“How to make a car as big as possible without increasing the amount of space inside it.”
Also the rest of the world thinks we are weird and love giant cars now. We don’t really have much of an option for normal sized cars
I noticed the same trend here in the Netherlands so don’t worry too much.
Pickup trucks are still a rare sight here though.
I wonder what the criteria for SUV is for these studies?
I’m probably an outlier but I switched from a compact sedan to a compact SUV that’s 10 inches shorter in length, 4 inches higher in height, and 1 inch wider than my old car. They are about the same in weight, within a couple hundred pounds, and the new car is about 80g/km lower in emissions.
I technically own an SUV but it’s not super different from a hatchback car.
I have a VERY small SUV, and its much the same. Its just a little car with a little engine… and big tires.
These aren’t the SUVs most people in North America are buying. They don’t even sell regular cars anymore just trucks and SUV monsters.
Well, like I said, I’m probably and outlier, but they still sell a newer version of both my old compact sedan and my current SUV.
That said, the current mid size pickups are more equivalent to a full size from 10-20 years ago and the continuing SUV lines are getting bigger for some reason as years go by.
We just replaced my wife’s old mid SUV from 2017 for a 2024 and the 2024 is more equivalent in size to the model one size up in 2017.
Unpopular opinion: For more than 90% of the population a car with an Otto engine volume of less than 1.5l is enough. Anuthing above should be taxed heavily.
Cars should be taxed proportional to the fourth power of their kerb weight, in line with the road wear they cause.
I’ve been a fan of little, simple vehicles for a while now. I have had a Geo Metro, Mitsubishi Mirage, and now I have a Suzuki Samurai. In all of these vehicles, I have had to deal with the same issue, when trying to get up to speed: The slowpokes in front of me. No matter how slow I go in my 65 hp little SUV, I end up waiting on someone in a much faster vehicle to get out of the way.
I drive a Prius and agree completely. It’s fuel efficient and extremely utilitarian. I can fit ten foot lumber in it, or my two big stupid dogs and our luggage for trips. Even when my wife drives like a maniac, we still get around 45 mpg. We typically end up passing slow moving vehicles on freeway on ramps, despite it having a maximum acceleration of 0-60 mph in about 10 seconds.
Popular opinion with me
Motor emissions could drop by 100% if we banned ICE vehicles already.
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It also has the disadvantage of being harder to fill and harder to contain (not dangerous, exactly, but hydrogen tanks generally leak.)
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Unless you’re talking cryo, it’s practical density is not great at all. And if you are talking LH, you’re insane.
It’s not just a question of the mass of the fuel itself that matters- it’s also all the mass of everything needed to contain it, and when you account for that, the low pressures of gas stored hydro is a joke (and the reason we haven’t created hydrogen cars, Toyota isn’t doing anything that hasn’t already been done,) and LH tanks are… a bomb waiting to go off when Karen is late for the kid’s hockey game,
That said there are other battery technologies coming down the pipeline that don’t rely on lithium. Sodium ion, for example, or there’s the “old” work horse in space- the nickel-hydrogen battery.
Energy density can be designed around- they’re doing it with lithium cells, and with hydrogen ice. Lithium isn’t offensive because of its energy density, it’s offensive because of how the lithium (and other rare earths) are sourced. NH2 batteries don’t have that problem as much. Nickel and iron are both much easier to extract and recycle than lithium- and the other compontemt is hydrogen gas with some some KOH mixed in. The other primary advantage of NH2 batteries is their recharge cycle count is north of 20k- an order of magnitude more than other batteries (and the reason nasa uses them.)
So there may be some changes to habits, and it might be necessary to use hydrogen ICE in trucking and other long haul transport. But EVs for consumer vehicles are where it’s going.
Latest figures are that green hydrogen accounts for 0.04 percent of total hydrogen production.
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Nonsense! ;)
That’s a good one! I approve!
Let me guess, you live in a city and forget that not everyone lives in a city?
Have you been to cities in North America? Full of massive trucks and SUVs for no good reason. Look up marketing.
I used to live in the middle of nowhere and walk 1 hour to the nearest shop. But an EV or walk. No excuses.
Do you want walking 50km/ 30 mi to school. How about half that to get any food.
Buy an EV, problem solved!
I need chargers in my area
They’re in every lamp post, no?
no not at all.
Damn, that’s crazy that you have the time to so seriously inconvenience yourself so you can feel good about this.
What actually is crazy is that you feel entitled to kill people for your convenience.
What’s actually crazy is that you think electric vehicles don’t have an environmental impact. You sound like a 1990’s era climate activist trying to switch to plastic bags because paper is killing trees, not realizing your solution is actually just as bad and/or worse.
You get all huffy and high and mighty like you’re making a difference but you’re not, you’re just performing activist theatre and acting like we are all murderers for having an hour commute by car. Sorry we don’t all live in downtown LA.
Also, just so you’re aware, manufacturing and coal cause more climate issues than the rest of us combined, trying to save the planet by getting individuals to switch to EV is like trying to clear your 2TB hard drive by deleting text files instead of the hundreds of gigabytes of 4k videos. There’s bigger issues here but you’d rather get recreationally angry.
ICE is here too stay. It’s pure gasoline usage that will probably fall out of fashion. Toyota is experiencing with ammonia based engines that cut down on emissions almost entirely.
The only benefit of ICE over BEV is quick refueling, and that only matters if you’re roadtripping.
The solution is fast-charging BEVs. Edmunds just released a roundup of EV charging times, and showed that with some Hyundais/Kias, you can get 100 miles of range juiced up in 7-8 minutes. Obviously, yes, that’s still slower than dumping some dead dinos in your gashole and taking off, but it’s still pretty quick.
With further technological refinements over time and infrastructure built to give you something to do during 15-20 minute charges, road trips will be perfectly feasible without ICE and will actually probably be more pleasant.
I’m not buying an EV.
Except fast charging quickly degrades the battery. For people without home charging access, this is the key issue. In reality, BEVs won’t catch on. Between the cost, weight, and other problems of the battery, it is a doomed idea and a repeat of the early 20th century. The future of transportation will involve a chemical fuel, whether it’s ICE or fuel cell powered or whatever. It has to mirror the functionality of existing cars completely, or it won’t work.
Terrible take.
Solid state batteries will get figured out well before useful non-polluting chemical fuels, rocketing BEVs beyond ICE’s wildest dreams.
Solid state batteries don’t exist yet. It’s the classic “magic batteries from the future will solve everything” argument. Meanwhile, a sensible path to zero emissions exist now, provide you accept that we should making zero emissions chemical fuels. At some point, refusal to accept this option is its own form of climate change denial.
Solid state batteries don’t exist yet.
So you start with this, but then…
provide you accept that we should making zero emissions chemical fuels
Why do you think we’re magically going to find zero emission chemical fuels but aren’t going to make solid state batteries? I mean, aside from your being a pretty obvious fossil fuel stooge?
We already have that ability. In particular, we can now make hydrogen from electrolysis at vast scale. Derivative fuels, such as ammonia, are also doable.
Your problem is that you are being brainwashed by the battery companies. You think magical batteries exist when they do not, but are stuck in the early 2000s when it comes to competing technologies.
There is no large well of ammonia that we can use for fuel. Transforming green electricity into a liquid fuel, whether hydrogen, ammonia or something else invariably results in large efficiency losses compared to battery technology.
Batteries are not a sustainable solution. For vehicles the size of SUVs, they are a disaster. In reality, the vast majority of transportation will be powered by some kind of chemical fuel. If you must have electrified vehicles, then you should look at trams, trolleybuses, light rail, etc.
a btter pint would be to bring how batteries don’t work for Semi, planes, and boats. We can easily live a world with out suvs, but wee can’t get by with out freight shipping
I doubt battery production is easier than creating ammonia fuel. There’s tons of chemical manufacturers available domestically.
Yeah but short term that would be worse for the environment, interestingly enough:
“Almost 4 tonnes of CO2 are released during the production process of a single electric car and, in order to break even, the vehicle must be used for at least 8 years to offset the initial emissions by 0.5 tonnes of prevented emissions annually.”
https://earth.org/environmental-impact-of-battery-production/
Do also note that estimated life cycle CO2 for BEVs are lower but not significantly so than ICE vehicles. The numbers do however improve significantly as we move to a more carbon neutral energy grid. Without construction improvements that reduce emissions the cap is at around 1/3 the total pollution for a BEV vs ICE. IF the electricity is produced and delivered without any CO2 costs.
The only real, long term, solution is to rethink transportation. Or some groundbreaking new battery tech.
As others have pointed out, your linked article doesn’t have any scientific weight and is hardly a source of truth. But even if it is correct, it is still better to move pollution outside of cities. There are no reasons to continue using ICE vehicles.
Yeah, the solution is not taking the car for every trip, and having car sharing available so you don’t need to manufacture so many cars.
If Americans wouldn’t be so allergic to public transport, it’d be way easier to move away from the whole concept of personal vehicles (except bikes and scooters of course).
Most of those who appear to be for it only are for it for the ability to shovel money to various interests, and don’t care about useful transit. Amtrak has run study after study, instead of taking the first and building whatever. NYC builds massive stations and so can’t afford more than short new subway sections.
I want to point out that the author of the article you are citing is not an environmental scientist or a climate change expert, but an economist with an interest in the field. The article is not a peer reviewed piece of work, it is more or less equivalent to a blog piece with citations. She is not citing peer reviewed research as far as I can tell, but instead a series of linked ‘studies’ (including drafts and organizational white papers) of questionable scientific value.
After reviewing, I would not be inclined to put much if any stock in her analysis.
Here is a peer reviewed article for nature, that finds BEVs are actually much , much lower in CO2 production even during pre use than ICE vehicles.
Thank you for your review. I don’t really agree with your criticism though since your main arguments against the linked article can easily be abused to discredit anything that hasn’t been studied in the exact form discussed. We will never have scientific papers on every possible dimension and perspective on a problem and as such understanding will need to be built by engaged members of society connecting dots in good faith and debate about it as you and I do now. There is nothing inherently bad about a blog with citations.
I also notice how what you link is not at all equivalent. They add in the infrastructure needed to supply vehicles with the fuel they consume, which is of course a valid addition. That addition then offsets the difference in production by adding on disproportionately more to ICE vehicles. What we then end up in is that we still see that building BEVs is still not going to solve our crisis. But they are for sure better than ICE, and this isn’t something I nor the article disputes. My claim that it would be worse for the environment short term also holds true because the gain for the environment only comes after the production cost increases has been offset and, as the paper you linked added, gasoline infrastructure can be decommissioned.
The paper you linked also doesn’t look into Lithium nor Kobalt which are problematic to say the least, if not from a CO2 perspective. Nor does it say anything about the feasibility of an even more rapid phase out (because a phase out is happening right now, and rather rapidly at that, we can’t go much faster without other significant risks).
In summary, the article and the linked paper are not in conflict, from my reading.
I’m not a bot! I’ve tried to reduce this comment down by removing some text. Here’s my summary:
“Scientists can’t be doing everything everywhere at once so we should believe capitalists when they pull numbers out of their asses”
I’ve reduced this comment down by 89%!
Good not a bot!
The paper I linked doesn’t look into all possible aspects because it’s a peer reviewed scientific work, which unlike blog posts tend to have narrow scopes and aren’t written to debunk every aspect of random peoples thoughts on the topic.
The long and short of this is that people need to be much, much more discerning in which information to trust and which to disregard. The author of your article had a Ph.D. , they could seek to publish their research in serious journals, but they’d need to actually do the hard work of finding reliable, evidence based , peer reviewed sources to do that. Instead we get a blog post the links out to other blog posts that link to yet more blogs, occasional draft papers, and decidedly non scientific works.
If I were to trust this author writing in this medium, why not trust anti-science fossil fuel interests who use the same mediums and communication strategies?
Are you familiar with the concept “the medium is the message”?
For me, it’s a big no thanks, especially on important issues like the adoption of BEVs.I fully understand the need to filter out information as being to much of a burden to actually verify/dispute. And I don’t think any less of you for sticking to the safest material in terms of trust, i.e. peer reviewed papers in acclaimed publications.
But at the same time we can’t really wait around for consensus and full understanding of every matter before making informed decisions either. Now, once again, I’m pro BEVs, I just don’t see them as the solution to climate change because even with 100% BEVs our planet can’t sustain personal transportation as it works right now. I haven’t written anything here with the intent to discredit BEVs, I’m just trying to steer focus to what I consider more important issues to craft policy and solutions around. Like personal transportation, wasteful consumption and more.
If you’re asking why I trust this author more than others it’s because they seem to argue in good faith, the cited sources aren’t horrible. The opinions aren’t hyperbolic or presented without any nuance. It doesn’t ring any of my warning bells that causes me to outright dismiss.
And as closing I have no issues with your dismissal of the source and I don’t even think we’re in disagreement.
Despite being someone who is a huge SUV fan and who adores off road cars such as G class, Toyota Land Cruiser, Ineos grenadier, I genuinely hate to see them as “cars for shopping” in the city driven by women with blonde hair who has no idea what a differential is. SUVs belong to off road or long trips, not to cities where they have the highest fuel consumption.
PS: tbh, cars don’t really belong to cities anyways
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A report by the Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI) showed SUVs now represented a majority of the new car market (51%), and the average LDV weight had reached an all-time high of more than 1.5 tonnes.
Automotive companies market SUVs intensively as they provide the most profit: they are sold at premium prices but have a proportionally lower manufacturing cost.
The authors of the report called for governments to place restrictions on vehicle sizes to reverse the SUV trend.
The reduction in emissions from the motor industry has been driven by an uptake of electric vehicles (EVs), which reached 15% of market share in 2022.
The report also said markets with strong growth in this area, such as China and Europe, had the largest annual energy efficiency improvements of close to 6%.
Dan Sperling, the founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, said: “Reversing the trend toward bigger and heavier vehicles is key to achieving more sustainable mobility.
The original article contains 409 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If we are going to leave the carve out for SUVs and Work Trucks, we need to at least:
A) repeal the tariffs on light trucks such as the Isuzu light truck.
B) require a business licence to purchase these “work vehicles”, and require a CDL to drive them.
That will reverse this trend tout suite.
a loophole in the cafe standards says the longer the wheelbase the less the fuel economy has to be and the manufacturers find it more cost effective to make bigger vehicles rather than develop efficient engines.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-the-suv-loophole-that-supersized-cars/
This is 100% correct, and now they have put most people in an arms race as who buys the biggest one to feel “safer”
Wankpanzery begets wankpanzery.
I didn’t know this term before. I live in the land of wankpanzern, I’ll be sure to use this one!
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I’d wager most people have been in one considering how common they are, doesn’t make them any less terrible. Size is definitely a problem, they are very space inefficient, and quite dangerous. The center of gravity is very high, and because the front end is high up, anyone hit by it is more likely to end up under the vehicle. The solution is to lower them down to make them safer, and replace them with safer and more efficient vehicles like station wagons and minivans.
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I literally just told you two things that make them more dangerous, what makes them safer?
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I must say, you’re the first person I’ve seen to cite ChatGPT as a source.
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Just more hot air
SUVs are just minivans with a small lift and a bit more thought put into body style
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They have the frame of a truck, but the spirit of a minivan. Almost everyone with an SUV would be better served by a minivan, but they are just scared to be seen with one.
Pulling an RV trailer with an SUV is usually easier to do than with a minivan.
We’re so fucked.
Not surprising since car manufacturers lobbied to get them classed as light trucks to dodge the stricter emissions and safety regulations that apply to general cars. Then marketed the hell out of them as there is more profit to be made due to them not needing to comply with as many regulations. And now they are everywhere and are way worst than cars in almost every way.
Funny how yet again the capitalist class chooses profits over any other metric leading to s shittier world overall. Almost like there is a pattern happening in every industry…
This guy does lots of videos relating to government and public roads.
This video sheds interesting light on the piece of the problem you’ve identified. It’s also the reason for a massive increase in pedestrian deaths. Seems like cars got bigger to circumvent a law enacted in an attempted to cut auto emissions, but had several adverse consequences.
There’s a reason I don’t watch tv news aside from the poor journalism, and it is this exact sensory assault format he replicates from them.
Love ‘Road Guy Rob’. He has a lot of great simple videos on traffic design and oddities
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/fEj-pyjA2oo?si=J5utF5B0y7zqpK1H
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
BUT THA SAYFTEE OF MAH FERMLEEE
The irony is that I have seen news articles about parents killing their own kids while taking their SUV out of the driveway. And yes, they had bought those because it was “safe” for the kids. The following is just one example you can find many more on the internet.
I heard a man once say, no shit, no kidding, that he bought his wife the biggest vehicle they could afford because she was a bad driver.
I knew a lady involved in a rollover accident in one of those old, flawed Ford Explorers back in the day. When she recovered, her solution to deal with her trauma and make herself feel safer on the road was…to buy an even bigger SUV with an even higher center of gravity.
And unfortunately there’s plenty of truth to this at least for those inside the vehicles. Driving my tiny hatchback in Texas can be really scary some days, the lifted trucks in particular have TERRIBLE visibility and simply can’t see sedans. Their headlights are often higher than the roof of most sedans. It’s so selfish and makes driving a worse experience for everyone else, propagating them too to get a massive light truck/SUV.
My parents recently sold their sedan for a SUV soley for the added safety and I honestly understand where they’re coming from. If I didn’t trust my reaction times as well as I do I’d want the same thing despite it making the roads less safe for others in the process.
