Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow Jun 26, 2024

EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit - *lots* of it.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

Pluralistic: Cleantech has an enshittification problem (26 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Peter Brown Jun 26, 2024

@pluralistic two unintended consequences of the move towards electric vehicles is that they are at their best on short journeys, not travelling transcontinental.
And they are also at their best at speeds under 40 miles an hour, becoming very greedy over 60.

Both of these factors will help modal shift to mass transit across longer distances and should help to reduce average traffic speeds.

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John Deters Jun 27, 2024

@peterbrown @pluralistic Almost all passenger vehicles become "very greedy" over 60, regardless of fuel type. EVs just put the power number conveniently on the dashboard so you can see it for yourself.

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Dominic Jun 27, 2024

@targetdrone @peterbrown @pluralistic ... because air resistance becomes very significant. It would be much better if cars could drive very close behind each other, so the first car pushes the air out of the way, and the rest ride along in the slipstream. This would require very advanced self driving or perhaps even better just mechanically coupling the cars together so they all move as one long unit...

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ahoyboyhoy Jun 27, 2024

@dominic @targetdrone @peterbrown @pluralistic huh, never considered coupling cars together... into a... train. Damn, we already had the answer all along, again!

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Dominic

@ahoyboyhoy @targetdrone @peterbrown @pluralistic you could make it even more efficient by replacing the relative rough road, and soft tires... with something really smooth and hard. You could eliminate most of the rolling resistance that way. Perhaps you could even have the road configured with grooves the wheels fit into so you don't even need to steer, like mechanical "self driving". It would also be much cheaper than making a whole 2d surface the car can move around on when it only actually wants to move _along_ it. So, long skinny hard smooth roads.... could call it a "rail road" or something!?