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China has the world's most aggressive electric car goals. Communist leaders are promoting them to clean up smog-choked cities and in hopes of taking the lead in an emerging technology.
At the auto show, the global industry's biggest marketing event of the year, almost every global and Chinese auto brand is showing at least one electric concept vehicle, if not a market-ready model.
Heizmann said VW, which vies with GM for the title of China's top-selling automaker, expects annual sales of at least 400,000 "new energy vehicles" – the government's term for electric or gasoline-electric hybrids – by 2020 and 1.5 million by 2025.
The vast majority of Chinese get around by smog-free vehicles already. They're called bicycles.
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Volkswagen to Roll Out an Electric Car in China. Can It Help Reduce the Smog?
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Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 28 2017, @12:14AM (8 children)
There's one advantage with electricity. You can pollute somewhere else and get the benefit elsewhere.
(but it takes an Hungarian engineer to accomplish that ;-) ,he probably weren't a professional engineer (R) [soylentnews.org] either, oh the horror)
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @12:31AM (7 children)
There are other advantages in re fossil fuels burned in the car vs electricity produced at a plant using similar fuels: overall efficiency tends to be / can be way up, and the vehicle immediately becomes energy-source-agnostic so as sources change, the car doesn't know, doesn't care, and gets "greener" as time goes by. Even driving to, and subsequently charging in, a new region can make the vehicle greener (or less so.)
Plus, it'd be kind of a bitch to drive a coal-fueled car; this way, they can leverage what they have, reduce dependency upon petroleum-based fuels, increase availability of the raw petroleum substrates for lubricants, plastics, drugs, etc. and prepare for any better future they can create, from marginally to amazingly better.
They're definitely aware of the pollution problem and focused on reducing it. In some ways, they're doing better than we are. As our (US) government is currently being driven by idiots who have shown multiple signs they think or are pretending pollution is imaginary.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 28 2017, @01:32AM (1 child)
Battery efficiency is the Achilles heel in this. And electric cars have high entry price.
As for saving cost. Wood gas may be more efficient.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @11:48AM
Batteries continue to improve. Ideally, we'd move to ultracapacitor based storage, but that tech is still pretty far behind where it needs to be and won't come into its own in the near term.
Still, looking into the near future assuming today's tech is the limit is unnecessarily pessimistic. That's almost never the case.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 28 2017, @01:41AM (4 children)
Minor flaw in your thinking. There are two reasons that corporations have off-shored so much of American industry. One, is labor cost, and two, is lack of regulations.
China may regulate things a bit better than many third world countries, but they still have a long way to go. Another post, above, noted that coal plants are a major source of pollution, and especially smog. We don't have that any more in the US. Here in the US, after the coal plants had been drastically cleaned up, automobiles became the major source of smog.
If China wants smog free cities, they need to clean up both the coal plants, and the cars. Electric cars will help on that second part of the problem. I don't suppose it matters which part is solved first, if they are looking at both parts.
Of course, if they neglect the coal plants, the cars won't make a huge difference.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday April 28 2017, @05:46AM
They should replace the coal plants with electric plants. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @11:44AM (2 children)
You said this, then you provided no explanation of the flaw you referred to. Care to elaborate?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 28 2017, @01:40PM (1 child)
" There are two reasons that corporations have off-shored so much of American industry. One, is labor cost, and two, is lack of regulations."
You seemed to have skipped over those last three words. There are few if any regulations on the coal plants. Coal can be much cleaner than it is, if the plants are properly regulated. Smog isn't a foregone conclusion if you're running coal plants.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @02:26PM
Still not seeing it. If a coal plant is made cleaner, the vehicle then is getting energy from a cleaner plant. I accounted for this: I specifically said that electric vehicles are source-agnostic. Don't know, don't care. If the source gets cleaner, it is a win. Doesn't matter what the source is. I didn't say coal couldn't be made cleaner, either. Sure it can. I'm right with you there. There are numerous forks in these paths. Not all of them are bad.
The root issue here is that the drive towards cleaner energy sources and cleaner energy consumption needs to be undertaken. China's doing that in various ways, including a very strong push to solar. I'm willing to say that's entirely a good thing. No matter how they do it. We're stumbling in the US right now, due to a prevalence of environmental know-nothings in our government, but that pendulum, too, will probably swing back. Although I find it actually painful to contemplate the backwards steps into increased pollution currently being encouraged by the Trump administration. I simply despise that man and his cadre of sycophantic morons. Sigh.
As far as US corporations moving their entire operations offshore, yes, absolutely – lack of regulations is a huge factor. However, our government, again, is dysfunctional in exerting any control over such transfers of industry, basically turning a blind eye to it, so we're pretty much screwed there, too. China, on the other hand, is very strict about who can import what, which means that should an operation move out of China, it's not a given that it's going to be able to sell stuff back into the country. We have huge trouble selling into China, and we're one of its biggest trading partners in the China-to-US direction.
As far as power production itself goes, US corporations have not off-shored power production much (a little bit to Canada.) It's just not practical, because no one can get the power from distant locations to here in any practical way at this point in time. So foreign regulations on coal plants have little or nothing to do with our corporate power supply structures. Chinese coal plants do what they're told. So that's down to a question of what they're going to get told. US coal plants are dying on the vine because of stiff competition; they won't be a significant factor for much longer. Though I'm all for them (and everything else) being regulated right down to zero CO2 and zero particulates. Which means 100% transition to nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, etc.