One valid criticism of EVs is that they require rare earth minerals and metals. Particularly in the batteries, I believe.
Those materials tend to come from unstable places around the world. It’s not inconceivable that these places might be sources of conflict in the future as the demand for the raw materials increases.
It's not actually a valid criticism. The vast majority of minerals in both batteries and motors are utterly mundane and widely available. Rare earth materials are not, in fact, particularly rare.
Rare earths are a group of 17 chemical elements that comprise the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. They have been considered as some of the most critical raw materials that are required for the future of mobility
I have to confess to not having read the whole thing but it looks like it's primarily part of the wider discussion of "is it such a good idea to be so reliant on China?" which is worth having but hardly unique to EVs (the Huawei issue springs to mind, for example). It's not a geological or technological constraint, however (plenty of other countries have the relevant minerals) but rather economic. Much like importing Russian gas it's a case of short term costs overriding geo-political concerns.
Are the economic risks of sourcing minerals from China significantly greater than the various oil price fluctuations every time someone rattles a sabre in the middle east? I doubt it.
EVs are superbly suited to local driving, regular commuting, trips to shops and the like. But, where public charging infrastructure is poor they're not as convenient for longer journeys (where you may not know where chargers are, and where there may be few).
"Not as convenient" includes quite a lot of "takes a lot longer", which is a problem for EV adoption.
It’s also a problem for attempts to switch people to public transport. My commute in the car takes about 20 minutes, by public transport it’s an hour at least.
Rare earths are a group of 17 chemical elements that comprise the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. They have been considered as some of the most critical raw materials that are required for the future of mobility
Yeah, but the reality is that they are fairly liberally available in the earths crust, the issue is that in other places they would cost more to mine.
I can't remember where I heard that the Chinese are currently working on developing Sodium batteries. Essentially they would work on common salt, removing the reliance on rare metals.
EVs are superbly suited to local driving, regular commuting, trips to shops and the like. But, where public charging infrastructure is poor they're not as convenient for longer journeys (where you may not know where chargers are, and where there may be few).
"Not as convenient" includes quite a lot of "takes a lot longer", which is a problem for EV adoption.
It’s also a problem for attempts to switch people to public transport. My commute in the car takes about 20 minutes, by public transport it’s an hour at least.
Which, like EV charging, is a fixable problem. Public transport for short journeys outside large city centres will always be a bit slower than taking your own car (there isn't going to be a bus stop outside every house, or every destination, so there's going to need to be a walk to bus stop/station, and buses will stop to let people on or off so travel at a slower average speed), though in dense cities (eg: central London) traffic slowing cars will almost always make public transport faster. But, the current public transport times are a function of infrastructure, outside those dense urban areas there are not enough bus routes and services are too infrequent on many, and trainlines and stations even more sparse. Invest in more public transport, and those journey times will come down. Public transport run for profit won't make that investment in routes that the operators don't expect to make enough profit, which is why running public transport on that model is bonkers.
Public transport (especially by train which should manage a faster average speed than 70mph) for longer journeys should be quicker than driving. I can get to my mums by train in about 6 to 6.5h (that includes walk to local station here, and bus from train station there, and a route that has me going into London and back out again), driving would be 6.5 to 7h without serious delays or any break (so in effect close to 9h if traffic isn't awful), but having the car while I'm there to get shopping in or getting out to places is so very convenient (because public transport for anything other than getting into London is awful, and needs a lot more investment).
Consumer choices around transportation are largely irrelevant.
The “big wins” in terms of emissions would only be achieved in terms of transportation by changes that are made by regulating industries not by voluntary changes by individuals.
Which isn’t to say that better and more practical public transportation would be a worthless effort, of course.
Isn't there a saying about ... er .... deckchairs and the Titanic?
Dear Mother Earth will (rightly) slough us off (Friends of the Earth indeed - that like fleas calling themselves 'Friends of the Dog') in due course and renew herself in a million years or so. To her that's 'a blink of an eye'.
Isn't there a saying about ... er .... deckchairs and the Titanic?
Dear Mother Earth will (rightly) slough us off (Friends of the Earth indeed - that like fleas calling themselves 'Friends of the Dog') in due course and renew herself in a million years or so. To her that's 'a blink of an eye'.
Or a lot sooner than that if you are unfortunate enough to live in the path of the fourth biggest tornado ever recorded.
The “big wins” in terms of emissions would only be achieved in terms of transportation by changes that are made by regulating industries not by voluntary changes by individuals.
Which isn’t to say that better and more practical public transportation would be a worthless effort, of course.
I don't see the two things as that separate; the other way to achieve change is public investment in transportation.
The current infrastructure in the UK was based in part on earlier ideas that the future was two-car households (with all the knock on impacts in terms of roads being sized for rush-hour as peak demand, large amounts of concrete used for car based infrastructure, steel used in car production etc).
Consumer choices around transportation are largely irrelevant.
The “big wins” in terms of emissions would only be achieved in terms of transportation by changes that are made by regulating industries not by voluntary changes by individuals.
Which isn’t to say that better and more practical public transportation would be a worthless effort, of course.
That will, of course, vary by where you are. UK 2022 figures, p11 are quite different. 27% of emissions from transport means cutting that will be very significant, especially when the current efforts are mostly related to electricity generation (and efficiency savings to reduce electricity use) at with emissions about half that of transport.
I agree that there needs to be regulation as well as individual choice. For transport I'd include regulation to bring public transport back into public ownership and operated to serve the transport needs of the public rather than dividends for share holders would be a start; regulation to price less efficient vehicles from the road (eg: end sale of new ICEs by end of the decade at the latest, LEZs) and reduce traffic (eg: congestion charges, priority lanes for buses and other multiple occupancy vehicles), regulation to put in decent safe cycle routes and footpaths to encourage people who can to walk and cycle more. Basically, government to offer carrots (better, cheaper public and active transport options) and wave sticks (increased charges and taxes).
You can keep stating things as fact that aren’t facts. You can keep claiming the moral high ground.
But the facts are what they are. Nothing you can do will be enough to stop climate change, it is unlikely anything you can do would even slow it. The planetary boundaries have already been breached, arguably it’s not coming back.
Yes, these things are importantly. Yes, it would be great if governments prioritised bikes and public transport. I would (as someone who didn’t have a car for a long time) support both things.
But let’s not get into a moral pissing match about what one individual is doing over another. Because that’s boring. And self defeating.
But the facts are what they are. Nothing you can do will be enough to stop climate change, it is unlikely anything you can do would even slow it. The planetary boundaries have already been breached, arguably it’s not coming back.
Pessimism is a valid option. Optimism that the sum of small things done by individuals and the larger steps by governments and corporations can make a difference for the better is also valid.
If pessimism wins out in the political arena and we continue to do bugger all then that position will be proven right and our grandchildren will struggle to survive on a hostile planet, we'd better let Musk develop habitats for living on Mars because they'll be needed here on earth.
If optimism wins out in the political arena and we try to make things better we may fail, but we may also leave our grandchildren a habitable world. IMO, it's worth a try. If the human race is going to go out we might as well go down fighting our own stupidity.
But let’s not get into a moral pissing match about what one individual is doing over another. Because that’s boring. And self defeating.
If everyone is doing what they can then there's no reason for a pissing contest. If some are not even trying, especially those with the means to make a difference (eg: those who decide to fly everywhere in helicopters and private jets), then it's not a pissing contest but a fight against those who wilfully destroy the lives of others.
EVs are superbly suited to local driving, regular commuting, trips to shops and the like. But, where public charging infrastructure is poor they're not as convenient for longer journeys (where you may not know where chargers are, and where there may be few).
"Not as convenient" includes quite a lot of "takes a lot longer", which is a problem for EV adoption.
It’s also a problem for attempts to switch people to public transport. My commute in the car takes about 20 minutes, by public transport it’s an hour at least.
It takes a little under two and a half hours to drive to visit my son in Newcastle, a little over 100 miles away. The same journey by rail (following a very similar route) takes another two hours with quite restricted journey times. The one trip can be done in a day, the other might be able to be done in a very long day with shorter visiting time, but might well need an overnight stay which makes it a wholly different proposition.
That's what I learnt today and it's an incredible number. I'll come back to that.
Today the UK Government has announced £500m investment for electric buses. I'm not sure of the details but it strikes me as a good thing.
One of the comments I saw was the standard comment about EVs being far worse for the environment than internal combustion vehicles. This is, as I indicated above, a completely false claim based on a tiny bit of truth. EVs come with a carbon debt. The production of a new Electric car releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than the production of the equivalent petrol car.
The up to date calculations I've seen reckon that in the UK today with our current electricity supply, this debt is paid off at around 8000 miles. So from a CO2 point of view, an electric car is unequivocally a better choice than a petrol one. At least 80% lower emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle. I haven't found the numbers for electric buses but I strongly suspect that they are very similar.
However, when looking for that, I came across the number of 60,000km. Or 45,000 miles, if your prefer. That's the number of how many miles you need to do in an electric car to pay off the carbon debt if - if - you only charged the batteries with electricity generated from burning coal!
This speaks to what was said above about the relative efficiency of electricity generation and transportation compared to the internal combustion engine in your car!
I have always felt that hydrogen will be part of the mix, mostly because of the ability to 'instantly recharge' with a liquid fuel but hydrogen production and distribution is just not there yet.
There are lots of situations where electric vehicles can be a straight swap for ice ones. And they are only getting more green as our electricity production gets more green. Right now, I think that's the way forward. In the long term there will be multiple solutions that are needed but EVs are part of it.
EVs are superbly suited to local driving, regular commuting, trips to shops and the like. But, where public charging infrastructure is poor they're not as convenient for longer journeys (where you may not know where chargers are, and where there may be few).
"Not as convenient" includes quite a lot of "takes a lot longer", which is a problem for EV adoption.
It’s also a problem for attempts to switch people to public transport. My commute in the car takes about 20 minutes, by public transport it’s an hour at least.
Which, like EV charging, is a fixable problem. Public transport for short journeys outside large city centres will always be a bit slower than taking your own car (there isn't going to be a bus stop outside every house, or every destination, so there's going to need to be a walk to bus stop/station, and buses will stop to let people on or off so travel at a slower average speed), though in dense cities (eg: central London) traffic slowing cars will almost always make public transport faster.
I remember reading an account by a travel journalist who wanted to test how long it would take him to get to central Shanghai from the airport if he took a cab rather than the airport maglev, which takes about eight minutes to traverse the distance. The cab trip took a little over two hours to cross the less than twenty mile distance.
It’s also a problem for attempts to switch people to public transport. My commute in the car takes about 20 minutes, by public transport it’s an hour at least.
But, the current public transport times are a function of infrastructure, outside those dense urban areas there are not enough bus routes and services are too infrequent on many, and trainlines and stations even more sparse. Invest in more public transport, and those journey times will come down. Public transport run for profit won't make that investment in routes that the operators don't expect to make enough profit, which is why running public transport on that model is bonkers.
It's always interesting to me that the massive government spending on building and maintaining roads isn't considered "public transport". The assumption seems to be that roads "just happen" for free, like some natural phenomenon. Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
It's always interesting to me that the massive government spending on building and maintaining roads isn't considered "public transport". The assumption seems to be that roads "just happen" for free, like some natural phenomenon. Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
It is a massive government subsidy to the automotive industry. If vehicles were taxed at a rate that paid for road maintenance, much less building more roads, then car drivers and road freight would be paying massively more than they currently do. Of course, many roads also benefit buses and cyclists, but the big money isn't being spent on roads that will be suitable for buses and cyclists. New roads, of course, just lead to more cars and don't even address the problems of congestion that advocates for new roads always claim they're needed for, or for improved road safety (because, more cars makes roads less safe).
It's bizarre that while the Scottish government has a commitment to reduce car use they're still funding new roads that work against that aim.
It's bizarre that while the Scottish government has a commitment to reduce car use they're still funding new roads that work against that aim.
TBF some of those roads are pretty much essential - upgrading of the A9 is a safety issue and the need for a long term solution to the Rest and Be Thankful can't be ignored. I suppose you could try and run rail freight up the Far North line to serve parts north of Inverness but I suspect the infrastructure costs would be insane. And there is really no viable alternative to access Kintyre, unless you think there will be a reliable ferry service from the Clyde.
It's bizarre that while the Scottish government has a commitment to reduce car use they're still funding new roads that work against that aim.
TBF some of those roads are pretty much essential - upgrading of the A9 is a safety issue and the need for a long term solution to the Rest and Be Thankful can't be ignored. I suppose you could try and run rail freight up the Far North line to serve parts north of Inverness but I suspect the infrastructure costs would be insane. And there is really no viable alternative to access Kintyre, unless you think there will be a reliable ferry service from the Clyde.
Agree about the RABT. Also, the need for bypasses to keep through traffic out of urban areas. The A9 approximately follows a rail line that for much of it's length is a single track - adding an extra track to the railway will be far more useful than doubling the width of the A9, especially if that includes provision of rail freight infrastructure. The biggest problems for A9 safety is excess speed, and I don't see how making it easier to go even faster is going to help there, and in particular some junctions where traffic joining or crossing the A9 has to deal with traffic on the A9 at excess speeds. Slowing traffic near junctions would make the road safer, or some relatively small changes to problem junctions.
Better ferries and other services that provide realistic alternatives to driving will always help. But, "ferries" is pretty much an expletive at the moment.
And, of course, if traffic levels do reduce by 20% over the next few years that will have a direct impact on safety on our roads.
Excess speed for the type of road. Keep the limit at 60 after dualling and it will be a lot safer. The problem with rail is that, unless you're going to be able to drive a car onto the train a la Le Tunnel, the train dumps you in a handful of places with minimal onward connections. I've done Golspie, Helmsdale, Brora, Wick, Thurso by rail and connected out to Orkney (and Lewis) by bus and ferry. The cheaper, quicker ferry to Orkney has both ends in the middle of nowhere (Gill's Bay and St Margaret's Hope). There just isn't the population density to make rail viable in the far north, even if you went the whole hog and ran a line through to Ullapool from Inverness and another tracing the NC500. There is far, far more low hanging fruit in terms of improved services in the central belt, and it's going to have to be accepted that where the population density is low personal transportation is unavoidable.
A fallacy of the term rare earth materials is that the materials are rare. They are termed rare because they are not found in many economically productive deposits. However, newer technologies are being developed to extract these materials more efficiently.
Also. other battery technologies using more common materials are also being developed.
And many of the batteries relying on rare earth elements can be recycled.
To the point about Plug in Hybrids being not that great, I find if you use just the EV mode, they will about 25 miles (40 km). But if you go long distance using the combined gas and battery mode, you can go up to 600 miles (956 km), which is more than a standard gas vehicle in the US.
The one disadvantage we find is the batteries do take up some luggage space compared to a standard gas vehicle. But, since there are only two of us traveling now, we do not need as much luggage space as when we had six on a trip.
Excess speed for the type of road. Keep the limit at 60 after dualling and it will be a lot safer. The problem with rail is that, unless you're going to be able to drive a car onto the train a la Le Tunnel, the train dumps you in a handful of places with minimal onward connections. I've done Golspie, Helmsdale, Brora, Wick, Thurso by rail and connected out to Orkney (and Lewis) by bus and ferry. The cheaper, quicker ferry to Orkney has both ends in the middle of nowhere (Gill's Bay and St Margaret's Hope). There just isn't the population density to make rail viable in the far north, even if you went the whole hog and ran a line through to Ullapool from Inverness and another tracing the NC500. There is far, far more low hanging fruit in terms of improved services in the central belt, and it's going to have to be accepted that where the population density is low personal transportation is unavoidable.
But, the question is - how much of the traffic on the A9 is people travelling from Inverness to Edinburgh or other large towns? Would a half decent rail service between towns ("decent" being a combination of frequency, journey time, reliability and cost) provide an alternative for enough people for the journeys they want to take that road traffic is reduced to a point where the existing road infrastructure can support the cars of people who for various reasons can't use the train (including living in low population density areas where distance to train station is excessive, needing a car at the other end etc). Add in decent car hire options at stations and that removes more cars, we're used to getting to an airport and hiring a car why not provide options for tourists to get the train to Inverness and hire a car there for a holiday in Orkney or NC500? The ScotGov aim is only to reduce car use by 20%, that's modest and isn't going to end car use entirely, but with that level of reduction very few road developments would be needed.
A fallacy of the term rare earth materials is that the materials are rare. They are termed rare because they are not found in many economically productive deposits. However, newer technologies are being developed to extract these materials more efficiently.
The other big fallacy is that the only economic deposits are found in China. These materials are found in many places, and were mined economically in places like Australia and Canada before aggressive Chinese policies cornered the market (effectively they sold these materials at a loss, so that mines elsewhere couldn't compete and closed, and when they had a near monopoly put prices back up to cover production costs - and, in many cases added very large export tariffs on the raw materials so they also cornered the market on making products including these materials). Many people mistake China for a Communist country, it's actually a very powerful State Capitalist nation, and the Chinese government has been very successful at learning how to be a good capitalist.
And many of the batteries relying on rare earth elements can be recycled.
Which will make a big difference to the Chinese monopoly, cutting costs and creating jobs around the world. One of the false arguments often made about EVs is that the batteries aren't recycled - it is true that there currently isn't a large capacity for recycling EV batteries, but that's because there are very few EV batteries needing recycling because the vast majority of them are still in cars, and most that aren't have been repurposed for other electricity storage needs for which they're still good enough; but the recycling technology is proven, over the next ten years of so older EVs will reach end of life and the number of batteries to be recycled will significantly increase and capacity to recycle these into new batteries will increase to match demand. No one's going to build a factory to recycle millions of batteries per year when the flow of batteries available to be recycled is in the thousands per year.
To the point about Plug in Hybrids being not that great, I find if you use just the EV mode, they will about 25 miles (40 km). But if you go long distance using the combined gas and battery mode, you can go up to 600 miles (956 km), which is more than a standard gas vehicle in the US.
The one disadvantage we find is the batteries do take up some luggage space compared to a standard gas vehicle. But, since there are only two of us traveling now, we do not need as much luggage space as when we had six on a trip.
I guess that's going to depend on model. The colleague I'd mentioned was lent a plug-in hybrid with a battery range of about 100 miles, but a small petrol tank with a range of only about 150 miles (so, combined range similar to a standard full EV). I can't remember the model, it was an SUV style vehicle and when we looked through the boot for a charging cable (absent) it didn't seem to be lacking space - so it's possible that the manufacturer decided to sacrifice range to maintain storage space.
Which probably just goes to show that EVs and (plug-in) hybrids share one feature with ICEs. A range of models with different features, and you need to look around to find the vehicle you want to match the needs of your household - do you need range, storage space, how many seats?, something for local small journeys or regular longer trips? etc.
Less than 3% of all cars are electric. The idea that recycling batteries would meet demand is ridiculous.
Less than 3% of cars are currently electric. That proportion is increasing, and recycling batteries will be an important part of the supply chain for new EVs in 20 years (and beyond). It doesn't impact the current carbon costs of producing EVs, though as several of us have said those costs aren't as high as the nay-sayers claim, but in the longer term the costs of EVs will come down as batteries are recycled. Couple recycling with car use reduction and in 30-50 years we may reach the point where the battery requirements for EVs will be met by materials recovered from old EV batteries (obviously, if the number of cars continues to rise this will never happen ... but, if we don't cut car use then we'll almost literally drive the human race to extinction).
Thank you so much for your knowledge about some of the points in the op.
There is one area which I omitted in the op, but which also confuses me: biomass! It seems like madness to me cutting down forests, using machinery to smash the wood to bits then transporting it half way across the world for people to burn, saying that it is for the sake of the environment! ?
Thank you so much for your knowledge about some of the points in the op.
There is one area which I omitted in the op, but which also confuses me: biomass! It seems like madness to me cutting down forests, using machinery to smash the wood to bits then transporting it half way across the world for people to burn, saying that it is for the sake of the environment! ?
In theory there are cases where it can be done sustainably (it's not that different from growing crops for ethanol as fuel), in practice many of the actual instances of it aren't examples of it being done sustainably.
Thank you so much for your knowledge about some of the points in the op.
There is one area which I omitted in the op, but which also confuses me: biomass! It seems like madness to me cutting down forests, using machinery to smash the wood to bits then transporting it half way across the world for people to burn, saying that it is for the sake of the environment! ?
In theory there are cases where it can be done sustainably (it's not that different from growing crops for ethanol as fuel), in practice many of the actual instances of it aren't examples of it being done sustainably.
Agree. I don’t think it’s inherently terrible as a concept. But as practised by certain large power stations, etc….
One of the comments I saw was the standard comment about EVs being far worse for the environment than internal combustion vehicles. This is, as I indicated above, a completely false claim based on a tiny bit of truth. EVs come with a carbon debt. The production of a new Electric car releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than the production of the equivalent petrol car.
I saw a similarly misleading claim recently, which was talking about how EV drivers cause more CO2 emissions than average ICE drivers. This claim is true.
But it's true because most current EV drivers are significantly wealthier than average (new EVs occupy the expensive end of the new car market, and poorer people mostly buy used cars anyway. So what the statistic is actually saying is that rich people cause more emissions than poor people (because they have larger houses, take foreign vacations, buy more "stuff", all of which has production and transport costs, and so on).
If vehicles were taxed at a rate that paid for road maintenance, much less building more roads, then car drivers and road freight would be paying massively more than they currently do. Of course, many roads also benefit buses and cyclists, but the big money isn't being spent on roads that will be suitable for buses and cyclists.
Damage to roads from vehicles scales roughly like the fourth power of axle weight, which means that bicycles and cars (even oversized heavy cars) are more or less irrelevant: all the road damage is caused by HGVs, and some buses.
Road surface required scales roughly like the number of vehicles. Higher speed roads need more surface per vehicle, because they (should be) spaced out more, but when you include vehicle spacing, the space required by a bus, an HGV, and a subcompact car isn't so terribly different.
There is an element of road damage that is purely caused by weather, and not by traffic, but that's mostly small (consider as an example how often you replace your driveway as compared to how often the road outside your home is resurfaced.)
Which probably just goes to show that EVs and (plug-in) hybrids share one feature with ICEs. A range of models with different features, and you need to look around to find the vehicle you want to match the needs of your household - do you need range, storage space, how many seats?, something for local small journeys or regular longer trips? etc.
Unless you're crossing the Australian outback or some similarly remote location, nobody cares about range for ICE vehicles, because it doesn't matter. Refuelling takes two minutes plus stopping overhead. You can buy a small economy ICE car for a modest sum of money, and it's just as good at driving at (or let's be honest, over) the speed limit on highways all day. A bigger, more expensive car might offer more comfort, and more luggage space, but your journey would take the same amount of time.
EVs don't work like that. EV batteries are expensive, and heavy, so if you're trying to make a small, relatively light, economical EV, it ends up having a small battery with only a modest range. Which wouldn't matter if charging took two minutes like refuelling does, but it doesn't.
For anyone considering replacing their ICE vehicle with an EV, I'd recommend playing with https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ - make a list of the journeys that you make regularly, give it a make of car and the speed at which you'd like to travel (for my part of the US, I find that telling it to drive at 120% of posted speed limits is a reasonable approximation of normal highway speeds, and EV efficiency falls off quite significantly at highway speeds because of air resistance), and see how long the journeys "should" take you in different kinds of car. It makes a big difference whether you will have access to charging at your destination or not; if not, you should ask it about the round trip rather than a one-way journey.
You can buy a small economy ICE car for a modest sum of money, and it's just as good at driving at (or let's be honest, over) the speed limit on highways all day.
I question whether a sum of money that often requires a bank loan can be honestly described as "modest", but perhaps we have different standards of modesty.
EVs don't work like that. EV batteries are expensive, and heavy, so if you're trying to make a small, relatively light, economical EV, it ends up having a small battery with only a modest range. Which wouldn't matter if charging took two minutes like refuelling does, but it doesn't.
You'd think that would be the case, but if you look through the list of all new EV's for sale in the U.S. you'll see almost no correlation between size and range. The Ford Lightning (curb weight 6,015 lb) and Kia EV9 (5,839 lb) have slightly less EPA rated range than the Chevy Bolt (3,680 lb and historically the best selling EV in the American market). The only real exceptions to this are at the very low end of size range, like the Mini Cooper SE, which is very small.
(for my part of the US, I find that telling it to drive at 120% of posted speed limits is a reasonable approximation of normal highway speeds, and EV efficiency falls off quite significantly at highway speeds because of air resistance)
That is also true for the efficiency of ICE vehicles. You say that as if ærodynamics don't apply if your vehicle is burning fossil fuel.
The only real exceptions to this are at the very low end of size range, like the Mini Cooper SE, which is very small.
Inadvertently, perhaps you've hit on one of the problems with cars in the US. The Mini Cooper SE is not very small. Most American cars are really big.
It's a different debate but a couple of years ago I ran the comparison of fuel economy between the average car on an American road and a European one. I know that many low-income Americans are very sensitive to gas prices. But the problem is not that gas prices are too high (they're a lot less than we pay, this side of the pond) but that your cars are desperately inefficient.
You can buy a small economy ICE car for a modest sum of money, and it's just as good at driving at (or let's be honest, over) the speed limit on highways all day.
I question whether a sum of money that often requires a bank loan can be honestly described as "modest", but perhaps we have different standards of modesty.
I can buy a functioning ICE car for <£1000 (half that if I only want to drive it locally, but that's an oddity). Even the oldest EVs (with worn batteries and ranges now ~50 miles) are £3-4k. There is a lot of working through the system to be done before EVs become accessible and useful at the bottom of the market. The Dacia Spring and the like may be the game changer once they age.
If pessimism wins out in the political arena and we continue to do bugger all then that position will be proven right and our grandchildren will struggle to survive on a hostile planet, we'd better let Musk develop habitats for living on Mars because they'll be needed here on earth.
If optimism wins out in the political arena and we try to make things better we may fail, but we may also leave our grandchildren a habitable world. IMO, it's worth a try. If the human race is going to go out we might as well go down fighting our own stupidity.
This is just ridiculous hyperbole. Even if we do absolutely nothing to change our carbon emissions, the world is not going to become completely uninhabitable inside half a century (the timescale by which most of us who are or intend to soon become parents are likely to become grandparents), or even 150 years.
It may not be as nice, some low-lying areas may be lost to the sea, and some crops may even fail. It’s likely that the total population the planet is capable of sustaining (and therefore the total human population) would be reduced. But the strong likelihood is that our grandchildren would be perfectly fine - western countries with the will and resources to defend their borders against inundation (be it by the literal sea or by the figurative sea of refugees) could easily avoid major reductions in their standard of living.
Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
If roads hadn’t existed for thousands of years before the automotive industry became a thing, maybe. Or were they a massive government subsidy for the horse-breeding, chariot-making and stagecoach-making industries as well?
You can buy a small economy ICE car for a modest sum of money, and it's just as good at driving at (or let's be honest, over) the speed limit on highways all day.
I question whether a sum of money that often requires a bank loan can be honestly described as "modest", but perhaps we have different standards of modesty.
I can buy a functioning ICE car for <£1000 (half that if I only want to drive it locally, but that's an oddity). Even the oldest EVs (with worn batteries and ranges now ~50 miles) are £3-4k. There is a lot of working through the system to be done before EVs become accessible and useful at the bottom of the market. The Dacia Spring and the like may be the game changer once they age.
I think the Dacia Spring is going to be a complete disrupter for the industry. If they can do it for £14k (admittedly that’s the basic model), then it makes all the other manufacturers look a bit flabby.
You can buy a small economy ICE car for a modest sum of money, and it's just as good at driving at (or let's be honest, over) the speed limit on highways all day.
I question whether a sum of money that often requires a bank loan can be honestly described as "modest", but perhaps we have different standards of modesty.
I can buy a functioning ICE car for <£1000 (half that if I only want to drive it locally, but that's an oddity). Even the oldest EVs (with worn batteries and ranges now ~50 miles) are £3-4k. There is a lot of working through the system to be done before EVs become accessible and useful at the bottom of the market. The Dacia Spring and the like may be the game changer once they age.
I think the Dacia Spring is going to be a complete disrupter for the industry. If they can do it for £14k (admittedly that’s the basic model), then it makes all the other manufacturers look a bit flabby.
There are issues with the Spring - it's pretty short range and has a shocking safety rating - but I think it does push other manufacturers to do better. Fiat in particular screwed up massively with their e500.
You can buy a small economy ICE car for a modest sum of money, and it's just as good at driving at (or let's be honest, over) the speed limit on highways all day.
I question whether a sum of money that often requires a bank loan can be honestly described as "modest", but perhaps we have different standards of modesty.
I can buy a functioning ICE car for <£1000 (half that if I only want to drive it locally, but that's an oddity). Even the oldest EVs (with worn batteries and ranges now ~50 miles) are £3-4k. There is a lot of working through the system to be done before EVs become accessible and useful at the bottom of the market. The Dacia Spring and the like may be the game changer once they age.
I think the Dacia Spring is going to be a complete disrupter for the industry. If they can do it for £14k (admittedly that’s the basic model), then it makes all the other manufacturers look a bit flabby.
There are issues with the Spring - it's pretty short range and has a shocking safety rating - but I think it does push other manufacturers to do better. Fiat in particular screwed up massively with their e500.
Sure, I wouldn’t buy one but they’re tilting the market.
On safety - isn’t that because NCAP is seriously flawed these days? I read a motoring magazine that basically said ignore Dacia’s safety ratings because safety ratings are now meaningless - sorry I was only half paying attention in a barber’s, but it made sense at the time!
Actually, I think from memory it was more that you get points for things like seatbelt warning lights, which Dacias don't have - and the journalist was suggesting that they (and other marques) are basically safe but get penalised for not having bells and whistles which arguably aren't necessary
Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
If roads hadn’t existed for thousands of years before the automotive industry became a thing, maybe. Or were they a massive government subsidy for the horse-breeding, chariot-making and stagecoach-making industries as well?
Of course roads are a big subsidy to the motorist. Up to a point, I have no issue with that. The economic pay off from a functioning road network is several multiples of that cost.
However.
However. And this is the key, it needs to be accounted for. We heavily subsidise our railways. Again, this makes economic sense as if you suddenly stopped doing that, the economic cost would dwarf the savings. Which is why it is right for taxpayers who don't use the railways to support them as well as passengers who buy tickets and pay tax. (This is a separate argument to using private franchises etc. Although, they're not completely unrelated).
The issue is that people who criticise railway subsidies get to pretend that roads aren't subsidised because it's a hidden subsidy.
For the purposes of our discussions here, the added relevance is that this gives the government a lever to pull to affect strategic change.
Let me give a personal example.
We live south east of Birmingham. As noted above, apart from when I'm on call, I get the train to work. My season ticket is £90/month. The trains are regular and fairly reliable. It takes about half an hour door-to-door and I don't have to drive in Birmingham or pay to park.
However, when we go to visit family, especially if it's all 4 of us, I wouldn't even consider going by train. Even if I travelled alone, it's cheaper by car and with all of us, it is much cheaper to go to Cheshire or Hampshire by road.
I am working at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in a couple of weeks and I will fly up as it's an hour from Birmingham airport. Even with early check-in (I tend to always be early) it's still quicker and cheaper for me to fly than get the train. Again, the aviation industry has hidden subsidies.
(For reference with conservative check in but hand luggage only, I'm door-to-door in 3 1/2 hours by plane. Can probably just manage 6 by train at twice the price).
Taking an electric train into the centre of the city gives me a rural home and a low carbon option. However, it is only possible because this side of Birmingham, the rail network is good. Much like London. However, on the west of Brum, it's almost non-existent. When travelling long distance alone, I drive when I would very much prefer to take the train as it's usually prohibitively expensive. Even going to London, I have often driven to near an outer tube station.
There is a huge amount that can be done with our transport network to change the overall CO2 emissions.
Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
If roads hadn’t existed for thousands of years before the automotive industry became a thing, maybe. Or were they a massive government subsidy for the horse-breeding, chariot-making and stagecoach-making industries as well?
They wouldn't exist at the extent and scale that they do if not for having to deal with a peak that includes a large number of individual commutes. At least in the UK the motorways and post-war road building programs (as well as cuts to the train service and layout of new towns) were based on the idea that each household would own two cars.
Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
If roads hadn’t existed for thousands of years before the automotive industry became a thing, maybe. Or were they a massive government subsidy for the horse-breeding, chariot-making and stagecoach-making industries as well?
They were mostly really bad roads, so bad that water transport was much better for most of history. Relatively good roads, like Roman roads, absolutely were a government subsidy yes.
Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
If roads hadn’t existed for thousands of years before the automotive industry became a thing, maybe. Or were they a massive government subsidy for the horse-breeding, chariot-making and stagecoach-making industries as well?
Pre-modern roads that were built (as opposed to simple dirt tracks formed by traffic) were typically government funded programs for moving troops. Their use by civilian traffic was seen as a nice bonus to their intended purpose. That being said, a road that can accommodate motorized traffic is a very different thing than a pre-modern road meant to accommodate traffic by foot and draught animals.
As an interesting historical note, the U.S. Interstate Highway system was funded for its ostensible use by the U.S. military. (Eisenhower had been very impressed by the Autobahns during the war.) In part this was because the U.S. Constitution authorizes spending on the military but does not explicitly authorize the federal government to build roads.
They were mostly really bad roads, so bad that water transport was much better for most of history.
Water transport is still better for most things. It's so much better that humans have cut continents in half (twice!) to be able to move things by water rather than land.
That is also true for the efficiency of ICE vehicles. You say that as if ærodynamics don't apply if your vehicle is burning fossil fuel.
Obviously the aerodynamics don't care what powers your motors. The difference is that you don't really care about range in an ICE vehicle, because it takes 2 minutes to "recharge" it, so the size of your tank makes very little difference to the net capability of your vehicle. (Assuming you're in a place with frequent gas stations.)
Inadvertently, perhaps you've hit on one of the problems with cars in the US. The Mini Cooper SE is not very small. Most American cars are really big.
AFZ
The US car market is completely ridiculous. If you wrote down a list of functionality people needed from their cars, then what Americans mostly need are:
1. Comfortable sedans
2. Small hatchbacks
3. Minivans
4. Some light trucks
What Americans actually want to buy these days seems to be large SUVs, even larger SUVs, and trucks.
Some of this is a crash survivability war. I spoke with the father of the young woman who ran a stop sign and crashed in to my car, and he was proud of the fact that he buys his daughters the biggest heaviest SUVs he can, so that they will be safe in the event of a collision. But they achieve that safety by making it less safe for everyone else - he expects them to drive badly, but win the collision. As more people make the choice to drive around in small tanks, this does two things - it normalizes the small tank as a means of personal transport, so it doesn't look out of place to people to buy one, and it makes it actively worse to own a "normal car", because you're surrounded by a massive wall of SUV in traffic. So buying an SUV to match feels safer.
Comments
It's not actually a valid criticism. The vast majority of minerals in both batteries and motors are utterly mundane and widely available. Rare earth materials are not, in fact, particularly rare.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/3/1919
I have to confess to not having read the whole thing but it looks like it's primarily part of the wider discussion of "is it such a good idea to be so reliant on China?" which is worth having but hardly unique to EVs (the Huawei issue springs to mind, for example). It's not a geological or technological constraint, however (plenty of other countries have the relevant minerals) but rather economic. Much like importing Russian gas it's a case of short term costs overriding geo-political concerns.
Are the economic risks of sourcing minerals from China significantly greater than the various oil price fluctuations every time someone rattles a sabre in the middle east? I doubt it.
It’s also a problem for attempts to switch people to public transport. My commute in the car takes about 20 minutes, by public transport it’s an hour at least.
Yeah, but the reality is that they are fairly liberally available in the earths crust, the issue is that in other places they would cost more to mine.
Public transport (especially by train which should manage a faster average speed than 70mph) for longer journeys should be quicker than driving. I can get to my mums by train in about 6 to 6.5h (that includes walk to local station here, and bus from train station there, and a route that has me going into London and back out again), driving would be 6.5 to 7h without serious delays or any break (so in effect close to 9h if traffic isn't awful), but having the car while I'm there to get shopping in or getting out to places is so very convenient (because public transport for anything other than getting into London is awful, and needs a lot more investment).
Concrete manufacturing 8%
Nitrogen fertiliser use and production 5%
Aluminium production 4%
Consumer choices around transportation are largely irrelevant.
The “big wins” in terms of emissions would only be achieved in terms of transportation by changes that are made by regulating industries not by voluntary changes by individuals.
Which isn’t to say that better and more practical public transportation would be a worthless effort, of course.
Dear Mother Earth will (rightly) slough us off (Friends of the Earth indeed - that like fleas calling themselves 'Friends of the Dog') in due course and renew herself in a million years or so. To her that's 'a blink of an eye'.
Or a lot sooner than that if you are unfortunate enough to live in the path of the fourth biggest tornado ever recorded.
I don't see the two things as that separate; the other way to achieve change is public investment in transportation.
The current infrastructure in the UK was based in part on earlier ideas that the future was two-car households (with all the knock on impacts in terms of roads being sized for rush-hour as peak demand, large amounts of concrete used for car based infrastructure, steel used in car production etc).
I agree that there needs to be regulation as well as individual choice. For transport I'd include regulation to bring public transport back into public ownership and operated to serve the transport needs of the public rather than dividends for share holders would be a start; regulation to price less efficient vehicles from the road (eg: end sale of new ICEs by end of the decade at the latest, LEZs) and reduce traffic (eg: congestion charges, priority lanes for buses and other multiple occupancy vehicles), regulation to put in decent safe cycle routes and footpaths to encourage people who can to walk and cycle more. Basically, government to offer carrots (better, cheaper public and active transport options) and wave sticks (increased charges and taxes).
But the facts are what they are. Nothing you can do will be enough to stop climate change, it is unlikely anything you can do would even slow it. The planetary boundaries have already been breached, arguably it’s not coming back.
Yes, these things are importantly. Yes, it would be great if governments prioritised bikes and public transport. I would (as someone who didn’t have a car for a long time) support both things.
But let’s not get into a moral pissing match about what one individual is doing over another. Because that’s boring. And self defeating.
Which facts do you think are being made up?
If pessimism wins out in the political arena and we continue to do bugger all then that position will be proven right and our grandchildren will struggle to survive on a hostile planet, we'd better let Musk develop habitats for living on Mars because they'll be needed here on earth.
If optimism wins out in the political arena and we try to make things better we may fail, but we may also leave our grandchildren a habitable world. IMO, it's worth a try. If the human race is going to go out we might as well go down fighting our own stupidity.
If everyone is doing what they can then there's no reason for a pissing contest. If some are not even trying, especially those with the means to make a difference (eg: those who decide to fly everywhere in helicopters and private jets), then it's not a pissing contest but a fight against those who wilfully destroy the lives of others.
That's what I learnt today and it's an incredible number. I'll come back to that.
Today the UK Government has announced £500m investment for electric buses. I'm not sure of the details but it strikes me as a good thing.
One of the comments I saw was the standard comment about EVs being far worse for the environment than internal combustion vehicles. This is, as I indicated above, a completely false claim based on a tiny bit of truth. EVs come with a carbon debt. The production of a new Electric car releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than the production of the equivalent petrol car.
The up to date calculations I've seen reckon that in the UK today with our current electricity supply, this debt is paid off at around 8000 miles. So from a CO2 point of view, an electric car is unequivocally a better choice than a petrol one. At least 80% lower emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle. I haven't found the numbers for electric buses but I strongly suspect that they are very similar.
However, when looking for that, I came across the number of 60,000km. Or 45,000 miles, if your prefer. That's the number of how many miles you need to do in an electric car to pay off the carbon debt if - if - you only charged the batteries with electricity generated from burning coal!
This speaks to what was said above about the relative efficiency of electricity generation and transportation compared to the internal combustion engine in your car!
I have always felt that hydrogen will be part of the mix, mostly because of the ability to 'instantly recharge' with a liquid fuel but hydrogen production and distribution is just not there yet.
There are lots of situations where electric vehicles can be a straight swap for ice ones. And they are only getting more green as our electricity production gets more green. Right now, I think that's the way forward. In the long term there will be multiple solutions that are needed but EVs are part of it.
AFZ
I remember reading an account by a travel journalist who wanted to test how long it would take him to get to central Shanghai from the airport if he took a cab rather than the airport maglev, which takes about eight minutes to traverse the distance. The cab trip took a little over two hours to cross the less than twenty mile distance.
It's always interesting to me that the massive government spending on building and maintaining roads isn't considered "public transport". The assumption seems to be that roads "just happen" for free, like some natural phenomenon. Another way to look at it is that road construction and maintenance is a massive government subsidy for the automotive industry (and its customers).
It's bizarre that while the Scottish government has a commitment to reduce car use they're still funding new roads that work against that aim.
TBF some of those roads are pretty much essential - upgrading of the A9 is a safety issue and the need for a long term solution to the Rest and Be Thankful can't be ignored. I suppose you could try and run rail freight up the Far North line to serve parts north of Inverness but I suspect the infrastructure costs would be insane. And there is really no viable alternative to access Kintyre, unless you think there will be a reliable ferry service from the Clyde.
Better ferries and other services that provide realistic alternatives to driving will always help. But, "ferries" is pretty much an expletive at the moment.
And, of course, if traffic levels do reduce by 20% over the next few years that will have a direct impact on safety on our roads.
Also. other battery technologies using more common materials are also being developed.
And many of the batteries relying on rare earth elements can be recycled.
To the point about Plug in Hybrids being not that great, I find if you use just the EV mode, they will about 25 miles (40 km). But if you go long distance using the combined gas and battery mode, you can go up to 600 miles (956 km), which is more than a standard gas vehicle in the US.
The one disadvantage we find is the batteries do take up some luggage space compared to a standard gas vehicle. But, since there are only two of us traveling now, we do not need as much luggage space as when we had six on a trip.
Which will make a big difference to the Chinese monopoly, cutting costs and creating jobs around the world. One of the false arguments often made about EVs is that the batteries aren't recycled - it is true that there currently isn't a large capacity for recycling EV batteries, but that's because there are very few EV batteries needing recycling because the vast majority of them are still in cars, and most that aren't have been repurposed for other electricity storage needs for which they're still good enough; but the recycling technology is proven, over the next ten years of so older EVs will reach end of life and the number of batteries to be recycled will significantly increase and capacity to recycle these into new batteries will increase to match demand. No one's going to build a factory to recycle millions of batteries per year when the flow of batteries available to be recycled is in the thousands per year.
I guess that's going to depend on model. The colleague I'd mentioned was lent a plug-in hybrid with a battery range of about 100 miles, but a small petrol tank with a range of only about 150 miles (so, combined range similar to a standard full EV). I can't remember the model, it was an SUV style vehicle and when we looked through the boot for a charging cable (absent) it didn't seem to be lacking space - so it's possible that the manufacturer decided to sacrifice range to maintain storage space.
Which probably just goes to show that EVs and (plug-in) hybrids share one feature with ICEs. A range of models with different features, and you need to look around to find the vehicle you want to match the needs of your household - do you need range, storage space, how many seats?, something for local small journeys or regular longer trips? etc.
There is one area which I omitted in the op, but which also confuses me: biomass! It seems like madness to me cutting down forests, using machinery to smash the wood to bits then transporting it half way across the world for people to burn, saying that it is for the sake of the environment! ?
In theory there are cases where it can be done sustainably (it's not that different from growing crops for ethanol as fuel), in practice many of the actual instances of it aren't examples of it being done sustainably.
Agree. I don’t think it’s inherently terrible as a concept. But as practised by certain large power stations, etc….
I saw a similarly misleading claim recently, which was talking about how EV drivers cause more CO2 emissions than average ICE drivers. This claim is true.
But it's true because most current EV drivers are significantly wealthier than average (new EVs occupy the expensive end of the new car market, and poorer people mostly buy used cars anyway. So what the statistic is actually saying is that rich people cause more emissions than poor people (because they have larger houses, take foreign vacations, buy more "stuff", all of which has production and transport costs, and so on).
Damage to roads from vehicles scales roughly like the fourth power of axle weight, which means that bicycles and cars (even oversized heavy cars) are more or less irrelevant: all the road damage is caused by HGVs, and some buses.
Road surface required scales roughly like the number of vehicles. Higher speed roads need more surface per vehicle, because they (should be) spaced out more, but when you include vehicle spacing, the space required by a bus, an HGV, and a subcompact car isn't so terribly different.
There is an element of road damage that is purely caused by weather, and not by traffic, but that's mostly small (consider as an example how often you replace your driveway as compared to how often the road outside your home is resurfaced.)
Unless you're crossing the Australian outback or some similarly remote location, nobody cares about range for ICE vehicles, because it doesn't matter. Refuelling takes two minutes plus stopping overhead. You can buy a small economy ICE car for a modest sum of money, and it's just as good at driving at (or let's be honest, over) the speed limit on highways all day. A bigger, more expensive car might offer more comfort, and more luggage space, but your journey would take the same amount of time.
EVs don't work like that. EV batteries are expensive, and heavy, so if you're trying to make a small, relatively light, economical EV, it ends up having a small battery with only a modest range. Which wouldn't matter if charging took two minutes like refuelling does, but it doesn't.
For anyone considering replacing their ICE vehicle with an EV, I'd recommend playing with https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ - make a list of the journeys that you make regularly, give it a make of car and the speed at which you'd like to travel (for my part of the US, I find that telling it to drive at 120% of posted speed limits is a reasonable approximation of normal highway speeds, and EV efficiency falls off quite significantly at highway speeds because of air resistance), and see how long the journeys "should" take you in different kinds of car. It makes a big difference whether you will have access to charging at your destination or not; if not, you should ask it about the round trip rather than a one-way journey.
I question whether a sum of money that often requires a bank loan can be honestly described as "modest", but perhaps we have different standards of modesty.
You'd think that would be the case, but if you look through the list of all new EV's for sale in the U.S. you'll see almost no correlation between size and range. The Ford Lightning (curb weight 6,015 lb) and Kia EV9 (5,839 lb) have slightly less EPA rated range than the Chevy Bolt (3,680 lb and historically the best selling EV in the American market). The only real exceptions to this are at the very low end of size range, like the Mini Cooper SE, which is very small.
That is also true for the efficiency of ICE vehicles. You say that as if ærodynamics don't apply if your vehicle is burning fossil fuel.
Inadvertently, perhaps you've hit on one of the problems with cars in the US. The Mini Cooper SE is not very small. Most American cars are really big.
It's a different debate but a couple of years ago I ran the comparison of fuel economy between the average car on an American road and a European one. I know that many low-income Americans are very sensitive to gas prices. But the problem is not that gas prices are too high (they're a lot less than we pay, this side of the pond) but that your cars are desperately inefficient.
Anyway... as you were...
AFZ
I can buy a functioning ICE car for <£1000 (half that if I only want to drive it locally, but that's an oddity). Even the oldest EVs (with worn batteries and ranges now ~50 miles) are £3-4k. There is a lot of working through the system to be done before EVs become accessible and useful at the bottom of the market. The Dacia Spring and the like may be the game changer once they age.
This is just ridiculous hyperbole. Even if we do absolutely nothing to change our carbon emissions, the world is not going to become completely uninhabitable inside half a century (the timescale by which most of us who are or intend to soon become parents are likely to become grandparents), or even 150 years.
It may not be as nice, some low-lying areas may be lost to the sea, and some crops may even fail. It’s likely that the total population the planet is capable of sustaining (and therefore the total human population) would be reduced. But the strong likelihood is that our grandchildren would be perfectly fine - western countries with the will and resources to defend their borders against inundation (be it by the literal sea or by the figurative sea of refugees) could easily avoid major reductions in their standard of living.
If roads hadn’t existed for thousands of years before the automotive industry became a thing, maybe. Or were they a massive government subsidy for the horse-breeding, chariot-making and stagecoach-making industries as well?
I think the Dacia Spring is going to be a complete disrupter for the industry. If they can do it for £14k (admittedly that’s the basic model), then it makes all the other manufacturers look a bit flabby.
There are issues with the Spring - it's pretty short range and has a shocking safety rating - but I think it does push other manufacturers to do better. Fiat in particular screwed up massively with their e500.
Sure, I wouldn’t buy one but they’re tilting the market.
On safety - isn’t that because NCAP is seriously flawed these days? I read a motoring magazine that basically said ignore Dacia’s safety ratings because safety ratings are now meaningless - sorry I was only half paying attention in a barber’s, but it made sense at the time!
Of course roads are a big subsidy to the motorist. Up to a point, I have no issue with that. The economic pay off from a functioning road network is several multiples of that cost.
However.
However. And this is the key, it needs to be accounted for. We heavily subsidise our railways. Again, this makes economic sense as if you suddenly stopped doing that, the economic cost would dwarf the savings. Which is why it is right for taxpayers who don't use the railways to support them as well as passengers who buy tickets and pay tax. (This is a separate argument to using private franchises etc. Although, they're not completely unrelated).
The issue is that people who criticise railway subsidies get to pretend that roads aren't subsidised because it's a hidden subsidy.
For the purposes of our discussions here, the added relevance is that this gives the government a lever to pull to affect strategic change.
Let me give a personal example.
We live south east of Birmingham. As noted above, apart from when I'm on call, I get the train to work. My season ticket is £90/month. The trains are regular and fairly reliable. It takes about half an hour door-to-door and I don't have to drive in Birmingham or pay to park.
However, when we go to visit family, especially if it's all 4 of us, I wouldn't even consider going by train. Even if I travelled alone, it's cheaper by car and with all of us, it is much cheaper to go to Cheshire or Hampshire by road.
I am working at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in a couple of weeks and I will fly up as it's an hour from Birmingham airport. Even with early check-in (I tend to always be early) it's still quicker and cheaper for me to fly than get the train. Again, the aviation industry has hidden subsidies.
(For reference with conservative check in but hand luggage only, I'm door-to-door in 3 1/2 hours by plane. Can probably just manage 6 by train at twice the price).
Taking an electric train into the centre of the city gives me a rural home and a low carbon option. However, it is only possible because this side of Birmingham, the rail network is good. Much like London. However, on the west of Brum, it's almost non-existent. When travelling long distance alone, I drive when I would very much prefer to take the train as it's usually prohibitively expensive. Even going to London, I have often driven to near an outer tube station.
There is a huge amount that can be done with our transport network to change the overall CO2 emissions.
AFZ
They wouldn't exist at the extent and scale that they do if not for having to deal with a peak that includes a large number of individual commutes. At least in the UK the motorways and post-war road building programs (as well as cuts to the train service and layout of new towns) were based on the idea that each household would own two cars.
They were mostly really bad roads, so bad that water transport was much better for most of history. Relatively good roads, like Roman roads, absolutely were a government subsidy yes.
Pre-modern roads that were built (as opposed to simple dirt tracks formed by traffic) were typically government funded programs for moving troops. Their use by civilian traffic was seen as a nice bonus to their intended purpose. That being said, a road that can accommodate motorized traffic is a very different thing than a pre-modern road meant to accommodate traffic by foot and draught animals.
As an interesting historical note, the U.S. Interstate Highway system was funded for its ostensible use by the U.S. military. (Eisenhower had been very impressed by the Autobahns during the war.) In part this was because the U.S. Constitution authorizes spending on the military but does not explicitly authorize the federal government to build roads.
Water transport is still better for most things. It's so much better that humans have cut continents in half (twice!) to be able to move things by water rather than land.
Obviously the aerodynamics don't care what powers your motors. The difference is that you don't really care about range in an ICE vehicle, because it takes 2 minutes to "recharge" it, so the size of your tank makes very little difference to the net capability of your vehicle. (Assuming you're in a place with frequent gas stations.)
The US car market is completely ridiculous. If you wrote down a list of functionality people needed from their cars, then what Americans mostly need are:
1. Comfortable sedans
2. Small hatchbacks
3. Minivans
4. Some light trucks
What Americans actually want to buy these days seems to be large SUVs, even larger SUVs, and trucks.
Some of this is a crash survivability war. I spoke with the father of the young woman who ran a stop sign and crashed in to my car, and he was proud of the fact that he buys his daughters the biggest heaviest SUVs he can, so that they will be safe in the event of a collision. But they achieve that safety by making it less safe for everyone else - he expects them to drive badly, but win the collision. As more people make the choice to drive around in small tanks, this does two things - it normalizes the small tank as a means of personal transport, so it doesn't look out of place to people to buy one, and it makes it actively worse to own a "normal car", because you're surrounded by a massive wall of SUV in traffic. So buying an SUV to match feels safer.