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Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 21.7%

  • Yes - preferred over petrol car if price/power/convenience similar

    Votes: 78 39.4%

  • Maybe - preference for neither, only concerned with costs etc

    Votes: 38 19.2%

  • No - prefer petrol car even if electric car has same price, power and convenience

    Votes: 25 12.6%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.1%
  • Total voters
    198
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basilio said:
Very thought provoking. Well worth checking out IMV.
Also highlights how strong China is creatively and industrially.
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I was listening to a BBC program on autonomous vehicles last night, and how pundits got the date wrong because all we have at the moment are really good "cruise controlled" cars (eg Tesla's).
True auto pilot mode will come - maybe a few years a way - and when it does the "accessory" nature of a vehicle that the video suggested probably wont work too well on an ICE vehicle unless it has a much larger battery capacity to continuously power the occupants gadgetry. It's akin to the transition from old style mobiles to smart phones.
 
Came across an excellent story on Bloomberg looking at electric cars.
Check out the picture of a woman charging her electric car in her garage in 1912 !

171 Years Before Tesla: The Evolution of Electric Vehicles​


Battery-powered cars have come a long way from the first electric carriages.


5 January 2019, 10:00 pm AEDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/hyperdrive


In 1900, electric cars accounted for about one-third of all vehicles on U.S. roads -- and then almost disappeared from the landscape as gasoline-engine models took over.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

www.bloomberg.com
 
126kg of CO2 or to put things in perspective what a tree would have absorbed to create a 70kg log of dry wood.Now remember last year bushfires ....A few controlled burns and more reasonable vegetation management laws could help
Today (or around) BYD produced its 1millionth EV.(vs Tesla around 3M)
 
I don't disagree with you but there is no point being King Canute, the tide will still come in, same with EV's. ?
It is just a new round of consumerism, to kick capitalism along for another century, the trick is to ride the wave.
Are you going to buy coal shares, oil shares or lithium shares and nickel shares? Not saying there isn't any money to be made on coal or oil, but ATM the riders on the wave, may well be on renewables just because of the current narrative.
 
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qldfrog said:
126kg of CO2 or to put things in perspective what a tree would have absorbed to create a 70kg log of dry wood
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The issue is exactly that.

The tree absorbed that CO2 then released it again.

The oil refinery that made the petrol sure didn't suck CO2 out of the air to make it.
 
Smurf1976 said:
The issue is exactly that.

The tree absorbed that CO2 then released it again.

The oil refinery that made the petrol sure didn't suck CO2 out of the air to make it.
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all fossil fuels came from forests /marine life which got trapped and did not decay, burning fuel is just releasing it back from where it was coming from, million years ago when the earth was a giant fertile jungle
 
Smurf1976 said:
The issue is exactly that.

The tree absorbed that CO2 then released it again.

The oil refinery that made the petrol sure didn't suck CO2 out of the air to make it.
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interestingly it could and instead of fighting to death for lithium mines, humanity could just solar power giant H2 +atmospheric CO2 capture "refineries to produce synth fuel without having to dump millions of cars/truck and try to fly some batteries powered planes.
your ICE could be CO2 neutral , but we can not reset/restart an economy if not forcing people to rebuild from scratch.
and imagine the billions of profit in the process
 
qldfrog said:
all fossil fuels came from forests /marine life which got trapped and did not decay, burning fuel is just releasing it back from where it was coming from, million years ago when the earth was a giant fertile jungle
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The trouble is the "million years" bit and that we're burning it several orders of magnitude more rapidly than it's being formed today.

That would be a problem even without environmental considerations.
 
Smurf1976 said:
The trouble is the "million years" bit and that we're burning it several orders of magnitude more rapidly than it's being formed today.

That would be a problem even without environmental considerations.
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Why?
Seriously why would going back to a fraction of the co2 initially in the atmosphere when life was booming be a serious issue.
Not scared of meeting some mega faune or giant dragonfly?
When coal was created co2 in atmosphere was 100s times higher..from memory ..than now, we are talking maybe adding 4 or 5% to current level, far from 1000 of percent then
Even if we were trying our best, we will never burn all the accumulated carbon and we will one day or another reach peak oil and peak coal.
The earth has much more serious issues than co2 concentration but these real issues are not as easy to face and shame/ blame.
And sadly the real issues are not solved by EV and more lithium rare earth mines.but EVs are cool and have a place in towns for smogs, bin trucks for efficiency noise, scooters for noise etc.
Replacing airplane fuel or long haul trucks diesel is a fallacy.but it will happen.i understand that
 
qldfrog said:
Why?
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Having to fight wars to get hold of the stuff is one problem for a start.

That the real, inflation adjusted, cost of oil is back up to what were historically considered outright crisis levels is another. $65 per barrel - adjusted for inflation that's slightly higher than during the 1970's energy crisis years.

Third reason is that cars discharge pollutants directly into highly populated areas and do so almost literally at ground level. In contrast, most cities don't have a power station right in the CBD these days and even if they did, they'd be discharging the fumes from a reasonably tall stack. Even a diesel generator installed for emergency use will have the discharge a few metres above ground level.
 
A long one:
100% agree on 3 points
so let's keep the current technology, use syn gas solar powered for most useage and reserve EVs for specific areas like city driving against smog as we both mentioned.lets not creat new rare minerals wars
But you do not do that with laws or capex pression on fossil fuel.
The west is preparing itself in my opinion for a self inflicted crisis of biblical proportion with oil in very short supply here with all supplies annexed by China, and if they wake up India.
The few people able to afford EV might not exactly be laughting in a western world with collapsing food supplies..no fertiliser,no transportation,no heating
Our wealth and i include well being is oil based
I see EVs as the mandatory paper..or, irony, steel drinking straws or banned plastic bags in Alice Springs supposed to save the ocean.
Nice, recyclable, sustainable..maybe..but overall maybe even more polluting and in any case not solving any issue as seen on the vegan green sea documentary.
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ss...l2j0.9014j0j7&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
I see EV push as greenwashing, pleasing crowd of pimple teenagers,not solving any real problem, worse hiding them but filling many pockets and increasing powers of the ruling class
I like the technology as an engineer but EVs will not save the world or the west.they will bankrupt us
As plane shaming develops in Europe, China is preparing to land on Mars.
When even dreams are restricted,where is hope..one day, i will own a Tesla?
Anyway, we can not seoarate EVs from the narrative is my point.
But sure,they have a great future as they will be mandatory.h2 is probably more feasible but as syn gas,not power cells to allow smoother transition.
We will see all this develop under our eyes in the next decades
 
My response is in blue to several of @qldfrog's points
let's keep the current technology, use syn gas solar powered for most useage and reserve EVs for specific areas like city driving against smog as we both mentioned.lets not creat new rare minerals wars First, syngas retains the atmospheric CO2 content so solves nothing in relation to climate change. Next, there are no mineral wars.
The west is preparing itself in my opinion for a self inflicted crisis of biblical proportion with oil in very short supply here with all supplies annexed by China, and if they wake up India. Oil remains abundant, and so does gas, just getting more expensive to extract and profit from - so was a false claim. Also, neither China nor India have annexed any supplies - another false claim.
The few people able to afford EV might not exactly be laughting in a western world with collapsing food supplies..no fertiliser,no transportation,no heating Given EVs can be anything from 2 wheels upward and very cheap at base levels, @qldfrog claims are nonsense.
I like the technology as an engineer but EVs will not save the world or the west.they will bankrupt us EVs don't require the fossil fuel industry and, as has been shown via solar PV take up, can now thrive without incentives - so a baseless claim
But sure,they have a great future as they will be mandatory.h2 is probably more feasible but as syn gas,not power cells to allow smoother transition. Not a single country has ever contemplated EVs being mandatory, so another nonsense claim. PWC provides a clear explanation of hydrogen's growth potential - hydrogen gets cheaper into the future and fossil fuels do not.
 
rederob said:
Not a single country has ever contemplated EVs being mandatory, so another nonsense claim
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They haven't made EV's mandatory but a ban on petrol or diesel vehicles being sold is effectively much the same in practice, it leaves EV's or hydrogen as the only real options going forward.
 
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qldfrog said:
The west is preparing itself in my opinion for a self inflicted crisis of biblical proportion with oil in very short supply here with all supplies annexed by China, and if they wake up India.
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The way I see it, people can argue all they like about how much oil's in the ground but what matters isn't oil in the ground but fuel in the tank of whatever consumes it. If there's no petrol in my car's tank then it's going nowhere, how much oil's in the ground is of little relevance to that.

Australia's oil supply has actually been disrupted on three previous occasions.

The first during WW2 caused the country considerable pain at the time.

The other two during the 1970's were a problem for industry and some rather drastic substitutions were done (with government assuring them that a very blind eye would be turned as to the consequences environmentally) but apart from that we scraped through due to being largely self-sufficient with rising production from Bass Strait which is all but gone these days. Had it not been for that, we'd have been in plenty of pain.

There was almost a fourth time. Not officially but specific refined products were getting pretty scarce circa 2008. That's to end users in Australia, the general public had supply of petrol etc but there were industrial situations where suppliers were refusing to take bulk orders with firm delivery dates due to lack of product in storage. That wasn't petrol or diesel though.

History shows that oil above ground in the West isn't particularly abundant I agree.
 
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Yes but you're forgetting one big change there smurf: Shale oil.
 
Smurf1976 said:
They haven't made EV's mandatory but a ban on petrol or diesel vehicles being sold is effectively much the same in practice, it leaves EV's or hydrogen as the only real options going forward.
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If you have wind and solar power, and no oil or gas, it makes strategic sense to move to an energy platform that is not susceptible to external disruption.
That's aside from the health and environmental benefits achieved from an orderly transition to renewables.
Aside from that, EV's are likely to be produced more cheaply than ICE vehicles within a decade, aside from their running costs being less and their batteries being both repurposable and recyclable .
And it's aside from the fact that oil and gas are not long term solutions as they are finite resources.
So setting a target date for transition makes perfect sense from multiple perspectives.
 
over9k said:
Yes but you're forgetting one big change there smurf: Shale oil.
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Not forgetting, I'm just far less bullish on its production outlook than most.

My reasoning is really quite simple.

Prices are high by historic standards meanwhile the cost of capital is ludicrously cheap. That ought to produce a drilling boom but in practice there isn't one as this count of the US rig count shows:


Meanwhile production hasn't bounced back, at all, from the 2020 cuts:


And the US is going back to being a net importer of petroleum:

U.S. will import 62% more crude by 2022 due to domestic production declines, says EIA

The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that the United States will import more crude oil to fill the widening gap between refinery inputs of crude oil and domestic crude oil production in 2021 and 2022.
www.worldoil.com
EIA expects the United States to return to being a net petroleum importer on an annual basis in both 2021 and 2022.
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A marked drop in drilling, which was underway before the pandemic, followed by what looks to have been a permanent drop in production given that price has rebounded and the US isn't governed by OPEC quotas.

My comments are US-centric since shale and the US are pretty much joined at the hip, nowhere else has anywhere even remotely near the same scale of oil production from that source. Don't confuse oil shale, a hard rock, with shale oil, a liquid, there.

I'll hold my judgement but I'm not convinced yet that there's any realistic prospect of shale or other oil production in the "West" actually increasing to the extent it would end reliance on the OPEC nations plus Russia etc.

Note that I'm not saying that with certainty, I'm acknowledging it might be possible, but I'm certainly not at all convinced.
 
Are you aware of the geopolitical angle reference the cessation of bretton-woods etc?
 
how could we see increase when any finance deal would be publicly shamed and have kids glued on the financial market exchange doors.China is buying the oil production and stockpiling, we close:
usually forever as you rarely can restart a well.
 
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