cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/22605592
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Every personal vehicle I've owned has been used. There's nothing wrong with them so long as they've been maintained. Commercial vehicles might be replaced every ten or twenty years depending on the use.
If combustion vehicles were banned tomorrow, it's not like the industry would just collapse. The manufacturers have so many fresh off the line vehicles piling up that they could stop assembly today and still have stock for a few years.
They could retool the factories inside a couple years, and resume churning out EVs as if nothing changed. The major issue we'd face would be the infrastructure crumbling around the additional weight, but that's another discussion entirely.
I find the additional weight argument pretty lame considering SUVs and just general size increases have been adding huge amount of weight to cars and noone batted an eye.
Just 30 years ago, the most common cars in Europe, hatchbacks, weighted about 1 ton. Now, the vast majority is SUVs that weigh 1.5-2.5tons, none have lithium batteries.
Oh, and don't get me started on the SUV/pickup craze in the US - look at the weight increase on that vs a European sedan, hatchback or a station wagon - eletric cars are not the problem, this are.
A huge part of that issue in america at least is related to the CAFE standards which basically made it economically unviable to build small and effecient cars. Unfortunately i think american evs will also be bigger and heavier than needed which means they'll need a bigger battery, have a higher cost, remain deadly for pedestrians and take up lots of urban space.
I'm familiar with CAFE standards but US politicians don't seem to have much intent on changing them.
And it is not economically unviable, it is just not as profitable because every other country produces and sells properly sized cars with a profit (except maybe Australia).
The weight is certainly a large factor in the crumbling of infrastructure. A bridge made 50 years ago was engineered based on traffic loads they extrapolated at the time. In the 1980's, there were around 100 million vehicles across the United States. Today, that number has nearly tripled.
Combine a tripling of the number of vehicles with the increasing average weight - sedan or not - and that's a much larger number than a lot of infrastructure was designed to handle. As a result, roads and bridges are degrading faster and faster.
This is a primary factor in the push to get people into smaller vehicles, which weigh less. As FireRetardant pointed out, CAFE makes this difficult as manufacturers are heavily incentivized to make these longer wheelbase vehicles. Which, surprise surprise, weigh more.
You actually can't 'just all retool the factories'. The mining of certain materials, notably copper, becomes a limiting factor. To produce the worlds 100,000,000 motor vehicles per annum (given a generous assumption of 50kg of copper per electric vehicle) would require 5 million additional tons per year, a 20-25% increase over current figures. Meanwhile the cost of refining increases exponentially with decreasing ore grade.
Sure not every manufacturer would go out of buisness, but the industry would absolutely collapse.
Sounds like a supply problem with copper. I read a couple weeks ago about some progress with salt based batteries. Progress is being made on that front. Progress that would be exponentially faster if the manufacturer's wanted to.
Regardless of the materials issue, the industry could adapt. There's oodles of money to make significant change, and of course they would if they had to in order to continue making money at all. Just like any industry that experiences challenges. Fracking was once considered far too expensive. Then they figured out how to guide drills beneath the surface and what do you know, now it's mainstream.
Ideally, if this were to occur, the industry would realize what you've pointed out and simply reboot all the small hatchbacks and wagons they used to make, as a method of stretching the amount of minerals we have over a longer period of time.
Blue sky thinking but maybe the governments of the world would realize the mineral issue, and instead of allowing 100 million cars to be manufactured each year, they took those minerals and created a transportation network with them that would render personal vehicles irrelevant.
I don't see that happening in my lifetime though.