Its neither self-driving, nor autonomous, eventually not even a car! (as Tesla slowly exits the car business). It will be 'insurance' on Speculation as a service, as Tesla skyrockets to $20T market cap. Tesla will successfully transition from a small revenue to pre-revenue company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJdKW-UnFQ
The last few years of Tesla 'growth' show how this transition is unfolding. S and X production is shutdown, just a few more models to shutdown.
It is not all wasted. Walk/bike environment would have been better, but EVs solve another problem, they add energy storage to the grid. Norway has excess production from wind, they can store it and sell it to rest of Europe at higher prices. Also, creating demand is important for scale, Norways EV demand played a (somewhat) crucial role in building up battery factories when it was still a nascent industry, help economies of scale.
It may or may not have helped Norway directly, but out of all the Western economies, Norway performed the sacred function of the rich: support the growth of new technologies that will eventually help everyone.
People buy new cars (~10m/year in US) and when they are at that decision point, follow this algorithm.
1) Is there any way you can walk instead?
2) Can you bike?
3) Can you use an e-bike?
4) Can you use public transportation?
5) Can you move to a place where 1-4 are doable?
6) If none of the 4 above work, are you a 2 car family (most are), then one of the cars can be EV. While you have a gas car for longer trips, most likely a minivan.
7) Can you buy a used EV? (which is already manufactured!)
8) Can you buy a used plug-in hybrid? A plug-in hybrid can be 99% electric miles, most trips are short.
9) Can you buy a new EV?
10) Can you buy a new plug-in hybrid?
11) Can you buy a used gas car? A 2023 manufactured used gas car is identical to 2024, the delta of new features is negligible (maybe new colors?).
4) no, unsafe. (this is a me problem. Until people stop smoking on or near public transit, it remains unsafe for me)
5) no, this is a really REALLY rude question. Part of it is city design prioritizing suburbs, but part of it is that the moving has a very high cost, and only increasing as property / rent prices continue to skyrocket. Mind, that's mostly a Canadian problem....
6) An interesting question. This one works.
7) Not really, infrastructure isn't much present yet for used EVs. Mind, it's possible, just not easy to find.
8) same as previous
9) Not easily, prices are much too high. This may change with introduction of Chinese EVs though.
10) same as previous
11) MUCH easier than other options. In some parts, going back as far as 100 years is doable in getting a car.
So we - when we finally needed a second car - went 11. Moving is out (cost of moving is comparable to buying a new car), and a new car is expensive enough that the cost is too high to carry. But then, we are not wealthy either, and I have no idea who can afford to buy that many new cars, but it ain't most people I've met or worked with. I see cars - like public transit in far too many cities in Canada - as pricing itself out of usability.
Thank you for the step-by-step execution! And 11 is the best solution when none of the above work. There are still scenarios where gas cars cover the edge cases. The first thing is to completely stop buying new gas cars. A new gas car will continue to pollute for the next 20 years. We can immediately stop all new gas car production and in the next 2 decades transition entirely to EVs.
eh, 30cm of broken ragged ice, a light layer of snow over top ... that's a Saskatoon Saskatchewan winter road.
so a LOT worse. heck the car does not handle it very well.
the wind makes it worse for clothing too, mind I have driven a jeep without a windshield or roof at -40C and that was more cold than I ever want to repeat. It was rather worse than working out in a field with survey gear at -55C and white out winds...
Norway is a LOT warmer than prairie Canada. You want an equivalent, go maybe 600km north. heh. (not entirely a joke. Mind as far as I can tell, typical North Pole weather is also warmer than Saskatchewan winters, so ... weather is weird)
I know the Antarctic is typically a lot colder, though.
Siberia is a FAR better comparison than China. Among many other reasons, most of the prairies are similarly arid, and temperatures are definitely similar. Similar range of climates too (Siberia's got people a lot more spread out though).
You have no idea what you are talking about. Significant number of people take public transit (Moscow, NYC, Chicago -- lots of other cities) when its available. When you build an environment for cars and cars only, force everyone to buy cars, they have no choice but to buy car. Lots of European counties have been building biking infrastructure. They are all Northern countries.
Coming up next: Tesla to end production of all cars and sell only NFT/Crypto with pictures of Cybertruck going to the moon/mars. This is the only company which provides Speculation as a Service. With a complete monopoly on SPaaS, the market cap will skyrocket to $20 Trillion. Elon will be given Nobel peace prize for saving mankind from itself as well as physics.
Can't Musk 'encourage' Germany and EU democracies to vote for the right people and take over a wrecking ball to all these agencies causing mischief to his many and varied businesses? I'm sure there are politicians who need a couple of hundred dollars.
I used IBM CoScripter[1] for many many years to supercharge productivity at work. It records macros and you can rerun it. Perfect for most Corporate applications which require you to fill many pages of garbage to close tickets/etc. I used to close hundreds of tickets/day working as a Linux production support engineer. The troubleshooting was quick, closing the tickets on the bullshit peoplesoft ticketing system with a dozen screens was the most timeconsuming thing. CoScripter helped me quite a bit. I've searched high and low for simple macro recorders like that, but never found any. I wonder if this solves the same problem.
Same spirit, yes. Record once, replay many. The difference now is when the page changes or an element moves, we have those fallback AI agents that can recover instead of just failing. But the core idea is the same; automate browser stuff.
We need to start taxing vehicles based on the damage they are responsible for. The 4th Power Law is a principle in road engineering that states that the damage a vehicle causes to a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of its axle load. This means that even small increases in axle load can cause exponentially greater damage to the road.
A Prius causes about 50,000 times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 16 billion times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 31,000 times more damage than a Prius.
The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars. Improve walking/biking/trains/public transportation. Private cars should be a luxury which is made a necessity with zoning laws.
That 4th power law works both ways. A 40 ft bus 2 axle bus with 80 passengers will weigh about 40 000 pounds. The axle weight is 20 000, so by the 4th power law the damage is proportional to 2 x 20 000^4 = 3.2 x 10^17.
If instead those 80 passengers each drove alone in a Kia Niro EV it would be about 4 000 pounds each, so an axle weight of 2000, so the damage would be proportional to 160 x 2000^4 = 2.56 x 10^15.
That's 125 times less road damage than the bus!
Another interesting 4th power calculation is EV vs ICE. My car is available as an ICE, a hybrid, or an EV. I've got the EV which weighs more than the ICE.
Based on the 4th power law I should be doing about 40% more damage than I would if I had bought the lighter ICE model.
But wait! With the ICE model I'd need to regularly by gasoline, and that gasoline is delivered by a tanker truck. Tanker trucks, especially when they are traveling between wherever they load and wherever they unload, are very heavy.
I calculated what would happen in a hypothetical city where everyone drove the ICE version and then all switched to the EV version, and how many tanker truck gas deliveries that would eliminate. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was something like if mid sized tankers were used for gas delivery then if they had to drive more than a few miles from wherever they loaded up to wherever they unloaded the elimination of those trips by everyone switching to EV would reduce road damage by more than the damage caused by the EVs being heavier than the ICE cars.
> A 40 ft bus 2 axle bus with 80 passengers [...] If instead those 80 passengers each drove alone in a Kia Niro EV
Bzzzt. Wrong, unless you literally have a bus that goes from A to B without stopping. City buses do not carry "x passengers", they serve trips. An 80-passenger bus serves way more trips than 80 (though not on average of course), as people can freely get on and off at any time.
And of course, there are way more aspects of this problem than just road wear, parking space for one.
But sure, we absolutely should put buses on rail tracks!
Thank you for doing the calculations. This is interesting and useful. Yes, people should switch to EVs, but mostly because it helps build resilient independent grids (eventually), EVs add a layer of energy storage, we can dump excess energy when its negatively priced (or free) and supply power back to the grid when its costly, replacing peaker plants.
I wasn't talking about passenger buses, because thats unlikely going to happen in US. Almost all of damage is done by 18-wheelers. A fully loaded 18-wheeler: 80,000 lb. Everytime a discussion comes on ICE vs EV, the fossil fuel proponents immediately jump to but EVs weigh more (debatable) and cause more damage. The damage they cause is insignificant compared to 18-wheelers. I'm not entirely sure if EVs weigh more either, maybe the earlier models did, but energy density keeps increasing. Also, there is no compelling reason to have 300+ mile range batteries when most of the trips are under 3 - 5 miles.
> "Walking and biking environments result in ghettoes"
I must admit this viewpoint is one I have never seen before! Instead I've heard many arguments that bike lanes and pedestrianization are forms of gentrification, but resulting
"ghettoes?" +1 for creativity!
Yes? Bikes are an incredibly segregating means of transport. They are inherently limited in range, and they are largely incompatible with any other transit mode.
So you create an environment where all the housing within bike range from good jobs is unaffordable for most people.
And the most democratic mode of transport? Cars. They provide far greater accessibility.
You are spot on about segregation. Yes, walking and biking are for undesirables. The suburbs are built for cars and cars only. Poor people (African, etc) can't afford the large lots, the minimum size of residence, the HOA and lawn maintenance, car required to go anywhere. This is how you can do segregation without violating any laws. Usually, most people don't admit that these are the real goals. I'm surprised that you are openly admitting that segregation is what we want. I guess times are changing!
So you're saying that bicycles have caused our land use patterns to be inequitable? I would say I agree that transportation modes have made land use allocations in western society problematic, but again you are very novel in being the first person I've ever met who attributes those issues to people riding bicycles.
No, bicycles are more of a symptom. They are not the sole cause, of course.
The actual root cause is over-centralization, where the only jobs worth having are concentrated in downtowns of a dwindling number of cities. These downtowns are always congested, and bike lanes are one way to make it more tolerable. But if you can afford an apartment, of course.
Bike lanes near Wall Street are an iconic example. If you're using them, then it's highly likely that you're a multi-millionaire. Or maybe you inherited a rent-controlled apartment.
Cars historically were a great equalizer. Sure, your CEO was likely driving a better car, and living in a better house. But they were stuck in the same traffic along with you. And this _was_ a factor when deciding on the next office location: "Hm. I really hate the commute, perhaps our next office should be in a bit less congested location?"
And this is reflected in actual research: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4938093/ - "For the USA, we observe an exponent βUSA ≈ 0 indicating that the density of jobs is independent from the skill level in the USA. For the UK and Denmark, we observe a non-zero exponent with βUK ≈ 1/2 for the UK and a larger value for Denmark βDK ≈ 0.8. These results indicate that the density of jobs decreases with the skill level, more in Denmark than in the UK."
Ok most of what you're saying makes sense, but having gone to bike lanes in lower manhattan it seems like it's a lot of food delivery people 24/7 with the normal new yorkers you'd see on the subway during commuting hours. From a humanistic perspective it seems like it's a good thing to ensure that delivery drivers aren't killed by motor vehicles and have the ability to not conflict with sidewalk pedestrians? As a driver I would prefer they're not in my lane.
> Cars historically were a great equalizer.
I suppose we'll agree to disagree on this one, there's like a bajillion books that assert the opposite so I will let those and the intertubes do the talking.
As it relates to the study, I'm a little confused how it relates to the above discussion. Is this a good or bad thing to have density of jobs relate to skill level? Wouldn't the historic development of these cities with thousands of years of human civilization in Europe vs. relatively recently developed US cities be a confounding factor in exploring land use patterns?
> Ok most of what you're saying make sense, but having gone to bike lanes in lower manhattan it seems like it's a lot of food delivery people
Yes, I should have mentioned that I specifically meant people using bike lanes for commutes. Bike lanes for work or for recreation are a totally different story, and I have nothing against them.
However, in this case it still reinforces my point: delivery by bike is a luxury good. It still is something that makes living in an utterly unaffordable area more bearable for people who have money.
> I suppose we'll agree to disagree on this one, there's like a bajillion books that assert the opposite so I will let those and the intertubes do the talking.
I'm actually not saying anything that is not an accepted fact in urbanism.
> As it relates to the study, I'm a little confused how it relates to the above discussion. Is this a good or bad thing to have density of jobs relate to skill level?
No, it's not good. This means that good jobs force people to move closer to the centers of their concentration. This automatically reduces opportunities for other people.
> Bikes are an incredibly segregating means of transport.
A bike costs on the order of a few hundred dollars; there's essentially no barrier to entry.
Comparing them with cars on this metric is laughable. Must be 18 or so and able bodied, obtain an expensive license, purchase the actual very expensive vehicle, pay for constant upkeep in insurance, fuel, repairs, and risk serious accidents. All of this is an insane barrier to entry.
> They are inherently limited in range
Yeah, to like a radius of 5km or so, on the low end. That's quite a bit in a city.
> and they are largely incompatible with any other transit mode.
Kind of, but not really? Between e-scooters, rental bikes, and bike garages at train stations, this really is just a matter of proper infrastructure in the end. I don't get the relevance of this anyway.
> So you create an environment where all the housing within bike range from good jobs is unaffordable for most people.
And where exactly is this place you describe where everyone commutes exclusively by bike? Ooops, right, it doesn't exist, never has, probably never will. So you're just making stuff up.
I mean, it is a cute little theory, but it has zero relevance to the world we've built or ever plan to build.
Or maybe it's a strawman, implying that someone somewhere has claimed that we should only commute by bike? Again, cute, but nobody says that. Adding public transportation to the equation neatly eradicates your entire made up theory.
> And the most democratic mode of transport? Cars. They provide far greater accessibility.
I adore your conversational technique of adding positively charged words like "democratic" and "accessibility" without any justification or explanation, just to make it seem like you have an argument. "The democratic, accessible and green coal power plants." I'll add this technique to my list of common fallacies, thanks.
> Comparing them with cars on this metric is laughable. Must be 18 or so and able bodied, obtain an expensive license, purchase the actual very expensive vehicle, pay for constant upkeep in insurance, fuel, repairs, and risk serious accidents. All of this is an insane barrier to entry.
Just wait until you hear how much transit costs!
> And where exactly is this place you describe where everyone commutes exclusively by bike? Ooops, right, it doesn't exist, never has, probably never will. So you're just making stuff up.
Who said anything about exclusivity? Please point out with a hyperlink.
> I adore your conversational technique of adding positively charged words like "democratic" and "accessibility" without any justification or explanation, just to make it seem like you have an argument.
I provided a link in this thread. Go on, dispute it.
What a ridiculous take. There are many, many cities and towns worldwide that are primarily walk/bike friendly and they seem to do very well in terms of quality of life.
Well, do they have easily affordable housing for poor people? Or do they self-segregate into high-income areas surrounded by a halo of low-income areas?
A better way to do this to remove the transportation subsidy for big businesses. Trucks do most of the damage to roads (4th power of weight) but consumers bear the brunt of road maintenance. If big vehicles paid their fair share of oil taxes for roads, it will even the playing field for local farmers and businesses.
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