
Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says UK adviser - matthewmacleod
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/04/fewer-cars-not-electric-cars-beat-air-pollution-says-top-uk-adviser-prof-frank-kelly
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dm319
> “Encouragingly, attitudes toward car ownership do appear to be changing,
> with younger Londoners increasingly replacing little-used vehicles with car
> club membership and ride-sharing apps,” he said.

I'm not sure an environmental conscience is the reason, rather the cost of
keeping your car taxed and insured, then finding somewhere for it to stay in
London, and then finding a use for it, outweighs simply using public
transport.

The article doesn't talk about electric cars reliance on whatever powers the
national grid of that country - and they can only be as green as the country's
means of energy production[1], although that is still better than a
petrol/diesel car for most countries.

[1] [http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-
green](http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green)

~~~
zamalek
> The article doesn't talk about electric cars reliance on whatever powers the
> national grid of that country

Right! You'd be delusional to think that EVs are somehow solving pollution.
However, they are almost like debt consolidation - each EV on the street
becomes cleaner as each coal power plant is decommissioned. Burning dead
dinosaurs in an engine will always be burning deal dinosaurs.

~~~
dTal
I hope it's not delusional to note that, even if you're burning fossil fuels
to power your EVs, at least you're not doing it in the middle of urban
environments, mere feet from houses, businesses, and sidewalks.

------
hokkos
Particles from brake and tyre dust are bigger than from exhaust fumes, so less
dangerous. Electric vehicles use regenerative braking so they uses brakes
less. But they are heavier, but I think electric vehicle are still way better
than other vehicles.

~~~
simonbarker87
When I test drove a Model S last year the rep proudly told me that many
(around 10 I believe) of the Model S's in the U.K. had done over 150,000 miles
and none had had a brake pad change yet thanks to the regen.

I would say that the car slowed down about twice as quickly as a conventional
car and I used the brakes much less than normal and unless another car was
coming, the speed at the intersection was perfect for rolling through without
using the brakes.

This is all anecdotal of course but interesting change nonetheless I thought.

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dade_
Tires and brake disks/pads aren't cars. If the chemicals that make them are so
dangerous, why not focus on replacements? Last I checked, bicycles have tires
that wear out too.

~~~
paganel
> Tires and brake disks/pads aren't cars.

I think they're part of a car, aren't they? I mean, you cannot drive a car
with no tires, and it's advisable that you should also have brake disks/pads.

~~~
Lio
Well with regard to brake discs/pads I'm surprised that the electric car
manufacturers are working towards a fully regenerative system.

If you could return all of the forward momentum as energy to the battery that
would remove the need for discs and pads.

~~~
mikeash
Mechanical brakes have two major advantages over regenerative braking.

One is that they can handle extremely high transient power levels. For
example, maximum-effort braking at high speed can easily involve over a
megawatt of power in the initial stages. Dumping that power into your brake
pads and rotors as heat is fairly easy to manage. Dumping that into your
battery without wrecking it is much, much harder. For comparison, a high-end
Tesla can charge at up to 120kW, and can discharge around 600kW in short
bursts.

The other advantage is that they're cheap, reliable, and can easily be built
with redundancy. You can lose all of your car's computers _and_ half of your
brake hydraulics and still be able to stop the car.

In order to have no mechanical brakes at all, you'd need a battery that could
charge fast enough to absorb the power of full braking at maximum speed, and a
sufficiently redundant drivetrain that you could still make regen work even if
major components failed.

~~~
gozur88
But the important thing isn't that the mechanical brakes exist, it's that they
get used. Presumably with computers driving cars and regional coordination,
you would have cars doing mostly regenerative braking and reserve the
mechanical brakes for emergencies.

~~~
mikeash
Indeed, and this is more or less how it is already. Hybrid and EV drivers
report their brakes lasting far, far longer.

------
sammoth
"It only reduces pollution by half, so there is no point"

~~~
AstralStorm
More importantly, cars are not even the main pollution source in general.

We could probably ban cars completely if not for social and lobby reasons.
(Replace with rail and public transport.) But that is only a quarter of total
pollution anyway.

The real trouble is UK either needs desert solar with huge investment, nuclear
power or drastic reduction in power use.

Electric cars are not even a stopgap measure.

~~~
benjaminjackman
So it's kind of a virtuous cycle though. First cell phones and laptops drove
up demand for energy storage and so battery tech and production efficiency
improved and prices fell to the point putting them in cars was kind of sort of
economically not insane.

Now cars are driving up demand by another leap of magnitudes since each car
requires magnitudes more batteries than a phone. The number of phones and cars
people would like to own per capita is well within an order of magnitude
though it's probably close.

Eventually this enables storage of solar derived power an again order of
magnitude larger application than cars in at first niche applications then
eventually it will be broad based.

Because just like the massive overprovisioning of dark fiber in the dotcom
boom, one producers start competing in what is in some sense a dollar auction.
The momentum of their growth and the people and processes tasked with ensuring
that growth will fight to keep growing supply since it is their livelihood and
perceived purpose to do so (both to grow the capacity and to justify that
growth, those that don't justify won't be as likely to do the growth and will
be selected against).

This will lead to a massive amount of batteries being produced since there
doesn't seem to be any supply limits beyond how many mines we can make (and
then ocean water than can be filtered for lithium from what I have read). I
therefore think that "the cars are only 1/2 as polluting and thus pointless"
statement lacks vision and an understanding of the positive externalities of
growing electric cars.

The spin off tech is great. ICE cars have played that out. What was their most
recent spinoffs? Tar sands / fracking? I guess we got a lot of cheap natural
gas which was a step forward and what's really crushing coal. But if we get
another oil spike I don't see the money flowing to oil just a much more
agressive push towards EVs and battery tech.

------
anovikov
Electric cars use regen braking so their breaking pads see many times less use
than those of gas powered cars...

~~~
Brakenshire
Yes, I had the same thought. Has anyone quantified the difference?

------
mrfusion
I'm actually super excited about eliminating noise pollution when evs are
common.

Imagine walking through downtown midday and it sounds like 2am.

~~~
jubabuba
Tires are as loud if not louder than the drivetrain noise of most modern cars

------
baldfat
I think once we have automated cars people in major cities will stop owning
cars. Membership to a "club" makes a ton more sense if you can call up a car
on an app and it drives itself o your location.

~~~
6d6b73
Unfortunately this will make the pollution worse. For example if I drive my
car to work, my car does 6 miles round trip . If someone else does the same in
total we did 12 miles. However if we share one car and the car needs to go
even a mile between two places, it will have to drive significantly more.

~~~
revelation
You're driving a 3 mile distance? This is exactly why electric cars are not
the messiah of transportation.

~~~
6d6b73
Well, I can't walk on the highway so yes I have to drive.

------
stuaxo
Of course it won't "solve" the pollution in cities. It will lessen it to a
greater extent.

Power is generated away from.l cities and it is easier to mitigate the
pollution all in one place.

As other people have mentioned regenerative breaking helps too.

No reason we can't encourage people out of cars at the same time as
transitioning the remaining vehicles to electric.

------
nkkollaw
Well, of course one should walk or bike instead of taking the car, but if this
is not possible EV are much better than regular cars, and if it's not the
ultimate solution to air pollution it doesn't mean it doesn't help.

------
devy
The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL
is not against EV but against all cars. So burn calories by walking and
cycling or use public transits, which is appropriate for highly populated
megacities with severe congestion problems, let alone public health concerns.

~~~
stcredzero
_The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL
is not against EV but against all cars._

Automated EV cars are a necessary step! Once automated EV cars become the
norm, there will be even more value placed on Public Spaces of Value. Right
now, the dirt and fumes from current automotive technology -- along with the
requirement for vast paved areas for parking -- make it harder to achieve the
traditional urban Public Spaces of Value so common in the US in the 18th and
19th centuries. (That said, not having horse excrement everywhere was an
environmental boon of cars.)

Once automated EV cars become the norm, society will think about urban
transport differently, and we will change the urban environment in just as
drastic a fashion as we did to make way for internet combustion engine cars.

Right now, public spaces most often have to be of a large granularity. We can
return to a time when urban Public Spaces of Value were ad-hoc and adjacent to
residences and businesses.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fRIGphgtk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fRIGphgtk)

~~~
alex_duf
I don't think autonomous cars are going to be more efficient than public
transport since you'll still need plenty of them at peak time.

And plenty of autonomous cars means traffic jams.

They can't replace public transport on that aspect as the transport density is
way higher in a train or a bus than on individual autonomous vehicles.

Sure they are going to revolutionise car ownership but I don't think they will
change the daily commute for the average office worker.

~~~
mohaine
I have to disagree.

Most traffic jams are more a factor of human nature then anything else. Ever
been in a slowdown due to drivers checking out a fender bender going in the
other direction on a divided highway? Combine the lack of unneeded slow downs
with closer following distances with fewer crashes and road capacity will go
way up.

~~~
strange_quark
> Most traffic jams are more a factor of human nature then anything else. Ever
> been in a slowdown due to drivers checking out a fender bender going in the
> other direction on a divided highway? Combine the lack of unneeded slow
> downs with closer following distances with fewer crashes and road capacity
> will go way up.

Even with autonomous cars, roadways still have a peak capacity. Yes, the peak
capacity will probably go up if every driver is driving "perfectly", but there
will still be plenty of bottlenecks, whether those are slower moving trucks,
crosswalks, traffic signals, etc. I'd guess that we might even see more
traffic than we currently have because if you don't have to drive yourself,
people are incentivized to take their car; even if it's slower than mass
transit, sitting in your own car is more pleasant for most people than a train
or bus.

------
sduclos
hypothetically, forget friction (air, tire,..), then all energy injected with
the accelerator must be remove by the break. So converting fuel to kinetic
energy is only half of the emission. Breaking must save that energy and
electric car (bike, truck,..) could do that.

edit: hokkos beat me :|

------
StillBored
This didn't even cover the part of my rant from a couple days ago (heavy
electric cars in areas deriving a lot of power from coal)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877569)

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deelowe
Boil the ocean much? Clearly they are a step in the right direction, no?

