<p>You’re using a cost argument in a mid-life crisis?</p>
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<p>I suppose that you’d prefer that we go back to horses as it is a greener
alternative.</p>
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<p>Yes, they didn’t.</p>
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<p>I guess I should put in a sell order for Acme Buggy Whip in the morning.</p>
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<p>We do have multiple, competing technologies for the replacement or
supplement of the ICE. Sometimes there are multiple paradigms where
picking the eventual winner can be a challenge. It seems to me that
the larger car companies are hedging their bets and placing bets on
hybird, plugin, and FC.</p>
<p>Why are you so wedded to one particular technology when there are
multiple alternatives out there?</p>
I’m not. What made you think I was? I’m just looking at the world as a dynamic environment, in which technologies which were “state of the art” yesterday give way to unanticipated new technologies at a pretty fast clip.</p>
<p>Electric motors are pretty good for moving objects, which is why I don’t see being supplanted in terms of efficiency and technical utility any time soon. (They use them in locomotives, even the ones that are “diesel powered.”) Getting electricity to the motors is the issue. My point about even the crudest forms of energy storage - golf cart batteries - was simply that it’s already good enough for most current “real” needs. If we were charged $100 a gallon for gas we’d be using them now. (The long-term “cost” of burning petroleum for fuel may well be that high, but we’re not paying the full cost of using the technology now so… “What? Me worry?”)</p>
<p>But if you need 200 mile range, they won’t do the job. Either a change in lifestyle, where people who are traveling longer distances will “naturally” look to an alternative that will be readily available, or a different technology, such as better power storage methods, will have to become the norm for the paradigm shift to progress. My guess is that it’ll be a little of both. </p>
<p>Twenty years ago I had some friends who lived in San Francisco - dense urban environment, hard to park, good public transit. The sold their car. When they wanted to travel outside the city, they rented. I thought it was weird then. But they saved a bundle of cash and hassle, and they didn’t seem to find it inconvenient. That’s the first option. Fuel cells are another way of storing and releasing electrical power that’s an alternative to chemical batteries. (Ditto as to compressed air, flywheels, etc.) Yet another technology may come along. Those are among the alternatives of the second option.</p>
<p>But just as I can’t see New York being habitable today if all the cars were replaced with horse-drawn buggies (think of the manure! And the flies!) I don’t see us all driving petroleum-fueled vehicles in another 20 years, for a variety of reasons. My guess is that most privately owned vehicles will be powered with electric motors before I die.</p>
Subsidizing oil and gas? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Using that logic one could try to justify waste in a thousand areas. The issue with this one is the extent of the subsidy.</p>
<p>Paying $7,500 taxpayer dollars to individuals to purchase a single vehicle isn’t an investment - it’s an utter waste of money. This isn’t a social good - that $7,500 would be far better spent elsewhere, such as on R&D rather than production when it’s not ready or in my pocket rather than in the pockets of a company selling $100K vehicles to rich people.</p>
<p>Battery technology has come a long way and I’m sure it’ll continue to but but the real test of whether it’s ‘ready for prime time’ is whether the products can be produced at a competitive price that’ll be appealing to consumers. The way it is now with electric cars and solar energy is completely artificial and ultimately wasteful.</p>
<p>Because you push one particular technology so strongly in the face
of technological problems.</p>
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<p>Well, I’ve worked in a technology industry for thirty years so I’ve
lived that too and while I do like the latest and greatest toys,
sometimes I still use a compass and straightedge or a calculator from
the 1970s to get something done.</p>
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<p>We have various economic systems around the world and the cost to the
end-user drives behavior. The current system is working out reasonably
well - we have people demanding more efficient vehicles and companies
building them. We are at a stage where we have ample supply though
that at relatively expensive prices for some things and not for
others. Perhaps prices will continue to come down.</p>
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<p>I’ve driven 20,000 miles so far this year. This is fairly unusual for
me as my normal average is 20,000 miles per year. The rest of the year
should be a more normal year for me. I live in a place where it can
get very cold and sometimes quite hot. There are a lot of people like
this - even those that work in the city. Many do take commuter rail in
but it takes a long time and it is getting more and more expensive.
The cheapest solution is to live where you work and my son does that
and he doesn’t have a car. His living expenses are relatively high
though because that convenience often drives real-estate prices and
rental rates so there are a lot of factors on living where you work.</p>
<p>Hurricane Katrina provides a pretty important lesson on stored energy
vs transmitted energy. How did all of those military vehicles travel
to New Orleans while clearing roads ahead of them? Would a
transmission system work in that kind of environment or do you just
depend on trucks that are 20, 30 and 40 years old running on diesel or
gasoline to get through?</p>
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<p>I learned to drive around 19 or 20. I lived in a small city with
excellent public transportation and I did a lot of walking and
bicyling around. It’s nice if you have it available and if someone is
subsidizing the system for you so that you don’t incur the real
costs. But it’s pretty expensive to build such a system from scratch.</p>
<p>I have a friend that makes high six-figures and he works in Manhatten
and doesn’t own a car. I understand the dynamics of living in the city
and living where it isn’t so busy.</p>
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<p>We aren’t all driving petroleum-fueled vehicles now. And there are
some that still drive the horse-drawn variety.</p>
<p>Before I die is a pretty loose term. 2040 is supposed to be the year
of immortality.</p>
<p>The $7,500 electric vehicle tax credits in aggregate are likely tiny compared to the subsidies for corn farming, ethanol fuel requirements, use of foreign policy and military capabilities to handle oil-fuelled international political problems, etc…</p>
<p>Perhaps removing all of the subsidies would be a good thing. This would include an oil tax to pay for foreign policy and military costs of handling oil-fuelled international political problems (and a corresponding reduction in deficit spending).</p>
I think the part that you and GladGradDad are missing, BCEagle, is that we’re not paying the “real” costs we’re incurring by burning fossil fuels for transportation right now. </p>
<p>Down in Ecuador there’s hundreds of open pits full of grossly poisonous sludge left over from oil drilling. Corporations, governments, lawyers, etc. are all fighting over whose job it is to pay to clean it up (I don’t have a quick answer for that, sorry) but in the meantime - the toxic stuff has been leaking into the environment, poisoning people for decades. And if the real scientists are right about global warming - how much will our kids and grandkids pay for the consequences of our continued dumping of carbon into the atmosphere? When do we pay for that?</p>
<p>Those are all “real” costs - they’re just ones that are being subsidized by other people. In the modern era government subsidies have pushed along a lot of technologies which have proved pretty useful - like the internet. Government subsidies of one sort or another have played a big part in the development of industry and transportation, from the land grants which fostered the railroads in the 19th century to the zoning and planning standards I mentioned earlier which helped create our modern auto-centric society. All of those things had a cost; but they also had a benefit. Analyzing the net “real cost” of sticking with current technology vs. the net “real cost” of pushing along some competing technologies is a more subtle analysis than most people are interested in undertaking.</p>
<p>It worked well for hybrids - they were initially subsidized to get them into the market and accepted, and now we see that they can work in the marketplace without subsidies.</p>
<p>The wasted money is money spent on useless technology like fuel cells for cars.</p>
<p>Sounds like you’re mixing this up with liquid natural gas. Compressed natural gas uses the same pipeline infrastructure that is used to bring natural gas to people’s homes to run hot water heaters, cooktops, and other basic home necessities. There’s already a very well developed pipeline infrastructure. </p>
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<p>The subsidy addresses the chicken-egg problem. A new alternative energy vehicle needs a fuelling network. People who might be able to afford e-cars are going to be put off by the limited range because there aren’t any quick-charge stations to use on the fly. But there’s no incentive to build those stations because there aren’t many people buying the cars. Goose sales of the cars, and you get enough of a critical mass to create a for-profit network of charging stations. </p>
<p>The subsidy is the same for someone buying a Leaf or a Tesla, with far fewer buying the upper-end Tesla. I suppose one could say that no car with a MSRP above, say, $50k gets the tax credit. </p>
<p>It was only a few years ago that small businesses (including incorporated professionals) discovered that they could get enormous tax deductions by purchasing enormous gas-guzzling luxury SUVs as company vehicles. I’m not even sure that that particular loophole got cut off.</p>
I don’t think so and it doesn’t even include all of the other subsidies these and associated companies are getting. On top of that, fossil fuels are still consumed (to create the electricity) and there are far more things that consume fossil fuels than cars (airliners, ships, and the list goes on) so some of the geopolitical side effects you mention would occur regardless. </p>
<p>This particular subsidy is way out of whack and when you consider that for the majority of people these aren’t ‘necessary’ vehicles but rather second or third vehicles and they have the luxury and funds available to spend what it takes to buy one of these vehicles even after the subsidy. Again, why should we heavily subsidize someone to buy a $50k to $100k vehicle?</p>
<p>For people who think the $7,500 is fine, why not make it $15K, or $30K, or better yet, just give everyone one of these cars (rhetorical question)?</p>
<p>There’s a huge amount of taxpayer dollars going to enrich individuals and companies to buy premature subsidized commodities rather than spending it in the R&D labs to actually improve the technology and achieve groundbreaking breakthroughs. When the time is right and people think the economic model exists to produce the commodity for a non-artificial profit then they’re sure to take advantage of that. The problem now is that the economic models and business plans are dependent on the subsidies to be viable at all and even then they can fail (Solyndra is an example - Tesla’s liable to be another one).</p>
<p>On the flip side - I can see myself driving an electric vehicle to work. I’d even be willing to drive a golf cart if I could do it safely but I can’t. I think we’ll likely eventually get there and we’re likely close but let’s improve the technology to the point where we don’t need to pay people to use it.</p>
<p>You might want to check the numbers on that - $100M in the DoE budget this year for fuel cell technology, and something like $2B in government spending to date. (Although in fairness that is not 100% waste - some of it is spent on non-useless applications for fuel cells.)</p>
<p>This is nonsense - the Tesla is a silly toy, but the electric cars selling in significant numbers are Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt. Later this year the electric Fiat and electric Prius will be introduced - regular cars for regular people that are replacing gas vehicles.</p>
I disagreed with using a subsidy on the hybrids as well. I don’t think they’re needed and only distort the reality. Most hybrids have been a money loser for their producers even with the subsidies but if they believe there’s a long term gain to be made, as it appears Toyota did, then it makes sense for those companies to do the investment and it shouldn’t require heavy subsidies of the type I mentioned.</p>
<p>I don’t know whether fuel cells make sense or not but I think it makes sense to do R&D in a lot of areas, perhaps including fuel cells. I just don’t want to start having to pay people to buy them.</p>
What’s ‘nonsense’ is my tax dollars being given to a rich person to buy a silly toy. We almost agree on the latter except I’d say the Tesla is a ‘cool toy’ albeit an expensive one. They’re so expensive that I don’t see how the taxpayer subsidy will be the deciding factor in someone buying a Tesla as opposed to something like the Leaf or Volt.</p>
<p>Neither of the Volt and Leaf models is selling in significant numbers and if they had to charge the non-subsidized amount it’d be far worse.</p>
Seriously? You’re fine giving each buyer of an expensive car $7,500? I’m not even if it were only a handful of cars. btw - Most of the Tesla models aren’t actually for sale yet so it’s hard to say what the numbers will be like.</p>
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When the word ‘but’ is used in this context it’s the trigger to the phrase of ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’.</p>
<p>Not all fossil fuels have the same geopolitical side effects. Indeed, it is mainly transportation that is currently dependent on liquid fuels (i.e. oil for the most part) due to their relative convenience in small mobile objects as opposed to larger fixed power plants. Most people do not want to shovel solid fuels like coal into their cars or give up their interior or cargo room to fuel tanks for gaseous fuel or deal with leaks from the highly pressurized fuel systems. Airplanes and ships have similar constraints. Putting a nuclear power plant in your car does not seem feasable at the current time, while geothermal and hydropower needs to be in a particular place. Solar and wind powered cars need to be very small and light, and have some dependency on weather conditions. People in the US seem very lazy in terms of willingness to use their own power to move around even short distances (e.g. walking, running, bicycling, walking up/down stairs instead of using the elevator).</p>
<p>But electrical power generation does not have the same constraints as transportation, and some industrial uses of energy (not necessarily electricity) can also have their own power plants fuelled by something other than liquid fuel.</p>
<p>Of course, all transportation and other things using oil would have to bear the cost of an oil tax if such a thing were implemented to pay for foreign policy and military costs of oil-fuelled foreign policy and military problems.</p>