I mean, I wouldn't call riding a motorcycle "safe".
I'm not even arguing against them, it just feels like calling it "safe" makes it easy to dismiss all the safety precautions you should take and safety gear you should use whenever you do ride one.
Someone once referred to motorcyclists (specifically the ones without helmets or leathers) as "meat crayons" in front of me and I can never get it out of my head.
In the medical industry they refer to motorcycles as "donorcycles", since, in the event of a fatality you can usually still salvage at least one or two organs from the corpse.
Inside the motorcycle community, there are two polar opposites: ATGATT (All the gear, all the time), who always brace for the worst and wear the heaviest gear they can find and SQuIDs (Super quick, immediately dead) who go at full speed wearing shorts and sandals. Pick your side.
I always found it interesting that Rolls-Royce had to let vibrations and noise in the back of their cars. Moving in a car without identifiers really trips with the brain.
Edit: downvote me all you want, it won't make electric cars charge any faster, have any more range, be any more affordable, work any better in the cold, or be any more fixable by their owners.
No I get it. Electric cars are definitely cool and have advantages, but also have some disadvantages that this just kind of ignores to make a gotcha moment
Generators, fans, boats, planes, lawnmowers (sit on and push), strimmers, powered dumpers, diggers etc etc. if you Google it you'll probably find more.
I hope the prices keep falling here in the US as well. Right now they're pretty much all as expensive as more luxurious cars, and the ones that are affordable kinda suck.
one of the major reasons is that new cheap evs cant compete with used premium ones, hence the desire to develop a cheap EV, at least in the states, is economically prohibitive.
basically because of how picky people are, especially with budget cars, the risk of devlopment on them are extremely high. Make the wrong cut and youre suddenly a bankrupt company
Just did a quick eBay check. The cheapest 350hp ICE I could find was a rebuilt $3,000 Chevy engine. A new one is more like $6-8k. An equally powerful, brand new Siemens motor was $1,500.
This makes sense when you think about it though. An electric motor is basically just steel with a bunch of coiled wire with some control electronics. An ICE is hundreds of pounds of precision cast and machined metal. The cost driver in electric vehicles is not the motor, it's the batteries.
Not really. The cities across the world are introducing public chargers in lamp posts and at the kerb. While it is kind of an issue today, it won't be tomorrow.
Hopefully it won't be, but charging an electric car is still not a standard thing for apartment buildings to offer tenants. So, for the moment, that's a major reason for renters to not take the plunge.
My apartment block in London has underground parking with allocated chargers. There are multiple lamp post chargers over here and other types of chargers. So, for the moment it's already fine.
Unless you take road trips often having a place to charge is literally any random Outlet. You don't need a fancy dedicated fast charger if you drive less than 100 miles in a day. Think about how many hours your car is just sitting at home, it has that many hours to charge it doesn't matter if it charges in 1 and 1/2 hours or 9 hours as long as it gets charged
So even as a renter as long as you have any kind of outdoor outlet or garage you've got somewhere to charge
I'm not who you replied to, but you are assuming a lot of the living situations for millions and millions of people. I live in a building built in the 40s and only have street parking. I do have a pretty damn good public transit system at my disposal, though. That's within reach for my short travel needs today.
I have an EV and charge at home. I love it. That said, I've lived in tons of rentals in college and immediately after. Not one of them would've had a practical option to charge, even on a regular outlet.
When I rented I only had street parking. In that situation an electric car is just another thing to manage. If you've got a garage to park in, sure, even with a basic 220V outlet.
A 2 year old Polestar 2 with 12,000 miles just cost my buddy slightly less than $25k. You can't even get an Accord with that age and mileage that cheap these days! Hertz dumped a bunch of them on the market recently, they were too much fun to be a profitable rental so they're absurdly cheap right now
I myself recently went from a '19 car with 220k km to a '05 one with 460k km because I realized my car's getting driven so much recently, the depreciation is killing its' value. For context, in 2022 when I acquired the '19 car, it had 140k on it.
I'll have to do some wheel bearings, brake pads, belts and pulleys, etc, on the old beater, but all that is way cheaper than the depreciation on a newer car.
To be clear, I don't advocate most people do this, I already knew beforehand what the engine and transmission are capable of. And if need be, I'll even do engine repairs or get the transmission refurbished. The ONLY thing I'm afraid of is bodywork because I can't paint for shit lol
It's not all Kazakhstan either. I'm in Estonia and half of those "200k km" German cars that get imported here have had their odometer rewinded.
Oh, the charging station. Charging port I think would mean the port it plugs into on your car. Yeah, I guess that could be an issue, but it's not really something that needs to be considered by a consumer. The fact that you're much less likely to have mechanical issues I think more than makes up for the rare case of vandalism, which can happen to any piece of the infrastructure, for gas and electric.
It's an extremely unlikely situation, and the same thing can happen with an ICE. An ICE is, in fact, much more likely to experience mechanical failure. For either the solution is the same: you have to get towed.
Luckily if it's just needing a charge there are other options than a fast charge station. You can go to an RV park and get a faster than a regular outlet charge, or go somewhere with a regular power outlet and ask if you can use it. Either of those could require spending the night, depending on how much you need, but it is very unlikely to be required and they are possible.
Regarding battery degradation - I've owned my EV for 4.5 years now, and its battery is still at 93% of its original capacity. That equates to maybe 10 miles of range lost, from an original range of around 230 miles. At that rate, it'll still be giving usable range in 10, 15 years from now. It's even warrantied to keep over 75% of its original capacity for 8 years / 100,000 miles - if it fails to achieve this (likely due to some defect), it's replaced for free.
And when it does eventually need replacing, it can be recycled into something like a home storage battery - where the power demand is not as high, but still more than enough to power everything in your home for days. Meanwhile, the car can be upgraded to a brand new battery, which will likely last even longer.
Edit: In fact, I tell a lie - I did have to replace a battery on my EV recently. The 12v lead-acid battery, that ICE cars also rely on.
Well, mine has gone through 1 set of rear axle bearings,one stupid oem heater bypass pipe assembly thst i swapped out for a stainless steel replacement, and two propeller shafts
I'll keep my ICE and ride a bike. I'll still do less environmental damage than you because I am human powered for all but the trips to the mountains, and then I don't have to worry about being stranded without a plug.
And I have yet to hear a convincing argument that taking my perfectly working vehicle off the road to buy another manufactured product is still more environmentally friendly than... not buying anything at all.
I don't give a fuck about initial torque. I'm going to be laughing in my wheetabix when there's not a single EV older than a decade on their original batteries.
Pretty easy to make a comparison to the average American. It's like BMI -- it's bigger than the individual and not a metric useful for individual comparison.
Drivers reported making an average of 2.44 driving trips, spending 60.2 minutes behind the wheel, and driving 30.1 miles each day in 2022. Projecting these results to all drivers nationwide, 255 million drivers made a total of 227 billion driving trips, spent 93 billion hours driving, and drove 2.8 trillion miles in 2022, all of which represented small but not statistically significant decreases relative to 2021.
It's totally relevant. You said "I’ll still do less environmental damage than you" and your reasoning for that is based on what the average American does.
So unless you believe that you're only talking to average Americans, you are using a meaning of the word "you" that literally no one else in the world uses.
So you sure claim you do. And the evidence you gave was, again, you were talking about the average American. So, again, how do you know that everyone here- that anyone here- is what you describe as an average American?
And I have yet to hear a convincing argument that taking my perfectly working vehicle off the road to buy another manufactured product is still more environmentally friendly than... not buying anything at all.
That’s because nobody is making that argument. The only statement I’ve ever heard from environmentalists/scientists is that the most beneficial thing to do is keep your old ICE car and maintain it well.
I certainly know of some "get rid of your car and bike everywhere" environmentalists, but most of them realize that isn't actually an option in, for example, rural Montana in February.
Yeah, at least they’re sticking to their ideals and their suggestion would help the environment. But as you pointed out, it just won’t/can’t happen in much of the US.
In fact, I just recently went on a road trip from Pennsylvania to Tennessee that took me through parts of West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. I can’t think of any places I saw where public transportation would be feasible. Maybe long-distance trains to augment air travel as an option, but nothing last-mile.
I saw more signs about reasons god might send me to hell, or how Trump is awesome, than any form of public transit. Even buses. Because I saw zero of any of it.
Not sure if this was a thing anywhere else but in some UK cities like London there were "scrappage schemes" that incentivised scrapping your car to replace it with something more efficient, which I always thought was missing the point
Approximately nobody is saying you should sell your 2020 compensator for scrap, in fact the general consensus is that the best thing you can do is keep your current ride in good repair as long as you can.
You don't have to invent boogeyman just because you have a weird parasocial relationship with big oil.
Because the first model year for the Nissan Leaf was 2011, not 2010.
Most cars are physically manufactured a year or so before the model year. If you want to search for Leafs (Leaves?) manufactured in 2010, look for model year 2011.
I can see it making sense. If you're blind and you hear the sound of a waterfall approaching you, you're not going to immediately think "that's a car."
While my sentence could be worded more clearly, that's a pretty bad reading of what I said.
My car is valued by KBB at ~6k in it's current state.
That current state includes a battery that was replaced under warranty 6 months ago, and is thus basically a brand-new battery, 9 years left on its warranty and everything.
So if something goes wrong with the battery and it isn't directly your fault: it gets replaced for free. The only 6k being spent is the original 6k on the car as a whole
We have a food delivery company in town, and they use electric cars. I got to talk to the owners a few years back, and they were paying around that price. So I suspect it's getting close to fitting your needs. How far do you drive each day, on average?
It all depends on where you live, of course, and how far you are willing to look for that car. And you might want to poke around on Edmunds.com, if only to satisfy your curiosity. Like others have said, and I would agree, it's getting close to your criteria - 90+ miles, $6K for a used. I suspect that there will be a whole lot more used EVs on the market over the next 5 years. All the 'cool kids' want to buy the latest, bleeding edge tech. And watching and waiting to get that tech seems like a prudent and viable option. The other thing the guy with the delivery biz said was that he was getting his cars from CA, because he could find them used, cheap, relatively good condition. Anyway, best to ya. I'm out.
The one thing stopping me is seeing how they fare long term with the overwhelming amount of electronics added to the cars.
Hopefully car manufacturers goes a different direction as electronic and appliances company went. Everyone I know that are into EVs went through 2 or 3 different one in the time I've owned my ICE car (~10 years). Most because of their lease ending and wanting the absolute newest but others due to battery issues making the car a total loss due to replacement cost.
I’m not optimistic about this. The finance “geniuses” have seen how much money software and electronics companies are making from subscription models and trying to put them into even combustion powered cars. I think it’s BMW that’s already started trying to put heated seats on a subscription model. The equipment’s already in the car but it’s disabled unless you pay them a monthly fee.
I'm hoping that as EVs become more common, conversion kits become a thing. Both straight-electric and PHEV; I would love to pull the oversized engine from my truck (it's a 4.0 in a Ranger, wtf, it doesn't need that kind of power) and replace it with a diesel-electric motor-battery-generator combo. With a half decent battery, I would be running on electric 95% of the time; for the other 5% (which is camping on rough trails, no I'm not renting a truck for it), there'd be the diesel generator backup
Isaac Asimov's Bible guide convinced me that abrahamic religions are mostly made out from stuff either from Mesopotamia (Sabbath, Eden, the floods) or myths coming from later cults (e.g. Greece).
I don't know about the shrooms, my reading of the old testament made me think it started with some old guy trying to stop his nomadic desert tribe dying of anything too stupid by telling camp fire stories with some sort of message. The whole 'god will make the ground open up to swallow you and your family if you screw up' is a desperate attempt to scare them into not doing stupid things like slaughtering too many of their livestock at once, or eating shellfish whilst wandering around in a desert.
The stories get retold, changed and embellished over generations before being written down, and you end up with the weird mess of basic survival tips, animal husbandry, heroic stories and mystic fluff that is the OT.
The new testament is just the story of a fairly chill guy, with a slight messianic complex, wandering around with his mates and suggesting people be nice to each other, put through a similar transformation.
All Religion has its origin in shamanism. That then led to polytheism which then led to monotheism. What all those have in common is that people made it up as they went along.
Afaik, christians don't see the devil as a god, but as one of god's minions takes with temping the flock or having them prove their faith or some shit.
Catholics also have patron saints for nearly everything from infants to ice skaters that they pray to but that are totally not gods because there is only one god. I mean, yeah, their second most important prayer is directed at the Virgin Mary, but that doesn't mean they worship her or anything.
This presumes some type of "pure" original religion — which indeed some people believe — as opposed to an evolving understanding that is relevant in each generation.
You seem to be confusing religion with a bible, which is probably a reflection of the dominant religion near you, but not every religion has a book, and not every religion with a book understands it in the same way.
Read it closely. It's making fun of petrol heads who try to justify keeping gas engines. Electric power plants are way more efficient, generates more torque and horsepower in a smaller package.
Then scroll this thread and you see all the same people doing the same thing.
To be fair the comic said nothing of batteries. Case in point: there are "gas engines" that are basically a generator connected to an electric motor because it's more efficient than just using an ICE. The generator is optimized for small constant torque and the electric motor delivers as much torque as the system demands.
Probably easier than thawing the gasoline in the ice engine, which freezes at -40. And your diesel generator won't run either unless you kept it plugged in to keep the fuel from turning to gel (that process starts at -10).
Mr. Monkey subjectively your finely tuned v8 sounds like a 400lb basement dwelling gorilla someone has fed laxatives and recorded from the bottom of a well used coachella porta potty.
I dunno, I’m “team electric is objectively better in every way” but I gotta agree, a fancy tuned racecar engine sounds like angry beast and that’s pretty sexy.
The jolt of max acceleration of an electric motor in complete silence is also extremely sexy, though.
Think of the nicest sound you know. A well-tuned instrument performing a delicate melody, a passionate singer performing their heart out, a cacophony of songbirds. That's what my good noises sound like when done right.
Obviously nobody wants to hear a fart can Honda Civic at 4am, but a fantastically engineered Italian V10 has its own melody that can't really be replicated otherwise. These examples will be missed, and the survivors will be sought after like a vintage violin.
It's incredible how certain people are conditioned to think the sound of a gas motor and shifting because your puny motor is out of optimal torque and rpm range are manly.
Yeh, but unless I uproot my life and move to a different country, I'm stuck doing it, so I can either bitch and moan about how much I hate it, or have the best time I can doing it 🤷🏾♂️
For sure, I used to drive stick when I drove, but I also argued for town planning that would make driving optional. Personal choices to deal with the reality you're given, public policy activism for the reality you want.
I don't see how making noise is good. I live in a street that doesn't get much traffic, but even one car is loud enough to be bothering.
I don't want to pause my music and conversations just because someone decided that vroom vroom sounds were more important than me hearing literally anything else.
Even more that noise pollution is definitely a thing, and affect both mental health and physical one.
Vehicles making noise actually is good, for pedestrians' sake, but yeah ICE vehicles make far more than they need to. Some (? many? I'm not sure how standard it is) electric vehicles make a sort of beeping sound for that reason.
If you're in an area where pedestrians may be crossing the road, traffic should be slow enough to use permeable brick pavers, which increase road noise, help with rainwater drainage, and add a little green to the road if find right.
I dunno, maybe take their conservative advice and violently overthrow your government?
Real talk, you'll have a hell of a time arguing for the upgrades, but even so, I only suggest switching to bricks when the road needs to be resurfaced anyway. The road works well enough as-is, this is just an improvement.
The majority of sound for cars are not the motor but the wheels compressing air, after I think 50kph, the sound of an ev or a ic is basically the same.
Well, in a neighborhood, cars won't always be driving 50 km/h. And the engine will be especially loud, when they need to accelerate after a turn or whatever.
Either way, I do hear the difference when an electric car goes by.
An interesting article about the Muskmelon, Tesla, and fuel cells. []https://energynews.biz/will-tesla-release-hydrogen-car/ (take the article with a spoonful of salt I think) It's perhaps another attempt at a pump and dump stock fraud as he does need money for twitter. But, I've seen a couple of these blurbs lately and I can't find where they originate from.
Even the ketamine wonder wants to sound like he thinks Tesla is going to abandon pure EVs and build and sell something with a hydrogen fuel cell evidently. If so,and you can't rule out it out completely yet, the ICE engine might not be done yet - just swapping a fuel source.
A fuel cell does not mean it's an ICE. It will still use an electric motor and probably even a small battery.
Hydrogen ICE exist, but are more complex and less efficient.
You could use Hydrogen to produce so-called e-fuels (we had a huge debate about them in Germany), but those can typically be used in normal ICE vehicels.
ICE with hydrogen has some racing applications, but that's about it. It's taking something that already has efficiency issues compared to batteries and making it even worse.
Fuel cells use hydrogen to generate electricity to spin a motor. There are issues with that, as well, but there's no future in ICE either way.
Personally, outside of some niche applications, I don't think fuel cells are going to replace EVs. The losses in efficiency are just to great in the conversion from water to hydrogen/oxygen gasses to electricity - unless someone figures out how to harness the energy released in a hydrogen bomb. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that. I do think that Tesla isn't as long for this world as Musk would have hoped for though. I personally hope he ends up broke and mocked as soon as possible. The world will be just a tiny bit better place IMO.
There's also expected future battery improvements to consider. We can't make a useful battery-powered airplane right now that could do passenger service from LA to Sydney. EV long haul trucking is also in its infancy at a barely feasible level for a limited number of cases. Then there's heavy construction equipment like cranes. All of which are cited as niches that hydrogen would be useful.
Thing is, our battery tech tends to improve--about 5-8% capacity by weight each year, at the higher end of that over the last few years. That's a doubling every 10-15 years. We're not at theoretical limits yet, money is still being pumped into both fundamental research and large scale deployment, and we have every reason to believe this trend will continue. That's going to squeeze out the niches where hydrogen is useful.
A fuel cell generates power through an electrochemical reaction, not combustion. So no, even if we went to hydrogen fuel cells, the ICE engine is done.
so my sisters Mazda MX-30 has more HP than my uncles Peterbilt 389? cool, I'll use it to haul my horse trailer. define "more powerful". Makes the point but XKCD usually does better.
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