Do you think the end of fossil driven vehicles is coming soon?

[Leeea]

These guys?

Long-haul options are coming soon.

That is not saying what you think it is saying. Yes, there are a ton of routes where electrified trucking will work great.


But two driver long haul trucking where the truck does not stop? No. Just No.

 

[IronWing]

That is not saying what you think it is saying. Yes, there are a ton of routes where electrified trucking will work great.


But two driver long haul trucking where the truck does not stop? No. Just No.

That's why we have railroads. I know, I know, but railroads make so much more sense.

 

[Leeea]

No. Transportation, including personal vehicles, will continue to be fueled primarily by fossil fuels indefinitely. What is changing (and quickly) is that for reasons of efficiency and practicality, the source of that 'fueling' is being moved to power plants, etc. Because, all else being equal, those power plants are more efficient and produce fewer emissions, and because battery-powered electric vehicles are more practical for consumers (ie powerplant takes up less vehicle space and allows for better design configurations, cheaper to own and operate, etc).

The future of electricity generation is wind mills and solar plants. That future is 2018:

Plunging Prices Mean Building New Renewable Energy Is Cheaper Than Running Existing Coal

New analysis shows renewable energy is beating coal on cost cross the U.S.: The price to build new wind and solar has fallen below the cost of running existing coal-fired power plants in Red and Blue states.

www.forbes.com

Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? And what can we do to use this global opportunity for green growth?

Fossil fuels dominate the global power supply because until very recently electricity from fossil fuels was the cheapest. This has changed dramatically. In most places power from new renewables is now cheaper than new fossil fuels.

ourworldindata.org

In less then 2 years it will be cheaper to build a renewable energy plant then it will be to pay the fuel bill on any fossil fuel plant. This is already true in most places. The time of dirt super cheap electricity is upon us.

 

[5to1baby1in5]

It will take time.
20 years easily.

Battery technology has to improve quite a bit before EV can even compete. I have read about some good progress with battery technology, but it's still in the laboratory phase right now, and is 5-10 (?) years out.
Once the batteries can provide the same or better functionality than fossil fuels, then it will depend on cost of ownership. If an EV is cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than ICE, then people will start to purchase only EV's.
As electricity demand increases, electricity prices will increase due to supply and demand (gasoline/diesel prices will also decrease due to lower demand making ICE's more attractive). If solar takes off, and you can get 'free' fuel just by installing some cheap solar panels on your roof, then the switch-over to EV will be quick. Otherwise, upgrades to the electrical grid will easily take another decade (new power plants, transmission and distribution systems).
The mining industry for copper and rare earth elements will also need to ramp up, and that will also take time.

You aren't going to see the oil consumption charts on this page turn around very quickly without some radical technological advances.
How Much Crude Oil Has The World Really Consumed? | OilPrice.com

 

[Leeea]

That's why we have railroads. I know, I know, but railroads make so much more sense.

Railroads are great in most of the world. But they take investment and government support. They could not make high speed rail work in the US anywhere. The most recent project in CA just crashed and burned. The average person in the US is just to much of a selfish twit infected with not in my backyard syndrome.

Electrified rail is superior, but here in the US rail is neither electrified or reasonable.

 

[vi edit]

I think here in the US railways are almost sabotaged by intent. There's a ton of private lines. There's major commercial airlines that get continuous bailouts from the feds and their airports are funded by cities. Amtrak is really the only exposure most Americans have to trains outside of light rails. And they are slow and expensive, the total opposite of what Americans want for traveling. Amtrak is setup as an experience and not a conveyance to an experience. People don't want to pay for that.

So you have bad marketing, bad experience, a handicapped playing field, and a massive other travel industry (airlines) wanting you to fail.

 

[Paratus]

Railroads are great in most of the world. But they take investment and government support. They could not make high speed rail work in the US anywhere. The most recent project in CA just crashed and burned. The average person in the US is just to much of a selfish twit infected with not in my backyard syndrome.

Electrified rail is superior, but here in the US rail is neither electrified or reasonable.

You do understand that the reason rail (really passenger rail) isn’t “reasonable” in the US is because the freight rail companies own and have track priority.

And yes just yes Amazon uses intermodal trains (and trucks and planes and shipping). In fact they’ve been considering getting into the business to lower their costs

https://trn.trains.com/news/news-wi...-direct-to-railroads-with-intermodal-business


SEATTLE — Amazon has joined Walmart in fielding a fleet of 53-foot containers for intermodal service, according to the Journal of Commerce.

Amazon will break convention by dealing directly with railroads, bypassing intermodal marketing companies. Walmart’s relationship with railroads is both direct and through the marketing companies.

Amazon recently established a third-party logistics organization and has been rapidly moving into controlling more aspects of the supply chain, including operating its own aircraft, having its own airport hub, functioning as a non-vessel operating common carrier for ocean transport from China, and having a fleet of thousands of truck trailers.

The online retailer’s move into transportation apparently reflected its frustration with hired carriers’ inability in recent years to meet holiday deadlines.

Amazon has a tendency to eventually compete with its suppliers and this summer FedEx declined to renew air and ground contracts with Amazon. Earlier in the year, FedEx had issued a terse statement indicating Amazon traffic made up a very small portion of its business.

FedEx’s decision stemmed from Amazon’s demands, its growing role as a competitor, and low margins, according to Fortune.

Amazon has been heavily into intermodal, mainly on BNSF Railway, but so far only has about 250 of its own marked containers, according to the Journal of Commerce, which estimates Walmart’s identified containers number about 2,000.

Both Amazon and Walmart are concentrating their identified containers on the West Coast.

 

[desy]

problem with trains is that they are owned privately and the rail companies figured out that the taxpayer pays for road maintenance, they have to pay for rail so since transportation companies own both and fuel is cheap, let somebody else pay for the road bed means lower cost for them and better just in time inventory

 

[UNCjigga]

I’m trying to figure out which of these will disappear first—internal combustion engines or outright personal ownership of cars. I think the latter might actually change first—shifting to usage-based renting, leasing or shared ownership models in urbanized areas. Electrification and the associated infrastructure is going to take at least another 20 years to cross 50% of the actual automobiles on roads.

 

[cytg111]

The funny thing is that electric cars are the one thing Trump actually talked up, all because Musk met with him and kissed his ass. That's all it takes.

That is, WAS, crazy. Hopefully that was the last war on climate change.

 

[cytg111]

I’m trying to figure out which of these will disappear first—internal combustion engines or outright personal ownership of cars. I think the latter might actually change first—shifting to usage-based renting, leasing or shared ownership models in urbanized areas. Electrification and the associated infrastructure is going to take at least another 20 years to cross 50% of the actual automobiles on roads.

Ride sharing with level 5 autonomous cars is gonna revolutionize personal transportation... that is what my crystal ball is telling me anyway. I've pitched it here before, people seem lukewarm on it however, maybe even outright sceptic.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Ride sharing with level 5 autonomous cars is gonna revolutionize personal transportation... that is what my crystal ball is telling me anyway. I've pitched it here before, people seem lukewarm on it however, maybe even outright sceptic.

We still have a decent ways to go for proper level 5, but yeah once that hits, it will be yuuuge. Bigly.

 

[Brainonska511]

Yeah I think the "real" future isn't in the sky, but rather underground or some combination of ground/underground rail for most commercial travel. We just have shitty Amtrack as our benchmark and look at it and go "That company sucks, why would I ever want to use that more!"

And that's not a wrong take. But there's a lot of reason why that is the case. The US rail system is a shit show.

Rail traffic in some parts of the country could be improved greatly if we just put a little money into (but not blindly, because some construction in the US is absurdly expensive for no good reason, when you compare it with costs in other developed countries). We don't even need to have true HSR to dramatically improve rail transit times.

Take for example the NE cooridor between Boston and NYC - 231 miles that the Acela takes 3.5 hours to travel (average speed, 66 mph). If we could make small improvements to get that average speed up to say, 80 mph, you could cut almost 45 minutes off that trip. Even with current train times in the NE, the train is still more popular than the short haul shuttles; and from my own experience, it ends up taking roughly the same amount of time door-to-door for the train vs flying.

For other parts of the country, some more extensive upgrades would need to be done - signaling, new track beds, (potentially) electrification, and maybe even some new rails, but none of that necessarily needs to be true HSR to start being competitive with short haul flights. It just needs the investment that we currently shovel onto roads and airports.

 

[cytg111]

Rail traffic in some parts of the country could be improved greatly if we just put a little money into (but not blindly, because some construction in the US is absurdly expensive for no good reason, when you compare it with costs in other developed countries). We don't even need to have true HSR to dramatically improve rail transit times.

Take for example the NE cooridor between Boston and NYC - 231 miles that the Acela takes 3.5 hours to travel (average speed, 66 mph). If we could make small improvements to get that average speed up to say, 80 mph, you could cut almost 45 minutes off that trip. Even with current train times in the NE, the train is still more popular than the short haul shuttles; and from my own experience, it ends up taking roughly the same amount of time door-to-door for the train vs flying.

For other parts of the country, some more extensive upgrades would need to be done - signaling, new track beds, (potentially) electrification, and maybe even some new rails, but none of that necessarily needs to be true HSR to start being competitive with short haul flights. It just needs the investment that we currently shovel onto roads and airports.

For what its worth, additional on rails, I went looking and found the opposite of what I expected...

Steel Wheels or Rubber Tires? | Steel Interstate Coalition

The North American Steel Interstate Coalition supports higher speed passenger and freight rail development, including putting trucks on trains in truck ferries.

steelinterstate.org

An argument for rails for those long distances.

 

[UNCjigga]

Ride sharing with level 5 autonomous cars is gonna revolutionize personal transportation... that is what my crystal ball is telling me anyway. I've pitched it here before, people seem lukewarm on it however, maybe even outright sceptic.

Just think of all the shens and hijinks our kids (or grandkids) will get up to in self-driving cars. And it will all be shared on the next TikTok or whatever.

We’ll be old and grumbling about, “when I was your age, I had to physically talk to girls, then drive manually to pick them up, and then find a quiet secluded place to park and get laid in the back seat! You lot replaced all that with apps!!”

 

[feralkid]

That is not saying what you think it is saying. Yes, there are a ton of routes where electrified trucking will work great.


But two driver long haul trucking where the truck does not stop? No. Just No.

Never say never.

https://tucson.com/business/self-driving-truck-company-tusimple-plans-major-tucson-expansion/article_6c7cf0e1-612b-5a0f-8a42-1b22684778e3.html

The next phase of TuSimple’s planned network will stretch across much of the Southern U.S. to Florida, with a westward spur on I-10 to Los Angeles; the final phase will stretch across the lower 48 U.S. states from coast to coast.
“Think of it almost as a digital railroad, where we map it from terminal to terminal,” Brown said.

 

[feralkid]

The time of dirt super cheap electricity is upon us.

*guffaw*

No, just No.

 

[Leeea]

*guffaw*

No, just No.

Maybe, but I am here in lovely CA not far from the windmill fields and my electric bill is forecasted to get cheaper.

If it is cheaper to buy and install renewables then it is to pay just the fuel bill of last generation power plants, the price of electricity will drop. Once those renewables are installed, they will turn out clean green electricity for as long as we maintain them. It is already far more economical to maintain the renewables then it is to purchase fuel and maintain fossil fuel systems.

 

[feralkid]

Maybe, but I am here in lovely CA not far from the windmill fields and my electric bill is forecasted to get cheaper.

If it is cheaper to buy and install renewables then it is to pay just the fuel bill of last generation power plants, the price of electricity will drop. Once those renewables are installed, they will turn out clean green electricity for as long as we maintain them.

I sure hope so, but history has shown us that Utilities generally prefer to pass the savings on to the shareholders, rather than the rate payers, but I guess that could change.

Or not.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

A high-school classmate ('65) and former girlfriend drove a 1968 Karmann-Ghia for almost 35 years before buying a Prius. She still has the Ghia and it still runs. But she invested in a brand new Prius from a sense of "environmental responsibility". Given her life-long income stream and the responsibilities of being a single parent, I thought she might have done better to save some money to wait and buy a used one. But this is what a lot of people do.

I was never like "a lot of people", and I had a sort of schizophrenic lifestyle in my working years. I'd put on my Hart-Schaffner-Marx suit, my Johnston-Murphy shoes, Hong-Kong tailored white dress shirt and power tie by day and go to work in the Capital. Sometimes, in the evenings, I'd get invited to a wine-and-cheese soiree on Embassy Row.

But on weekends and here and there, I ran with a group of Good-Ol'-Boy "Dukes of Hazard" Virginia mechanics. One of them would rent a garage bay in Thornburg, Virginia, and he had a friend who drove a tow-truck. The tow-truck driver would occasionally obtain a car damaged in an accident that was headed to the junk-yard, but for which the damage was exclusive to body panels, and we would tour the various junkyards to rebuild it. I was sort of the "store-front", posting ads in the Post to sell those rides, so here and there I might pick up a few thousand extra bucks in a year for my trouble. Even so, I helped with the wrenching, and I went on weekend hikes in muddy junkyards in my camo-fatigues and mountaineering boots.

The only car I ever purchased new from the dealer-lot was a 1979 Honda Civic, and through the 80's and 90's, I acquire a fleet of three more. Some days I'd take the Amtrak train to work, but more often I'd fly up and down the Shirley Highway in my best "Super" Civic, and I had a low carbon footprint for getting 32 miles to the gallon. I paid my dues to society for about 20 years, but I paid less to the oil companies. Some of the dues-payment arose with lower prestige; some of it came with a sore ass and a trick knee from working the clutch. Except for the one I bought new, I picked up the others for about $500 each, invest another $1,000 to renew them, and the annual Virginia personal property tax on each could be about $14. My insurance bills were a fraction of what people pay for their new rides.

And . . . I learned how to pick a used car. And that is where I am on the Garage Forum, yammering about my 26-year-old Isuzu Trooper I've kept for 19 of those years. It gets about 15 miles to the gallon, and it will outlive me. But I still have a low carbon footprint, because I only drive about 3,000 miles per year.

So I'm not going to shell out $40,000 dollars for a hybrid or electric model that will precisely fit my mid-sized SUV lifestyle. Or -- I will wait until the price of gasoline is prohibitive, or the DMV tells me I'm too old to drive, or until I'm dead.

Sure I'm pissed off about Climate Change, and I was telling folks around 2002 that it was coming. But everyone is so focused on the moment, untutored by any science, that they've all been sticking their ostrich-heads in the sand. And now Nature has come around to make the pain, like an undertaker waiting to collect the bill.

I'm going to bide my time until I can pick up an electric that goes 500 miles between charges. And you can bet your bottom dollar that I won't pay new car prices and new car insurance.

A lot of people poorer than I am pay as much for their car as they might for a house payment. I never thought those people were stupid. I just know that I am one crafty Sumbitch. That's how I get my satisfaction in my sunset years.

I love to drive, but can't leave home for more than two hours at a time. I'm ordering groceries with Insta-Cart. I've finished tweaking my 21st century makeover of an "Android Trooper", which is as much as a Grand Concert Hall "Kennedy Center" with the Library of Congress music collection -- a super-juke-box on wheels. I'm ready to connect the disco-light LEDs for the lower interior sometime this year. I feel like the old fart in the Star-Trek movie who invented Warp Drive.

Just don't blame me for the hurricanes, droughts, oil wars, super-blizzards and floods. I paid my dues, with the sore ass and bum knee to prove it. It was also a lot of fun, before I passed my 50th birthday, anyway.

 

[Commodus]

I'm going to bide my time until I can pick up an electric that goes 500 miles between charges. And you can bet your bottom dollar that I won't pay new car prices and new car insurance.

You'll get an EV that goes over 500 miles this year, with the Tesla Model S "Plaid+" — the tricky bit is getting that range in something that doesn't cost as much as a supercar. I suspect it'll happen in a few years, just not now.

You'd have a much easier case for buying an EV or hybrid if you were commuting daily and had considerably more mileage than you do... but 3,000 miles a year? Yeah, keep your Trooper until it either fails or doesn't meet your needs.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

You'll get an EV that goes over 500 miles this year, with the Tesla Model S "Plaid+" — the tricky bit is getting that range in something that doesn't cost as much as a supercar. I suspect it'll happen in a few years, just not now.

You'd have a much easier case for buying an EV or hybrid if you were commuting daily and had considerably more mileage than you do... but 3,000 miles a year? Yeah, keep your Trooper until it either fails or doesn't meet your needs.

I'm sure I said it in "Garage". Before I took matters into my own, old withered hands, I had retired from wrenching, and gave it over to a local mechanic I could trust. He retired in 2017, and I had to risk the trial-and-error losses of market-search. I needed someone honest, who could replace a harmonic balancer in two hours and work with a DIY-factory-manual-bookworm. So I found the replacement to the retired mechanic.

I told him I might need him to rebuild or replace my tranny or engine -- things I wouldn't do myself. And -- he said to me -- "It ain't really gonna happen. They built that Trooper to be virtually indestructible."

Couple weeks ago, I was doing casual web-searches and found one for sale up in Washington or Oregon. It was a used-car dealer, asking about $5,000. I studied the Car-Fax reports going back to 1995. That thing had 270,000 miles on the odometer, and the dealer was merely trying to retrieve the investment in a new engine. I'm at 192,000, and it runs like new.

 

[vi edit]

Yeah I'm in a weird place with cars too. I moved to Portland, OR a little over a year ago. Prior to that I lived in Lexington, KY where cars were mandatory. Both of my kids were in public schools that were 4 miles away from where lived and you had to use multiple roads that were 50MPH+ traffic. My work was 6 miles away and no safe way of getting there on a bike. Plus weekend travels, sports for kids and what not to see family, visit stuff, ect. We were driving 10,000 miles a year, easy.

Now I'm in Portland. My wife and I both commuted to work by bike. My office shut down and we went full time remote. Once my kids go back to school they are in walking distance and I don't need to pick them up anymore. I moved intentionally to a place where there is a grocery store and a pile of take out options within walking distance. I put 2000 miles on my car last year, 1500 of which was when my parents were here and we traveled all over the state and WA state sight seeing. I've got two cars, both paid off, and they just sit there unused 25+ days a month.

It's such a weird change in lifestyle. When I lived in central, IL I was racking up almost 25,000 miles a year...per car.

One of my cars is pretty beat up cosmetically. But it's a hybrid and what we use most of the time when we do drive around town. The other is my minivan which is super useful about 10 days a year. Paid off too. It's just a weird situation where they aren't worth much to trade/sell. But I'd never get anything as nice as I have if I had to go and buy a second car again. So there's not a lot of incentive to drop to one. Insurance and registration isn't prohibitively expensive.

 

[pauldun170]

Gonna be fun when EV's of today are 20 years old.
Also going to be fun when State\Fed build infrastructure enforce speed limits and traffic law where all vehicles are net connected.

"My EV can go 0-60 in 2 seconds!!"
Not on public roads it can't.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Gonna be fun when EV's of today are 20 years old.
Also going to be fun when State\Fed build infrastructure enforce speed limits and traffic law where all vehicles are net connected.

"My EV can go 0-60 in 2 seconds!!"
Not on public roads it can't.

When I moved back to CA twenty years ago, I saw all these kids with neon-green or blue Nissans and Toyotas made over for street-racing. I actually found their presence on the road to be annoying, when I myself had taken pride in my Super-Civic. About 15 years ago, a news-item appeared in the local paper about a couple of teenagers who were street-racing fast and furious, when they killed an old lady in a wheel-chair traversing a cross-walk.

It's like Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi", when the days of the steamboat were coming to an end. The days of the internal combustion engine are fading. It will all be a matter of balancing costs and benefits for each individual to make their conversion and adjust to a new technology.

I think they could've offered natural-gas conversion kits with incentives back at the beginning of the millennium, but of course, there wasn't a ready-made infrastructure for providing it en-masse, and fracking for gas was in an infant stage. That would've been a stop-gap measure to buy time, but it probably wouldn't have been an encouragement to the Fast and Furious.

These days, I just have to have a trip to the grocery every three or four days, so I can play with voice-navigation and listen to Bach's Concerto for Three Harpsichords or the percussion parts of Chicago's "I'm A Man".

I believe in the Machine Manitou. The Manitou is a native-American spirit that inhabits everything including the inanimate. My SUV must be driven occasionally and religiously waxed and polished. This keeps the Manitou happy, and the vehicle runs better . . . .