Rivian CEO issues strong statement about people who purchase gas-powered cars: ‘Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’
Rivian CEO issues strong statement about people who purchase gas-powered cars: ‘Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’
"I don't think I would have believed it."
Rivian CEO issues strong statement about people who purchase gas-powered cars: ‘Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’::"I don't think I would have believed it."
You're viewing a single thread.
Manufacturing needlessly large vehicles that you can't even see 30 feets in front of you while you run over children and still use plenty of fossil coming from the coal power plant 50 miles away, is also like building a horse barn in 1910. Obnoxiously large vehicles for anyone other than those that actually use them for their intended purpose is just as antiquated. In 20-30 years when half the world is suffering or dying due to the most extreme impacts of climate change we are going to look at large vehicles like we were insane. Edit: in before, "but I need my enormous vehicle because once every 13 years I haul 3 2x4's and am too dumb to use a roof rack or rent a truck for the day!"
still use plenty of fossil fuels from coal plants
This is disingenuous as fuck and you know it. Updates to the grid are by far the most effective means of limiting carbon release. Tying engines to the grid maximizes gains in solar, wind, etc that not doing so does not.
There is no serious plan for climate change mitigation that does not involve EVs.
I own a gasoline car. I was being too flippant. I would point out that our car centric culture is inefficient no matter how you swing it. I agree it's a part of solving climate change, but cars of any type are still a problem, we need to massively overhaul our urban transit and get away from cars in urban areas.
In the end all transit only accounts for 15% of the overall problem. Our spread out infrastructure caused by car convenience has many other negative externalities though, like the increased need to maintain more roads, electric loss over longer distribution, heating and cooling in large single family homes made possible by cars bringing you to your job while living way out in the suburbs (arguably way more serious than the cars themselves), etc. The suburban experiment was an environmental disaster, and I say this as someone that lives in a large house in the suburbs currently pumping out AC, so I'm not judging.
But plugging in your personal tank isn't really solving the problem. It's just ignoring it. Cars are the problem no matter the fuel source, because of the impact they have had on how we spread out and grow our consumption... We need multi use zoning, dozens of train lines in every city, bike infrastructure, work at home, massive reduction in fossil fuel based power plants... A reordering of society around alternatives to spreading out, a massive worldwide effort of urban densification. As well as a massive effort to hold corporations accountable for their energy use as well. That and we need to stop having so many fucking kids, the world can't support this level of consumption forever.
Not disingenuous. True. Grid power is still dirty so electric cars are still dirty. Probably about a 50% improvement in carbon emissions based on the most common fuel mix in the US for an e car.
Clean transportation by car is a luxury that we do not yet have.
You don't engineer for what you currently have. You engineer for where you want to be.
Renewable energy is the fastest growing segment of the energy market by a mile, growing exponentially.
I don't have my numbers at hand, but renewables account for something like 80+% of new energy growth in the US.
Yes. The OP is about how TODAY it is silly to use ICE. Today it is silly to pretend that electric cars are clean. They will be at some point. At that point, I will agree with the obnoxious CEO from the article. Today, he is wrong, very heavy (7-8k lbs) coal powered trucks are not clean.
Make them smaller!
Purchasing EVs sends price signals. Big trucks are in demand, and it's easier to cater to demand than shape demand when you're an emerging market.
Seriously the epa doesn’t even bother to rate mpg in vehicles that approach rivian weight. An f250 probably gets a combined 15mpg. It weights 6k lbs vs the rivians 7k. if your only seeing a 50% cut in emissions with the switch to electric. A rivian truck is pretty much the same as an ICE car that gets around 30 combined.
There are a million reasons that drive them to make these monsters. But the climate isn’t one. I don’t care about the market forces. I care about cutting CO2 emissions. These vehicles do not help that mission today. The CEO is wrong. His vehicles don’t make sense TODAY except as a luxury product for rich people to signal their virtue. That’s it.
I don't care about market forces
Then you are not serious about impacting climate change.
The rivian truck (I call it "froggy") is actually a pretty small pickup truck, by american standard ... have you seen a F150? (including the electric "lightning" version)?
in before, "but I need my enormous vehicle because once every 13 years I haul 3 2x4's and am too dumb to use a roof rack or rent a truck for the day!"
I win!!!
My enormous eletric vehicle (plug-in Rav4) is powered from my home solar panel system, and I use it to transport my dogs to the park a couple of times a week.
I'm completely guilt free!!!!😃
Rivian truck
It's like buying a small house!
A small house for 74,000? Lol, you'd need at least double that in the Northeast part of America.
I was being facetious
Even a subcompact automobile takes up an entire traffic lane and an entire parking space, and providing such spaces is what ruins cities.
The future is designing our cities for walking, biking and transit, not replacing our disastrous car sewers of gasoline cars with disastrous car sewers of electric cars.
Completely agree, people are not zooming out enough to understand the real problems. Our spread out car centric infrastructure has externalities past just the fuel issues on the cars themselves. Our car centric culture is largely responsible for a huge boom in energy consumption outside of just driving. There is a huge cost to spreading out beyond cars. I think the biggest is our trend in occupying larger and larger single family homes and larger and larger office spaces which require heating and cooling (Which is a little more than double the environment cost of cars iirc). One of the benefits of densification is that you often share a wall with someone else that is also heating and cooling and there is far less energy loss. Those energy costs far exceed our transit issues, but are directly related, in that cars allow density to reduce and therefor people to consume more energy at home and their place of work. And if people are still unwilling to densify then we need to greatly increase the energy efficiency of single family homes and businesses by 4 fold. Better insultation, better windows, better appliances, across the board.
The thing that bothers me about the communication around electric cars is not that they are an improvement, because they most certainly are a good stop gap to one of our many issues, but people like to singularly focus on car fuel type like it is the focal point of climate change when it really is urban and suburban car centricity that is a much larger issue. Electric cars wont stop climate change, they only slow it down a little. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc are far closer to becoming carbon neutral partly because car centricity is not a focus in these places, people live closer together and use all types of transit that supplement each other. And yet no one would claim any of those places are unpleasant to live, far from it they are some of the most desired places to live in the world. We need to start modeling the rest of the world off of the design improvements those countries made over the last 60 years.
Man I can haul 3 2x4s in my Camry