Damning new report finds nearly all major car companies are actively sabotaging world’s efforts to avoid catastrophic global warming, and Japan companies are the worst.
I'm only buying Toyota because it didn't get sucked into the stupid EV craze. They have common sense.
The U.S. doesn't even have the electrical grid to currently manage many parts of the U.S., especially California. How tf are we going to introduce a product that will require electricity, straining the electrical grid further beyond its capacity? It's fkin nonsense.
Not to mention.. the number of EVs (Teslas) that were having battery failures during the Winter in the midwest. And this last Winter was mild.
Literally google, "tesla stranded in winter". Urineidiot.
edit: lol and I just learned not only that Teslas were having battery issues but even the charging stations were having issues. Good grief. Imagine being stranded in the middle of nowhere... but hilariously, stranded in front a fkin charging station lmao dead.png
I think the OP has a point here: most of North America is distinctly not urban, distinctly not pedestrianized, and really spread apart. EVs take a substantial range hit in the cold, which might not be a problem in the Montreal area but is a bit more of an issue when living in bumfuck, Wisconsin.
I have relatives up in Saguenay where temperatures reached -50 last year. They have EVs and it's not an issue. Sure the range and efficiency drops, but I wouldn't say they break or become unuseable
First of all, you need to check your attitude. I don't know why you're being so aggressive.
Second, I'm not a liar. I fucking live here and my cousin who has TWO Teslas for his family has never encountered any problems. I have other relatives who have other EVs from different makes who never had problems. The vast majority of people with EVs here, even in the northern regions where it gets fucking cold, don't have problems.
And third, Tesla's get stranded everywhere, regardless of temperature or weather, more than any other EVs, mainly because they're poorly built PoS cars.
Thanks. I find that quite fascinating, honestly. How is it that in the Americas, EVs - or at least Teslas and their charging stations were failing but in Norway apparently this is not an issue they face.
In the U.S. extreme heat and extreme cold is bad for the electrical grid. He have blackouts / brownouts and rolling blackouts during these extreme weather/temperature conditions.
It was common in the Midwest. And I just literally gave you the keywords to google search.. there's all the sources you need for the limited information I provided in my initial comment. Don't like it? Kick rocks. You can't re-invent reality.
Gasoline is a finite resource, so at some point all gas stations will sell out of gas. Imagine how hilarious it will be when gas cars are stranded at gas stations because there's nothing to fill them with.
I agree, if the resource is out... there's nothing you can do but to go to another gas station. However, gasoline in winter weather, even if it's -30 degrees Fahrenheit, is still usable. You're still able to pump the fuel into your vehicle. Where as with these charging stations cold temperatures is a nemesis.
I have no beef with EVs, I just think we're putting the cart before the horse. Like building a house with no foundation, it's ludicrous.
I'm trying to say that eventually there won't BE another gas station, and we have to prepare for that. Progress isn't always a straight line, but I'd still rather be moving forward than digging our heels in with something we know we can't use forever.
No it isn't. Crude oil is finite, but gasoline could be synthesized from other carbon and hydrogen sources (up to and including CO2 + H2O + solar power) if you really wanted to.
The process of synthesizing it is inefficient and expensive. Companies have gone bankrupt trying to make it profitable, so it really doesn't seem like that's an answer here, especially when we have cars that don't require any such fuel already on the roads.
Right. At the moment, hydrogen production is too costly, energy wise. If we could find an easier, better way to make it, that would change the game entirely.
Right now there is a hydrogen refueling station in Quebec city that produces it's own hydrogen on the spot. It takes electricity and uses water electrolysis to create hydrogen.
It's inefficient, but it works. No need for transportation.
A highly exaggerated claim. Once you factor in all of the challenges of grid energy storage and battery manufacturing, there's likely to be little to no difference.
I know that right now hydrogen production is really not efficient compared to simply recharging a battery. Producing hydrogen takes more electricity to produce from water electrolysis to fuel a car for the same range as it would take to simply charge a battery. This I am aware of. And that's what I was implying in my previous comment.
However, a small hydrogen cell powered car has at least twice the range of a similar sized EV. And also, it doesn't take hours to recharge. Only a few minutes to refill the hydrogen tank.
What I hope it that we one day find a way to efficiently produce hydrogen. Because I'd rather have to wait a couple of minutes to refuel on a long trip than having to stop for an hour every time I need to recharge.
We have a more efficient way to produce hydrogen, which is using nagural gas. That's obviously a bad idea. You can't change the laws of physics, producing hydrogen from water and electricity just takes that much energy.
Yeah I know that. That's why initially I was saying it would be great if we found a better more efficient way to produce it. Obviously hinting at the fact that it wasn't the case right now.
If that was the case, Toyota would never have created the Toyota Mirai.
And have you ever seen what happens when an EV battery is damaged? Many residential buildings with underground parkings don't allow EVs to park underground due to the fear of the intense fires and how it can cause severe damage.
People don't seem to get it. Electricity to hydrogen to electricity to motion is really, really lossy, and hydrogen leaks. It is worse than electricity to hydrogen to methane to power.
Exactly: it makes sense only if you have an excess of clean electricity to electrolyze it from water, and even then the best thing to do would be to immediately (at the point of production) use it to synthesize a liquid hydrocarbon fuel for easier transport and storage (which also has the benefit of letting it be burned in existing ICE cars).
Carbon is what matters, but not in the way the hydrogen-pushers want you to think:
It doesn't matter if the fuel has carbon in it, if the carbon is part of the short-term carbon cycle. Biodiesel, for example, releases no net greenhouse gases even though it has lots of carbon in it.
The dirty secret of hydrogen is that the vast majority of it is made by cracking fossil methane. (My previous comment about combining hydrogen with carbon to make synthetic liquid fuel charitably presupposed it was made the right way, by electrolyzing water with solar power, but most hydrogen production is not like that)
In other words, anybody telling you that hydrogen is better for preventing climate change than biofuels -- despite them containing carbon -- is trying to hoodwink you.
Ok. Because over here we've had a hydrogen station that's been producing hydrogen at the station itself via electrolysis using electricity from the grid. It's been working fine so far.
I'm gonna have to look into your claim about cracking methane being the way the majority of the hydrogen is created.
Ah ok yeah I see what you mean. Thanks for providing that info.
Yeah for sure if it's just as dirty, or worst, there's no point. But, I feel like people forgot what my original comment was. I basically said that if we could find a better way of producing hydrogen, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles could potentially be better than EVs for many reasons. The main advantages being that you get better range and you can refuel in a couple of minutes instead of an hour.
Other than that, if we can't find a way to produce hydrogen in a clean efficient way, of course there's no point in continuing down that road.
This wasn't even a debate about which vehicle type is better, or what fuel is better or any of that. It was just a discussion about the pros and cons of EVs and HFCs.
I don't know why people got so riled up over it. Like you gotta pick a camp and defend it. Are EVs and hydrogen cars that polarising??
I don't know why people got so riled up over it. Like you gotta pick a camp and defend it. Are EVs and hydrogen cars that polarising??
I think there are two main factors:
Differences of opinion among people legitimately trying to find the best solution (e.g. because they assign different amounts of importance to tradeoffs between batteries vs hydrogen, such as slow charging vs difficult storage).
People pushing particular technologies in bad faith because they're more interested in perpetuating the business model they already have than pivoting to what's best in the long term (e.g. fossil fuels companies greenwashing with "blue" or "grey" hydrogen, BMW wanting to keep making internal-combustion engines, etc.).
Frankly, hydrogen has enough challenges associated with it that it's easy to assume anybody advocating for it falls in the latter group.
The main advantages being that you get better range and you can refuel in a couple of minutes instead of an hour.
I still think biofuels or synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels burned in normal internal-combustion engines are better at those things than hydrogen ever will be, while also being much more convenient in terms of reusing the infrastructure and vehicles we already have.
The only way in which hydrogen is really superior is that it emits only water vapor, rather than the traditional pollutants like NOx, VOCs, and particulates that ICEs burning even carbon-neutral fuel would continue to emit, but that mostly matters in urban areas where battery EVs beat out hydrogen anyway.
In other words, I just don't think there's any niche where hydrogen is the best solution. Long-haul rural trips are better suited to carbon-neutral bio or synthetic liquid fuels (or, you know, trains), and short urban trips are better suited to battery EVs you can just charge at home (or, you know, bicycles).
Long rural trips for cars are fine on electric, as long as there is fast charging on the way. The car takes as long to top up as the human takes to take a break from driving
Trucks, ships, aeroplanes, off roading will need dense fuel. Trains might need fuel, but most of those should be electric
You ever wondered why traditional carmakers are pushing so hard for hydrogen? That's because they can still reuse those super inefficient combustion engines, which they perfected in the last 50-100 years, and which is serving as a big gatekeeper to newcomers.
And with EV, they need to start from scratch like everyone else and they hate it.
Nobody is going to upgrade the grid, if there is no prospect of increased demand.
I've noticed that media tend to bitch equally about both surplus and shortage of certain commodities. Expensive power? Horrible! Cheap power? Catastrophe! That way the world seems even more depressing than it really is.
They should be upgrading the grid as the population and demand for electricity increases ahead of time. This is how it works in the tech world. We set the base for the upgrade and then commit to the upgrade with fall back / disaster recovery plan.
Check when the last time an installed utility performed maintenance. Now you want them to turn things off while they put in new hardware? The only thing that will drive a business to make that kind of change is if the money is behind it, which will happen when EVs are much more prevalent.
Not from all the profits made by all the people using electricity and paying for electricity? And electrical grid has redundancy. You can take down primary and secondary takes over temporarily.
That’s just the media doing its thing. Information content is a byproduct of making money. Actually, educating the public isn’t strictly necessary, because you can also manipulate emotions to attract attention and clicks.
If you’re in a city, bikes and public transportation are the answer. Rural areas are stuck with cars though. America seems to be a bit of an exception to this rule, because lots of things would need to change before any of this could potentially happen.