A thread to discuss electric vehicles and hybrid technology. No politics, please.
Technology, commercial aspects and marketing are all on-topic.
- Companies (e.g. Tesla Inc.) are only on-topic when discussing their electric vehicle products and research, not their wider activities. The exception is when those wider activities directly impact (or are impacted by) their other business areas - e.g. if electric vehicle development is cut back due to losses in another part of the business.
- Technology that's not directly related to electric vehicles (e.g. general battery research) is off-topic unless you're discussing how it might be used for vehicles.
- If we're talking about individuals here, that should only be because they've said or done something directly relevant to the topic. Specifically, posts about Tesla do not automatically need to mention Elon Musk. And Musk's views, politics and personal life are firmly off-topic unless you can somehow show that they're relevant to electric cars.
Also, posting this late, so sorry for any misspellings I might have left in there.
(Mod edited to replace original post)
Edited by Mrph1 on Mar 29th 2024 at 4:14:39 PM
Figure of Hourai
As ever, it's more moving parts that have some minor luxury benefits but also interfere with basic safety. Not a fan of such approaches.
You now have two ways a door can fail to be openable in a crash†. 1) the automatic release doesn't release. 2) the door is actually broken. In exchange, the car is... very... slightly quieter?
† Plus any others that might be inherent to all doors.
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Lost in Space
I don't completely disagree with you, but regulators have approved the system. Take it up with them, I guess.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Figure of Hourai
Guess we need a plague of people dying in entirely preventable trapped-in-car scenarios first.
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Lost in Space
Do we, though? If there isn't a problem in practice, then theoretical problems are not really relevant. If we had statistics on trapped-in-car incidents and could show that Teslas suffer from them at a higher rate than other vehicles, maybe...
In the court of public opinion, anecdotes are sufficient to convict without a trial, but to regulators, they are not data.
Edited by Fighteer on May 21st 2022 at 10:19:55 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Figure of Hourai
Conversely, needing to wait until we have evidence of a problem when the problem is entirely foreseeable from the outset means getting a whole bunch of unnecessary tragedy before taking action. Proactive vs reactive regulation.
For instance, the principle "there should not be a situation where you would be uncertain how to exit the car if the doors can still be opened" is limited in scope, sensible (you could probably have the same manual release system with some reworking, just tie it to the normal door handle) and might not be necessary but does not unduly restrict innovation.
It's not like we don't have entire fields of regulation that work on the exact opposite principle of unsafe until proven otherwise.
Edited by RainehDaze on May 21st 2022 at 3:24:09 PM
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Apparently Failsafe Failure never happens in real life or something?
"Yup. That tasted purple."
Figure of Hourai
HGV brakes at the relevant example.
Albeit, if your car defaults to unlocked if not powered, that would be another problem. Maybe if it didn't recede the handles when stationary? Hm.
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Once again, I restate my belief that there was nothing wrong with a mechanical "pull lever to open door" system and this whole thing smacks of Tesla's ongoing Complexity Addiction.
"Yup. That tasted purple."
Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
This is like the thing with the truck. There's a reason you want actual mirrors and not just cameras. There's a reason you need a manual door release on the inside that is obvious and easy to use. A mirror is not going to be affected by a glitch or a bug. A manual door release is much less likely to fail because of a bad update and they can't fail because of a dead battery.
This is what I mean by bad engineering. It is good engineering to look at this and go "so, this automatic release isn't a bad idea, but we should make sure there's a manual release too, just in case." It is bad engineering to actively remove safety features that aren't dependent on software to function. You want to prepare for even rare scenarios.
Like, say, what happens if there's a coronal mass emission that hits the Earth? We don't really know how to predict those, but there's a good chance it might cause a big EMP blast on the side of the planet facing the sun at the time, and they'll be more likely in the next few years. Will the automatic unlock function if the entire car is disabled instantly? Or is it just a last gasp thing just before the battery runs out? A manual door release might not be necessary most of the time, but it's incredibly dumb to leave it out because the scenarios where it might be necessary are bad.
A good engineer looks at the rare scenarios and takes reasonable steps to prevent them from being a problem, and including a manual door release is a dead simple way to avert problems from almost all of the rarer scenarios you can think of.
Edited by Zendervai on May 21st 2022 at 10:57:23 AM
Not Three Laws compliant.
Figure of Hourai
They have a manual door release, it's just that depending on the model this included such ideas as "remove the interior carpet and pull a cord".
Which is better than no manual release but bad on the grounds of "people in the back are the ones who are unlikely to have the manual".
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Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
Okay yeah, that's just bad design. It also sounds, like, really hard for a lot of disabled or elderly people to use. Just use a fucking manual door handle, people are familiar with it, no one will think twice and it doesn't require you to do a bunch of contortions to get at it.
If there's a perfectly functional and accepted approach to something and changing it just makes it more complicated and difficult, there's zero reason to change it.
Edited by Zendervai on May 21st 2022 at 11:05:32 AM
Not Three Laws compliant.
Figure of Hourai
Again, I refer to these manual excerpts.
The Model S hid it under the carpet, the Model X requires removing a speaker grille, and the Model 3 apparently decided rear doors don't need a manual unlock.
Apparently, the Model Y has a plain manual system. Maybe they got the idea. Or maybe they just didn't think the SUV needed to block out wind noise (or wanted to save the money for something else; it seems to about the same price bracket as the Model 3?). Hard to say.
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Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
That lack of consistency is concerning too. Doesn't inspire confidence if they have to keep fiddling with it and radically changing it to make it work when they could just build it into the fucking door.
(Also, falling back on "it's legally allowed" is not a good defense for...basically anything, to be honest. It's legal to use a hoverboard as a method of travel, but they still had a nasty habit of lighting on fire with very little provocation for at least the first year of their availability.)
Edited by Zendervai on May 21st 2022 at 11:34:52 AM
Not Three Laws compliant.
An interesting article I stumbled on for the people who live in Canada (and to a lesser extent the United States):
Putting the Brakes on Electric Vehicles
Today, the supremacy of the automobile can feel like an immutable reality—but it wasn’t always that way. In 1913, there were only about 50,000 motor vehicles on Canadian roads, but the year prior, the Canadian Highway Association had already started pushing for a national highway system. By 1919, they were starting to get their way. The government of Robert Borden passed the Canadian Highway Act that year, directing highway funding to the provinces, followed by even more during the Great Depression. Finally, in 1949, the government of Louis St. Laurent passed what became known as the Trans-Canada Highway Act to set federal standards and provide federal funding, which reached up to 90 percent on some segments. The Trans-Canada Highway was considered complete, as per the Act, in 1971.
The history of highway funding is one example of the central role that governments have played in enabling the automobile-dependent society we live in today, but it is not the only one. Over the years, federal and provincial governments expanded road networks, provided incentives for automotive manufacturing, and created the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation to make mortgages more accessible to people, while setting standards that encouraged suburban development. This partnership between industry and government was mutually beneficial, but it hasn’t been without consequences.
Vehicle ownership costs on average between $8,600 and $13,000 a year, according to the Canadian Automobile Association, and that was before recent inflation. Meanwhile, 1,762 people were killed by motor vehicles in 2019, and another 8,917 people were seriously injured. The environmental toll is also significant, with suburban living having a bigger carbon footprint than urban dwelling, and transportation accounting for 25 percent of national emissions in 2019, second only to the oil and gas sector. Those emissions grew by 54 percent between 1990 and 2019, in part because of the increased number of large trucks and SU Vs on Canadian roads.
To address the transport sector’s contribution to climate change, the Canadian government and its provincial counterparts have coalesced around a plan to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, with a goal of reaching 100 percent of passenger car and truck sales by 2035. To incentivize that shift, the federal government is offering rebates of up to $5,000 for the purchase of a zero-emissions vehicle, subsidies for the construction of electric vehicle chargers, and is working with industry to ensure production facilities are in place.
On its face, electrification seems universally positive since it will be essential to any transition in the transportation sector—but it also signals a lack of vision. “Automobility as a technology and as a set of desires is never fundamentally challenged,” explains James Wilt, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk. Instead, Wilt says, the government’s policy assumes “all you need to do is get people out of an internal combustion engine vehicle and into an electric battery vehicle.”
That is in part because of a common assumption that electric vehicles are without environmental cost since they do not produce tailpipe emissions. It can be seen in the language of “zero emissions.” Yet, as Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) professor John Sandlos says, “To conceive of those vehicles as being ‘green,’ wholly green, and without cost, that would be a mistake.” In most scenarios, an electric vehicle has a lower emissions footprint than one powered by gas or diesel, but that does not mean they do not have an adverse impact of their own. A greater share of their emissions are generated in the production stage rather than from their use, and their batteries account for a significant portion of that environmental cost.
As part of the federal government’s push to grow electric vehicle production, it wants Canada to become a key node in the mineral supply chain for the batteries that power them. Former Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry Navdeep Bains calls this Canada’s “competitive advantage,” explaining that “we are the only nation in the western hemisphere with an abundance of cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel, the minerals needed to make next-generation electric batteries.” The 2021 federal budget was praised by the Mining Association for introducing new funding and tax incentives under the government’s Mines to Mobility initiative. U.S. officials have also referred to Canada as a “51st state” for minerals after a concerted push by the Liberals for an integrated supply chain.
For government, the expansion of domestic mining is positioned as a significant economic opportunity, while “the mining industry sees that as an opportunity to portray themselves as clean and green,” says Sandlos. But in order to lay the groundwork for increased extraction, the costs are being downplayed. “Part of the problem goes back to our measures of what is economic success,” explains Mining Watch Canada communications and outreach coordinator Jamie Kneen. “The reason that these things look like good economic options to governments is that there are big dollars invested and high-paying jobs are created, but not that many jobs, and a lot of the real costs of mining are externalized.”
According to Wilt, such a plan “is premised on the continued dispossession and underdevelopment of Indigenous nations, especially in the North.” While mining can provide opportunities like high-paid jobs and training, it also comes with many consequences, and communities—be they Indigenous or non-Indigenous—are not always able to effectively assert their rights to ensure mining developments minimize the harms and deliver the promised benefits.
The government is championing its strategy, but it’s still early days. Kneen explains that opposition to lithium and graphite projects in Quebec is already mounting, and most existing Canadian mining is still for minerals that wouldn’t be going into batteries. That means there’s time to ensure mining projects must meet a more rigorous standard. “It’s a question of having much stricter and much more effective regulations in place,” says Kneen, “including things like free, prior, and informed consent for Indigenous communities and processes that provide meaningful democratic engagement and that respect Indigenous authorities and their decision-making, so that people are not being asked to sacrifice beyond what’s already been stolen from them.”
Sandlos warns against “a Wild West rush” for battery minerals and asserts the need to learn from the mistakes made during the oil boom earlier in the 2000s. In her book Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada’s Petro-Provinces, University of Waterloo professor Angela Carter describes that period as one in which provinces were “neglecting the environmental risks and impacts of oil extraction in their rush to capture the spoils.” In her research, Carter outlines how, in seeking to capitalize on high oil prices, governments subsidized oil companies, rolled back environmental regulations, and even stifled environmental research. Those actions not only had impacts on local environments and the climate, they were also accompanied by the oil industry having greater influence over policy and growing inequality, particularly in the provinces where that extraction was taking place.
As we look forward to a potential mining boom driven by electric vehicles, an environmental assessment process that gives people real power over resource developments could be one way to avoid a similar fate. “If there are communities near a mining development, those communities should be involved in the planning,” Sandlos explains, “especially if this mining is happening in the proximity of Indigenous communities which have particular rights to land, and culturally I think they would say they have certain obligations to the land as well.” In his view, that process could require companies to sign agreements that create community-controlled oversight bodies to audit the mines.
Each of these projects should also have to do a full accounting of their costs, says Arn Keeling, an MUN professor and collaborator with Sandlos on the Toxic Legacies Project. “If we’re going to talk about electrification, what’s the true cost?” he asks. “Well, the true cost means paying every dime” of the social, environmental, and infrastructural costs, not being distracted by “promises of windfall profits that usually get privatized anyway.” There will be opposition to higher standards for mining projects, but they are essential to responsible development. “The neoliberal way of thinking about this is to see all this as red tape,” says Sandlos, but “it’s the way of imposing a land ethic on doing this kind of development and being willing to put the brakes on developments that don’t make sense.”
Beyond ensuring mining is done in a more responsible way, the government’s transport policy needs a broader rethink. “The first of the three Rs is reduce,” says Kneen. “Reducing demand through efficiency and technology is great, but we also need to look at the structures of the way we do things.” The suburban, auto-oriented communities we have today are the product of decades of government policy that encouraged us to live that way, and a transport policy that meets the scale of the climate crisis requires a similar level of ambition. “I wouldn’t want to see electric vehicles become an excuse for more suburban development,” says Sandlos.
As an alternative to requiring most Canadians to buy electric vehicles, Wilt argues for a “radical decommodification of transportation” where governments prioritize policies and investments that encourage people to ditch their cars—whether gas, diesel, or electric—in favour of taking public transit, riding a bicycle, or walking where it’s feasible. In practice, that means directing significantly more funding to expand transit systems and cycling infrastructure in urban, suburban, and even rural communities across the country. It also requires federal and provincial governments to not just pay the capital costs of buying new buses or building new subway lines, but subsidize the daily operating costs usually shouldered by cash-strapped municipal governments.
Finding success with such a transport policy requires thinking about the broader community too, in the same way the automobile incentivized suburbanization. “All levels of government are focused on profit opportunities for shareholders,” explains Kneen, “and it’s not a policy that’s really responding to people’s needs.” Instead, Wilt argues such a shift “requires densification and socialization of housing” to ensure investments in transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure don’t just serve to further gentrify cities with new condo developments and prices that many people can’t afford. “It really does revolve around understanding mobility as a fundamental right and responsibility for all of us to collectively share,” he says.
The government is embarking on a project that continues to centre automobiles, while requiring a significant increase in resource extraction at home and abroad—extraction that will have consequences for communities and local environments. It’s a policy that doesn’t fundamentally challenge the status quo, other than swapping internal combustion engines for batteries, even as our reliance on automobiles has created inequities and harms that this transition offers us the chance to address. The transition away from fossil fuels will require minerals, but the amount depends on the path we ultimately pursue—and one that reorients mobility toward public transit is far less resource-intensive than one where many Canadians continue to rely on automobiles.
As Wilt puts it, “The question is not so much whether the policy can or will be effective, it’s more, ‘Is this the future that we want?’” We have a rare opportunity to think seriously about how we want to live in the century to come. It would be a shame to let mining and automotive companies make that decision for us.
Now, it should be said that the author, Paris Marx, did their MA in geography on transport policy and automobility and is currently pursuing a Ph D in the same field, having also written a soon-to-be published book called Road to Nowhere - What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. They're also the host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, which is dedicated to exploring and critically assessing some of the wild claims coming out of Silicon Valley and the tech space. Feel free to read it with a critical eye to the author's background/dismiss it all as biased lefty bullshit as you will.
But I do think it's important to assess the technical aspects of EV's with an eye to how they're created and ensuring that it's not another case of the global north letting the global south foot the bill for its consumerism because the technical option is more politically palatable. Especially since we know the environmental costs of lithium mining and the economic cost of cobalt mining get fairly consistently downplayed.
Edited by math792d on May 21st 2022 at 8:14:46 PM
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.
Lost in Space
So it's more of the "cars are bad" thing. And it overlooks the fact that plenty of indigenous people are being harmed by oil extraction, which would substantially decrease with EV adoption. Worst case, we'd be replacing one form of resource extraction with another for a net zero change, plus the cars are cleaner. Tailpipe emissions contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people each year.
But there's another factor to consider, which is that the lifecycle of battery materials is effectively infinite with recycling, and the more batteries we have, the more get recycled. Eventually we should reach a point where the quantity of batteries reaching end-of-life is equal to the quantity of new batteries needed, and mining can slow down dramatically.
In a nutshell, EVs have the potential to become end-to-end sustainable: powered by solar and wind, built in factories using solar and wind, and with 99 percent of their battery materials recycled. Gasoline vehicles will never have that capability.
Even if we decide that cars aren't the way forward, we'll still need lots of batteries to power buses, trucks, and trains in our utopian mass-transit cities, not to mention all the batteries to store renewable energy for later use. It's just shifting the demand, not fundamentally altering it.
"Think of the poor people" is just a talking point without any real value. The global poor are always getting left behind in some way or another, and obviously we should address that, but "don't adopt this new technology that could help address climate change because of the global poor" is nonsensical. The poor will suffer even more if the planet warms by three degrees. It's the Perfect Solution Fallacy used to justify the status quo.
Now, it's true that the advantages of EVs will initially accrue to the wealthy and middle class, leaving poor countries to keep using gasoline powered vehicles because they are cheaper. This is true of every new technology and is not a reason to, and I can't believe I have to remind people of this, keep making gasoline-powered cars.
Oh, and yes, a lot of people also die in car crashes. So we get self-driving going along with EVs and solve that problem too. Self-driving is also useful for trains, trucks, and buses.
Edited by Fighteer on May 21st 2022 at 3:41:05 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Congratulations on missing the point of the article completely. Like, I'm genuinely impressed at how little you seem to either actually comprehend or how little you bothered to read the details.
Marx doesn't argue for getting rid of EV's, nor for doing nothing.
What they're suggesting, and what a lot of people in the same camp are suggesting, is that we stop treating "just replace all of our existing infrastructure that brought us into this climate crisis in the first place with electric infrastructure without thinking about ways in which social policy can contribute to fixing this crisis."
The Perfect Solution Fallacy is the idea that going full-tilt on EV's without thinking about other infrastructure, without securing the prosperity and health of the people who will be the first to be affected by climate change and whose labor is currently being exploited to make these vehicles, without considering whether or not we are currently wasting entirely too much energy on imperfect solutions when we now have a chance to invest properly in alternative infrastructure will be fine. Every new feature getting hyped up in Silicon Valley is going to be The Thing That Saves The World.
It's all well and good to say "yeah but the global south's going to get fucked over anyway" when the rich people are investing in the energy infrastructure of the place you live, but billions more people are going to get shafted if we don't take the opportunity to consider what we're doing. We can electrify our personal vehicles, invest in energy-efficient transportation, and make sure there aren't Congolese miners dying to extract cobalt for 2-3 dollars a day, or entire communities in Chile suffering from record droughts because of the ecological damage caused by lithium extraction. We have the unprecedented wealth to do it, we have the means by which to do it right now, we don't have to rely on making breakthroughs in technology to do it. We can do it right now if we bother to better organize the resources we have available while we have the opportunity of needing to massively overhaul our infrastructure to accommodate the switch to electric transportation anyway.
It's a plea to be more mindful of our resources and our ability to affect change beyond spec sheets on a designer's lunch table. To consider that we have a spectrum of options available from technical to social solutions and that right now we're assuming we can fix everything with the former and neglecting any option to meaningfully employ the latter.
In fact, battery recycling is a perfect example of the sort of social policy they're talking about - the ability to build that infrastructure and subsidize it to the point of making recycling of batteries safe and attractive as an option for people buying into EV's is fantastic, but unless the process is cheaper than extracting new batteries there's going to be a financial incentive to keep mining, and legislation to help avoid planned obsolescence or similar features creeping into production has the potential to help make these vehicles last longer.
Edited by math792d on May 21st 2022 at 10:04:16 AM
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.
Lost in Space
We can electrify our personal vehicles, invest in energy-efficient transportation, and make sure there aren't Congolese miners dying to extract cobalt for 2-3 dollars a day, or entire communities in Chile suffering from record droughts because of the ecological damage caused by lithium extraction. We have the unprecedented wealth to do it, we have the means by which to do it right now, we don't have to rely on making breakthroughs in technology to do it. We can do it right now if we bother to better organize the resources we have available while we have the opportunity of needing to massively overhaul our infrastructure to accommodate the switch to electric transportation anyway.
Yes, and? These things are already being done. So he's pleading for things to happen that are already happening. Battery recycling is occurring right now, both in factories that make them (scrap utilization) and in third-party facilities that recycle end-of-life units. There are already global efforts to improve the human rights record of mining.
Edited by Fighteer on May 21st 2022 at 4:14:45 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Right, this is becoming pigeon chess again, I'm out.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.
Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
So why don't the companies extracting these minerals do a profit-sharing scheme with the workers doing the actual dangerous work? Like, with a lot of this stuff, the problems need to be addressed now because if situations get bad enough, the source countries could very well just completely shut off all access to these resources. And relying on pure profit motive isn't good enough. Companies need to be willing to have some profit instead of all of the conceivable profit that ever could exist.
You have a real way of reading everyone else as being completely binary, Fighteer. No one is ever saying it's "this or that", it's always "this and that" and you tend to ignore that distinction. We need to figure out a way to do this production now in a way that doesn't fuck over those countries because making those countries hostile to green tech in general by not paying enough attention to their concerns is really fucking stupid.
Also, uh, how much of those resources exist in accessible places? We kinda can't just assume that there's enough of the stuff to make the whole world run on batteries like that, we need a lot of alternate ways to handle things too. Like say, the way a lot of cities handle buses and trolleys now, where there's electric wires overhead and they get their power that way. (and batteries aren't a reliable way to deal with power outages for vehicles, because a bus that's been out all day and the power going out overnight before it gets back to the depot means it can't recharge before the next day.)
Edited by Zendervai on May 21st 2022 at 5:08:39 AM
Not Three Laws compliant.
For those curious, the article is about how electric cars aren't the end-all-be-all solution to many of the issues associated with gas cars because it's the car part of the deal that is responsible for those issues, regardless of whether it's gas or electric. Specifically it addresses the harmful environmental and economic impacts the mining business practices have on local communities, singling out Canadian First Nation towns as an example, and urban sprawl more broadly as the auto industry influenced how cities are built.
The writer argues that policy makers need to take these into consideration and push for change before the vehicle/mining industries complete the transition and become settled and resist any further change that would threaten their bottom line.
Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
Yeah, it is absolutely true that the way American cities exist is contributing to global warming. They create these gigantic islands of heat that don't dissipate properly because they expand too far.
And in before "but we can't redesign the cities!", Amsterdam did it in the 80s, it's completely possible. It'd also create a ton of jobs in the process and pour an enormous amount of money into the working class.
Not Three Laws compliant.
A procrastination in of itself
I do think we need a shift in thinking, E Vs perhaps need to be viewed not as the final solution, but as a key stepping stone to developing environmentally friendly transport infrastructure. The short term problem of increasing tailpipe emissions can be solved by E Vs, but that still leaves the long term problem of an environmentally unsustainable transport infrastructure built upon mass personal vehicle ownership.
The shift in thinking needs to come from both sides though, the groups that keep shitting on E Vs for not being the final solution have to recognise that they’re a key step to finding a solution. As a society we aren’t going to make the cultural jump away from personal vehicle ownership fast enough to address the immediate claims change problems that tailpipe emissions are a massive contributor to. It’s gonna take at best 30 years to move us culturally to a mass-transit society and another 10-20 years to implement that change in infrastructure. Getting the EV switch done in say 10 years might just give us the extra 30-40 years for the secondary transition.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
I swear we had an urban planning thread. Darn it, why can't I find it.
A procrastination in of itself
Poor forum infrastructure planning? 
Like I said, in a crash, the doors are supposed to automatically release themselves so the handles will work as expected. If that doesn't happen it indicates a major problem.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"