> “What Elon Musk wants to produce is a lifestyle,” Zulkifli said Wednesday when asked about the entrepreneur’s comments. “We are not interested in a lifestyle. We are interested in proper solutions that will address climate problems.”
Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.
Climate change aside, it's not hard to imagine a country as densely populated as Singapore opposing electric cars.
Electric cars are not at all "counterproductive" for long term solutions to climate change. They are one piece in the big picture of fixing climate change, drawdown.org ranks electric vehicles as #26 on their solution list. (https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank)
Also, by your qualifying "long term" I assume you think they are fine short and even intermediate term? Given the urgency of the climate crisis, short and intermediate term matters - a lot.
I agree with you that public transportation and the "elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle" (hard to define, but giving you the most charitable interpretation here) is very important. However, we don't have to choose one or the other, the decision as to which car to buy is typically an individual decision and I would think it correlates well with support for greener public transportation. Additionally, I fine it hard to believe that even in the long term there will be no need electric cars in more distant areas. Finally, development of electric cars and their infrastructure will also support electric public buses used for public transportation.
I'm glad Singapore is pursuing public transportation (a no-brainer in a city state) but the claim that it is not a "proper solution" isn't helpful and worse, it assumes that there is a solution. There isn't. There are MANY solutions which will be implemented at different speeds, with different levels of effectiveness and by many different organizations and individuals.
In general, it is better to encourage any useful efforts on this front rather than arguing that solution X isn't "proper" or less effective than solution Y.
> Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.
Sure, but that's the solution you get from people who've never really experienced a well designed public transportation system. It's essentially a "faster horse" solution to traffic pollution issue which doesn't address the reasons behind the insane amount of tarmac space in modern US cities.
The car is one of the ultimate goals of individualism: constant access to what Mills called "Negative Liberty", essentially the freedom to do whatever physical thing you desire to do at any given time. Unfortunately, that means that the subject must self-coerce themselves into believing it's ok that everyone own a car, and something that we can maintain forever. I wonder how many people in the US refuse to believe climate science simply because the idea of losing their car is physically painful.
When individualism leads us down a path of bad decision making (building electric cars rather than the far superior collective path of building up mass transit), I'm always reminded of a scene from the Cixin Liu "Rememberance of Earth's Past" books, where an individualist decision is made that ultimately dooms the people of the solar system, and the person who would have been the true hero of the story only gets to tell that decision maker that they are a child before he is sent off to prison.
This is essentially our battle against climate change right now: technologists trying to make enough toys to keep the rabble of toddlers happy so that we can actually fix the problem.
Even if electric vehicles do not substantially reduce greenhouse gases, they do pollute the air far less assuming you have cleaner electricity generation.
Moreover, ending the reliance on unsustainable fossil fuels is an end in itself. It would reshape global geopolitics and of course there’s a ton of destruction that happens from oil spills and oil extraction. Going full electric has many benefits beyond just reducing greenhouse gases.
From all the cities that I used, Singapore was the one where I used most often taxis, because they were so cheap. It may have changed since 2004, but I think even for Singapore having electric cars, even for taxis might be better. What am I missing?
Other than this I agree that for cities public transportation, together with good infrastructure for bicycles is very important, because in most cities driving your car yourself is so bad: it is slow, demands a lot of attention, getting a parking place is often very difficult.
What about inspiration? Huh? The fact that you can buy salvaged tesla batteries and experiment for an even greener future. We gotta take steps, and this company is feeding the american keep up with the joneses framework along with car heads desire for horsepower. Don't give me this externalities BS. We need it mass produced because it's a stepping stone.
I don't agree. I think it's a positive. Not everyone agrees with your utopian public transportation and cutting back to as minimalist a life as possible.
The most ecological thing to do is to kill ourselves. Any environmental plan has to allow for people to love rewarding lives, or else it's not a good environment for humans.
In Singapore they have monopoly on car servicing and distribution. C&C takes care of Benz and Performance motor for BMW. Then Japanese and Korean cars are also by single distributor entities. They control the price and the market.
Also Oil and Gas is core industry for Singapore economy. So when anyone fills gas it helps government revenues and generate jobs. Climate is not the primary concern given the small footprint of Singapore.
Also if Tesla comes in Singapore as it is perfect place for its range BMW, Benz which are the primary brands will suffer heavily. Also thousands of jobs repairing gasoline engine, oils, filters will be lost. Since electrical car do not have as many mechanical moving parts as traditional gasoline car it will reduce maintenance costs and car servicing and parts related business.
So Singapore won't let Tesla setup up easily. It will be taxed higher than other electrical car companies which works on fringes and do not threaten the oil and gas related automobile jobs and taxes.
Singapore already has an excellent public transport system (such as the electrified subway & light rail), so the "threatening the oil and gas industry" theory doesn't make sense.
The first line reads: Taking mass transit is a better climate-change solution than tooling around in one of his Tesla vehicles.
I don't know, I can't really see how this can be a conspiracy aganinst Tesla by BMW and others when they argue that it is better to use mass transit that also runs on electricity. How can anybody argue that it is more efficient to transfer people in 2 tons, 3 metres long 2 metres wide boxes with chemical batteries instead of much more denser electric systems like metro trains and no chemical batteries.
I like what Tesla is doing to the car industry, I want dinosaur smoke out of my living space ASAP but please stop gunning towards public transport. Poblic transport is great and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to replace it with private vehicles no matter how dinosaur free they are.
So yes, electric cars are a lifestyle choice. Maybe a health choice too if we are to ban the fossil fuel from the cities.
I recall Elon Musk bad-mouthing public transport but public transport is great and cannot be replaced by Tesla vehicles. Maybe he will finally come to that realization when Hyperloop's final version inludes ride-sharing :) I cannot wait for fancy looking metro syst... I mean Hyperloop ride sharing.
it is ridiculously expensive to drive in Singapore. The saying is always that the license to drive a car in Singapore can cost twice what you paid for the car itself. As a result, driving is an absolute luxury. For its population of 5.6 million, there are only 600,000 cars licensed to drive on Singaporean roads[1]. Even if all of those cars started running on electricity it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the ~ 68,100,000 tons of oil SG exports[2].
>Climate is not the primary concern given the small footprint of Singapore.
I would have thought that given its geographical location, climate would in fact be a primary concern of Singapore. So why is it not? One could hardly accuse Singaporean government of short-sightedness.
I think the control of Singapore's cars is a reason why they can make a shift away from petrol/diesel cars, not against it. Electric vehicles primarily move pollution from the daily usage in dense urban areas, to remote production and recycling. For Singapore this is ideal as it means cleaner air. The local environment is very much a concern for Singapore.
The market effect on BMW, Mercedes, etc... is probably not much of a concern on them as most car manufacturers are introducing electric models, with BMW having a major share of the electric car market in some places. Tesla currently has a good market share in the prestige range but that is decreasing.
The oil & gas companies are also getting in on the act, so they're reducing the impact on the introduction of electric cars. The first charging station in Singapore is in Shell petrol station. They might prefer hydrogen fuel cell cars as it maintains the need for their distribution network, but they'll adapt either way.
As to maintenance, Tesla's quality issues mean there's no shortage of work. I used to live near a Tesla workshop and it was always overfull with cars needing expensive repairs.
Your argument is speculative at best and ad hominem at worst.
> Also if Tesla comes in Singapore as it is perfect place for its range BMW, Benz which are the primary brands will suffer heavily.
Citation needed. Model 3 has performed very poorly beyond initial demand from early adopters/fans.
> Since electrical car do not have as many mechanical moving parts as traditional gasoline car it will reduce maintenance costs and car servicing and parts related business.
And yet Tesla repair and maintenance costs are astronomical.
Isn't that the commonly understood strategy of Tesla?
You can't start with the environmental benefits as the main selling point, it has to be a good car. Especially when Tesla started, the base cost of EV tech was extremely high, so the only market-competitive 'good' car you could build on top of it was a luxury car focused on optimising performance, comfort, brand, etc, with a very high price tag.
Obviously as the price of the base tech falls, a mass market car will emerge that's actually good, and sells, bringing the environmental benefits along with it not as a primary thing but a secondary one. That's the way it has to work (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective). Also seems that's exactly what Tesla is doing, I don't see any evidence to the contrary.
> "it would be difficult to develop adequate charging stations with 85% of the population living in high-density, government-supported housing."
This is a common fallacy. If there is already somewhere to park the car, then you already have somewhere to install charging. In a highly developed city like Singapore, the electric grid already extends almost everywhere.
> "hydrogen is a better long-term solution than electric vehicles for decarbonizing transportation, in part because of the carbon footprint from mining the metals needed to produce car batteries and the issues around their eventual disposal."
Batteries aren't free, but neither are electrolizers and fuel cells (limited life span, large quantities of platinum and rare earth metals needed for catalysts, etc). The lifecycle efficiency of battery electric vehicles is much better than for hydrogen fuel cells, and the infrastructure requirements are much more managable.
Batteries will get greener over time. Their main components, lithium, steel,aluminum, carbon, water, these are not dirty materials. Cobalt and other rare metals, yes those must be minimized, which may be why Tesla bought Maxwell which has non cobalt cathode tech, and which has supercapacitor tech that may supplement the battery. In short, EVs will get cleaner over time, let's not throw them out or slow adoption. We desperately need a cleaner atmosphere and they will somewhat help with that by replacing ICEs.
There's serious engineering problem - you need CHEAP material which will be able to handle:
1) very high pressure
2) ultra precise sealing
3) material needs to be resistant againist hydrogen embrittlement (problem for all metal materials)
...in order to build cheap vehicle which will lasts at least 10 years.
Singapore has always been super anti personal vehicle... they have a big excise tax on personal vehicles. Far removed from the context of America where everyone has a car
Accessibility and empowerment are important to liberal society. The fact is that there is high demand for motor vehicles even in large municipalities for children/families, the disabled, the elderly, or anyone moving large packages. This is a plurality of the populace, even in urban centers. Banning cars in favor of public transit will greatly reduce their mobility and their voice in society. Electric cars are a great way of serving this demand with a much smaller local and global environmental impact. The fact that the wealthy also enjoy the comfort of private vehicles doesn't make them immoral.
Certainly we can use fewer, greener parking lots. Certainly we can use better public transport. Certainly the _majority_ of transit in Asian and European metros is public, and should be in America. But a plurality of transit even in the densest hubs is private. There are plenty of cars, and there is plenty of real need for them.
Condemning cars is reductionist and elitist, and at the risk of an ad-hominem attack, usually advocated by those who can afford expensive taxis when they need them, and don't often need them since they are young and single.
Maybe the dynamics will change with self-driving vehicles whose hiring will be more economical than ownership. But that is so far not a practical short- or medium-term reality.
I found the last paragraph particularly interesting. I have a friend who is a real car enthusiast; he owns several classic cars which he maintains himself and takes to car shows. A few weeks ago he said that he believed that hydrogen fuel cells were the future, not electric cars.
I don't know enough about hfc's to have an opinion but I followed the link they gave and it looks like they could still be a way off in terms of practicality.
Anyone here have an informed opinion they'd be willing to share?
They are the future if you believe the institutional/inertial/lobbying power of the century old ICE will be insurmountable. As storage and solar/wind $/kW costs continue to fall, hydrogen is looking less promising.
Interesting note, hydrogen motion is governed more by quantum tunneling than by Fickian diffusion which makes it materially challenging to effectively store at high energy densities. From an infrastructure standpoint, it is much lower in costs to store and transmit electrons than it is atoms (which is intuitive from a simple mass balance argument).
As far as I know, currently the hydrogen technology is vastly worse than battery cars (BEV) and could only win because of corruption. Which might still happen of course.
The issue is that hydrogen cars are about as expensive as battery electric cars (i.e. twice to tree times the cost of similarly sized and equipped ICE car) but BEV is much cheaper to run, while H2EV costs about as much per km as ICE car, so you get the worse of both world. Also the car is more complex - it also has to have a battery because you can't recuperate into hydrogen cell.
You can create hydrogen using electricity, but a lot of energy is lost, so it will probably always be more expensive than just using electricity.
The tech only makes sense in uses where weight is extremely limiting, like in airplanes or maybe ships? Spaceships?
I really love the pragmatism of the Singaporean Government sometimes. Other countries are nowhere near as pushed for resources and consequently don't do anywhere near as good a job as them of facing big, gnarly problems like this. Kind of a pity, really.
Singapore is in an interesting position, because anything they do to mitigate air pollution pales in comparison to the Malaysian fires that annually fill their air. It’s hopeless until the situation with their geographical neighbors change.
Electric cars may be a lifestyle, but electric mopeds are a solution. They reduce congestion, consume far less energy per mile traveled, and are generally a greater way to get around the city - especially if you join a club and share the devices among a group of people who are interested in maintaining them and using them effectively.
So, all Tesla really needs to do is make an e-moped. I'd sign up immediately - I love my Unu, but it needs a bit of the Tesla flair...
if you have 'clean' electricity mix e.g. France (dominant nuclear), Norway (dominant hydro) then I consider electric car as 'ecologic' (after few years lower CO2 than conventional car).
For other places around the world where electricity is more 'dirty' just drive some small car with combustion engine and maintain it as long as possible. Small car needs less energy for transport then heavy electric vehicles.
Just the battery production can take 2-4 years to offset compare to a gasoline car[1]. Then you also have to take into account that battery have to be replaced regularly and the overall production of the car pollution.
It would be more ecological friendly to just use you gasoline car until it die and then only make the switch to electric. And even then, buying a used car and also running it until it dies might still be more ecological.
The technology will get better, on production level and on the car level. But right now, its very far from a clear cut to say if electric car are more 'green' than gazoline car (that are already produced).
Overall, the main issue is personal transportation. If you really want to be ecological, you should use mass transportation (excluding planes for short travel) whenever possible and use car sharing when you really need a personal transportation. The idea of all having a car sitting idle 90% of the time is fundamentally incompatible with ecology and electric car won't solve this.
Power plants + EVs are much more efficient than ICE cars, even if the power plants are 'dirty', for many reasons: recuperation, the car not spending more energy warming up, thermodynamic efficiency of the engine compared to generator, etc.
Digging up liquefied dinosaurs, shipping them thousands of kilometers all over the world in huge ships, doing crazy chemical things with them, and then burning them in small batches 2500 times a minute ... how could that ever make more sense than using power grid?
[+] [-] apo|6 years ago|reply
Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.
Climate change aside, it's not hard to imagine a country as densely populated as Singapore opposing electric cars.
[+] [-] ozborn|6 years ago|reply
Also, by your qualifying "long term" I assume you think they are fine short and even intermediate term? Given the urgency of the climate crisis, short and intermediate term matters - a lot.
I agree with you that public transportation and the "elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle" (hard to define, but giving you the most charitable interpretation here) is very important. However, we don't have to choose one or the other, the decision as to which car to buy is typically an individual decision and I would think it correlates well with support for greener public transportation. Additionally, I fine it hard to believe that even in the long term there will be no need electric cars in more distant areas. Finally, development of electric cars and their infrastructure will also support electric public buses used for public transportation.
I'm glad Singapore is pursuing public transportation (a no-brainer in a city state) but the claim that it is not a "proper solution" isn't helpful and worse, it assumes that there is a solution. There isn't. There are MANY solutions which will be implemented at different speeds, with different levels of effectiveness and by many different organizations and individuals.
In general, it is better to encourage any useful efforts on this front rather than arguing that solution X isn't "proper" or less effective than solution Y.
[+] [-] izacus|6 years ago|reply
Sure, but that's the solution you get from people who've never really experienced a well designed public transportation system. It's essentially a "faster horse" solution to traffic pollution issue which doesn't address the reasons behind the insane amount of tarmac space in modern US cities.
[+] [-] everdrive|6 years ago|reply
Do you propose that everyone should live in a city in the future? Or that public transit should extend into the suburbs?
[+] [-] moosey|6 years ago|reply
When individualism leads us down a path of bad decision making (building electric cars rather than the far superior collective path of building up mass transit), I'm always reminded of a scene from the Cixin Liu "Rememberance of Earth's Past" books, where an individualist decision is made that ultimately dooms the people of the solar system, and the person who would have been the true hero of the story only gets to tell that decision maker that they are a child before he is sent off to prison.
This is essentially our battle against climate change right now: technologists trying to make enough toys to keep the rabble of toddlers happy so that we can actually fix the problem.
[+] [-] outlace|6 years ago|reply
Moreover, ending the reliance on unsustainable fossil fuels is an end in itself. It would reshape global geopolitics and of course there’s a ton of destruction that happens from oil spills and oil extraction. Going full electric has many benefits beyond just reducing greenhouse gases.
[+] [-] spodek|6 years ago|reply
Would it be too off-topic to mention the most effective solution: having fewer children?
> a country as densely populated as Singapore
Nope, population control seems on-topic.
[+] [-] reirob|6 years ago|reply
Other than this I agree that for cities public transportation, together with good infrastructure for bicycles is very important, because in most cities driving your car yourself is so bad: it is slow, demands a lot of attention, getting a parking place is often very difficult.
[+] [-] pcdoodle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bizarro|6 years ago|reply
How are the central planners planning that one?
[+] [-] tinus_hn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lonelappde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonsh|6 years ago|reply
Also Oil and Gas is core industry for Singapore economy. So when anyone fills gas it helps government revenues and generate jobs. Climate is not the primary concern given the small footprint of Singapore.
Also if Tesla comes in Singapore as it is perfect place for its range BMW, Benz which are the primary brands will suffer heavily. Also thousands of jobs repairing gasoline engine, oils, filters will be lost. Since electrical car do not have as many mechanical moving parts as traditional gasoline car it will reduce maintenance costs and car servicing and parts related business.
So Singapore won't let Tesla setup up easily. It will be taxed higher than other electrical car companies which works on fringes and do not threaten the oil and gas related automobile jobs and taxes.
[+] [-] bouncycastle|6 years ago|reply
Owning a private vehicle is in fact usually a status symbol there. Source https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/31/asia/singapore-cars/index...
[+] [-] mrtksn|6 years ago|reply
The first line reads: Taking mass transit is a better climate-change solution than tooling around in one of his Tesla vehicles.
I don't know, I can't really see how this can be a conspiracy aganinst Tesla by BMW and others when they argue that it is better to use mass transit that also runs on electricity. How can anybody argue that it is more efficient to transfer people in 2 tons, 3 metres long 2 metres wide boxes with chemical batteries instead of much more denser electric systems like metro trains and no chemical batteries.
I like what Tesla is doing to the car industry, I want dinosaur smoke out of my living space ASAP but please stop gunning towards public transport. Poblic transport is great and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to replace it with private vehicles no matter how dinosaur free they are.
So yes, electric cars are a lifestyle choice. Maybe a health choice too if we are to ban the fossil fuel from the cities.
I recall Elon Musk bad-mouthing public transport but public transport is great and cannot be replaced by Tesla vehicles. Maybe he will finally come to that realization when Hyperloop's final version inludes ride-sharing :) I cannot wait for fancy looking metro syst... I mean Hyperloop ride sharing.
[+] [-] zemnmez|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/24/news/singapore-car-numbers-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_industry_in_Singapore
[+] [-] agent008t|6 years ago|reply
I would have thought that given its geographical location, climate would in fact be a primary concern of Singapore. So why is it not? One could hardly accuse Singaporean government of short-sightedness.
[+] [-] dominicr|6 years ago|reply
The market effect on BMW, Mercedes, etc... is probably not much of a concern on them as most car manufacturers are introducing electric models, with BMW having a major share of the electric car market in some places. Tesla currently has a good market share in the prestige range but that is decreasing.
The oil & gas companies are also getting in on the act, so they're reducing the impact on the introduction of electric cars. The first charging station in Singapore is in Shell petrol station. They might prefer hydrogen fuel cell cars as it maintains the need for their distribution network, but they'll adapt either way.
As to maintenance, Tesla's quality issues mean there's no shortage of work. I used to live near a Tesla workshop and it was always overfull with cars needing expensive repairs.
[+] [-] Allower|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] computerex|6 years ago|reply
> Also if Tesla comes in Singapore as it is perfect place for its range BMW, Benz which are the primary brands will suffer heavily.
Citation needed. Model 3 has performed very poorly beyond initial demand from early adopters/fans.
> Since electrical car do not have as many mechanical moving parts as traditional gasoline car it will reduce maintenance costs and car servicing and parts related business.
And yet Tesla repair and maintenance costs are astronomical.
[+] [-] pornel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davnicwil|6 years ago|reply
You can't start with the environmental benefits as the main selling point, it has to be a good car. Especially when Tesla started, the base cost of EV tech was extremely high, so the only market-competitive 'good' car you could build on top of it was a luxury car focused on optimising performance, comfort, brand, etc, with a very high price tag.
Obviously as the price of the base tech falls, a mass market car will emerge that's actually good, and sells, bringing the environmental benefits along with it not as a primary thing but a secondary one. That's the way it has to work (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective). Also seems that's exactly what Tesla is doing, I don't see any evidence to the contrary.
[+] [-] Reason077|6 years ago|reply
This is a common fallacy. If there is already somewhere to park the car, then you already have somewhere to install charging. In a highly developed city like Singapore, the electric grid already extends almost everywhere.
> "hydrogen is a better long-term solution than electric vehicles for decarbonizing transportation, in part because of the carbon footprint from mining the metals needed to produce car batteries and the issues around their eventual disposal."
Batteries aren't free, but neither are electrolizers and fuel cells (limited life span, large quantities of platinum and rare earth metals needed for catalysts, etc). The lifecycle efficiency of battery electric vehicles is much better than for hydrogen fuel cells, and the infrastructure requirements are much more managable.
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raaaaraaaa2|6 years ago|reply
...in order to build cheap vehicle which will lasts at least 10 years.
[+] [-] simisimiailah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smiley1437|6 years ago|reply
As of 2000, 95% of hydrogen production is sourced from 'steam reforming', basically breaking off hydrogen gas from fossil fuels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen#Steam_reforming
Sure, everyone knows you can get hydrogen from nice clean electrolysis but it's not nearly as cheap (energetically) as getting it from fossil fuels.
Anyways, the oil industry would be relatively happy to a move to hydrogen so they could continue being the primary suppler of fuel.
[+] [-] Neil44|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sempron64|6 years ago|reply
Certainly we can use fewer, greener parking lots. Certainly we can use better public transport. Certainly the _majority_ of transit in Asian and European metros is public, and should be in America. But a plurality of transit even in the densest hubs is private. There are plenty of cars, and there is plenty of real need for them.
Condemning cars is reductionist and elitist, and at the risk of an ad-hominem attack, usually advocated by those who can afford expensive taxis when they need them, and don't often need them since they are young and single.
Maybe the dynamics will change with self-driving vehicles whose hiring will be more economical than ownership. But that is so far not a practical short- or medium-term reality.
[+] [-] Digit-Al|6 years ago|reply
I don't know enough about hfc's to have an opinion but I followed the link they gave and it looks like they could still be a way off in terms of practicality.
Anyone here have an informed opinion they'd be willing to share?
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
Interesting note, hydrogen motion is governed more by quantum tunneling than by Fickian diffusion which makes it materially challenging to effectively store at high energy densities. From an infrastructure standpoint, it is much lower in costs to store and transmit electrons than it is atoms (which is intuitive from a simple mass balance argument).
[+] [-] clouddrover|6 years ago|reply
- Hyundai Nexo: https://www.hyundaiusa.com/nexo/index.aspx
- Toyota Mirai: https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html
- Honda Clarity: https://automobiles.honda.com/clarity-fuel-cell
- Lexus LS next year: https://www.motor1.com/news/362598/lexus-ls-fuel-cell-spied/
They're practical realities today. They have fast fueling with good range.
[+] [-] glogla|6 years ago|reply
The issue is that hydrogen cars are about as expensive as battery electric cars (i.e. twice to tree times the cost of similarly sized and equipped ICE car) but BEV is much cheaper to run, while H2EV costs about as much per km as ICE car, so you get the worse of both world. Also the car is more complex - it also has to have a battery because you can't recuperate into hydrogen cell.
You can create hydrogen using electricity, but a lot of energy is lost, so it will probably always be more expensive than just using electricity.
The tech only makes sense in uses where weight is extremely limiting, like in airplanes or maybe ships? Spaceships?
[+] [-] protomyth|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_Hogg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahartmetz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulfw|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_industry_in_Singapore
[+] [-] lota-putty|6 years ago|reply
Edit: http://www.globalstewards.org/reduce-carbon-footprint.htm
[+] [-] brosinante|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somesortofsystm|6 years ago|reply
So, all Tesla really needs to do is make an e-moped. I'd sign up immediately - I love my Unu, but it needs a bit of the Tesla flair...
[+] [-] raaaaraaaa2|6 years ago|reply
For other places around the world where electricity is more 'dirty' just drive some small car with combustion engine and maintain it as long as possible. Small car needs less energy for transport then heavy electric vehicles.
[+] [-] maeln|6 years ago|reply
It would be more ecological friendly to just use you gasoline car until it die and then only make the switch to electric. And even then, buying a used car and also running it until it dies might still be more ecological.
The technology will get better, on production level and on the car level. But right now, its very far from a clear cut to say if electric car are more 'green' than gazoline car (that are already produced).
Overall, the main issue is personal transportation. If you really want to be ecological, you should use mass transportation (excluding planes for short travel) whenever possible and use car sharing when you really need a personal transportation. The idea of all having a car sitting idle 90% of the time is fundamentally incompatible with ecology and electric car won't solve this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_aspects_of_the_e...
[+] [-] glogla|6 years ago|reply
Digging up liquefied dinosaurs, shipping them thousands of kilometers all over the world in huge ships, doing crazy chemical things with them, and then burning them in small batches 2500 times a minute ... how could that ever make more sense than using power grid?
[+] [-] pretendscholar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|6 years ago|reply
The newest Chevy Bolt has more range than a base Tesla, btw. Progress moves on.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
Why? To listen...
[+] [-] bazooka_penguin|6 years ago|reply