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Electric Cars
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Fuck Cars
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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I hate this car-centric society, but let’s be real cars aren’t going anywhere. Moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing. Not sure why we’re criticizing progress here.
It's because on the modern internet, everyone is all-or-nothing when it comes to their chosen issue. Nuance has become unacceptable.
This community in particular can get a little out of touch at times. In North America in particular, even if every level of government agreed to begin working towards a car free society immediately, we'd still be facing a decades long construction campaign as entire towns and cities would have to be restructured. In the meantime, a shift to electric vehicles is something that can drastically help the global warming issue, and can be implemented in less than a decade.
In reality, we should be shifting to electric cars in the sort term, while we work towards eliminating the need for them in the long term.
Also, I'm convinced that the brake dust/tire wear particulates talking point is the result of oil industry astroturfing. The brake dust thing especially is actually better on electric cars, since regenerative braking reduces the amount of brake wear.
Higher weight and higher torque means tires wear faster on EVs. That’s physics, and the theory is backed up by real world evidence.
The flatter torque curve (peak torque on electric cars is usually very comparable to ICE) is irrelevant, unless you are a shitty driver who treats the gas pedal like a two position switch.
If you were really concerned about higher vehicle weight, trucks are much worse so let’s start there
Trucks are typically carrying tons of goods (except those awful LTL cases where the 50' trailer is carrying one pallet)
Cars (mostly SUVs these days) are usually just carrying 80kg of spongy meat.
Those are not even the same levels of utility
EVs are about 20% heavier than the equivalent gas powered car and offer the same utility.
Full sized pickup trucks are 50-100% heavier than cars, are the most common vehicle in most of the US, and is “ usually just carrying 80kg of spongy meat.”. They are usually exactly the same levels of utility, plus don’t have any environmental benefits
Yeah, it also applies there. It’s just a fact - heavier vehicles have more tire wear.
Things can be both true and irrelevant. Astroturfing highlights irrelevant things to the point of relevance so they get in the way.
Like Trump's"feud" with Rosie O'Donnell. It exists, but means literally nothing and is just there to distract from actual conversation.
I feel it’s fairly relevant with the interest in microplastics lately.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5664766/
The average difference between EV and a gas car is around 300 to 400 kg. With an average weight of a small car being around 1500-1700 kg, and an electric variant of the same car being 1800-2000 kg, the difference is basically nothing. It's, like, two large dudes. And that's smaller car, the difference in big SUVs becomes almost negligible. It's so nothing, especially compared to all the particles EVs don't emit, the only reason we keep talking about is astroturfed bullshit from the conservative car manufacturers. It's from the same playbook as wanting to get rid of wind turbines because sometimes they kill birds.
400kg makes a huge difference. Road damage increases proportional to the fourth power of axle load, which is like 2x in your example.
For the smallest car on the market it's around 20%. It rapidly gets smaller the bigger the vehicle is. Exchanging lack of tailpipe emissions for less than 20% increase in road damage is nobrainer.
Uno reverse : I really dont think these are all or nothing criticisms. If anything, you're engaging in that. Just because we criticize the proposed progress doesn't mean we oppose it. You have no room for nuance in your criticism of our criticism!
organic tires now!
Also ethical tire dust absorbers!!
Its because EVs are being marketed as a green solution, not a stepping stone. If a car must exist it might as well be electric but we should be asking how do we reduce the cars that exist and their frequency of use. Building electrified transit and keeping ICE cars would as a whole be more beneficial than just converting all cars to EVs.
This choice you've presented is extremely misleading. The build out of electrified public transportation and the shift from ICE to EV cars are not in any way related choices. If the government chooses to build more public transportation, that has no effect on whether or not EVs replace ICE cars.
The government building transit would effect the number of people who need to rely on a car.
Which is good, but still has nothing to do with what the remaining cars are powered by. There's no reason why it has to be "transit+ICE" instead of "transit+EV".
My point is that we should be making the most impactful changes we can to fight climate change and environmental destruction, which means subsidies, government investments, and tax breaks are better spent on transit, density, or active transport than on EV infrastructure/incentives
And the most impactful change I can make is purchasing an EV.
Since I already vote for officials who support all of those issues there is no impactful change because the alignment is already there.
There are locally impactful actions that I can participate in but none that will have the same impact as my personal choices.
The most impactful choices I could make are all illegal. The majority of them being some form of demestic terrorism.
Even here in a walkable town with good transit, I still need a car so an EV is what I can do.
I highly, highly doubt it. I lived in the country with pretty good transit, but exclusively ICE cars. It was not good, not at all. Better than cars only, still not good. Good transit doesn't eliminate cars, unfortunately, and always breathing car emissions is bad, very, very, very bad.
The only solution is to do both. Right now I live in the city with very good public transport, but still sprawling car infrastructure, the only difference is, there is a robust car emission rules, so most cars around are EVs or hybrids. It's so, so, so much better than the first variation, it's not even close.
I would prefer city getting rid of most of the car-centric infrastructure still, but now I have a chance to see this day, and not die of a lung cancer at a ripe age of 55
Because it's progress that needed to happen 30 years ago. While we've been transitioning to electric cars, progress also needed to happen on every other issue but it doesn't happen because we're all in on electric cars instead of doing something about car dependency as a whole. It's not moving forward, it's moving sideways.
Speaking from the US, we’re clearly not yet all in on EVs and we just killed funding for transit and intercity rail. And they’re trying to remove fuel efficiency standards altogether. We are 30 years ago and regressing fast.
Transit and intercity rail are receding into some future utopian fever dream but some of us can still choose EVs
My 2 favorite cities that is lived in were San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro. Apart from both of them being gorgeous and fun, one of the best things was that I did not need a car.
Yes, but not if it promotes destructive behaviours such as increased car dependency.
EVs are like low-calorie sweeteners: they do nothing to stop obesity, and actually encourage more eating (and more obesity).
You want electric buses? You want battery electric trains? Electric airplanes?
Cars are your path to research and development for these modes of transportation.
I wish that happened. It's very difficult to convince an EV owner to take a train or bus, even if they are electric.
The more convenient we make driving in cars, and the better drivers "feel" about driving an EV, the more difficult it is to move away from car dependency.
Here's a survey from CAA (Insurance company in Canada, like AAA in the States):
Drivers were more likely to drive more in a battery-powered EV than even a Hybrid.
And this part kills me: "The majority of trips for both BEV and PHEV drivers are relatively short, typically staying within 10 kilometers of home. This pattern reflects the convenience of electric driving for routine commutes and local errands."
UCDavis Institute of Transportation Studies also found that EVs are driven more than gas cars (SOURCE).
As a side note, I'm especially annoyed that every BEV "needs" a 300 mile range when 50 miles would be more than enough for the average American (assuming they can charge at home). Those additional batteries make the vehicles larger, heavier, and more expensive, and the batteries could be better used elsewhere.
But still, electric cars were a gateway to electric bikes and scooters.
The 300-mile-range req is just ridiculous. However it's easier to pad the margin on a 60K vehicle by adding this or that for another 5-10K. It's harder to do that on cheap vehicles and they can't sell a 100-mile-range EV for a lot of money. Am working in automotive and emphasizing big expensive models is key for creating shareholder value.
10 km is pretty far. Walking 1km isn't bad, but 3 is a decent chunk of time and energy. 10 is a pain in the ass by bus and a relatively quick trip by light rail assuming you didn't have to walk that far to the station.
Like, I'm not contesting that a lot of drivers should walk for errands more, or that evs encourage car focusing, but that metric fails to account for the fact that few people will walk 2 hours one way for an errand.
That's "up to 10km", not that every trip is 10km.
In that context, it's going to be easier/faster to bike or take an e-scooter to your destination.
If it's under 2km, then walking really shouldn't be a problem.
And if public transportation is available for medium distance trips, that should be first (as it is in cities/countries that are not built around car-dependency).
Look at the bigger picture. We should be walking a minimum 10,000 steps a day (something like 8,000 to 12,000, realistically). That's 8km a day as a bare minimum for minimum basic health.
Driving costs more time, because you now have to allocate time to drive + time to get those steps in. Why not walk that 2km errand instead?
At those short distances, we aren't talking about massive differences in time to destination. And I think anyone can use the mental health benefits of movement, too.
Not sure if you're aware but we've had electric buses and trains for well over half a century. We don't need them to carry long range batteries. We have them in Europe and even in some places in North America. Batteries haven't been needed for electrifying public transit for a very long time. In fact some of the first public transit was electric. Some places just choose the cheapest upfront option instead of spending a bit more on infrastructure in order to realize environmental and efficiency benefits.
As for planes, yes probably. Although I'm not sure whether there's a viable route to electric planes that goes through batteries or whether that use case would necessitate synthetic fuel.
even without external electricity you don't need batteries, there were perfectly functional buses in the 60's that used flywheels to store energy. And i believe technology has advanced ever so slightly in the 60 years since then..
Yes, but yes actually. It's not how the question exists in the world, it's not and it's never "more car-centrism with EV or less car-centrism with FFV". It's usually two related but very separate questions and you need to fight for right answers for both.
Also, not how that works.
Thank you for saying that
Yup, which is why the policies to ban the sale of new gas powered vehicle is a good thing.
We're not criticising progress. Moving away from ICE cars is a good thing. Moving away from cars when and where possible is an additional, better thing. This is !fuckcars@lemmy.world where people tend to look beyond moving from a worse car to a better car.
Cars will always have their place. However, that place doesn’t need to be “everywhere”.
That depends on where the electricity comes from. Instead of ‘EV’ we should really be calling these things Natural Gas cars.
The grid could be powered by 100% coal and an EV would still be better than an ICE car. The efficiency difference between car motors and power plants is staggering.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the CO2 gasoline equivalent for coal-generated EV is just 29mpg; i.e. no better than a decent ICE.
https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf
cool, now we can simply replace the fossil fuel power plants with renewables and kill two birds with one stone. right?
...
...right?
People can only think in binary terms.