Reply to post: Re: What about auto-updates?

Re: What about auto-updates?

Someone ran the numbers for materials for making the annual replacement vehicles in the UL battery EVs.

Thanks very much for posting this. This is why "green solutions" scare me - they seem really great until you sit down and do the numbers.

Many years back I was sold on the basic idea of hybrids when I got a ride in a diesel-electric locomotive (double-header towing around 100 trucks worth of wagons - yes I am very much pro-rail for cross-country transport!). The train was travelling along a relatively flat section of track, running at top speed (somewhere in the 80-100kph region IIRC), and the big powerful engines were barely ticking over. They only needed to generate enough electricity to keep the momentum going, unlike a petrol or diesel engine that'd be loaded up a fair bit more with spinning the gearbox and turning engine over at a matching speed (I think my car does 4,000rpm in top gear at highway speed, it cannot go any slower at that speed, but a hybrid could idle and keep the car moving)

Copper equal to world production in 2018

Aluminum equal to about 28% of world production in 2018

When I first read the numbers they were scary enough. But then I did a post-coffee re-read and saw what I missed. That's just for the UK!

I'll re-iterate. Green solutions often appear great at first glance, but when you crunch the numbers, they can get terrifying real quick.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't be working on research, even if a lot of research effort gets wasted. We need better tech or much less population, and while I know there are claims that the latter is the UN's goal I myself am much against the wholesale killing of people (although lowering the global birth rate would be a useful thing to do! - a generation or two of below-replacement birth rates before bringing it up to only replacement levels would be useful - or find another planet we can move the excess population to)

WRT numbers, I found the same thing with wind turbines :( They looked so magnificent and promising until I learned what the cost :(

Thanks again for posting those numbers.