so on, even in a car-free utopia.  And - as the government have been careful to avoid - we need a fuckload of electric-assist cycles.



[1] The current supply of end-of-life lithium-ion cells is mostly lurking in obsolete computing devices in people's drawers-of-shame.  The ones used in cars have barely made it to static applications.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #30 on: 23 October, 2019, 11:44:40 am »
The problem with allowing electric cars into bus lanes is not that they're electric, it's that they're cars.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #31 on: 23 October, 2019, 11:45:52 am »
The problem with allowing electric cars into bus lanes is not that they're electric, it's that they're cars.

The problem with electric cars is not that they're electric, it's that they're cars.

I get sick of this EVs-are-evil rhetoric from people who are fanatically in favour of cargo cycles.  As if they're not going to have a lithium-ion battery and a motor and rubber tyres and brakes.  It's not the technology's fault if people use it inappropriately.

ian

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #32 on: 23 October, 2019, 11:49:56 am »
I'm not really arguing that they're not better than the alternative, which is an ICE. If we buy another car it'll likely be electric. But, tbh, the solution is not to buy another car, because other than the pollution, it'll still do all the bad things vehicles and our dependency on them do. And even recycling has a resource cost and we're talking about massively increasing the number of electric vehicles.

Silly ideas like free parking and access to bus lanes just keep our dependency as is, they don't address any social or environmental issue in a meaningful way, and they allow people to shrug off the problems. Look, I'm driving an electric car and using paper straws, what more do you want? We not talking about how we change our urban and suburban environments to favour other forms of transport. It's just more cars, more roads, and ever more sprawl and dissociation.

And to be honest, it's another transfer of our money to a corporate, all these fillips accrue to the P&L of car manufacturers who get to keep selling us cars (at our expense) while avoiding absorbing any of the associated costs. As a by-the-by, the British car industry is smaller than our video games industry these days.

Kim

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    • Fediverse
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #33 on: 23 October, 2019, 11:53:14 am »
Quite.

I'd suggest that electric cars are a bit like cycle h*lm*ts.  Useful to a point, but a distraction from the real issues.

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #34 on: 23 October, 2019, 11:53:47 am »
I like coming here BECAUSE the views I read are often the exact opposite to my own beliefs. Stepping out of your internet filter bubble is important but I do realize that most people don't understand that and do get upset if not everyone agrees absolutely with their opinions.
:-)

ian

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #35 on: 23 October, 2019, 12:05:19 pm »
Also, mining all these ores is a hugely ruinous activity, those big holes are very big and they generate massive amounts of pollution, and are usually located in places that have far laxer environment standards. Then they have to be refined. Probably more so than extracting oil which is tubes in the ground and fractional distillation.

On the plus side, all our helium is mostly a byproduct of the oil and gas industry, and everyone needs a floaty birthday balloon. OK, you might also want to cool the magnets in an MRI machine or run a large hadron collider too.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #36 on: 23 October, 2019, 12:15:22 pm »
Also, mining all these ores is a hugely ruinous activity, those big holes are very big and they generate massive amounts of pollution, and are usually located in places that have far laxer environment standards. Then they have to be refined. Probably more so than extracting oil which is tubes in the ground and fractional distillation.

Yeah, but once you've burnt the oil, it's gone.  We need to stop wasting it.

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #37 on: 23 October, 2019, 12:35:15 pm »
The “hugely wasteful” critique applies equally to pretty much everything humans do. But it seems to only be wheeled out against electric cars, often as justification for continuing to drive some fossil fuel burning contraption.

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #38 on: 23 October, 2019, 12:38:25 pm »
As a by-the-by, the British car industry is smaller than our video games industry these days.
While it makes less money, I bet it employs a huge amount more people. :)

Putting EVs (other than busses) in bus lanes is dumb. I don't even think taxis should be allowed to use them - save them for busses and human propelled vehicles. The green number plate is likewise ridiculous - ANPR means that you can tell what class a vehicle is by asking the DVLA (but they charge per request, so we have to have a stupid bureaucratic inefficient, easily scammed alternative).

EVs in and of themselves are better for the environment than ICE cars, and less good than all other forms of transport (barring flying). As a Zoe owner, this is something I can acknowledge, while accepting that my current circumstances don't permit me to go carless. I'd like to see more EVs, and more varied forms (vans, pickups, trucks etc). Bashing people who have chosen to accept the limitations of EV ownership with the technology in it's current state is counterproductive.

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #39 on: 23 October, 2019, 12:41:38 pm »
The “hugely wasteful” critique applies equally to pretty much everything humans do. But it seems to only be wheeled out against electric cars, often as justification for continuing to drive some fossil fuel burning contraption.

No, it's trying to get across the point that EV's are not a universal panacea (is that tautological?).  They're a less bad option for motorised transport.
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

simonp

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #40 on: 23 October, 2019, 12:44:56 pm »
The “hugely wasteful” critique applies equally to pretty much everything humans do. But it seems to only be wheeled out against electric cars, often as justification for continuing to drive some fossil fuel burning contraption.

Mail on Sunday published an article in 2007 claiming the Prius had destroyed the environment around a nickel factory in Canada. They have taken the article down, it was so misleading, and in its place there is now a letter from a reader pointing out some of the mistakes.

https://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-417227/Toyota-factory.html

This stuff isn't accidental. It's all about preserving the status quo.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #41 on: 23 October, 2019, 01:08:25 pm »
Putting EVs (other than busses) in bus lanes is dumb. I don't even think taxis should be allowed to use them - save them for busses and human propelled vehicles.

I'm rather partial to Nottingham's approach of only allowing taxis that are wheelchair-accessible to use bus lanes.  Means the disabled people who might not be able to access a bus aren't disadvantaged, and provides a strong incentive to taxi owners to upgrade their fleet.

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #42 on: 23 October, 2019, 01:16:20 pm »


[1] The current supply of end-of-life lithium-ion cells is mostly lurking in obsolete computing devices in people's drawers-of-shame.  The ones used in cars have barely made it to static applications.
You'll be happy to learn that (lots of) Nissan's UK stocks are coming to a hill just outside Consett to be storage for peaks and troughs of our turbines and photo array.


rob

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #43 on: 23 October, 2019, 01:41:12 pm »
Probably off on a tangent but I recently saw a presentation on the net zero by 2050 requirements.   We're looking at full electrification or transport and heating.  I suspect this will mean some sort of scrappage scheme for cars and boilers.

Electricity demand will increase but we'll need to retire the gas fired generation fleet (coal will all be well gone by then).  The generation gap will be filled by more nukes but also a whole heap of offshore wind.   Unfortunately though we will have to, fboab points out, manage the peaks and troughs of generation.   The answer to this is grid scale batteries, possibly in conjunction with some other less mature storage technologies.

So, the upshot of more cars with batteries is even more batteries to manage the grid.

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #44 on: 23 October, 2019, 01:44:01 pm »
I'm not really arguing that they're not better than the alternative, which is an ICE. If we buy another car it'll likely be electric. But, tbh, the solution is not to buy another car, because other than the pollution, it'll still do all the bad things vehicles and our dependency on them do. And even recycling has a resource cost and we're talking about massively increasing the number of electric vehicles.

Indeed, and take the extreme thought experiment of, overnight, replacing every ICE vehicle on the roads with an EV.

Renewable electricity supply can not magically increase to compensate for the increased demand, and so any increased demand on the national grid is going to mostly be met by non-renewable sources, e.g. increased burning of fossil fuels or nuclear. At least until this country (and eventually the world) can move to completely renewable energy generation.

V2G will help mitigate some of this as the non-constant aspects of renewables [solar, wind, hydro, etc] can be evened out thanks to a huge fleet of batteries that don't have to be charged at peak times and that can actively feed back into the grid at peak times. Also helping is the fact that industrial electricity generation at national scale is going to be much more efficient than a generally inefficient petrol/diesel ICE.

Replacing an ICE vehicle with an EV is going to be of some benefit, replacing an ICE vehicle (or to a lesser extent an EV) with nothing is even better.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

HTFB

  • The Monkey and the Plywood Violin
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #45 on: 23 October, 2019, 02:10:18 pm »
Electric cars are a 2030-ish solution. They will make sense once the grid is decarbonised. But as Scottish Power (was it? I was half listening) point out today installing the infrastructure to anticipate charging them all, alongside being able to heat our homes without natural gas, is a huge and enormously expensive job that will itself take decades. Coordinating the existence of the cars and existence of the charging infrastructure, so that neither is sitting idle for years, is itself a challenge.

To achieve Net Zero we will all need to adapt our behaviours and prejudices, from learning to sleep in warm bedrooms with the windows closed to being happy with nuclear power plants built close enough to cities that we can use their waste heat. Congestion and parking charges, to reflect the true social cost of vehicles moving and vehicles standing still, will be the least of it. (The big impossibility, though, is knocking down homes in the hope of rebuilding more efficiently and at higher densities. Replacing all the pre-1919 homes in England would cost nigh on half a trillion quid just for the building work, which buys a hell of a lot of electric buses.)

London's congestion charging is already moving to stop exempting low-emission vehicles (electric only from October 2021, no vehicles by 2025). I don't think they're going to gain special bus-lane status now.
Not especially helpful or mature

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #46 on: 23 October, 2019, 03:31:02 pm »
The big impossibility, though, is knocking down homes in the hope of rebuilding more efficiently and at higher densities.

And by extension stopping households of two people living in properties with more than one bedroom. And controlling / limiting the size of families.

EV's are the tip of a very big iceberg.
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #47 on: 23 October, 2019, 03:52:01 pm »
All very utopian and in the finest traditions of YACF somewhat off topic.

I'm a bad person, in fact I'm murdering the planet for future generations.

Why you may ask?

Well, I personally have three cars. They all pollute, the most efficient manages about 30 mpg and my classic car does nearer to 20 mpg. I drove to work this morning in my newest car (2004) and bought fossil fuel to do so. I own three cars but can only drive one at a time - my dad has four, three of which were built before 1971.

I'm a motoring enthusiast. Yes that's right I like cars. I actually drive them for fun on racing circuits and I am a passenger in what some would consider a pointless sport called rallying in which we drive very fast for fun. The calculation I make for our fuel figures is 1 litre for every competitive mile - yes 4.54 miles per gallon although in a modern UK national rally the competitive mileage is about 45-60 miles depending on the event, some are longer.

Except to me none of that is pointless. My sport is something my friends and I have have passion for, I could argue it's brought safety, reliability and high end development to the masses and in the old days it did just that but really even then people did it to prove they were better (faster) drivers than others.

I don't however, rely on my cars, yes I drove to work this morning but I do have the means to cycle and will continue to do so. I'd like an electric car but our funds aren't sufficient to buy a new-ish car of any sort at the moment. I see my colleagues buying/leasing the latest model every three years and wonder why. Our main car has 145,000 miles on the clock. I've tasked myself with extending it's life for as long as actually possible - mostly out of fun because I'm interested in the mechanics of the whole process. I don't need to impress my colleagues or neighbours with what's parked on the drive.

Others think it's their only option, which is wrong. I hate commuting by car, there's too many cars to actually enjoy 'motoring'.

I do my best to do what I can for the environment elsewhere in my own small way but my love of cars is not going to change. Hopefully one day I'll have the means to 'operate' an EV or something but it's not driving.

Sorry.
Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped

Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #48 on: 23 October, 2019, 04:08:08 pm »
For us who live in tiny flats in the city, once electric cars come in that are self driving, everyone will give up uber/mini cabs and switch to whatever version of car sharing (zip etc) is available then*.  All the cars that are currently parked on my street are a wasted resource. Cars on my street might move for 2 hrs a week. The rest of the time they're just sat there. Car sharing and driverless cars will change things, and it's coming.

*Thinking about it, car deodorising and self cleaning car interiors will be when everyone will make the switch to driverless car share schemes.

quixoticgeek

  • Mostly Harmless
Re: Electric cars in bus lanes?
« Reply #49 on: 23 October, 2019, 04:32:38 pm »
Electric cars are a huge resource sump, where do you think the lithium comes from

A big hole in Australia, mostly.  And remember there's a lot less lithium in a lithium-ion cell than a lithium cell.  And you can get it from scrapped batteries, if there were any scrapped batteries to recycle[1].  (AIUI there's a company in the Netherlands who have a commercially viable industrial process, but a limited supply of raw materials.)

The rare earths in permanent-magnet motors are as much of an issue.  Those mostly come from China.  But there are other ways to build electric motors.

I thought most came from south america these days?

There's not actually that much in an electric car. Google suggests:

"A 70kWh Tesla battery uses 63kg of Lithium Carbonate Li2CO3, of which 19% or 12kg is Lithium. That's about 0.17kg/kWh in Tesla Batteries"

And because mass is a stupid way of describing it[²], that works out as approximately 22.4l in volume (just under half the typical volume of a Kitchen bin).

The big issue with your battery isn't the lithium, it's the cobalt. Cobalt is added to increase the durability of the battery and improve performance, it's about 5% (I can't find out if that's by weight or by volume). Only Cobalt is almost exclusively found in the DRC. Which gives rise to all sorts of ethical issues wrt conflict minerals etc...

How much aluminium do you think is in your average car engine? Where do you think that comes from?

In theory a car should be nearly fully recyclable. The most difficult items being the tyres and the plastics.

Lithium ion battery recycling exists, and there is some evidence suggesting that the materials recovered from a used battery are of better quality and performance than the first time round. A proper case of upcycling. The problem Lithium battery recycling is having currently is one of supply. Lithium ion batteries in cars are lasting considerably longer than anyone expected, and once they have had their life in a car, they are often used as static batteries in homes and grid scale storage.

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all the other components and their constituents?

The same places they do for combustion-engine cars.

The latest Renault Zoe has tried to do something about this, all the plastic in the Zoe is recycled, and even the fabric of the made from recycled fibre.

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Even if we pretend all the electricity is made by in a completely renewable fashion by cuddly creatures, the impact is huge.

But no huger than the current status quo, and electricity functions as an abstraction layer.  You can power an electric car on petrol, diesel, coal, natural gas, uranium, wind, solar, geothermal heat, pixie farts or quantum foam without modifying the car, and it's approximately five times more energy efficient.  That's an improvement.

It's that energy efficiency that is the key point here. It may be that you replace 200 diesel cars with 200 teslas, and you charge the teslas by burning coal, but it's a lot more plausible to put filtering equipment into the output of the 1 coal plant, than it is into the output of 200 cars. If CCS ever takes off, this will be even more useful until we have completely divested our grid of the burning of coal. What is more in some places the CO² from some power plants is being used, along with the waste heat to improve the growing of food crops to help feed people. Which reduces the CO² emmisions of the power plant.

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What about end-of-life.

In general the batteries get a retirement in a static application and then recycled.  The car gets a new battery and goes back on the road, until some fuckwit writes it off, then it gets scavved for parts to retrofit a combustion-engine vehicle.  (Currently, a written-off Tesla is almost worth more than a working Tesla.)

Yep, the amount of moving parts in a modern EV are so few, that if the frame of the vehicle is intact, then swapping the battery is a worth while path, esp when that battery can be used in static applications.

This is actually going to make for interesting issues. An EV in theory has a lot longer life before it wears out, meaning that manufacturers don't have the expected obsolescence keeping their business going.

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I'm sorry, but electric cars are Marlboro Lights of driving. The let us keep our vehicle-dependent lifestyle and the majority of the costs and impacts, while avoiding reflecting on the impacts of that lifestyle.

Absolutely agreed.  But vehicles, where used, should be powered by something less wasteful and harmful than burning stuff.  We need this technology for buses and vans and fire engines so on, even in a car-free utopia.  And - as the government have been careful to avoid - we need a fuckload of electric-assist cycles.

There is also the major improvement that the emissions are moved to outside the city. This greatly improves the health of the population at large, even if it isn't making a massive difference in total amount of CO² going into the atmosphere.

To go back to the previously mentioned point regarding non-tailpipe particulate emissions, even your bike has these. Sure it's a lot less than on a 2t death box, but my tyres still lose weight over their life, and it's going somewhere. Everything has an impact.

It's easy to be sceptical, it's easy to say that electric cars are feel good green washing for the middle classes. But as long as each new EV is removing a dinosaur burner from the road, it does make things better. Sure it doesn't solve the problem of entitled wankers misusing public space, sure it doesn't help with inactivity related illness. But if we replaced every single dinosaur burner with an EV in the same phyiscal envelope, it would make a noticeable difference to the world. And that is a step on the way towards replacing those EV's with cargo bikes and public transport.

Now if we could just solve the chicken and egg problem of pubic transport, we'd be onto a winner in actually improving out world...

J

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[1] The current supply of end-of-life lithium-ion cells is mostly lurking in obsolete computing devices in people's drawers-of-shame.  The ones used in cars have barely made it to static applications.

The problem with the computing device cells is they are so varied and small, making it more expensive to recycle. If you have 100t of leaf batteries, it's a lot more cost effective to recycle than 100t of nokia batteries, and increasingly, integrated into the rest of the device.



[²] It's actually a big problem when it comes to discussing things like nuclear waste. People say a nuclear plant is generating lots of waste, you can even find numbers like a 1GW nuclear plant will generate 27t of waste in a year. But if you ask people to visualise that, it's about 52l, or about the same as your Kitchen bin. If you empty your kitchen bin once a year, you're generating a greater volume of waste than a 1GW nuclear plant does. Sure the nuclear waste is pretty damn dangerous, but we are coming to realise that the plastic waste we generate isn't all that great either. When you consider that the full stock pile of 100t of plutonium the UK has, would fit in a transit van. Sure that would be a bad idea on so many levels. But people are just crap at visualising stuff if you use mass to describe it. It's even worse when you think about CO². A flight across Europe will produce 2t of CO² per passenger. Just how much is that? How much does all the air in the room you're in weigh? Using mass is great from a science point of view, but we really can't visualise it as normal humans.
--
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