A huge benefit of electric cars is removing pollution from cities; this seems to be forgotten.
Surely if the pollution is killing thousands of people a year this is an issue.
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It's not forgotten by the authorities! In the SF Bay Area the local air quality council subsidizes electric car chargers. EVs reduce the total pollution and moves what's left out of the prone-to-atmospheric-inversions Bay Area.
In Amsterdam, the city creates an electric car parking spot (with charger) near your house if you get an electric car. This is effectively a private parking spot if you're the only electric car owner in the street, and that's incredibly valuable in a city where parking spots are hard to find.
Amsterdam is really charging ahead with environmental & climate change issues. I'm still glad I live in GLD and only work there, but it's leading the way in the Netherlands on multiple fronts. Really inspiring.
This will not scale as more and more people make use of this though. I agree it's a very strong incentive though.
It doesn't have to. It just needs to help electric cars reach the critical mass needed before companies enter the charging station market.
It's great for early adopters. Eventually, as everybody switches to electric, the advantage will disappear, but by then, everybody has switched to electric, so that's all good.
And by then there will be a market for commercial charging stations, if they are necessary.
The version that scales better is inexpensive pay charging stations.
Ubitricity is an example of such a scheme:
Isn't ozone worse than traditional pollution and the main byproduct of electrical cars? So unless we go into a draconian charge laws, will cause more harm in this regard.
NOx from diesel vehicles is by far the most significant source of ground-level ozone in most European cities.
I read that article as saying that power plants emit ozone. The ozone isn't emitted where the electric cars are.
BTW a large source of ozone in the Bay Area and LA (both of which have big problems with it) is emissions from internal combustion vehicles.
So, overall, electric vehicles are a big decrease in ozone in the inhabited areas of the West Coast.
I thought that too, I studied the pollution maps of London, and it appears that NOx removes Ozone pollution, I was flummoxed for ages.
Perhaps an Atmospheric Chemist can support this?
This is misleading - that article refers to ozone emitted from fossil power plants. Not the cars or chargers.
CO2 is an issue, but not the only one, I was just annoyed the article didn't mention it.
I would wear a gas mask to work, but they're no use.
It is not just in our cities...
As my mother pointed out, going electric is removing money from the pockets of the Saudi so-called 'royal family', thereby reducing their capacity to buy bombs and weapons from Western arms companies.
The death toll in Yemen is allegedly 10000 and every motorist with an old fashioned car is currently funding that, albeit by proxy.
Yes. There are huge political implications to the energy transition. Less nat gas dependence is going to be the next step after electricity generation is clean, and that's going to hit some petrostates very hard. Places like Qatar and Russia are definitely already making plans.
Two types of polution! Air and sound.
There's still pollution from the tire particulates due to friction.
Although I guess it's negligible to gas exhaust.
Gasses yes, but a large part of the particulates is actually emitted by the tires (through abrasion).
A large part of the mass, but not a large part of the PM2.5 and below. With particulates, smaller is a lot more dangerous.
That's correct. In normal conditions, the vast majority of tire particles are very large and stick to the road where they are eventually washed away by rain. Not small enough to hang in the air and end up in our lungs.
Aerosolized tire particulates are mostly a problem in tunnels, where they keep getting thrown up into the air by passing vehicles and recirculating.
Yes, and the problem has become a lot worse since the introduction of diesel pump injectors. Previously, diesel particulates were mostly caught in the lungs and could be coughed up, but now they hit the bloodstream.
If you have a car with regenerative braking, doesn't that also keep brakepad dust out of the air?
I wonder if he means that it's the tyre against the road that creates the dust?
He does. Both types of dust exist.
It does, yes.
Breaking with regen makes EV use the physical breaks less often as compared to combustion engine vehicles. Using breaks also emits particulates although I am not sure how it compares to the volumes of particulate emissions by combustion engines and tires abrasion.
My anecdotal experience having done some work in the automotive sector is that the volume is probably less but brake dust is much nastier and something you do not want to be breathing. At least it doesn't have asbestos in it anymore.
Electric cars do not remove pollution - they are not trees. They merely pollute at a greatly reduced rate.
> Electric cars do not remove pollution - they are not trees. They merely pollute at a greatly reduced rate.
You seem to be oblivious to the fact that electric cars are replacing cars powered by an internal combustion engine.
If you replace an IC engine with an electric motor then that source of pollution is removed, don't you agree?
Furthermore, electric cars typically get their power from the national power grid, which generates power in a much more efficient way than your typical IC engine.
On top of that, nowadays any power grid is being supplied by sources other fossil fuels. This shift away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy sources is being spearheaded by the European Union and reflected by their national action plans. This already resulted in some EU member-states breaking green energy records such as:
* covering around 35% of their national power generation from renewable sources
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-green...
* running the entire country over 4 days straight on renewable energy alone
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/18/portugal...
This is the energy production that is powering electric vehicles.
>removing pollution from cities
They move the pollution from a tailpipe feet away from people to a large smoke stack specially optimized to lower the effect on air quality in the immediate area.
Combustion is just one type of pollution that cars produce. And while relocating pollution is a tempting way to externalize the problem, it doesn't solve the underlying issue.
I don't know why you're stretching so hard to make it seem like moving pollution away from population centers isn't an excellent benefit and likely to reduce in many fewer deaths from direct exposure to pollution.
The comment above was referring to local pollution in cities (which directly kills thousands through diseases related to particulates in that pollution). Relocating that pollution does solve that problem.
(PH)EVs also produce much less particulate pollution from brake dust due to the use of regen to brake (which is why they can go several times the normal replacement interval for brake pads).
The creation of pollution is a separate problem from the location of that pollution. Yes, EVs don't magically prevent the creation of pollution, but they can severely limit the creation of pollution in population centers, where they have the most immediate effect.
I live in a city and am not dying, in fact the air quality is very good. Do people who can afford electric cars live in the same cities where pollution is so bad that people are dying from it? Why don't they move to where the air quality is better? (Why move from a problem when you can make the problem move from you, I guess?)
When the majority of pollution is coming from large trucks anyway, will swapping a few cars even matter?
Big city air can look great and still kill young children and old folks due to small particles. Most cities in Europe have terrible air thanks to the popularity of diesel autos, the low standards for pollution controls, and European governments being willing to ignore automakers who break the rules.
Do you have a source for most pollution coming from large trucks?
Simply from the weight they carry, the energy required for this. Supplying a large city is neither cheap nor easy, and requires dozens or hundreds of daily shipments from dozens or hundreds of logistics companies. The majority of these happen during off-peak hours, to reduce load on the highway network.
Lithium batteries still can't approach 10% of gasoline's energy density, so gasoline is mandatory for trucks, and will be until yet another new battery technology is not only discovered and brought to market, but mass-produced to the point that we have a battery-pollution problem.
> the low standards for pollution controls
Why don't they increase the standards? If people are dying there must be public outrage. Does Universal Healthcare cover pollution injuries?
> European governments being willing to ignore automakers who break the rules.
Are people protesting or working to change their governmental leadership? Or are they content to see their loved ones perish? If diesel cars are such a problem, why not outlaw these? Then only outlaws will drive them.
Do you have a source for particulates killing children in cities?
It solves the problem of exposing hundreds of millions of people to multiple emission sources of highly deleterious fine particulates in their immediate vicinity, every single day. It's not rocket science, it's an obvious fact, and not a single person posting here can honestly claim not to understand it. Ignoring or downplaying it is a near criminal act of negligence.
I thought the underlying issue was people dying from exposure to pollution? Or is that not something that you're concerned about?
It reduces overall emissions by a lot, and saves thousands of lives even beyond that.
Dismissing any solution that doesn't 100% fix everything is a great way to never accomplish anything.
> They move the pollution from a tailpipe feet away from people
You can't move non-existent pollution. It hasn't occurred yet, so there's no "movement". Electric cars create pollution displaced from the location the car is used in.
Are you saying that gasoline cars do not pollute? Check this out: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22126432
Electric cars can be (and are) charged with power generated with low pollution methods (solar, wind, water turbine...), while a gasoline, or worse, diesel powered car, will always pollute. Additionally, e-cars are more power efficient, even after subtracting line and charging heat losses.
Coal burning power plants are a problem on their own (e.g. high mercury emissions), so those should be shut down entirely IMO, and not be used to cover e-car power demands. They are problematic anyway because they can not change their output much, making them inflexible for modern requirements.
No I am not saying gasoline cars don't pollute.
I making the pedantic point that saying "electric cars move the pollution" is technically inaccurate. It is better to say "electric cars pollute in places physically displaced from where they are used".
Any normal reading of English would understand a world before electric cars, and a world after electric cars, as having moved pollution. We're talking at a higher level of abstraction, where the mover is a change in the mix of polluters.