Interesting look at how green EV actually is
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banjopotato
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Strongly disagree. I had occasion to drive a 2022 Tiguan for a few days and found it to be enormous and impractical in the city: hard to park, cumbersome on narrow roads and just generally pointlessly large. The US is not a relevant term of comparison as it's a clear outlier when it comes to vehicle size.
All relative Banjo depends what you normally drive
Agreed small cars are easier to park, but to say all SUV's are massive is over egging it a bit.
I only mentioned US because someone else mentioned US pickups. as you say not apples and apples.
I drove a Transit Van for over a decade mwb and lwb and found it fine to park, had to learn the size of it but only took a while.
Worked all over City and country with it
My CX5 was a lot easier mind and easier for us to put our toddler in and out of the child seat.
Horses for courses.
The Times had a similar article on the future of car taxation, suggesting weight would be a fairer basis, but that, like the current system punish the potential to pollute and not the reality. A small car doing 50k km a year will cause more pollution than one twice it's size doing 10k.
Why should there be any incentives for private cars in cities? All incentives should be to move people away from cars towards active travel and public transport.
There's a climate crisis and an obesity problem. We've problems with air quality in our cities. The last thing we need is more incentives for cars.
I guess because the limitations of our public transport system cannot be solved quickly. The options to me would seem to be -
- Aggressively invest in public transport and in ~50 years have something to rival London that takes a significant number of people off the roads + continue suffering the consequences of fossil fuel burning cars in cities for two more generations until the subway is here
- Aggressively invest in public transport and in ~50 years have something to rival London that takes a significant number of people off the roads + electrify personal transport to reduce NOx/SOx/PM/noise pollution by ~100% in cities so the very next generation can have clean air in cities
- Meagrely invest in public transport + electrify personal transport to reduce NOx/SOx/PM/noise pollution by ~100% in cities so the very next generation can have clean air in cities
you're safer in a bigger heavier vehicle, sure. Everyone outside that vehicle is less safe though. Death/injury figures for car occupants have plummeted (for a variety of reasons, not just car size) but they haven't dropped to the same extent for pedestrians and cyclists.
I'd agree. It would be a mistake ever to give private cars any further use of bus lanes. Even small numbers of them would only slow down a service already severely hampered by drivers who can't stay out of yellow boxes.
T McGibney
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Is there a connection between these two statements, assuming for the moment that they're true? They seem to contradict each other. If pedestrians and cyclists are less safe, their death/injury figures should be rising rather than falling?
And I would imagine for instance that cars have on average been getting lighter rather than heavier in recent times?
I don't have figures to hand, but if people who used to drive saloons are mostly driving SUVs now (which is clear, some manufacturers don't even make saloons or small cars anymore) I'm not sure how they'd be getting lighter on average. Even cars of the same size are likely to be heavier than they were 30 years ago as they're carrying more equipment.
EVs are heavier too because they're hauling around a load of batteries.
T McGibney
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Massive assumption there I would have thought.
Maybe true compared to 50 years ago (1970s Morris Minors and Beetles were famously light and infamously dangerous for occupants), arguable at best for 30 years ago, (early 90s Nissans, Toyotas etc were the opposite) but definitely untrue compared to 15-20 years ago. My own car is considerably lighter than its mid-2000s same-make-and-model predecessor.
Unfortunately option 3 doesn't solve the current traffic problems. And those problems are only getting worse if we're building 20k new homes per year. It doesn't help the obesity problem either. And it probably won't help us meet our climate change targets.
And something that is overlooked is the reduction in quality of life due to car dependency. How much better would our lives be if we didn't drive as much and had more livable cities.
I don't see how re-classifying existing electric vehicles, whose greenness is the thread topic, into a newish vehicle class could worsen road safety risks, not by any stretch of the imagination. At worst it might induce more navel-gazing by statisticians changing their focus to cars and RTIs now the COVID stats frenzy seems to be coming to an end.
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Thanks and if someone runs with some of it, maybe I won't have to hold my breath next time I'm in an urban environment, although I could wear two or three of my now (allegedly) redundant COVID masks.
Has anyone tackled the problem of tyre particulate pollution? Are EVs worse offenders than ICEVs in this respect?
Totally agree with all that. To be clear option 3 is not a great option, I’m just making the point that it’s better than option 1 and regrettably the most likely Ireland will take. Nothing in Ireland’s economic or political landscape suggests we’re within 50+ years of even a mediocre public transport infrastructure.
EV's are heavier so yes will be harder on tyres. although one step at a time
I think vans, buses and trucks that are on the road most of the day are a much bigger problem here.
Feel free to start your own threads on the climate and obesity crises and city air quality. This thread is about an "Interesting look at how green EV actually is".
I responded to your comment suggesting incentives for cars in cities. They're related topics. You could respond to that if you want. Or not.
EVs are 2 ton with their batteries taking up half the weight
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