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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.

    Original post 
I was surprised there wasn't one already, so here's the spot to disscuss electric cars, hybrids, ect. No politicsing this thread please.

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

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4901: Jan 2nd 2025 at 8:03:42 AM

More pertinent to the topic, Tesla posted its first full-year sales decline, with 2024 totals of 1,773,443 vehicles produced and 1,789,226 vehicles delivered, compared to 1,845,985 and 1,808,581 for 2023, respectively.

Financial results will be published on January 29, followed by an investor relations conference call.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
PointMaid Since: Jun, 2014
#4902: Jan 2nd 2025 at 8:40:34 AM

I'd say the reason noting it was Tesla would be germane would be because it could tie into motivations or political implications (which I'll obviously not get into), especially given the location. A Ford wouldn't really have any of that implication AFAIK. Not because the media are trying to smear electric vehicles and/or Tesla in particular.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4903: Jan 2nd 2025 at 9:49:05 AM

Yeah, but the media said "Tesla Cybertruck" right out of the gate. This is a pattern in the media where if a Tesla is involved in any incident, it gets prominently noted as such, while other makes get referred to generically.

People viewing the media are then psychologically conditioned to expect Teslas to crash, burst into flames, etc., when this is very much not accurate. Heck, it's practically a meme across TV and social media, with content creators that I otherwise respect joining in on the fun.

Words have meaning. You can't cherry-pick which people or companies this applies to without being a hypocrite.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 2nd 2025 at 12:50:45 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
HandsomeRob Leader of the Holey Brotherhood from The land of broken records Since: Jan, 2015
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
#4904: Jan 2nd 2025 at 9:58:40 AM

I've always said Memes are dangerous.

They can be fun, but they are very dangerous, because to maintain them, you often have to ignore any and all other context, and since people find them funny, they'll latch onto them and spread them further.

If it's at the expense of someone people don't like or if people would otherwise not care, but still find mocking said subject to be fun, then it's especially hard to deal with them.

Musk sucks. That much is certain. And that makes any bad news connected to his product even more entertaining to latch onto.

One Strip! One Strip!
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4905: Jan 2nd 2025 at 10:10:39 AM

Musk may suck, but that doesn't attach to the products that his companies sell via the commutative property, and I hate how the usual critical thinking that we apply to product safety and reliability go out the window just because someone we don't like is involved.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 2nd 2025 at 1:13:52 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
HandsomeRob Leader of the Holey Brotherhood from The land of broken records Since: Jan, 2015
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
#4906: Jan 2nd 2025 at 11:23:39 AM

Eh. I see your point, but how people view the person behind the product does sometimes affect the product as well.

You refuse to buy something, even if it's good, because maybe the person who sold it kicked puppies or something.

How much you agree with such an act (refusing to buy the product, not the puppy kicking) can vary, and maybe this does stem from people wanting to find more to dunk on Musk over (since the Cybertruck does have some legitimate issues that have been brought up on this thread), but I do see the benefit of sticking purely to facts.

One Strip! One Strip!
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4907: Jan 2nd 2025 at 11:29:58 AM

We can illustrate what I'm talking about with a few hypothetical statements.

  • "I refuse to buy a Tesla because I dislike Musk." This is an entirely subjective opinion and cannot be disputed with facts.
  • "Teslas are unsafe because Musk sucks." This is a statement of fact ("Teslas are unsafe") linked to a subjective opinion, and the factual statement can be easily checked. (It's false, by the way.)
  • "Ha ha, Musk is a joke. Look at all those Teslas bursting into flames." This is factually inaccurate because EVs catch fire substantially less frequently than gasoline powered vehicles and Teslas are statistically safer than other EVs in this regard.

It becomes exhausting to defend the safety and reliability records of Teslas and of electric vehicles in general when anyone arguing with you resorts to ad hominem arguments to make you look like an Elon Musk stan. By tying these statements of fact to like or dislike of Musk, anyone attempting to disprove them can be accused of "defending" him.

Before someone accuses me of hyperbole, I've seen this exact thing happen multiple times in both this thread and elsewhere. Tribal posturing requires people to signal membership in the "anti-Musk" community by dunking on the products that his companies make.

The tragedy is that the conversation is poisoning the well for electric vehicles in general. We need more of them as fast as possible, and Tesla is by far the biggest game in town outside of China.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 2nd 2025 at 2:33:10 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#4908: Jan 2nd 2025 at 12:12:11 PM

I'd like to see more hybrids with ethanol and biodiesel.

But that is just me, I live in a region with practically zero support for E Vs.

Inter arma enim silent leges
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4909: Jan 2nd 2025 at 12:25:50 PM

Unfortunately, ethanol has not been demonstrated to reduce carbon emissions on net, since it relies on corn farming — it's just shifting where the emissions occur. It mainly acts as a subsidy for the corn industry — a blatant case of greenwashing.

Synthetic fuels have promise in some applications if they are created via carbon capture and electrolysis, but they are (a) costly, (b) don't address the inherent efficiency problems with internal combustion engines, (c) don't significantly reduce smog and particulate emissions.

They may be useful as stopgap technologies but are a dead end when it comes to actually solving pollution from transportation.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 2nd 2025 at 3:29:01 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#4910: Jan 2nd 2025 at 12:42:26 PM

Only the Americans have been stupid enough to make ethanol from corn because they didn't want to lose the farming subsides.

Ethanol from sugar cane is viable and doesn't require energy input. It practically turns into ethanol on its own.

Corn isn't the only source for bio fuels and isn't even close to being a good one.

Inter arma enim silent leges
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4911: Jan 2nd 2025 at 2:28:59 PM

At best biofuels are carbon-neutral since the plants that produce them capture carbon which is then released as the resulting fuels are burned. Which is fine; it's an improvement from baseline. The problem is that they're still horribly inefficient if you think about the total ratio of the Sun's energy that is delivered as torque.

The "well-to-wheels" energy efficiency of battery-electric vehicles is vastly higher, making it the superior long-term choice. Plus, they have the benefit of not emitting noxious exhaust.

There's also the abstract argument that biofuels are a crutch to prolong the lifespan of internal combustion engines. Like hydrogen, they are not a viable long-term solution, and we run the risk of people saying, "Well, we did good enough, right?"

There are a few applications where synthetic fuels may be irreplaceable, mainly in long-haul and ultra-high-performance aircraft, plus high-temperature metallurgy. Those are probably acceptable in a net-zero civilization.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 2nd 2025 at 6:45:23 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
HandsomeRob Leader of the Holey Brotherhood from The land of broken records Since: Jan, 2015
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
#4912: Jan 2nd 2025 at 4:19:30 PM

Huh. I didn't know you could do Bio-fuel with Sugar Cane.

Gonna keep that in mind. When we need fuel during the Zombie Apocalypse, we'll need to explore all options.

One Strip! One Strip!
KnightofLsama Since: Sep, 2010
#4913: Jan 2nd 2025 at 4:42:39 PM

[up] You van make bio-fuel from almost anything organic. It's just a question of supply and efficiency.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4914: Jan 2nd 2025 at 4:56:28 PM

And energy. You can use the power of the Sun to transform sludge into gasoline so it can be trucked across the country and farted out of a car, or you can capture the Sun's energy as electricity, send that to the car, and put it into motors that use it three times more efficiently.

The advantage of biofuels is that they can work in existing machinery and utilize existing infrastructure, but we're trying to get rid of all that last I checked.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 2nd 2025 at 8:20:35 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#4915: Jan 2nd 2025 at 5:33:32 PM

[up][up][up]The tech sugarcane to ethanol has been a thing in South America, mainly in Brazil, since the 70's.

Considering that since ethanol production is an industry that existed in Brazil for over 40 years, its technology and methods are pretty energy efficient with studies that is carbon negative and not just carbon neutral. You can even use the sugarcane bagasse to generate thermal energy and reduce dependency on coal and natural gas for energy.

It is sheer protectionism that gate kept sugar cane ethanol from being widely adopted.

[up][up][up][up]

I'm not buying that we can replace all vehicles with E Vs. Both because lithium batteries are very energy intensive, hard to recycle and then there is the scale issue related with a global production and demand since each EV requires a lot of rare earth minerals. It also competes with electronics industry. On top of having relatively few viable mines. Lithium isn't exactly an unlimited resource.

We also have the issues that while an EV vehicle doesn't produce carbon emissions directly, it does via its need to be powered and how energy intensive it is to make those battery banks.

Ethanol ICE is both a well established technology and can be either carbon negative or neutral. It can use a lot of existing infrastructure to fuel cars and its production is about as cheap as gasoline ICE vehicles. To the point I've seen vehicles from the 90's and early 2000's that run exclusively on ethanol still working.

You also have to consider that most of the world can't afford an EV, that the infrastructure to support E Vs simply doesn't exist in most of the underdeveloped or developing world and E Vs themselves are still fairly inconvenient. From limited range, taking too long to charge to being expensive to service, on top of most developing world having really terrible roads that can easily damage less sturdy vehicles.

Meanwhile flex fuel vehicles, that can run both of gasoline or ethanol, have been a thing in poorer countries for decades. For example, my average earnings is better than 70% of Brazilians and buying an EV still out of reach for me. Imagine for the other 70% that earn less than I do.

I'm in favor of hybrids, both because manages two main issues of petrol burning vehicles and E Vs. It reduces emissions inside cities since it will mostly use the batteries. A hybrid usually requires 1/4th of the lithium an EV does, and doesn't sacrifice range since the ICE can take over long travels or recharge the depleted batteries without having to rely on charging stations that might not be there.

[up]

We aren't worried about running out of sun for the next billion years.

Solar energy is literally the most abundant form of energy we have access to.

Edited by AngelusNox on Jan 2nd 2025 at 10:35:09 AM

Inter arma enim silent leges
Falrinn Since: Dec, 2014
#4916: Jan 2nd 2025 at 6:50:30 PM

There's a lot of new battery technology in development, so a lot of the issues with Lithium Ion Batteries might not apply to E Vs as a whole as time goes on.

Sodium Ion batteries in particular is something I'm looking at. Sodium is ridiculously common and most of the chemistries people are working with don't involve a lot of other rare materials.

They are also being produced industrially right now, if on a fairly small scale, so they are more than just a lab experiment.

Right now their big issue is energy density, but at least in the lab they've achieved densities within the range of the lower-end lithium EV batteries, so this isn't a "we need to increase it by an order of magnitude" situation.

Long term I suspect Lithium will always have the advantage in terms of energy density, but there's a world where mass market vehicles (along with stuff like grid or home storage where cost matters far more than density) use sodium batteries instead.

megarockman from The Sixth Borough (Experienced Trainee)
#4917: Jan 2nd 2025 at 9:49:55 PM

So sodium is iron and lithium is bronze from 3500 years ago?

The damned queen and the relentless knight.
AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#4918: Jan 3rd 2025 at 12:52:47 AM

The thing is, the technology is being developed and isn't yet competitive. It's yet to yield results.

Biofuel is something that had been viable since the 80s and doesn't require technology that hasn't come to fruition yet.

Using biofuels in tandem with electrification, is for me, a painful road not taken. Not only it could potentially have reduced the dependency on fossil fuels, but it wouldn't require anything radically different from what already exists. Specially serviceability and ease of access.

I'm fairly bitter that promotion E Vs almost completely killed off government investments, research and development of alternative fuels that don't require fossil fuels.

Inter arma enim silent leges
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#4919: Jan 3rd 2025 at 12:55:34 AM

It's even more annoying since you know that if sugarcane were a major crop in the USA that it'd be a different story.

But like you said, protectionism. If there's no money to be made by USA farmers or business, fuck'em.

Disgusted, but not surprised
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#4920: Jan 3rd 2025 at 5:35:43 AM

I'm sorry, folks, but the idea that special interests in the United States are behind the push for electric vehicles is absurd. The push is global and driven by the fact that EVs are simply better than internal combustion cars. They're a superior technology: more efficient use of energy, fewer moving parts, less noise, less pollution, lower maintenance, etc.

In fact, the "special interests" have been sandbagging the technology for decades, including seeding culture with propaganda like that cited above.

  • Energy companies hate it because petroleum sales will crash.
  • Established auto manufacturers hate it because they have an enormous capital and labor investment in the status quo.
  • Dealer networks (in the US) hate it because they can't make huge profits on service.
  • Unions hate it, ironically, because it requires fewer worker-hours per vehicle to build EVs.

There's plenty of lithium on Earth to make all the batteries we need; it's just a matter of resource development. Plus, 99% of battery materials can potentially be recycled, meaning we will reach a saturation point where mineral extraction can be curtailed. We'll never get there with petroleum, nor even biofuels.

As noted, there is also a ton of research into alternative battery technologies that could be even more effective, so we haven't come anywhere near to exhausting the tech tree. Internal combustion engines are as mature as they'll ever be.

Fundamentally, the advantage that battery-electric has over biofuels is efficiency: three times less energy wasted in the end-to-end process. That will guarantee its economic dominance.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2025 at 9:02:05 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Azorius24 Knight of Solace from the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond (Five Long Years) Relationship Status: love is a deadly lazer
Knight of Solace
#4921: Jan 3rd 2025 at 5:49:39 AM

Another major reason why mass adoption of biofuels is sub-optimal, which hasn't been brought up yet, is that every acre of land being used to grow biofuel crops isn't being used to grow food. Which, at sufficient scale, will begin to cause problems.

"The only thing which is certain, is that something will happen".
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#4922: Jan 3rd 2025 at 7:13:08 AM

Still would be an improvement over gasoline.

Disgusted, but not surprised
AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#4923: Jan 3rd 2025 at 7:22:12 AM

There is a food surplus already, sugarcane wouldn't shift much besides making me sugar industry annoyed.

[up][up][up] I'm not arguing that E Vs don't have their advantages. I'm arguing that E Vs are going to leave a lot of the global population behind.

Even if E Vs don't break easily, it is a world of difference between current cars that can be serviced anywhere to E Vs that practically require highly specialized shops or a return to factory policy.

Biofuels like ethanol might not be as energy efficient as E Vs but they are accessible. Basically most third world cars are flex fuel and can be fueled with ethanol if needed be, gas stations already service ethanol and range isn't an issue. Meanwhile you'd need to completely replace all ICE vehicles with E Vs and I can assure you that plenty of people won't be able to afford one.

Edited by AngelusNox on Jan 3rd 2025 at 12:23:43 PM

Inter arma enim silent leges
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#4924: Jan 3rd 2025 at 7:29:24 AM

The problem with food in the USA at least isn't a lack of crops. We're throwing away excess crops.

Edited by M84 on Jan 3rd 2025 at 11:29:44 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised
DeMarquis (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#4925: Jan 3rd 2025 at 8:11:48 AM

"I'm not arguing that E Vs don't have their advantages. I'm arguing that E Vs are going to leave a lot of the global population behind."

Sure, but the same thing could have been said of ICE's when they were first introduced. Then the Model T happened. EV's need their Model T, and that ain't anything from Tesla.

Chinese models, on the other hand...

There's a left coded conspiracy theory on the web that the real reason Republicans want to put tariffs on Chinese goods is to block the entry of cheap Chinese EV's. Well, one of the reasons.

Biofuels have an image problem: they promote agricultural monoculture, with all of those associated problems, and they fail to make sufficient progress toward reducing carbon emissions. Not true?

Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 3rd 2025 at 8:16:23 AM

I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.

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