RE: Honda e | Driven

[otolith]

I don’t believe that it will be necessary to put everyone on the bus. But if we don’t have an alternative to fossil fuelled cars, that’s what will have to happen.

[DonkeyApple]

otolith said:

I don’t believe that it will be necessary to put everyone on the bus. But if we don’t have an alternative to fossil fuelled cars, that’s what will have to happen.

We do have an alternative. It’s called the EV. But it is very expensive and very compromised and will remain so until an efficient way to store energy is developed. It will take decades to migrate ever car user over while we are still beholden to the clumsy, expensive and compromised brick solution so knowing this why on earth wouldn’t you opt to put into effect robust solutions to combat excessive fuel consumption in the interim. Especially as such action would speed up the conversion to EV by those who can without inhibiting the economic ability of those who can’t?

Your logic is that we should continue burning as much fuel as we possibly can while waiting the decades to convert everyone to EV, whereas mine is to reduce the fuel wastage while everyone converts as well as to speed up that conversion where it is economically and in user terms plausible.

[otolith]

DonkeyApple said:

otolith said:

I don’t believe that it will be necessary to put everyone on the bus. But if we don’t have an alternative to fossil fuelled cars, that’s what will have to happen.

We do have an alternative. It’s called the EV. But it is very expensive and very compromised and will remain so until an efficient way to store energy is developed. It will take decades to migrate ever car user over while we are still beholden to the clumsy, expensive and compromised brick solution so knowing this why on earth wouldn’t you opt to put into effect robust solutions to combat excessive fuel consumption in the interim. Especially as such action would speed up the conversion to EV by those who can without inhibiting the economic ability of those who can’t?

Your logic is that we should continue burning as much fuel as we possibly can while waiting the decades to convert everyone to EV, whereas mine is to reduce the fuel wastage while everyone converts as well as to speed up that conversion where it is economically and in user terms plausible.

Nope, I've not said that at all, I was having a pop at the people who think that electric vehicles are worse than ICEs and that continuing indefinitely with ICEs is a viable option. The kind of people who post pictures of open cast lithium (actually copper) mines, or wave their hands in the direction of hydrogen because it's an option that isn't currently available and thus postpones actually doing anything.

We can try to push people away from less efficient ICEs as transitional measures, along with encouraging them to use active or public transport instead and to reduce their need to travel, but let's be honest, governments have been pushing those lines since the 80's. Has it worked so far? To some extent, but not enough. So there are other things we can try, we can clobber the economy by restricting the availability of credit (this would be very effective way beyond transport, but might be catastrophically unpopular in a democracy, however it looks like the plebs have just successfully voted us into medium term economic decline of their own free will, so...), we can try rationing petrol or putting other sales controls in place, etc, but the bigger picture transition has to be either a shift away from private transport or a shift away from dino-juice. Otherwise, we're just rearranging the deckchairs. I'd rather we kept private transport, on the whole.

I think this Honda-e is the right direction, though - people need to get over the idea that it is a necessity to have an extra quarter ton of batteries or an ICE engine for just in case when what they actually need is something that will do 20 miles a day. As you point out, there is profligacy. Excessive range, excessive size, unnecessary 4wd systems, are not helping. So kill the SUV altogether, encourage smaller cars in general, encourage electric, encourage shorter range electric.