What do you think about Electric Cars?

Discussion in 'Serious Discussion' started by Katzenfreund, Aug 24, 2017.

?

Will your next car be electric?

  1. My next car will be electric

  2. I’ll wait several years for prices to drop

  3. I’m not convinced by them, I’ll buy conventional

  4. I am undecided, far more info is required

Results are only viewable after voting.
  1. acer-5100

    acer-5100 MDL Guru

    Dec 8, 2018
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    The right question isn't why should move to electrical cars.

    The right question is why we didn't use them since the end of 1800s.

    And the answer is simple. It's called capitalism.

    Building and maintaining gasoline/diesel cars involves a workforce which is hugely larger than building maintaining an electrical car.

    There is a whole economy built around traditional cars/trucks/vans

    A gasoline engine car implies thousands of components, hundreds of consumable mechanical pieces, carburetors, differentials, mechanical brakes, heaters, radiators and so on. And all of them last for a limited number of kilometers.
    The engine alone is a very complex mechanism (in English it's called "engine" and not "motor", for a reason)

    An electric car is made basically by four components, a motor, a control unit, a body and a battery.

    An electric motor is made by 3/4 items: a rotor, a stator, a couple of bearings, and (for old DC ones) a couple brushes.

    Last but not least an electrical car is virtually immortal. Just take the example from electrical trains that are almost unknown in the USA, but are the norm in Europe and Japan.

    This is the Italian class E626

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FS_Class_E.626
    [​IMG]


    It was produced starting from 1928, it worked on the main national lines until 1999, then was moved to private companies and ran for another bunch of years.

    Some of them were retained by the former Yugoslavia after the WW2 and ran in Slovenia, Croatia for another bunch of years.

    In short they ran for dozens of millions of kilometers, before being decommissioned because too slow/too uncomfortable for machinists/not meeting the modern security standards, but after 75 years they ran, exactly like they did in 1928 just following a normal, cheap maintenance.

    Some of them are preserved (fully functional) today and they are used for historical trains

    That's the whole matter, electrical cars had (and have) the potential to destroy the western economy, that's the untold truth behind them.

    Any person that's againist electrical cars is either an ignorant or someone that fears to loose his job or his income, that's all.
     
  2. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    That's at least a semi-decent argument and it merits questioning, rationally! The whole economy must be changed - in a staggered manner, so we avoid a huge cyclical crisis, so typical for Capitalism... From production and distribution of energy onwards...

    In the EU Parliament these things are now being questioned and a new type of economy is being prepared. I don't think they are fast or radical enough but give credit where credit is due...

    The planned obsolescence of devices is being legislated against, cheap repair mandated and circular economy instituted bit by bit. The longer lasting and easier and cheaply maintained EVs are "it"! More rational!

    Oil-based, i.e. ICE machine uses only 20% of the energy from petrol/diesel. It sends 80% into the atmosphere... Very inefficient! EV uses 80% of the energy stored in its batteries! With all of the above. No contest! RATIONAL!

    Only this time, when it comes to EVs, it's gonna be closer to the early 19-hundreds, when most cars ran on batteries (different to the modern ones, of course) - and then Texas discovered... you guessed it ==> oil...

    Now, though, we must preserve the precious oil for other uses, from the building industry and engineering to pharmaceuticals (that can be replaced, though) and onwards, as Yen warned long ago...

    As for the trains > MAGLEV. We look to China, Japan and some EU countries...

    Let's just hope we aren't too late... Or too stupid to start yet another idiotic world war...
     
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  3. acer-5100

    acer-5100 MDL Guru

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    https://www.scientificamerican.com/...ivity-claims-leave-many-scientists-skeptical/

    Scientist are still skeptical but if it's confirmed it may be one of the most important things happened in this century.

    Potentially it's as important as the nuclear fusion, no wasted electricity in production, transport and usage.

    Potentially it can bring the efficiency of electric cars, motors and industry in general to the next level

    Perhaps w/o any usage of exotic materials, rare earths, whatever.

    Seem too good to be true, but hope is the last thing to die....
     
  4. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    Our wet dreams!!!

    Imagine, if that were true: (almost) freely generated tons of energy in Saharas of this world and delivered all over the place, wherever it's needed!!!

    IP.S. I wrote about the joined Sahara project here, which then moved West but refused to die... Maybe it will prevail soon, then...???
     
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  5. Sajjo

    Sajjo MDL Member

    Feb 6, 2018
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    Those are actually very cool, in my country they are expanding rapidly - specially in the fast food delivery chain atm.
    Tesla has dominated the traffic environment for more than a decade, local busses and trucks with 900 kw are also expanding.
     
  6. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    Everywhere around the world - deliveries of all sorts, from Post Offices to Amazon...
     
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  7. acer-5100

    acer-5100 MDL Guru

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    And don't forget Intel CPUs consuming less than 400W :D

    P.S. First confirmations seem coming

    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/superconductor-breakthrough-replicated-twice

    But to be honest was the same in the early days after the announcement of the cold fusion almost 40 years ago....
     
  8. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    No more housing servers in Iceland, heh...:D
     
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  9. acer-5100

    acer-5100 MDL Guru

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    Well... aside jokes isn't that simple.

    Semiconductors work because they are *semi* conductors, superconductors can surely help to dissipate less energy because the tiny power lines, but a good share of the energy dissipated is dissipated by the transistors. To reduce consistently the power dissipated by them we need better semiconductors, not superconductors.

    Something that's already happening right now on power circuits with GaN Mosfets, we already have 60/90W power bricks for notebooks which are as small as a 5 year old cellphone power supply (they are small because they waste less energy, so require smaller heatspreaders, or no heatspreaders at all).

    Obviously everything helps. A big datacenter employing the current CPU/GPU but with power supply made by GaN mosfets and superconductive coils, that potentially can reach efficiencies close to 100% (we already have traditional silicon PSUs with 95%+ efficiency), can spare a huge amount of power.

    More efficiency means less direct power consumption, and even more indirect gains because the air conditioning (assuming we are not in Iceland or Greenland)
     
  10. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    The conservative bozos here keep forgetting one can't stop Science and Tech from advancing, in this case various devices getting ever more powerful, smaller, more effcient..... Thanx to Human ingenuity, creativity, imagination...
     
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  11. Bat.1

    Bat.1 MDL Expert

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    Which Libtard sCiENcE is advancing fastest :confused: Men can birth babies o_O People can change genders o_O or abortion is "Health" Care o_O
     
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  12. acer-5100

    acer-5100 MDL Guru

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    I'm afraid that one can't stop ignorance and stupidity as well...

    My father used to say that before getting the right to vote one should pass a threshold in the IQ test, he died long before the web was a thing, but I'm sure that if he was alive now, he would suggest to do the same for forums and social network subscriptions, instead of a stupid captcha. :evil:

    The world would be a better place.
     
  13. MS_User

    MS_User MDL Guru

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    dont forget the toilet;)
     
  14. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    I'm looking forward to the new lighter carbon-fiber (nanotubes or whatever comes out of that research) material for building vehicles (or other devices, too), which will also be a battery in and of itself...

    It's being worked on and that would make a huge change in aviation, shipping, EVs of all sorts... Much more efficient, lighter and uses less energy generally but also much safer...

    https://www.motortrend.com/features/structural-battery-composites-automotive-ev-energy-storage/

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181018082702.htm

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=carbon fi...or vehicles that stores energy&t=brave&ia=web
     
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  15. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    #1495 gorski, Aug 2, 2023
    Last edited: Aug 2, 2023
    Btw, "stupidity", while some of it is real, most of it is engineered, I think - bad education, upbringing, bad experiences founded on an adversarial type of society, which result in overly fearful and touchy individuals, on lots of pharma products etc. "Keep the buggers down"! Or "Somebody must clean the toilets and empty the garbage bins" and so on... That is the only way we can have so many billionaires and millionaires - if there is a steady and plentiful supply of the poor. As soon as you say Capitalists you say Proletarians. Inseparable! And the engine of social immobility is - bad education, narrow, mindless automaton-producing education, whereby one learns to keep one's mouth shut before the authorities etc. etc. See OECD and Rowntree Foundation reports on social mobility. Like this: https://www.oecd.org/wise/observatory-social-mobility-equal-opportunity/

    Most people do not have enough education to be able to think, let alone think critically! For instance, very few people can understand the huge amount of systemic violence built into the foundations of Capitalism, which in so many ways hampers Human potential, as much as it's rather pushy in some other ways ("making money")...

    Be that as it may, "stupid" sometimes is not only uneducated but also badly educated, even indoctrinated, not necessarily "low IQ" and therefore "absolutely incapable of understanding..."... Capitalism has also used its own "propaganda" heavily, in every facet of its structures, institutions, processes and so on... Even the intelligent can fall for it...

    In short, these phenomena are complex and by no means straightforward, which means that "remedies" would also have to be carefully constructed, poly-dimensional and complex, plus long-term would be the only way to actually change it for the better...
     
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  16. Yen

    Yen Admin
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    #1496 Yen, Aug 2, 2023
    Last edited: Aug 2, 2023
    Reproducibility is one major claim in science.

    Here is a pdf, anyway it has not 'passed' usual scientific hurdles.
    [2307.12008] The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor (arxiv.org)

    This would be a great discovery, especially for quantum computer development.

    Science is flawed by ideologists, though.
    What would be an electric car when still using fossile fuels to make electricity?
    Nothing..

    The 'problem' is that many ideologists propagate a special 'scientific matter' by taking it out of its actually complex context to manipulate others....One can say...they simplify science to satisfy an ideology.
    This is even more 'dangerous' than capitalism alone..because "Human ingenuity, creativity, imagination."is abused then to satisfy a small group of people only...
     
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  17. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    #1497 gorski, Aug 2, 2023
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2023
    See, this is where "scientists" don't begin to understand the problem but want to pontificate and do that from rather dubious, *strangely* fossil-fuel industry "sponsored", right-wing grounds...

    Do we have tons of renewable energy, way more than we can use? Yes, we do. Are we doing that, comprehensively, ATM? No, we are not. Why is that?

    Well, for starters, fossil fuel companies are subsidised worldwide to the tune of $1.9 trillion.

    Why is that? Particular interests prevail, not the general interest.

    What would the general interest be, then? To invest in R&D and transition to renewable forms of energy and technology to capture it.

    Why? Well, it's much cheaper and better for the environment - we have the Sun, wind, water, thermal and other resources to dip into safely.

    But the fossil fuel industry is lobbying (sorry, corrupting, bribing) our politicians not to do that (because the system is set up for such strong interests to have the upper hand, hence it doesn't serve everyone but primarily some rich individuals).

    See, wind etc. are 9 times cheaper than gas, thank you very much... Imagine if we really invested in those areas of human activity, including recycling etc. - does anyone "think" we can't hack it, despite all the hitherto advances of the Human Spirit?!?

    So, why don't we...?!? I'll tell you, Yen: because of many "scientists" and politicians - not to mention the media types of all kinds - being bought up by the "ideologists" of Late Capitalism, especially the neo-Liberal kind! That's what I call "Science misused in order to manipulate the Public Sphere, i.e. the "general public" to vote against their own interests"!! In fact, to bolster their class enemies' interests, working against not only Human but Life as such!!!

    Humans can indeed be bought, be it Scientists, politicians, everybody and anybody - to work in the interests of particular interests, such as the fossil fuel industry, the financiers, the bankers, the corporations, sure...

    What is more likely ATM: that the general interest is being propped up OR precisely those interests that are currently strong due to our civilisation being based on the fossil fuel industry?!? The future (which we want to see), which interests are nowhere near as strong as those of the past and present true giants of Corporations?!? Whaddyafink, eh, @Yen?!?

    Will "Common sense" (the current form of Capitalism) or Reason (we have no idea what that might be called but certainly not Neo-Liberal Capitalism such as it is...) prevail?!? Where do you stand?!?
     
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  18. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    And I repeat...

    Renewables are now 9 times cheaper but the prices of energy are calculated in a completely un-capitalist manner, according to the highest price (fossil fuel produced energy), so there is no competition on the "market"!!!

    Moreover, there is no market and no competition!

    If you, as a consumer, could choose... Oh, well... Would you still choose the mofos who rip you off, who skin you alive?!?

    Long live this Capitalism, eh?!?



    But oh no: keep on regurgitating the fossil fuel industry's brain-washing talking points, whydontcha...
     
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  19. case-sensitive

    case-sensitive MDL Expert

    Nov 7, 2013
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    The problem is inhumanity itself ............ theres much to many people on the planet ........... and they are greedy , disshonest and can't be trusted ......... they cant even trust eachother .............. and the planet cant suport it = One way or another nature / life will get rid of a t least a lot of them ...... and if we dont do it ourselves it will be done to us :)

    That pisses me off .......... and the fact that we all sit in the same boat and its sinking .......... = People so blind and greedy that they sink their own boat .......... and expect someone else to save them !?!? ........... and ......... that the stupid ones , the ones that caused it , and the ones that wont see it are going to kill us with them = The good ones , the honest ones are going to die with the ones that did it .
     
  20. gorski

    gorski MDL Guru

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    Guess what: you are one of them untrustworthy, dishonest...

    Oh, wait, I remember Sartre now: "Hell?!? That's others!!!" Always just "others", always other people, never you... Riiiighhhttt...

    We haven't seen a single contribution here, for a long time, from you... Just pointing a finger at "horrible others", never towards a solution... of any kind... No effort of any kind...
     
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