Comment by paddy_m a day ago
BEV are not a serious climate solution unless you are talking about ebikes. BEV also contribute a load of pollution to waterways via tire wear. ebikes are cheaper to purchase and make a significant change.
Last time I checked, a Tesla 3 (a small car by NA standards) weighted 1800kg. That's twice the weight of my 1987 VW Jetta and very close to that 2T you mention. The weight issue is real; it affects the driving dynamics and makes the energy problem worse in many ways.
Modern cars are generally overweight. A 1987 BMW 325 weighted 1200kg. Considering the advances of materials science and digital technology, weight should have gone down, not up. What's the daily purpose of that extra 600kg, other than protecting against an eventual collision with a monstruous pickup?
90M light vehicles are sold globally every year. As long as consumers demand cars, BEVs are the most climate friendly cars to sell them. Anyone saying “don’t buy cars!” is living a pipe dream.
China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.
(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)
Why not both? Ebikes are obviously highly useful in cities, but not so much for longer distances in the countryside, also problematic in winter up north. There will always be need for private car ownership for areas that can't be effectively served by public transport (and obviously public transport itself should also be electric powered).
Just electrify everything and let people choose what mode of transport fits their needs and wallet. I barely use my car in city, but absolutely need it to visit my relatives who do not live within reach of public transport.
Because resources are finite. Subsisdies and household income invested in Electric cars would have a much greater benefit if put towards ebikes. Most car trips are short and could be replaced with ebike trips (and that's without any infrastructure change). Leave long trips to gas cars that already exist.
For public transit, rail should be electrified because it has lower maintenance requirements and better acceleration. Trolley busses are great for similar reasons (and noise). Battery busses are a horrible idea, expensive and not yet reliable. Transit agencies are replacing diesel busses with battery because of lower emissions, and at the same time reducing frequency of service, making public transit less usable and less used -- encouraging personal vehicle use.
Most car trips could be replaced with ebike trips, but the majority of distance travelled (and thus, roughly, carbon emitted) can't. 80% of the distance driven is with trips >10 km, 70% of the distance driven already at >20 km. There are people doing these trips on E-Bikes daily, but even with great infrastructure they'll remain a small proportion of the modal split (Data from Germany, MiD, 2017). The long(er) trips are the majority of the problem, as the rest are, well, short.
Most rail should be powered by overhead electricity, but for short- to medium-term gains BEMUs are also great, with most European train manufacturers not building DMUs anymore. They'll hopefully also come down in price, as this first generation is really expensive.
I know that the US (and Canada) has issues with battery busses, but in (western) Europe, they work great (but currently still a tad too expensive). Trolley busses are even more expensive (similar if not higher purchasing cost, much higher infrastructure cost, slightly less energy usage) and require a whole lengthy political process to deploy, while battery busses can be deployed in a few months.
BEVs are the only feasible solution for replacing a large part, if not most, of the emissions from cars. Even in countries with a great countrywide transit network and reasonable bike infrastructure (Germany), 73% of passenger-kilometers are traveled by car (MiD 2023, 19% by transit, 4% by bike, 4% by walking), down from 80% in 2002. There is no way to much more than double transit usage in the next 15-20 years. And the situation is much worse in e.g. the USA where little good transit exists, where good infrastructure exists operations suck, building transit is astoundingly expensive, land developmental patterns run contra feasible attractive transit and transit agencies seem unable to learn anything from outside the US (in operations, construction, planning, ...).
This is not to say that anti-car policies (and pro-walking/biking/transit) policies shouldn't be implemented and are in many cases preferable compared to subsidizing BEVs, but their potential in the short- to medium-term for carbon reduction is quite limited.
Ebikes might have more positive impact, but that doesn't matter unless you can convince a critical mass of people to use them instead of their cars. I say this as someone who thinks ebikes are cool, but that's absolutely not going to happen in any significant way at least in the US. Replacing a gas car with an ebike requires a significant shift in your lifestyle, which most people either can't or don't want to do. The benefit of a BEV is that you can mostly use it exactly like you use the gas car you already have, with some added benefit of being able to "refuel" it at home while you sleep. Changes that people actually adopt are at the end of the day the most impactful ones.
They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.
Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)