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The picture would of course look very different if manufacturers had chosen to make smaller inexpensive electric sedans.
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Another reason to have smaller cars with smaller batteries with shorter ranges, just enough for the every-day commute.
Why do you need to bring several hundred kilograms of road-tripping range to work and the grocer every-day?
To answer the question, because a lot of people don’t want to or can’t afford to buy a second car just for when they need to drive longer than their daily commute.
I agree that you could go smaller than the average of 300mi, but the minimum necessary range for say interstate travel around here is 150 to 200mi.
The answer is to focus on the smaller sedans and such we lived with for generations instead of just the largest and highest markup suv or pickup out there. While EVs are heavier on average, it’s worth noting this difference is a lot smaller than the difference in weight between say a sedan and a crossover, or a crossover and a SUV.
Who said you need to own the car you need for a couple days, once or twice a year?
Do you buy the moving truck each time you need to move your stuff to a new home? What about the bus, train, or plane you use to go long distance?
"don’t want to" is not an argument as history has shown consumers will buy whatever marketing convinces them to want.
That's kinda the whole reason behind the current big car problem in the US. It's not what consumers wanted, it's what automakers made in order to skirt environmental restrictions.
Because you can’t fly everywhere, renting for a routine trip is an expensive, time consuming, and logistically difficult process, and if you’re going to spend so much to own a car it might as well be useful for all your trips instead of just some of them?
Moreover, someone’s commute is often nowhere near the longest trip they make on a regular basis, as often one might need to drive several places, go into town multiple times in a day, travel to a neighboring city to meet with friends, etc… all of which can require several times the (hopefully short) work and back distance.
This is ignoring that battery degradation is a direct consequence of the charge and discharge current, and as such a larger battery will degrade at a significantly slower rate.
All this means you’re going to face an uphill battle trying to get people to sacrifice a bunch of capability for a few percent reduction in weight and cost.
Their is almost certainly a market for short range city cars, but that’s likely to be eventually more than filled by the used market, where a decades old 200mi range car is still going to be more capable than a 50 to 100mi range car.
Yup.
There truly is no alternative to car-centric infrastructure. And there is no way to reduce the distances we all simply must drive. /s
You're presenting all these factors as if they're intrinsic and unavoidable. They are not. We should not only move towards smaller vehicles, but denser urban design that removes the need to regularly travel stupid distances.
Intercity travel is truly the WORST in a personal vehicle. Why the hell would I drive somewhere for hours, when I can sit in a train and game on my steamdeck the whole time?
I know the US sucks in this regard, but that's a reason to fix things, not perpetuate the problem.
Let me ask an even more basic question, who said you need to own a car, at all?
Because that was the auto-industry, too. You know what we did for "generations" before we all drove small sedans for generations?
Walked.
And it worked fine. When cities were for people, not cars, nothing was ever so far apart that getting from A to B was inconceivable without a personal vehicle.
Firstly, you are the one who started from the premise you need to own a car to commute, and indeed that one should own a car capable only of commuting and other very short often bikeable trips.
Secondly, while I do heavily support urban density, in the english speaking world we are generally woefully short of having enough urban housing for even the people who live there right now, much less relocate everyone who doesn’t.
Because these places are so desirable, people can and demonstrably do pay a large premium to live in these areas, pricing out a large number of people from the start.
Moreover, in a country where a solidly blue city in a solidly blue state can spend a decade and an obscene amount of money to try and so far fail to put in a bus lane, mass transit, as much as I love be it and want more of it, simply isn’t going to be built out to the point where it serves every house and farm in anything like the next ten years, which is already a painfully long time from a climate prospective.
It is also completely disconnected from a country where some large cities have gone so far as to outright ban rasing taxes to fund mass transit, and a continent where Doug Ford is literally ripping out well used bike lanes to signal how much he loves cars. The people and places who elected him still need to decarbonize, and an easy drop in change like electrifying the the current system while expanding transit.
To note the obvious, back before cars, trains, planes etc… when we walked, people still had horses and ships. It just meant that unless you were rich most people lived and died in the same small village as their family lived and died in, and is a rather silly goal for a world in which people talk and make friends with others on the far side of the planet, and where a day trip with nearby friends means less than 500mi and people regularly travel hundreds for work.
We live in a vastly more connected world where inter-city travel is a routine thing, and a country where we have spent the lasr half century desolving and selling off every intercity rail line we could, a network which took nearly a century to build.
Even in places like Swisserland or the Netherlands, places built before cars and with extremely prolific bike and rail infrastructure, about half the population own cars, they just don’t get used for short trips as often.
This is a great achievement that represents a hopeful vision of the future that is worth working for, and one that took entire generations of advocacy. To suggest we are going to go so much further beyond it in a few short years in a far larger and more spread out nation with a hostile federal government is outright absurd.
Did I? Imo I merely expressed that the weight problem of cars meant that how they are designed should change. How does "we should have" mean everyone should have one, and only use that?
All I meant is that smaller and lighter, shorter range cars should be available, and be considered as normal to use as what is normal now.
And why did you just write nine paragraphs at me explaining things I'm fully aware of?
Do you think people with ideas about how the world could work, are somehow blind to how it does work?
I mean you are pretty explicitly expecting people to buy a car just to go to work and groceries.
More to the point NEVs in NA and quadracycles in Europe are already available, and indeed represented the majority of the EV market about fifteen to twenty years ago.
They didn’t really find a market in the US and most of the companies that made them failed, but have remained semi-successful in Europe where their low cost and less strict licensing requirements made them popular with teenagers and seniors.
Nevertheless, it was only with 250mi plus ranges that EVs actually stated to push gas cars off the road in any number.
Generally, on the internet, it is helpful to at least lampshade when you are proposing an idea that is very far off and/or disconnected from both the context of the conversation and the way you think the world actually does work, especially when in a community that regularly discusses legislative and technical details and changes of the clean energy transition.
When the conversation started from a news story about how a ok method of reducing emissions in the US is achieving more than technically better method because it’s seen slower adoption, passerby’s are going to assume given that context that you are talking about changes to be made in the few short years and decades we have to stop the destruction of civilization as we know it into account.
Aaand that's several more paragraphs on condescension.
So what I'm getting is this: your problem is that I didn't write my comment in the form of a watertight essay, while discarding any mention of anything that is unlikely to occur in the immediate future?
I don’t have a problem, I’m just explaining why when you start talking about the far future in reply to a problem in the here and now without any mention that’s what your doing you shouldn’t be surprised someone might think you were talking about a reasonable solution to that problem and explain some of the barriers to that solution.
Still it’s getting late, and we are off topic from off topic and dominating the comments on something completely unrelated to the conversation, so we should probably leave things here.
I apologize if I was to snarky in response to the rhetorical questions, and I do hope you have a lovely day/night.
To clarify, I find your reply unhelpful, because you explain the logical course of action for an individual to make the most of the current sorry state of western transport. US transport, to be specific.
And in reply to something obviously rheotorical.
Your answer is not even close to the most efficient solution to transport we might come up with as a society.
Meanwhime I am commenting about that hopelly improved future, where owning a car in the first place is no longer a choice made for you.
Where you can head out, and get to any point on the map for a reasonable cost, in a timely manner, while owning nothing more than the clothes you'd be wearing.
I literally live in a country where that is how it works. It's possible.
And I live in a country which As a Society just decided, by popular vote, to elect someone with the explicit goal of devolving what little remains of our sorry little public transport, and which promises a fight for our communities to hold one to what little we can, so yes, I gave an individual answer, because as a Society the answer is demonstrably“Drill baby, Drill” and “climate change is a hoax”.
Depends. I tried the fiat 500e and it would die halfway through the day if you added passengers and air conditioning. Great for a one person car, but if you’re hauling kids and spouses, you’re going to need a larger car with more range. Not necessarily an SUV — but something with at least a 200 mile battery.