fuyume
Enlightened
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2021
- Messages
- 275
As PT Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Imagine actually believing that Ford is losing $70K on every EV it sells. This is a public, shareholder-owned company. Institutional shareholders would immediately force Ford to cease production if Ford wasn't making a substantial profit on each and every one, let alone taking any amount of loss, at all.
There will always be people who can't adapt to change. I honestly feel sorry for them, especially people who get old and refuse to embrace the future. There's nothing about age that inherently makes people fearful of the unknown. I'm 55, and I'm not afraid of EVs.
EVs are not, of course, a panacea, and although they may be demonstrably better for the environment than ICEVs, they are not by any means a *benefit* to the environment. In the end, it's not about what you fuel your vehicle with, it's about the fact that we spent an entire century building a society that revolves around the idea of ubiquitous high-speed personal mobility without ever once considering the actual consequences of that. It's not about *what* you drive, it's *that* you drive, at all.
As David Owen said in his book, "The Conundrum" (2012):
The only clean energy is the energy you don't use. There is no such thing as "renewable energy". All forms of energy generation require the use of non-"renewable" resources.
The real problem is not what we use to fuel our mobility, it's that we have substituted the profligate consumption of energy resources and created a polluted world to substitute for better design choices that would have obviated the need to burn those resources and create that pollution in the first place, because we were so arrogant as to fail to see that our "freedom of the road" had real and lasting consequences.
And now that the hens have come home to roost, a substantial proportion of our population now regards the idea that their future lifestyle choices might be restricted by both environmental and economic realities as something akin to totalitarian communism.
It's demonstrably true that, while there will always be those who abhor population centers because they despise the very idea of living in close proximity to others (or are just misanthropic), most people want to live close to where they work, learn, shop, play, and enjoy cultural activities. Most people want to live in towns and cities, even considering the fact that in the US, motor vehicles are taken as a given. 81% of Americans live in an urbanized area or urban cluster.
The theoretical ability to travel in private boxes at highway speeds has destroyed our environment at every level, from the most urban areas to the most rural, and even what is left of wilderness on this planet. Our lives would look much, much different if we simply limited motor vehicle speeds to 25 mph. The biggest problem with cars is not what fuels them, it's the fact that they allow us to go much farther than we could without them, and that is the very definition of sprawl.
Without highway speeds, our lives would necessarily need to be conducted within much tighter radii, and we would need to invest much more heavily in intercity rail, much like we did in the early 20th Century, when cars didn't go fast and air travel simply wasn't a thing.
Humans have used boxes on wheels to move themselves and their goods for millennia. Boxes on wheels will always continue to exist in our society. But, before long, we are probably going to be using horse carts all over again, because human civilization simply isn't going to survive this century if we continue the Happy Motoring delusion.
I live in an urban cluster in Northern New England. There is an Amtrak station with a direct line to NYC, PHL, and DC within walking distance from my house. I have been car-free for over 2.5 years. I don't need a car. Most of my needs can be taken care of within a 5 mile radius. What I need is essentially a glorified enclosed golf cart, a low-speed vehicle to get me, my groceries, and occasionally my music gear and/or tools from one end of town to the other with protection in the case of inclement weather. Heating and air conditioning would be nice, but not actually totally necessary. And needless to say, with such needs, battery electric power would be more than enough. 25 mph gets me to the other end of town, about 4 miles away, in 10 minutes.
But, I cannot operate such a vehicle legally on the streets of my town, despite the fact that the speed limit everywhere in my town is 25 mph or less. There's a growing number of low speed "Neighborhood Electric Vehicles" (NEVs) out there.
I don't pay for a car loan, I don't pay for fuel for a car, I don't pay for car maintenance, I don't pay for car insurance, I don't pay for car registration, I don't pay for car parking or parking tickets. And that means I can invest that money into better things than a hole in the driveway that needs to be constantly filled by my time, labor, and money.
My ebike cost me about $1600 total, with all the accessories, and takes pennies to charge. It will take me at least 20 miles on a charge at 20 mph. It's just limited in how much I can carry on it, and is obviously not weather-protected.
There will always be people who can't adapt to change. I honestly feel sorry for them, especially people who get old and refuse to embrace the future. There's nothing about age that inherently makes people fearful of the unknown. I'm 55, and I'm not afraid of EVs.
EVs are not, of course, a panacea, and although they may be demonstrably better for the environment than ICEVs, they are not by any means a *benefit* to the environment. In the end, it's not about what you fuel your vehicle with, it's about the fact that we spent an entire century building a society that revolves around the idea of ubiquitous high-speed personal mobility without ever once considering the actual consequences of that. It's not about *what* you drive, it's *that* you drive, at all.
As David Owen said in his book, "The Conundrum" (2012):
The only clean energy is the energy you don't use. There is no such thing as "renewable energy". All forms of energy generation require the use of non-"renewable" resources.
The real problem is not what we use to fuel our mobility, it's that we have substituted the profligate consumption of energy resources and created a polluted world to substitute for better design choices that would have obviated the need to burn those resources and create that pollution in the first place, because we were so arrogant as to fail to see that our "freedom of the road" had real and lasting consequences.
And now that the hens have come home to roost, a substantial proportion of our population now regards the idea that their future lifestyle choices might be restricted by both environmental and economic realities as something akin to totalitarian communism.
It's demonstrably true that, while there will always be those who abhor population centers because they despise the very idea of living in close proximity to others (or are just misanthropic), most people want to live close to where they work, learn, shop, play, and enjoy cultural activities. Most people want to live in towns and cities, even considering the fact that in the US, motor vehicles are taken as a given. 81% of Americans live in an urbanized area or urban cluster.
The theoretical ability to travel in private boxes at highway speeds has destroyed our environment at every level, from the most urban areas to the most rural, and even what is left of wilderness on this planet. Our lives would look much, much different if we simply limited motor vehicle speeds to 25 mph. The biggest problem with cars is not what fuels them, it's the fact that they allow us to go much farther than we could without them, and that is the very definition of sprawl.
Without highway speeds, our lives would necessarily need to be conducted within much tighter radii, and we would need to invest much more heavily in intercity rail, much like we did in the early 20th Century, when cars didn't go fast and air travel simply wasn't a thing.
Humans have used boxes on wheels to move themselves and their goods for millennia. Boxes on wheels will always continue to exist in our society. But, before long, we are probably going to be using horse carts all over again, because human civilization simply isn't going to survive this century if we continue the Happy Motoring delusion.
I live in an urban cluster in Northern New England. There is an Amtrak station with a direct line to NYC, PHL, and DC within walking distance from my house. I have been car-free for over 2.5 years. I don't need a car. Most of my needs can be taken care of within a 5 mile radius. What I need is essentially a glorified enclosed golf cart, a low-speed vehicle to get me, my groceries, and occasionally my music gear and/or tools from one end of town to the other with protection in the case of inclement weather. Heating and air conditioning would be nice, but not actually totally necessary. And needless to say, with such needs, battery electric power would be more than enough. 25 mph gets me to the other end of town, about 4 miles away, in 10 minutes.
But, I cannot operate such a vehicle legally on the streets of my town, despite the fact that the speed limit everywhere in my town is 25 mph or less. There's a growing number of low speed "Neighborhood Electric Vehicles" (NEVs) out there.
I don't pay for a car loan, I don't pay for fuel for a car, I don't pay for car maintenance, I don't pay for car insurance, I don't pay for car registration, I don't pay for car parking or parking tickets. And that means I can invest that money into better things than a hole in the driveway that needs to be constantly filled by my time, labor, and money.
My ebike cost me about $1600 total, with all the accessories, and takes pennies to charge. It will take me at least 20 miles on a charge at 20 mph. It's just limited in how much I can carry on it, and is obviously not weather-protected.
every 90 days.
