The worst thing is, there is no real alternative to Windows that is backed by somewhat of a corporate guarantee besides macOS.
But many people who use Windows wouldn't want to move to a considerably new platform like macOS, which works quite differently. There is Linux, but then there are compatibility issues and driver issues and other things that are not great for the casual average user.
It feels like Windows could have been better off without being free, but being something like a buy once, keep forever solution, like the good old days.
Today it has just turned into a complete toxic pit of mess that tracks you in every little thing you do and works against you to make sure that it maximizes profits for Microsoft and its partners. The usability is completely destroyed, alas.
It ain’t that confusing. Click on the icon of the app you want to launch and that’s it.
The app is similar to what’s going in on windows.
Where that becomes frustrating is when you have a computer that isn’t well supported by Linux, things don’t work, battery is bad, you have to look up for ways to fix them and so on.
But if the « driver » support was as good as on windows, people could switch in 2 seconds.
My university computers ran Ubuntu, we were not computer nerd but civil engineering yet everyone adapted very quick.
Well okay, tell me why a single user would end up buying enterprise support?
And I would still argue that linux is confusing for casual users. Everything from file system paths to system settings, things are not understood readily for casual users. Lack of available apps like photoshop, etc can also frustrate users.
I must have miss written it. I meant that single user would have to buy computer that are well supported by Linux.
You don’t need canonical enterprise support.
If nothing is already broken, Ubuntu isn’t that different from windows. You got your 10 app icons, and a button to shut down the computer.
And the file path ? Everyone used the standard file picker and had no issue. I guess it defaulted to the home directory or desktop, whatever the case we just put all the garbage there in folder like we used to do in windows.
This really isn't the case any longer. Linux Mint and similar are gaining traction in the gaming community because of how simple they are to use. It's entirely possible to use Linux nowadays without ever opening a terminal, and the UX is no more difficult than Windows XP was.
My dad wanted a computer for the interwebs, at 70ish. I built him a PC and loaded it with the Ubuntu of the day (like 2012). It worked fine.
The previous time he meaningfully interacted with a computer before that was via punched tape containing ALGOL in the early 1960s. (When I first manually "decoded" those tapes 30 years later in the 1990s, it kind of blew my mind. I had just learned Turbo Pascal. Looks very similar at a high level.)
No matter how we look at it, EVs are much friendlier and safer to the environment. Some people argue the source of electricty can be contested against because that involves fossil fuel burning again, but in today's world we are rapidly moving away from it and towards nuclear/hydel/wind methods for generating power.
I hope ICE cars completely become a thing of the past in the next couple of decades to come.
The number of ICE cars I get stuck behind from time to time that just REEK is amazing. I’m in a decently well off area too.
Some putting off soot clouds, white smoke, nothing visible but clearly not doing complete combustion. Sometimes I wonder if half the cylinders are even working.
I’ve heard one car like that is the equivalent of a surprisingly large number of modern ICE cars is in good shape.
I love EVs. I’ve had one for 5 years now, and I’m glad they help. But I think the “are new EVs worse than new ICE” discussions so often miss a fact.
The pollution from ICE isn’t just from very modern well tuned vehicles, things vary wildly. But all EVs use the same power supply (assuming local grid only), so no individual vehicles put off 10x the pollution per kWh.
My city is covered by a low emissions zone so the odd van polluting sticks out. I was in Athens recently and the pollution from so many old rough cars was so noticeable (and quite unpleasant).
Reminds me of how I didn't really notice cigarettes until they were banned from public spaces and the base level of normal was recalibrated.
Many car enthusiasts remove the catalytic converter for a combination of additional power and/or better sound. It has a massive impact on emissions and what you might be smelling is hydrogen sulfide which is normally converted to sulfur dioxide which is orderless.
I should note the power increase may not have a major impact on newer cars where the cat has been optimized to reduce it's negative power impact.
Infact a popular tuner company, APR, that provides flashes tested the recent Volkswagen GTI and R generation with their most common tune and determined that with their tune removing the cat had a nominal impact.
*Basically they can bring the cars power as high as the OEM internals can handle reliably while keeping the cat. There are cars where it still has some impact and of course, different from power ,"straight piping" a car can offer a subjective sound change.
For every car enthusiast there are probably a hundred poorly maintained vehicles on the road. Black smoke is likely soot, and white smoke is almost certainly an oil leak.
Oil in the exhaust in quantities high enough to produce acrid white smoke is extremely common on a number of ICE engines, like blown head gaskets on E25s (found in most Subarus before their Toyota involvement in 2010) for example
Subarus with bad head gaskets leak combustion gas into the cooling system displacing the coolant. If you run a flat engine low on coolant it will score the upper cylinder walls and the you will have oil consumption. This is fundamental to all flat engines. Oil in the exhaust is blue smoke. Coolant is white.
I never got the "blue" and "white" thing. Both look "white" to me, but you're right about subarus also leaking coolant in the exhaust which is easily identified by a "sweet" smell. Blown gaskets on ICE engines like E25s leak both oil AND coolant, no? I might be mixing up blown heads with cracked manifolds which often go hand in hand since temp extremes in engines fissure cast parts like the manifold. Either way the end result is the same: noxious fumes in the exhaust.
You've never see an old vehicle blow a substantially "bluer than normal" cloud. That's what I'm talking about.
> Blown gaskets on ICE engines like E25s leak both oil AND coolant, no?
This is way, way too broad of a statement. The Subaru EJ25 tends to leak oil externally from the valve covers. When they have head gasket problems it tends to be combustion gas into coolant which blows the coolant out the expansion tank until equilibrium is reached. Typical head gasket failures cause some degree of that but coolant mixing with oil is more typical. Many V engines have intake gaskets that can leak coolant into the intake or oil or both.
Regardless, if you can taste coolant in the exhaust the car is basically at the point of "fix it now"
> I might be mixing up blown heads with cracked manifolds which often go hand in hand since temp extremes in engines fissure cast parts like the manifold.
A sizable minority of cars don't even use cast manifolds anymore. While it's possible for cast manifolds to crack in a way that makes them leak that's rare and it's more common for them to crack their mounting tabs off. Steel exhaust tubing can and does sometimes break after many years of vibration, say nothing of rust.
While cylinder heads can crack it usually takes the kind of overheating that requires major work to fix in order to make it happen so just about nobody is driving around with a cracked head.
So I was going to reply to mention that all VWs sold in the US at least for the last 10 years use an iron block. I wanted to know if the EA888 (VWs go to 4 cylinder engine) was cast so I asked chatgpt.
"No — the VW EA888 Gen 3 engine block is not cast iron in the latest versions. engines.... use an aluminum alloy block, not traditional cast iron."
So I know for sure it's iron so I said "Are you sure it's an aluminum block on the gen 3"
"No — the VW/Audi EA888 Gen 3 engine does not have an aluminum block"
My experience is limited to cars manufactured before 2008 (back to 1928). Maybe the new ones are all welded cold rolled steel tubes but I've only seen cast parts for intake and exhaust manifolds, nearly universally. Shit cracked all the time.
This isn't a new thing. Jeep used "factory headers" on the last years of the 4.0. Ford did welded manifolds on the 5.0 Explorers. Subaru went to welded steel for the EJ series engine in the 90s. GM had them on the LT5 in the early 90s. Just about every application that has the catalytic converter right up at the manifold used a welded one.
I recently worked on a 2008 ej25 and it was definitely a cast manifold. Possible we're mixing up terms? Maybe you meant the ejs are cast steel instead of cast iron? When I read "welded steel manifold" I think of perfectly cylindrical tubes welded to steel plate for the mounts. Likely we're saying the same thing and manifolds are just cast parts that are welded together
Note that the one I worked on was in a US Forester so definitely not stock parts (j is for Japan)
EDIT: link to example 2005 manifold listing on eBay
> Infact a popular tuner company, APR, that provides flashes tested the recent Volkswagen GTI and R generation with their most common tune and determined that with their tune removing the cat had a nominal impact.
I could see a single "bad" ICE car being the equivalent of 100 "good" ICE cars. Even the VW emissions scandal (where the cars were still functioning as designed, just not as well as they should) had instances where pollutants were 35x higher than they should be. So I could see an emissions deleted diesel (of which there are many, i.e. catalytic converter and DPF removed) could easily have more than 100x the usual emissions of noxious substances. Maybe even more! Especially if (as is often the case) the DPF was removed because something is faulty on the engine and was overwhelming the capacity of the DPF in the first place.
You can smell these cars from halfway up the road sometimes, when they're 100 metres ahead.
I don’t have hard numbers on this, but I once read a claims that the lawnmowers and weed-whackers in California with their two-stroke engines are responsible for more nitrate and particulate emissions than all the cars and trucks in the state put together, even though by fuel burned the latter outnumbers the former by orders of magnitude. I could totally see a malfunctioning four-stroke ICE with dirty burns being worse than 100 maintained ones.
That probably explains why California banned the sale of gas powered leaf blowers, law mowers, and weed whackers in 2024. You can still use them if you have an old one or by one out of state.
And at the right time too. At almost every point before that, a gas powered engine was justified for duration and power, but the significant advances in both batteries and electric motors in the past 10-20 years have finally made them good enough that ICE tools are totally unjustified.
Even modern cars pollute a lot (especially in winter) because you need a certain temperature for the cats to start working. On short city trips it happens frequently that you never reach proper operating temperatures.
I used to work for the Air Resources Board of California, and while there is a warm-up period, modern ice cars are so profoundly cleaner than cars even from the early 2000s. It’s pretty stunning.
Regardless, there’s nothing cleaner than no combustion, and I can’t wait until EV‘s have replaced them all
Every single survey that I'm aware has concluded that by any measure EVs are more environmentally friendly than ICEs. The only caveat is that the "startup" footprint of an EV is higher (because batteries), but the ongoing cost is far lower, even with polluting electricity sources like coal, because it's still way more efficient to burn coal in a proper power plant than it is to ship around gasoline and burn it badly in ICEs. The breakeven point (depending on your assumptions and driving habits) is a couple of years in, and after that EVs wipe the floor with ICEs.
Even where they are charged using coal? Please provide the research on that. Note that I'll be checking who funded and who performed the peer review, so please choose carefully before posting.
Based on that I no longer believe you are an expert of any chemistry or energy. Or you are really bad at making jokes maybe?
Regardless, electricity for your EV comes from somewhere, right? It's powered by a coal power plant in much of the US, with electrical energy transduced (effective loss at every transduction point) through countless parts and miles of electrical equipment before it reaches your charger.
Are you about to tell me that coal is cleaner than gasoline? It's not remotely comparable. Coal is insanely dirty. This is common knowledge.
Every metric you asked about applies to coal and much worse and therefore to your EV in vast swathes of America.
The EV in such places is doubly destructive. You've burned coal AND mined lithium and shipped it, plus you're carrying a heavier load, and your batteries are short lived, and toxic.
>Oh no, am i bad at making jokes?, Or is your argument a joke?
No my argument was serious. You've sliced your data gratuitously. You're also making rude jokes, and I think there are HN rules about that somewhere. But, I'll forgive you.
You looked up the share of energy for the US as if every vehicle owner spends equal time driving in every city. That's dishonest. A vehicle owner typically drives in one city nearly all the time. If that city is coal powered as we can see, many are, that owner should not operate an EV. But policy relying on blanket data like yours would incentivize their doing so. That's bad for everyone, except the policymaker and his buddies selling EV related products.
The primary point, however, is that EVs move the pollutants up the supply chain. The car itself is non-emission, but the power plant and battery cycle are not! And the alternative power sources aren't really clean either. Nuclear, for example, requires mining, enrichment, etc. (all carbon heavy) and then we still need to deal with disposal which doesn't even exist! We're sweeping that under the rug when we call that clean energy. We don't have a solution for waste so we just exclude it from our impact calculations? Ridiculous.
Now add a toxic battery on top of all of that, and all of the mining and waste disposal associated with it. You've moved your pollutants to China, added shipping lanes, and dumped more oil and now lithium into the ocean. This may be worse overall and it's for sure worse for owners of cars in coal powered locations.
But you do get to say that the EV in a vacuum is zero emissions (at the location of inertial output only). Nice work!
Your argument zoomed out to blanket statement the US where it suits you, and then zoomed in to the car itself to exclude where your pollutants are. It's truly very dishonest. That argument is damaging to the public interest and to the environment, and insults the sciences.
Did you really not understand? I suspect you did, and in the context of your previous jokes, I think you're trying to annoy me. It'd be nice if that's not true.
Is it?
I suppose if we want to look at the US as a country (pretending it's all one city with one grid), then we will continue to encourage the 20% (roughly by your numbers) that drive gasoline in the coal power areas to downgrade to coal powered EVs.
I don't think that's good. I think you're careless and destructive for supporting that.
Anyway, you're not really acknowledging very real problems with your assertions and that's not going to make for coherent discussion. There's nothing scientific about that, so I suspect you might not be interested in science.
Lost my interest. Cheers.
For others reading, I'm happy to continue scientific discussion on this topic, especially if you disagree.
No warmup here. I've stated that much of the research favoring "clean" energy makes extremely generous assumptions about the validity of the data and allows for overly confident assertions mainly used for marketing. We know a lot less about the environment than you think, and even with what we do know, we can say for sure that when you include supply, manufacture, transduction, etc. you really can't call any method for power generation "clean" with current tech. It's all empty promises of new potential tech to be seen if we milk the tax payer. Just people with degrees in the field making money on selling pipe dreams to the public, and helping officials pump taxes into their investments. That's "clean" energy in a paragraph. It doesn't exist.
Yes, any cyclist daring to drive in winter can easily confirm this. It is so disgusting (and unhealthy) having to stand behind a ICE car on a traffic light and being behind a electric car is such a relief, that thoughts of wishing to ban all ICE cars as soon as possible (at least in cities) come automatically.
You could run them on propane, which doesn't need the catastrophic converters - they make no difference at all if there's no CO or HC in the exhaust stream.
You've got the added bonus that you don't need to strip-mine huge chunks of Africa for precious metals, too.
As an aside, I'd like to mention that like 9 times out of 10 if you are driving down the road in an ICE vehicle and smell weird oil or hot coolant smells you are smelling someone else's car. The wind blows away a lot of your own stink before it gets to you. I learned to ignore anything that didn't smell 1) when I was stopped, and 2) more than once in totally different locations. After trying to track down smells that I thought were mine and were invariably from someone else nearby.
If your high voltage line is conducting enough to the ground that it's sparking, your vehicle isn't going to work. Electricity follows the path of least resistance and a path to ground is a lot lower resistance than a motor coil.
EVs eliminate a lot of polluting failure states of ICE vehicles. There just simply aren't that many things to burn or leak and still have a functioning vehicle.
You're not allowed to drive cars like that in a functional society. When you go for your compulsory car checkup it wouldn't pass the required safety standards.
What is allowed and what actually happens are two very different things, my friend.
In the neighbourhood I live, there's a guy who visits someone here several times per week. His headlights are broken, the tires are worn smooth, the exhaust is loud beyond all reason. Given the general state of the vehicle, I don't have high hopes for the brakes.
I reported it to the police. I'm really not the type of person to do that, but this is worse than anything I've seen. Of course nothing happened. I didn't even get a reply. They don't give a shit. Some day that guy is going to rear-end my car and break my neck because his brake lines finally gave out.
Also, the compulsory car inspections only work for honest people. People with illegal mods will put back the stock parts for the inspection, and switch them back after. I'm not gonna say the inspections are worthless, but it does make a lot of money for the state and the private actors who run the inspection centres.
EDIT to add: They made a law recently that the inspector has to take a photo of the car inside the inspection centre, because there was so much fraud happening with vehicles just being "inspected" on paper.
I think the point they're making is that the ICE cars that OP is complaining about also aren't supposed to be driven in a functional society. The difference is that mostly wealthy people can afford EVs: https://ampo.org/electric-vehicles-are-out-of-reach-for-most... thus they stay maintained and have a polished image.
I think they are more accessible now than when that article was written. My wife and I bought a mid-trim Hyundai Kona Electric for under $35,000. Besides, lots of people buy used cars, and there are crazy deals on used EVs. I've seen Bolts go for under $15,000. 2 year old ID.4s are selling for under $20,000 in my area. You may not find a $5,000 beater, but EVs are penetrating further into the middle of the market now.
There are also lower ongoing costs for maintenance and fuel.
There is still the secondary wealth filter of having a place to park and charge, of course.
What I think is missing today is a way to challenge someone else's car. A few independent reports should force an early checkup, and if passed soon after the accusation, the accusers should get their own just to have something at stake.
It's missing because letting the minority of Karens harass everyone like that would cause the political will for the inspection programs to evaporate instantly.
Second, places with high touch governments already lose out on business due to registration arbitrage. Your proposal would dump gas on that fire.
while I agree, there's many places where the compulsory car checkup is tied to your relationship with the mechanic. I don't think my parents ever had a "valid" car but the certificate always was. It never felt wrong (although I think it is) but more like mutual aid or service.
There’s also the fact that nearly 1/4 US states require no emissions or safety checks whatsoever [1]. So everything is valid by default and realistically the only thing stopping you from driving a literal rust bucket, with tailpipe dragging, poor combustion, or modified emissions filtering (like modifying your truck so you can roll coal down Main Street) is it a cop feels like pulling you over for it
Unlikely. Many of these sensors are mostly CAN-based, rather than hardwired. It would be a time consuming enterprise to custom bake a solution for each vehicle model to fake out protection systems. For better or worse EVs are substantially more difficult to modify than typical ICE.
Only takes 1 person to make a "safety system faker: Makes car run even with faults" which is a $20 thing you can buy from aliexpress and can be clipped anywhere onto the canbus - just two wires to hook into.
It then runs code which auto detects the car model (fairly easy from the messages on the bus), and has a database of the messages to send/inhibit to change the behaviour in the desired way.
Because so many cars use electronics that are common across a whole manufacturer of cars - ie. all GM cars, or all cars with a Bosche ECU - there won't be awful lot of work making it compatible with hundreds of models of car.
Such devices already exist for faking data for engine tuning, and for faking 'zero faults, all monitors pass' to pass government tests.
You basically get internal faults and cable faults with HV stuff. A box reporting that the AC compressor motor winding isn't shorted isn't going to make the compressor work with a shorted winding. ECU probably wouldn't disengage the powertrain for that though.
And then things like battery temperature warnings will quickly turn into real failures.
And then the next generation or 2 of stuff is going to at least attempt to implement cybersecurity features that greatly complicate tampering at the message level.
It isn't until it is.
Manuals will appear, guides will show up online, shadetree mechanics will get better at electronics(they used to be experts in carburetors after all), software will be cracked if necessary.
I'd say that putting off sooth clouds is a way to sequester carbon (which obviously failed to burn). Such over-enriched fuel mixes must generate much more CO though, and I wonder if those who "tune" their cars like so take care about the catalytic converter :(
The health consequences of inhaling exhaust particulates are far more harmful than the equivalent CO2 contribution to greenhouse effect warming unfortunately.
All in all, a well tuned ICE is better for everyone than a poorly tuned one, if you had to pick between the two.
> The health consequences of inhaling exhaust particulates are far more harmful than the equivalent CO2 contribution to greenhouse effect warming unfortunately
Short term for the individual definitely, but long term for all individuals affected?
At least soot from ships is an issue in high latitudes, as it turns out that the soot reduces the albedo of the ice and it thus has an outsized global warming impact.
I know in some car tuning circles, or even just blue collar Joes in some places, will recommend removing the catalytic converter. Supposedly it makes the car use less fuel at the cost of worse emissions, and can make it sound better for those who care about that.
HEPA filters stop dust particles and not those tiny organic molecules that cause the smells. Filters for these exist as well, usually used in respirators, but those need to be exchanged pretty frequently and are not cheap.
Activated charcoal filters are a common option even out of the factory, and I’d be surprised if there were a car you can’t get them aftermarket. They don’t last that long but honestly I’d recommend swapping the cabin filter yearly anyway.
Someone recommended them to me years ago and I’m never going back.
One of the reasons I wrote the comment above is because my filter has worn out and needs replacing, so all of a sudden I can smell all this nonsense again.
We love privatising the benefits and socialising the harms of everything.
If the exhaust had to go through the cabin so the driver got the worst of it, car exhaust would be the cleanest air on the planet within months and/or alternatives to cars would rocket.
But as long as it’s other peoples health affected, meh.
> If the exhaust had to go through the cabin so the driver got the worst of it, car exhaust would be the cleanest air on the planet within months and/or alternatives to cars would rocket.
This is why forklift trucks and Zambonis run on propane instead of petrol or diesel. If you burn gas, you get no carbon monoxide or unburnt fuel because it runs ever so slightly lean and all the fuel is burnt.
This means keeping the air clear is just a case of getting rid of carbon dioxide and water, so you can open some vents (warehouses have great big vents, big enough for trucks to drive in and out...) and let the place air out. You won't die if you breathe it, unlike the CO and unburnt fuel from petrol and diesel engines.
That's very interesting. I guess it could be a great option for when the % of ICE vehicles is low enough, it might be practical to ban more polluting fuels.
(Edited to add) Hmm actually people are already doing LPG conversions today as it's cheaper. Not sure if all LPGs are as pollution free, though.
It depends how you do it. The conversion on my elderly Range Rover is not as efficient, being an old-fashioned "single point" system - this has a thing a bit like a cooker ring attached to the throttle, a stepper motor controlled valve driven by a third lambda sensor, and a thing to disconnect the petrol injectors when it switches to gas.
You can get ones with a complete set of LPG injectors and an ECU that takes its timing from the petrol injectors, and these are incredibly efficient. They're a bit harder to install (you need to drill holes in the intake manifold, it's a faff) but the engine can be mapped for even more power than on petrol and a tiny amount of pollution.
There's still a lot of CO2 and water vapour, but as previously discussed you're burning all this shit anyway so you might as well extract useful work from it.
The time to have done this was 25 or 30 years ago, when it was ridiculously cheap to buy gas and there were a lot of old-fashioned carburettor-fed cars that were incredibly badly polluting.
White smoke is water vapor. It's a normal byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion and tends to condense in the exhaust at low loads or immediately after exiting the exhaust, especially in colder temperatures, so you'll see a lot of it in stop and go traffic.
If it "reeks" though it's not just water vapor. I see a lot of these cars too, and you can tell it's been going on for a long time when the back of the car is covered in a layer of black grime. I think that's what kind of car problem the post is referring to.
Yep. My newest car is over 20 years old. May be a bit more polluting (though it doesn't smell or smoke) but I've in theory saved the environmental impact of the manufacture of one or two new cars by keeping the old one.
I'm not spending $30-40k or more on a car. That just isn't going to happen.
Cost to replace the catalytic converter, cost for new exhaust pipes, cost to diagnose ignition timing problems. Whatever.
If the car drives and you don’t have the money I can completely understand why someone wouldn’t get the problem fixed. Even if it means they’re burning a 1/3 of their fuel, that’s still less in the short term than the $1500 it may cost to fix it.
It’s insanely rare I get the sense that the person is running really dirty on purpose.
I don’t know what a realistic fairway to fix it is. They’re probably isn’t one. I don’t think fines would work, it would probably just make things worse. Seems like the kind of thing where a little government group to find the worst 0.1% of cars on the road and just get them back to reasonable levels would be a huge help.
Some states handle this by requiring cars over a certain age to be emission checked before you can renew its registration. Failing cars have to be fixed and rechecked before you can get your tags.
I think they stop checking cars after a certain year. Like, if you are driving a 1980 Buick, they won’t make you scrap it because it’s emission tech is way out of date.
I can only speak about Germany. Here the technical safety and exhaust check are mandatory every two years. The exhaust check is relative to what the manufacturer specified when they first started selling the car. No one is getting their car taken away because technology improved but you can‘t let your car degrade (or modify it) so it becomes more dirty.
2005-ish cars were more reliable and had better emissions profiles compared to cars today. Yes cars today are more advanced ,but less reliable, so their emissions overall are worse.
A lot of Americans take their cat off on purpose for louder noises.
Additionally, a lot of conservatives love to "Roll coal", and literally will shit up the environment on purpose just because they feel schadenfreude from pissing of an environmentalist.
> A lot of Americans take their cat off on purpose for louder noises.
Some people remove catalytic converters when they install a performance exhaust. Nobody is doing it for louder noises because the muffler portion is what dampens the sound.
Also I wouldn’t say it’s “a lot of Americans”. We have emissions inspections in most major cities and your car won’t pass if you remove the catalytic converter. They can now detect modified ECUs, too. Someone would have to be so determined to do this that they’d swap the exhaust in and out every time they had to do emissions inspections.
Yeah, it's definitely a small percent of people. But i do wonder how many there really has to be to have an outsized effect. One of those lifted kid killers blowing black smoke for the entire duration of the bicycle pack is definitely more than 3 of my tiny honda civics, i wonder how many it really is, and how much those modifications increase the "resting emissions rate"even when not blowing shit. Should be illegal, likely is.
I'd wager it's largely disruptive and dangerous in a highly localized way due to the small percentage of folks doing it. Doesn't make it an acceptable practice though. One person "rolling coal" can temporarily blind 3 or 4 cars back and several across depending on wind conditions, etc.
In terms of NOX it can be a factor of 100. If 1% drive without cats they produce half the NOX emissions. In reality it is probably less since there are other old cars as well that have higher emissions
I live in a progressive state and unfortunately encounter "coal rolling" regularly. I also assume that's the point. Someone has to "own all the libs" as it were
However, I do agree that there aren't enough folks "rolling coal" in aggregate to really move any needles on planet-scale environmental impacts though. Just VERY unpleasant to be caught behind.
They muffle slightly, but removing the cat alone isn’t going to make a big difference with modern high efficiency single cat exhausts.
I’ve seen (heard) the effects first hand. Trust me, people aren’t removing the cat just to make their car annoyingly loud. If they are, they’re going to be disappointed.
If I had to guess, the downvotes were from the “A lot of Americans” claim
> HNs lack of knowledge around cars is sort of frightening.
I actually have a lot of knowledge and experience in the automotive space, including with exhaust systems!
Catalytic converter removal alone doesn’t have a big change exhaust tone. I have seen it first hand, and also with 100-cell and 200-cell race cats as an intermediary step.
Your posts are full of condescending assumptions about Americans and HN’s comments about cars, but you’re ignoring the actual facts others are trying to share.
I’ve run into a few of those. They’re generally pretty obvious. Usually a big truck, lots of MAGA & adjacent bumper stickers.
I haven’t noticed people removing the catalytic converters just for noise. The rare time I see a car that wants to be loud it usually just seems to be the exhaust end they changed, or maybe removed the muffler.
The kind of stuff I’m complaining about mostly seems to be older cars, or those in poor mechanical shape. Cases where the people probably just don’t have the money to fix it.
The exhaust from a well functioning modern ICE is likely enough to have less pollutants than the air. Of course it still has carbon dioxide, but less other pollutants.
>> EV have far more tire wear because they are heavier
Is this true?
If an EV were 30% heavier than an ICE, would it produce 30% more tyre wear emissions? Or would it produce more or less than 30%? Is the primary factor in tyre wear weight and is the relationship linear?
The types of tyres appear to be quite different, the EVs seem to have smaller contact patches (narrower wheels) and they're made of different "less grippy" compounds that drag less. Does this change the equation at all?
Even if we still make a mess I think centralization of the mess is better than distributing it - what I mean is that polluting cities where millions sleep, eat, drink and breathe will probably be worse, net effect, than containing energy pollution to select places.
Running EVs in densely populated regions is probably a lot better for the population on the whole even if the net pollution would stay the same, IMO.
Still no EV is even better, but we’ve created a world where transport is often required so, one step at a time I guess.
Even if the electricity source would burn similar fuel, just the fact that you don't pullote right in the middle of population centers makes a huge difference. In reality, it's not only that, but _also_ that they use cleaner methods of energy production.
Huh, no. Pollution close to humans is bad for both city and rural people.
> The pollution always goes somewhere,
"The solution to pollution is dilution". We want the concentration of pollution low, so the health effects are low too, and we can give natural processes the time to decay/oxidize/etc the pollutants.
> not like we have large swaths of useless places
We do... we mostly care about the lower ~100 meters of atmosphere because that's where people live. That's less than 1% of the total atmosphere. This means we can distribute pollution over a volume a 100x larger than that that is important for us. And then I'm not even counting the vast amount of the planet that's uninhabited / non-land.
Also, smokestacks are designed to not directly pollute the air close to people, see:
And it is a fallacy for obvious reasons, including
a) electricity generation is more flexible, and rapidly shifting to solar and other non-polluting sources.
b) Moving pollution away from people is better. Cars are inherently around people, streets, residences etc.
c) One centralised plant with no weight restrictions is easier to control for emissions and efficiency than many thousands of mobile, weight-constrained power plants.
d) Wikipedia: "The extraction and refining of carbon based fuels and its distribution is in itself an energy intensive industry contributing to CO2 emissions."
Even if the fossil fuel argument at the source was/is valid, it's infinitely more efficient to do it at the source than in a car. You can extract far more energy and do better to mitigate byproducts.
Also, an EV is as green as the grid. Hamburgs public transportation is heavily investing into electrical busses, because a bus is expected to function for 10 - 15 years. Meaning, a diesel bus built today will be as polluting in 2035 as it is today, though they are also looking at alternatives there. But an electrical bus will become cleaner and cleaner over time.
The surprising part to me is that there are now enough EVs to make a measurable difference, since I kept thinking they are still relatively rare. The linked study has this piece of data:
From 2019 to 2023, ZEVs increased from 2.0% (559943 of 28237734) to 5.1% (1460818 of 28498496).
We're still burning massive amounts of fossil fuels as waste products from refining oil to make plastics and chemical feedstocks. A huge amount of that is propane that just gets flared off.
We could have been running cars on that for decades, but getting people to make their dirty polluting inefficient old petrol cars run on fuel that emits carbon dioxide and water with no HC, CO, SOx, NOx, or particulates was nowhere near as profitable as selling them lots of debt to buy cleaner greener diesels.
Actually it's considerably less explosive than petrol and far safer in a crash.
If a petrol-fuelled car goes on fire, the fuel tank will explode. The tanks are usually thin plastic and will split open in an accident, spilling fuel everywhere.
By contrast, the LPG tanks are pretty much indestructible and if you remove a tank from a car that's been on fire (a lot of taxis are LPG-powered and seem to go on fire late at night for some reason, especially if they're parked in the wrong part of town) you'll find the tank is still about as full as it was before the car got burnt.
Is that really true? Liquid gasoline does evaporate pretty quickly, yet doesn't need special metal tanks. Isn't propane sold and kept in pressurized tanks?
As I understand it, gasoline tanks on cars are unlikely to explode unless they are nearly empty.
The petrol in the tank will boil quickly and blow the tank apart, especially if it's already a bit melty. You won't get enough pressure for a proper "BLEVE" because the leaky plastic bucket won't hold enough pressure to stop it beginning to boil, but it'll throw burning fuel all over.
An automotive LPG tank is a bit different to the kind of thing you'd run your barbecue off with a "multivalve" that's got a float to shut off the filling port when it's full and act as a level gauge (similar to a petrol tank) and a pipe to pick liquid up from the bottom. You get "four hole" tanks with a vapour tap that you can use a normal regulator in, which is handy for things like motorhomes - same tank runs the engine and the cooker :-)
They're only pressurised to about 8 bar, low enough that you can use plastic pipe to connect them to the vapouriser at the engine. It's kind of nylon tubing with braid over and a PVC outer jacket, and it handles liquid propane at tank pressure.
If there's an overpressure because it gets really hot (like, car is on fire hot) it'll burp out a bit of gas which will cause a puff of flame but you're talking about something like a deodorant can on a bonfire (and don't tell me you've never done that).
Quite honestly, I'm more wary around the 15 bar air suspension tank and lines. That's where pressurised gases start to get a bit spicy.
That ... still sounds more dangerous than liquid gasoline to me. Though I suppose if it were cheaper and as plentiful then the world would switch. Gasoline was after all a byproduct of kerosine processing.
You think something that goes "puff" and emits a wee puff of flame every so often is more dangerous than something that just sprays liquid dynamite all over the incident?
I know someone who took a drill to a small propane tank and ended up life flighted to the hospital. Perhaps the equivalent with a gas can would be worse? I just don't see it.
You cannot burst an automotive propane tank, no matter how you might try. You could probably drill a hole in it with a decent drill bit (it's thick steel) or cut it open with an angle grinder, or even gas axe your way in.
But, as I say, deliberate stupidity aside, it's not just going to burst on you.
It's just not dangerous, period. There are multiple countries where every single taxi in the country pre-EVs ran on LPG, and now most of them still do though some get replaced by EVs. Ask anyone from there if they've ever heard of them blowing up. You'll get nothing but a "huh, what are you talking about?".
You forget the most important aspect of policy: it can't cost a single dime, and everyone must lie about that. Read the first sentence of the article:
"When California neighborhoods increased their number of zero-emissions vehicles"
Obviously neighborhoods/cities/states didn't increase anything. It was just rich people living there buying fancy cars. Of course, this needs to be described as a great accomplishment of local government.
And nowhere in the article is the obvious solution even suggested: advancing electric car technology so they're cheaper than ICE cars. And I don't mean charging extra tax while cutting public transport to make sure poor people don't go anywhere anymore, I mean fixing the technology so everyone has transport, for less money.
Shouldn't the obvious solution be based on observable reality? Which is that there is no technology in sight that will make EVs cheaper to build than ICEs. Otherwise you are praying for a miracle, and that's not a sound policy.
Technological advance can be modeled like anything else. Everything about plug-in EVs is cheaper than ICE cars, except the battery. So you can model exactly what you need to get the same as you're currently seeing with solar panels. You can calculate at exactly what point they'll take over aviation and so on.
I mean, this isn't even a very hard thing to model.
> I mean, this isn't even a very hard thing to model.
Could you please explain in more detail what exactly do you want to model here? Above, you mentioned "advancing electric car technology so they're cheaper than ICE cars". Now as we both know the issue is with the battery, do you just want cars with battery so small that the car is cheaper than an ICE but nobody wants it? Because there is no need to model that, it has been tried and failed.
If you mean modeling battery technology that's not yet available in EVs, good luck with that. There are better batteries available than in mass-market vehicles, but they are not cheaper; cheaper technologies are not as good. Sure, in 10 years the batteries will be much better overall, but we don't really have the luxury of waiting until the technology gets perfect and then scaling that, do we.
Decent public transport makes all the difference.
Luckily we have good transport here in the Netherlands and I haven't needed a car in 10 years.
Also, the trains here have been running 100% on renewable energy since 2017.
Post crash connectivity (as well as complex video classification) are part of the ncap standards now.
And with the way we are moving to centralized one system architectures, the device that does video processing can be the same soc that does smart infotainment.
Smart connectivity essentially comes "for free" if the manufacturer wants to hit 5 safety stars, so its not going away, and will come to ICE cars as they modernize the vehicle architectures.
You must have missed the news about cars being hacked, while in movement no less. That some have tried to save money while risking lives is not an endorsement or evidence of a solved problem.
I hate that. If I live in the country, my car spies on me. If I live in the city everyone spies on me. One value I agree with the libertarians on is, I just want to be left alone.
Amusingly my Cupra Born in Australia is a “dumb” EV, because Cupra/VW didn’t put a SIM in the car in this country. It’s quite lovely really, though it means I have to go to Cupra for a firmware update.
Why? Are you worried from a liberty/privacy standpoint? "Smart" EV's are demonstrated to be significantly safer than "dumb" EVs. Waymo’s 2025/2026 data shows an 80–90% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers in the same cities. [1, 2, 3, 4]
So liberty then. I don't disagree with you, but this modern flashpoint in the classic debate between individual liberty and collective safety does bring up the question what is saving 50,000+ lives annually actually worth in terms of loss of personal freedoms? I am personally struggling with this debate having lost loved ones in this manner.
That is not the argument being made. We are discussing how "dumb" vehicles (e.g. vehicles that contribute to 50,000+ fatalities annually) provide independence, privacy and freedom that "smart" vehicles (e.g. vehicles with self-driving that can be bricked at will) do not ensure.
Also you are conflating thing the poster may not have intended. I’ve not heard anyone complain about collision avoidance systems, antilock brakes etc. But spying packages, and touchscreen dash, hell no.
> "Smart" EV's are demonstrated to be significantly safer than "dumb" EVs. Waymo’s 2025/2026 data shows an 80–90% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers in the same cities.
It's important to realize the reason for that.
Crashes by human drivers are hugely disproportionately by people who are driving drunk or with insufficient sleep or significant distractions etc. In other words, it's not a difference in the cars, it's a difference in the drivers. Waymo can beat a drunk driver, and therefore can beat the human driver arithmetic mean which has the drunk drivers averaged in.
That doesn't mean it's any safer than driving an ordinary car when you're not drunk.
The assertion that 'I just hope "dumb" EV's become a thing soon' led me to a different assumption. The ultimate aspiration of a "smart" EV is self-driving, which incorporates Internet connectivity features (e.g. digital mapping, over the air updates, etc).
"Smart" in all other classes of purchases typically means IoT / Internet connected.
The computerization of formerly mechanical features making it harder to DIY repair is a separate but also valid concern, though I'm not sure how it applies to EVs.
By using touchscreens and software for most functionality, you dramatically reduce your supply chain overhead and better enhance margins (instead of managing the supply chain for dozens of extruded buttons, now you manage the supply chain of a single LCD touchscreen).
This was a major optimization that Chinese automotive manufacturers (ICE and EV) found and took advantage of all the way back in 2019 [0] - treat cars as consumer electronics instead of as "cars".
Edit: Any answer that does not take COGS or Magins into account is moot.
Not sure what your point is when we're talking about cars, where fixed physical controls are demonstrably more usable and safer for drivers that need to keep their eyes on the road. Multiple manufacturers have pulled back from excessive touch controls (not just touchscreens, but capacitive buttons and sliders) and reinstated more traditional buttons and dials.
Physical controls and smart cars are not mutually exclusive. That’s why they’ve been fixing that.
I agree that was an idiotic trend.
But if someone wants a car without connectivity, it’s too late. The market is not strong enough to get rid of that. Most people either like it or don’t care enough to avoid it.
Just like most people liked or didn’t care enough to avoid smart TVs.
I declined the master data agreement when Toyota updated it, and my car hasn’t connected to the Internet since. They also wanted to charge me like $20 a month for stuff like bothering me with notifications that my wife has failed to lock the car when I’m halfway across the city after the first year of ownership.
I suppose they could still remote kill the car though, and have no idea what would happen if I hit the emergency button.
The business case is the same as every “dumb” device since the dawn of time, up until maybe 10 years ago.
Sell and product with enough margin to make money. Don’t sell it at or below cost, then spy on your users and sell them to the real customers, the advertisers.
“Dumb” stuff has a very simple and honest business model. Market the cars by exposing what every other car brand is actually doing.
>Edit: Any answer that does not take COGS or Magins into account is moot.
Auto quality touch screes are not cheap. A high quality switch/button assembly is still cheaper for a give lifetime (100k, 200k, whatever), which is why it's what the 3rd world compact cars all use. The switches start losing when you start having a ton of different sets of features the car needs to support.
I have hopes that the Slate vehicle will turn out to be a dumb EV, but I'm cynical enough that I want to wait til it hits the market and someone does a tear-down. https://www.slate.auto/
Just get a used one that’s a decade old. The cell providers will all move on past 3g/4g etc and the cars won’t be able to connect. Plus I’m sure no one is paying to keep a cell connection going for a decade old EV.
Typically, yes. Although I chalk much of that up to traditional ICE companies being extremely slow to adopt new technology and implementating it poorly or only superficially.
Depends. They get a virtually continual supply of standby power that can last for months if left untouched. So from a technology standpoint that enables them to do many things - from being connected to the network, aware of their location on the map, recording camera footage and other remote capabilities. ICE cars do have some of these but the huge battery packs on EVs make these very feasible.
EVs use 12V for standby just like ICEs. I guess it could occasionally recharge it from the main battery, but needing a jump is a thing for EVs also in theory. I’ve also had issues with the 12V disabling remote systems because of abnormal discharge (well, BMW has an issue with their lock on weak away in that it keeps drawing power if the fob gets near even if the car is locked).
I was under the impression most EVs cut off the connection to the high voltage battery almost all the time they’re not in use.
They rely on a 12 V battery or a 48 V battery like a normal car.
The only thing I’m aware of that special is that if that low voltage battery gets low enough the car will detect it and recharge it from the high voltage battery, temporarily connecting it for that purpose.
> They rely on a 12 V battery or a 48 V battery like a normal car.
Which leads to "fun" situations when that battery runs out, like not being able to get into your car or start it. However not much power is needed, so a tiny portable jump pack is enough to get things going.
Both me and my sister has experienced this, me a Nissan Leaf and her a VW ID.4, good times.
Fair enough, at least my Leaf had that too, and I guess the ID.4 as well. However for the Leaf and my current car it's just the driver side, and you still can't get the car started, or turn on the heat say.
The latter can be an issue as my sister got stranded in the mountains during winter. Battery ran flat while they were on a long ski trip, and they couldn't get it fired up when they got back. Took a few hours before rescue vehicle arrived and gave them a boost.
Well that was what I meant - the battery pack meaning the entire system of batteries, be it 1 or 2 or 3.
That really enables them to have a continuous state of power supply for a long long time.
This cannot be achieved by ICE cars and not even hybrids for that matter.
In theory. In practice, a lot of EVs (and hybrids, which could do the same thing to a more limited extent) ship with the same cheap flooded lead acid 12v batteries that ship with ICE cars and don't handle constant charging/discharging well.
This puts a cap on how much the "smart" systems can do because it dramatically increases cycle count and thus the risk of the 12v battery losing the ability to produce enough voltage to start the car, leaving the driver marooned somewhere.
It could also result in a noticeable "vampire" drain on the high voltage battery which looks bad and could put you at a disadvantage vs. competitors.
It depends on your definition. Tesla Model 3 has a dedicated low-current connection to the high-voltage battery that bypasses the main contactors, specifically to power the 12V system.
Ah yes, the previously-marketed $20,000 Slate which is actually $30,000 now, still comes with nothing, and hasn't hit production yet. If only BYD could come in and destroy the non-smart/budget EV market.
My previous car had its infotainment system reboot several times while I was on the expressway. The idea of my instrument panel, or other more critical systems, crashing and rebooting while driving terrifies me.
The infotainment is not connected to the ECU and other car control electronics. At least not on my Tesla nor my F150 Lightning. You can reboot them to your hearts content while driving down the road.
Yes, but it is still rather unnerving when part of the car goes dark. It also makes me question the QA on this stuff. If that is crashing, will the other systems be crashing at some point as well? Is there redundancy? These are the questions that went through my mind while hoping the screen would come back on before I missed my exit. Even knowing the systems are completely separate, it spoke to overall quality.
I agree that it is unnerving, but I expect it to be normal in the future. They save a bunch of time by being able to push out a 90% product with low risk of catastrophe and just push updates later to fix it up. As a bonus, they can market the frequent updates as a benefit rather than cleaning up technical debt they would have had to iron out before shipping the first car.
I've had multiple vehicles have instrument cluster failures while operating them. None of those have been screens. "Analog" gauges have not actually been analog for a while. They're all digital controls being read by a computer.
Even a carbureted motorcycle I owned from the early 2000s had "analog" gauges with values given to it from a computer!
There are large implementation differences in touch screens. My wife's care needs several second: turn the radio on, wait for the splash screen, press the drives heat control, wait for it to appear (100s of ms - long enough to notice) then find the button in the miedle of the screen - finally I can change the heated seats. My car that button is always has the button at the bottom of the screen in the same place so is is ms to look and see.
Backup cameras are an enormous safety improvement.
You know that a backup camera can be added to practically any car right? My ~2002 Toyota has a Pioneer deck from around 2007 (I guess?) that supports reversing camera input. My wifes 2012 Toyota hybrid has a reversing camera using some POS cheap Chinese deck that's so shit it doesn't even support Bluetooth audio.
No part of reversing cameras are dependent on any of the "modern" trends in cars that are being discussed here.
I feel like you're deliberately missing the point.
You don't need them to have a reversing camera. Literally millions of cars over the past 2 decades have perfectly fine reversing cameras using the screen of a regular double-DIN deck (or fold out single-DIN deck).
I, too, felt you were being intentionally dense in this thread. We've just been talking past each other.
I don't see a meaningful distinction between a screen on a DIN unit and an integrated screen.
With Android Auto or the ios equivalent -- a hard requirement for most car buyers today -- a touchscreen is basically required.
Other "smart" features aren't required but I'm not surprised car companies want to try and extract value from in-car tech. It's got nothing to do with providing value to consumers.
> I don't see a meaningful distinction between a screen on a DIN unit and an integrated screen.
Someone questioned why a car needs two 12" touch screens.
To which you replied
> Backup cameras are an enormous safety improvement.
My entire point is, that there's zero relationship between having a backup camera, and needing a 12" touchscreen, or a touch screen of any kind.
If your backup camera needs a touch screen, you've already failed. The entire point is that it activates automatically and deactivates automatically.
They've been available for literally decades - Toyota had a production model with a reversing camera in the fucking 80s.
Nothing else you've said since is related to your claim "Backup cameras are an enormous safety improvement" and that claim is completely unrelated to OP's question about why a car needs not one but two 12" touch screens.
I want the car to be able to contact emergency services, but not to otherwise be able to use the cellular network. Is there a good way to sabotage the eSIM, without otherwise breaking the modem? (This would still allow the car to be tracked via IMEI, but I'm not too worried about that: anyone capable of that is also capable of tracking my actual phone, and anyone buying that data will already know what car I own.)
There's often been a few cases of "disappeared" people who went missing and it turns out they actually crashed off the road somewhere and weren't found for a week or two.
That's extreme of course but there are probably a lot of accidents that happen in low-density rural country areas or late at night when there aren't many people around. The automatic e-call from the car gives exact GPS coordinates and severity of the accident, even if you are unconscious or if your phone that was neatly in the cup holder before the crash was flung somewhere else (potentially even flew out of the car etc) and you're trying to find it while someone might be dying in the seat next to you etc.
People didn't survive before all this. It's a mandatory feature now because it's so effective at saving lives. 2 to 10% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries apparently. Would you also question why we have mandatory airbags and traction control?!
right, but airbags, seatbelts, etc. are not internet connected. That's the critical distinction. I do not want the risks that come with my car connecting to the internet.
A much more reasonable ask would be for your car's systems to use your phone to place a call to emergency services. I absolutely do not want yet another internet connected device in my life, especially one like a car, where examples exist of hackers being able to disable the electronics remotely.
Funnily enough, I mostly hear about it from hyper-individualistic types. It's probably a facet of some American conservative-traditionalist belief cluster invented in the last 40 years, but it's hard to say for sure, because the people who say this tend to be bad at introspection, so can't answer my questions about it (even when they're curiously cooperating with my investigation).
I don't love smart TVs either, but why not just buy a smart TV and not use the smart features? I have a few "smart TVs", but I haven't even connected them to Wi-Fi, and I instead opt for an Nvidia Shield TV or just a laptop computer plugged in instead.
A few years ago it came out that one of the manufacturers (my hunch is Samsung but I don't remember the specifics) had their "smart" tvs aggressively try connecting to any and all networks it can find in range, if you didn't connect it to one.
I reluctantly bought an LG with webOS (least bad option available) a couple of years ago. For some reason they weren't content to let the TV menu/remote work with up/down/left/right buttons.
That's too fucking predictable, and anyone who's used a tv in the last 2 decades could use it....
Let's give it a fucking nipple, just like those horrific fucking IBM/Lenovo laptops.
Then of course it also tries to "help" by detecting HDR content and change view mode... while something is playing.... which makes the screen go black for several seconds.
Other car companies fucked it up is funny way to put it. Tesla hasn’t made a new car in a decade and the whole lineup is for my 80-year old Dad. I have 2014 Tesla S, my neighbour 2025, same car. Tesla X is from a decade ago, Tesla 3 is basically Toyota Corolla and Y is basically Model 3 that was pumped up a bit to look like a “crossover”
when I bought my Tesla S there was a lot of head injuries from people turning around to see this new amazing cars. now, not only are sales tanking but the cars look so old and dated that my first assumption when I see say Model Y is “gotta be someone’s grandma”
when was the last time you saw a Tesla and went “oh cool car!”? been awhile, right? Now ask the same question for BMW, Benz…
Even if the source of electricity used to charge an EV is mostly generated by fossil fuels, EVs are still probably more energy efficient because gas powered cars are not particularly efficient at turning gasoline into useful energy compared to the efficiency of larger scale power plants.
Also as you point out, non-fossil fuel energy is becoming a larger part of the grid over time, so an EV you buy today will become cleaner over time, while the fossil fuel reliance of a gas car purchased today will never improve.
Honestly the biggest blocker for EVs from my perspective is charging infrastructure. Public fast charging sites are too uncommon compared to gas stations and a less than ideal solution to use for all of your charging needs and lots of people live in housing where installing a charger at home is difficult or impossible. Eventually both of those will change, but it will lag significantly behind the quality of the vehicles themselves.
The interesting thing to me is that even for people who can't charge at home, EVs and charging infrastructure have reached the tipping point where they're at least viable. They're less convenient in such situations than a gas powered car and so will be limited to people who are extra motivated for one reason or another. But the EV world is over the "possible" hurdle so the "practical" threshold seems inevitable.
Don't EVs use resistive breaking to recharge their batteries? I would hope that reduces particle emissions.
Though I suppose that EVs and hybrids are heavier than similar gas powered counterparts, so tire wear is worse. At least until EVs can be made lighter.
>You mean we can do something today that will reduce PM10 pollution by half?!
We could. We could massively fund public transit and massively reduce private car ownership. But we won't, because then capitalists will make less money.
scam is a bit of hyperbole. also, ZEV has always explicitly referenced tailpipe emissions, which is also why there's been the odd sounding "partial zero emissions vehicle" category. It's certainly valid to be concerned about additional sources of fine particles, but eliminating engine emissions is not something to be dismissed as a scam.
Further, particle emission from brake dust is mitigated in EV's that use regen braking. One of my ev's can go days without phycical brake usage, and another uses the brake pads so infrequently it has an automatic mode to touch the discs occasionally just to keep them from building up rust.
tire particles --- different compounds can effect that, but will always be a side effect of tires on vehicles.
> tire particles --- different compounds can effect that, but will always be a side effect of tires on vehicles.
There's vehicles like trains, subways and bycicles, responsible for transporting hundreds of at least a billion people per day, which don't use tires whose particles are the biggest source of microplastics.
> I hope ICE cars completely become a thing of the past in the next couple of decades to come.
for this to happen the EVs depreciation needs to drastically improve compared to ICE. I don't see this. On top of this EVs tend to push ideas from Software/Tech companies, such as recurring revenues (because the underlying technology lends itself to it better).
Personally I'm unsure that this will be accepted by all consumers as much as is needed. After all the automotive marketing has since Ford insisted that driving was about "freedom". So some pivot needs to happen in the messaging. Suppose decades is a lot of time to change it. Personally I think EVs are nonsense, and a better utopia would be making sure public transport is abundant, high-quality and free.
> For this to happen the EVs depreciation needs to drastically improve compared to ICE.
Define "improve" ?
One way for "ICE cars completely become a thing of the past" is for there to be lots of cheap, reliable, second-hand EVs. If you can buy a good used EV for less then yes, a barrier to quitting ICE cars has been removed.
That's an improvement. The car doesn't have to be an asset, it could be more like a utility.
EV depreciation seems to be driven by
1) rapidly advancing state of the art, which should eventually stabilise and
2) Fears of battery lifespan, which in current vehicles is largely unfounded
I’m not going to try to convince you that you can’t control your immediate environment better in a car, but not having to deal with parking or insurance or traffic is quite freeing.
You know what would make me more free? Being able to just walk and bike to all the places I want to go, and not have to pay car insurance and the energy cost and the high upfront cost or a loan to buy a giant chunk of metal every time I need a loaf of bread.
You know what would make my kids more free? If they could just play outside without the giant death machines flying by with their operators looking at their phones well over the speed limit.
I'm trapped in a world where I need to spend a good chunk of my life in a cage just to work and eat, and you call that "freedom".
You’re free to live in some dense urban environment where amenities are a five min walk away, and everyone relies on underground trains, busses and taxis.
If you think “freedom” means not having a car, then there are options for you.
I moved out of a dense urban public-transport-and-cycling environment into a countryside town with heaps of space, and where everyone happily owns cars to give them the freedom to go wherever they like, whenever they like, taking family and cargo with them, without issue.
I would never go back to the urban environment, waiting around for public transport, being limited to the routes served by public transport, useless cycle lanes everywhere (what good is a bike when I need to transport my 3 year old, 6 year old, and all our shopping?). And the stifling density of housing and amenities was oppressive and unpleasant.
There is a better way. Move to countryside town, buy an EV that cost negligible amounts to run, cases negligible local pollution, and is a joy to own.
> You’re free to live in some dense urban environment where amenities are a five min walk away, and everyone relies on underground trains, busses and taxis.
Not really. People are often tied to lots of areas for a number of reasons, and we don't build this much of this kind of urban environment in the US. We've made it largely illegal to build this in most of the country. I'm not free to really live that kind of life.
For most Americans, it's not an option.
> what good is a bike when I need to transport my 3 year old, 6 year old, and all our shopping?
If it was designed well enough your six year old should be able to ride on their own bike with you. You can take a lot of stuff with you with an even mildly powerful electric bicycle. And I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to have the option for a car, but we've designed our urban spaces to be actively hostile to everything but a car when we really didn't have to. Freedom is being able to choose, not be forced into only one option.
Rarely in everyday life situations do I feel as claustrophobic as being in a car in traffic in a typical road.
Can’t change direction (one lane no junctions), can’t change speed (vehicles in front and behind), can’t stop (flow of traffic), can’t break concentration (driving), can’t change body position (car cabin is tiny, seats and hand/feet controls are fixed, no space to stand), can’t look away for more than a moment (responsibility of driving).
And the only places to go are on the predetermined road, from a car park, to a car park, following a lot of strict prescribed rules about how.
This meme of “freedom” is brainwashing and marketing (which has been picked up as an identity thing by the right wing recently).
There’s nothing free about having to use a $20,000 vehicle to buy bread because no other options are available.
I do not own a vehicle, and most of my life I've depended on public transit. Lately, I take Waymos or I ride scooters, or use public transit as usual.
Sometimes, for special errands, I rent a car. For example, I intended to move across town last year, so I rented a car for 3-4 days.
It was the most excruciating pain I could have. I chose a little Mitsubishi Mirage, and firstly, it was the middle of July in the Sonoran Desert, and the A/C hardly worked, so I was sweating, and the car would heat up real good in parking lots. No sun shades, dark upholstery. Also, the USB connection was flaky, so sometimes my phone didn't charge, and whether or not, it was directly exposed to the Sun and overheating.
By the second day, my legs hurt a lot. I had spent an unexpected amount of time on my feet and walking around, despite the vehicle. Do you know how big parking lots are these days?!
I tried sitting down at every opportunity. I have a running gag/dispute at my bank to see whether they will allow me to "sit down" at the "ADA/Disabled" teller window.
Driving home at night on the last night, my leg cramped up really bad. I was in such pain, I nearly pulled over because it was my accelerator/brake leg and I was going to lose control of the car.
Thankfully I was able to hold it together, and returned the car the next day, but boy I did not want such a vehicle ever again. And it was not a stick-shift; it was an automatic transmission.
Next time I'm going to be really sure that the USB and A/C work. And that my legs are super-comfortable and has cruise control.
For most of the country you can't really get groceries or have reasonable employment without operating a car. We've designed our cities to make it effectively a requirement.
It entirely depends on where you live. You could live in a dense urban area with abundant transport options, where owning a car is more trouble than it's worth, or in a more spread-out community where it's nigh-essential.
That’s not true, that’s your mental gymnastics to try to defend the ideology you have taken on.
While there are no alternatives with similar funding and societal support to driving, car dependency forces many people to drive even for trivial things. Most car journeys are less than three miles. That’s a bonkers state of affairs for the planet and for human history.
All 110 billion humans who ever lived couldn’t possibly be considered “not free” because they didn’t have cars to get to the nearest stream or nut tree. Wild animals aren’t considered to have “no freedom” because they don’t own cars.
I said “cars bad” and you read “trains bad”. Was that deliberate bad faith on your part or did you not even notice you did it? Trains are fine - nice even, I can stand on trains, I’m not physically restrained by a belt on trains (or buses), I can move and stretch my legs because there’s tables and room and no pedals, and I can slouch and look around because I’m not the one driving. Airplanes though, they can get lost.
> “Buddy, the world is a bigger place than the 4 square miles around your downtown studio.”
4 square miles at the density of Manchester UK is enough for 50,000 people; if every one of them has to drive everywhere for everything, that’s a nightmare of traffic.
Not to mention that I can bike, bus, tram, a lot further than 4 miles in an hour. If that isn’t enough to do the tasks of everyday life then something has gone wrong. (car obsession).
> “The fact that you think you're "free" because you can walk around a little bit...well that's as brainwashed as it gets.”
The fact that you think having to drive everywhere is freedom, but being able to (walk, bus, bike, tram, drive), everywhere isn’t freedom, is nonsense. The choice to drive or not-drive is more freedom than having no choice. (Obviously)
> Buddy, the world is a bigger place than the 4 square miles around your downtown studio
I live in a suburb. There's a bus stop outside my door. It connects me to 1,100 square miles of service area. The busses and trains also have bike racks so it expands the area even more. It connects me to multiple international airports with one offering non-stop flights all around the world.
I could be on the other side of the planet in a day without having to get in my car.
Even if you power a typical EV from 100% coal, it pencils out as about equivalent to a late model Prius. And any improvements in the energy mix take it further.
I don't think many people really understand how awful automobile-scale internal combustion engines are at efficiency. The only reason they work at all is thanks to the absurd energy density of the fuels they burn.
The current generation of Lucid, BMW, etc. are 400+ mile vehicles.
You think we need 800-1200 mile batteries?
As for charge speed, the twice a year someone needs more than 400 miles isn't as significant in real world EV usage...
I plug in on a dopey 1.3kW (~115V, ~12A) outlet and my car is at 80% charge in the morning. For commuting, a 5pm to 7am charge is ample for most people living ordinary lives.
Based on my firsthand experience, cold weather (big one) or hauling/towing significantly reduces that 400 mile range (sometimes by 50%+). Yes to comfortably get 400-500 miles per charge in the worst case scenario it needs to be atleast 2x.
If you're saying 100% only EVs with no use cases whatsoever for gasoline, then I suppose so. I don't think that's a smart goal, though.
More like, more people should understand how EVs can easily work for them, and then try to shoehorn gas-powered vehicles into the few niche they need to be in.
How often does someone need a 400 mile range again? Towing? When is the last time you towed something 400 miles? The most I ever towed was... using a rental truck and a rental trailer when I moved. (Anecdotes are not data!) But why in a rational purchasing decision would I need an 800 mile EV battery for a car just because sometimes it's cold out?
It depends on your lifestyle. I haul my RV around sometimes two weekends a month. In my F-150 lightning I get around 100 miles between charges which is pretty dismal. I’m assuming you live in a city or in Europe. Where I live people regularly haul RVs, boats etc. I also frequently drive long distances and even in the best case scenario 2.5 hours of driving followed by 40 minutes of charging is a pain. These aren’t unusual driving patterns where I live.
RVs need to have a dual purpose battery pack on board.
I feel like long distance boat hauling is rare. Either they're driving across town to a launch, or it's moored/docked for the season.
No need to double twice. 250 miles (~4 hours of driving) is about what you want. Pretty much everybody needs to bathroom at least that often. And nowhere on a road in the continental US is more than 150 miles from a charger.
So yes, you want 400-500 miles of range, but that's because you've doubled the 250 for weather, safety margin, etc.
I believe we need 700-800 miles of stated range which will result in 400-500 miles of actual range in the worst possible conditions. That’s about what you get from a tank of gas and what it would take to reduce range anxiety. Stopping every 2 hours for 40 minutes doesn’t make sense, stopping every 4 hours for 40 minutes is much, much better.
I recently did a day trip of 800km while it was freezing and snowing. Yes the range is impacted, so i never did more than 200km in one go. Then a quick 15 minutes break to recharge and continue. It takes a bit longer, but not bad enough to go back to ICE cars. EV drives so much nicer.
Once a week you plug it in for ~30 minutes somewhere.
EVs charge unattended, so they can be left charging while you do something else. Shopping malls often have chargers.
At city distances and city speeds BEVs often have enough battery to last a week or two, and the battery doesn't drop when the car isn't used.
You don't have to charge to full if you don't have time. Even if you plug it in for 10 minutes, you'll probably return home with more charge that when you left.
I can't think of the last time I've willingly gone to a store to shop. I do all my shopping online and everything is delivery including groceries. Going to a physical store feels like a huge waste of time to me.
I drive quite a bit for work as I drive around and calibrate and repair lab equipment so it just seems like a major inconvenience to my schedule to have to go places to charge for awhile so often and hope they are working and hope they are not being used.
If you can't charge at home, can't charge at work, don't park at any other place, and still need to drive a lot, then this is indeed a tough edge case.
I don't have a charger at home, but when I'm travelling I stop at pubs, cafes, and fast food joints, so I have plenty of opportunities to charge.
Some cities have chargers in lamp posts for overnight charging of cars parked on the street. This should be more common! 300kW DC chargers that recharge in 20 minutes are an expensive equipment, but 3kW AC chargers are technically almost as primitive as a cable for an electric oven.
They've made almost 9 million cars overall, with a lot of those made in the last several years. Spreading it over the cars they've made so far, 40,000 / 9 = 4,444.44.
Doesn't seem that crazy. I'm not seeing your point.
That's 9 million (and probably many more unless Tesla disappears tomorrow) far cleaner cars on the road, offsetting what would have probably been ICE sales.
I'm no Tesla-stan but spending $40B over a decade to inject massive amounts of change in an entrenched industry to move forward in efficiency and emissions sounds like a pretty good investment to me.
It’s probably still more net efficient in the long run. Besides, the main advantage EVs bring isn’t being more environmentally friendly. The main advantage is that it allows a nation to have more flexibility with its energy sources. i.e. an EV can run on anything that can generate electricity like coal or natural gas, while ICE cars mostly only run on gasoline.
Yes do the same for ICE - very constructive suggestion. Completely unnecessary to call the argument silly though..
There are marked differences in what's needed in an EV vs an ICE, most obvious of which is the giant battery with a very different supply chain.
Is that true? EV have much higher emissions of micro plastics and pfas (or variations thereof) due to increased tier degradation. EVs are typically way heavier than similar ICE due to the batteries and combined with the higher torques, tires wear faster.
> EV have much higher emissions of micro plastics and pfas (or variations thereof) due to increased tier degradation
I find those claims highly suspect: I own an EV and haven't had to change the tires more often than I did on a gasoline-powered car. My EV bought in 2021 still runs on original tires and they're fine (although I do change from winter to summer tires, so that's 2 sets technically).
I suspect black PR, and there is always a grain of truth in black PR: emissions are indeed likely to be higher. Probably not "much higher" and probably not in a way that really matters.
Just because a tire lasts as long doesn't mean it isn't wearing in different ways. EV specific tires are a lot different than their ICE counterparts.
This isn't "black PR". It's comparing apples and oranges. But throw non-EV tires on one and you'll definitely chew those tires up much more quickly [0][1][2][3].
The class of the Ioniq 5 isn't lighter than it's ICE competitors. It may be lighter than a larger SUV, but the tire changes drastically as the GVWR increases.
An Ioniq 5 can weigh over 1000lbs more than a Honda CR-V, for example (depending on trim & battery).
While it is true that EVs are heavier than the equivalent ICE vehicle, and that this causes more tyre and road wear.
1) this is not the only or even the overriding factor when comparing the two. There are engine emissions (none for EVs) and braking (EVs have regen braking)
2) There is a trend for larger, heavier ICE vehicles in the USA as well. Big trucks and SUVs. It is very selective to argue against EVs in this way without also arguing against these.
I have a heavy and high performance EV (Tesla Model S) and I have replaced my tires twice in the last six years. So it’s about the same as an ICE vehicle in that regard.
One thing that differs is brake wear. My car is ten years old and still on its original brake pads and discs. The regen braking is amazing for avoiding mechanical braking. So that means less particle emission from brakes, compared to ICE.
>"I have a heavy and high performance EV (Tesla Model S) and I have replaced my tires twice in the last six years. So it’s about the same as an ICE vehicle in that regard."
Well no, it's not "the same". We have things like physics to tell us that more torque and more weight means more tire wear, despite your anecdote. There are even studies on this. They also have a greater impact on road wear.
EVs have many advantages over ICEs. I don't understand why people have to lie and say they are worse nowhere.
They were saying "the same" in context of how often you have to replace the tires. Now, EV tires are often a slightly different compound (and more expensive) to deal with the higher weight and torque. I don't know how that plays into the particle emissions from those tires though.
Micro plastics pollution is a relatively new problem and thus many direct and indirect effects are not yet fully understood. Moving emissions from CO2 (gas) to micro particles (solid), means emissions will be deposited more local to roads. Moving emissions from 'big oil' installations to the road, means more local emissions/deposits nearer to your home and backyard.
Additionally, due to the fourth power law [0], you only need 20% weight increase to obtain a 2x road wear. Asphalt/concrete production is also accompanied with substantial emission, although progress is made to reduce it [1].
Is there a break-even for weight vs emission reduction? And if so, is it somewhere between personal and cargo vehicles or is it 'EV always better'?
Are we trading 'well-known and bad for global environment'-emission for 'poorly-understood and possibly very bad for local environment on a global scale'-emission?
Of course, with the available information EVs seem to be the better solution, but it should not prevent us from researching/solving unknown effects or being careful choosing a single solution on such a large scale.
> A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.
> The accuracy of the law of the fourth power is disputed among experts, since the test results depend on many other factors, such as climatic conditions, in addition to the factors mentioned above.
It's incredible one agency in the '50s did some small limited tests and everyone will parrot it as if it's tablets handed down from God.
"The oil companies! The oil companies!". Yeah, they only lie, nobody needs their products! We all hate it! Buy a car from a good company with honest leadership, like Tesla (made of oil products)!
I have been noticing this lately on my Macbook Pro.
it was updated recently but my system has been freezing on and off at random times and I have found edge to cause quite an issue overall.
This is a gentle reminder to remove these shithole browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera etc.) from your machines and move on to something more trustworthy. Currently I'm using Brave and Waterfox. I'll probably look for one more open source alternative to Brave pretty soon I guess.
Good question. It's just something I used as a spare browser from time to time, I felt it wouldn't be that much of a big deal.
But surprise....I just had one tab open with just one website and that's it 100% CPU just like that. I'm sure it was doing a lot of AI bullshit and tracking in the background.
What a coincidence of shitholery here.
I've been a very loyal user of Nova for almost a decade now, and I have never even thought of using any other launcher. Now, strangely since 2 weeks ago, on my Samsung phone, I've been experiencing a lot of freezing and random crapping out of my Nova launcher, where it would just not let me do anything and show a blank home screen with a wallpaper. So this most likely is the reason, I'm not sure, but this sends a very bad vibe down the line now.
I am going to look for a nice open source launcher and get used to it. To hell with the shittification of our beloved apps and services.
Just blocking access to internet for this one app is not enough. It can use intents or a shared local storage with some other app to send the data out.
I use an app called BuzzKill on Android for achieving this and many more things.
I usually keep my notification bar at an absolute minimum when it comes to the number of notifications, but this app allows me to set rules for notifications based on their content.
By default, all apps that I use have notifications turned off by default and they also get into deep sleep mode. So I'm sure they are not even running after a while. Only apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Signal can receive notifications. And by using the rules on Buzzkill, I am also able to automatically discard marketing notifications and useless notifications from these apps as well.
For an app like Google Maps though, I completely turned off notifications because there's really no need for me to have them. If you go into the notification settings through the Google Maps app, it's a big shitshow because it has some 40 categories that you will have to manually manage and I'm sure this was designed for the very purpose of letting users become tired after looking at them and then leave things as is.
Similarly, I do think the vast majority of the apps that we use don't need to send us any notifications at all. Thanks to Android for adding this feature to block all notifications from apps some four years ago, I guess.
Glad there are other options! Before Buzzkill I used another app that stopped being maintained and then stopped working on newer Androids. I had to deal with notifications for a year before I found Buzzkill.
I have never been a fan of GitHub and their entire system, always felt Bitbucket or GitLab were superior in terms of the tooling and included features across all plans.
However, my experience with GitHub Actions was really poor. Some build that would run perfectly on my local machine and any other servers we have hosted would always time out on GitHub runners. I went back and forth from small runners to large runners and the result was always the same. Then I found that there are third-party companies just offering replacement runners for GitHub Actions at less than half the price for an amazing reliability and cost. It was a night and day difference.
Now... this move by GitHub is almost unbelievable. Charging folks to use their own machines
Signal seems to work alright for me, although I felt the desktop app gets a bit annoying because of too many frequent updates happening to the app, which I believe is based on Electron.
But besides this, there is really a strong need for a web client, just like Telegram or WhatsApp. If only the protocol can be extended in such a way that it allows for integrating into a web app, that would be incredibly great.
Which is pretty odd as WhatsApp allegedly uses the very same E2E encryption and has no problem implementing a web client. I really don't see the point of Electron if it doesn't allow you to provide a web client.
But many people who use Windows wouldn't want to move to a considerably new platform like macOS, which works quite differently. There is Linux, but then there are compatibility issues and driver issues and other things that are not great for the casual average user.
It feels like Windows could have been better off without being free, but being something like a buy once, keep forever solution, like the good old days. Today it has just turned into a complete toxic pit of mess that tracks you in every little thing you do and works against you to make sure that it maximizes profits for Microsoft and its partners. The usability is completely destroyed, alas.
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