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We're almost at the end of the first month of the Volkswagen scandal, which now includes 11 million cars and Leonardo DiCaprio. VW's US boss has testified to Congress, blaming a few rogue software engineers. All the while, questions have raged about VW Group's future: which projects are safe, which ones are on the chopping block, and how exactly will the company recover from this?
...
VW's board has finally started to answer some of those swirling questions. For starters, there's going to be much more emphasis on electrification. Electric vehicles and hybrids have played more of a bit part at VW, compared to Toyota, GM, and domestic rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz. That's going to change with a standard electric architecture that can be used across multiple vehicles and brands.VW Group isn't devoid of hybrid and EV know-how. Audi's Le Mans program has taught it a lot about high voltage automotive systems, and Porsche has a wealth of experience from the 918 Spyder, Panamera Hybrid, and even the 919 Hybrid racer. VW would be smart to leverage all these programs.
VW is the largest car company in Europe. This is what sudden, disruptive technological change looks like.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @04:03AM
Energy density matters not one whit. So long as the miles per overnight charge is comfortably greater than the miles driven during a day...that's all that matters.
For most people, the Nissan Leaf and its competitors with a mere 80 miles per charge already fits that bill perfectly. For most of the rest, the upcoming generation of 200-mile base-model electric vehicles are luxurious; short of a vacation, when was the last time you drove 200 miles in a single day? Even at 65 MPH non-stop, that's over three hours of driving -- and 50,00 miles / year if that's your daily commute.
And, for basically everybody, a Tesla coupled with their Supercharger network is downright overkill.
We've already got all the technology we need; now, it's just a matter of economies of scale to bring the price just a bit lower.
It's also worth noting that EVs absolutely smoke their gasoline equivalents on pretty much every other metric you could care to mention -- performance, maintenance, noise...you name it, and EVs are better. And, when they cost not much more than the gas guzzlers...well, let's just say that the transition to electric will be much faster than the transition from manual to automatic transmission.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ayn Anonymous on Friday October 16 2015, @04:54AM
You absolute not understand what sustainable practise means.
Not one bit. And so almost everyone else, influenced by *green wash*.
You can't use *anything* from the earth crust in a systematic way.
That's a non-go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural_Step [wikipedia.org]
You have horizon of a day, a year a decade ?
That's nothing. That's the way of thinking that causes the destruction of the biosphere.
Look at what you are proposing. Can it be done for thousands of years ?
You probably don't know, because you never thought about that time frames.
Yes that's heretical. How can I think in thousands of years ?
Nobody is doing that.
Exactly.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @05:26AM
Anything that assumes continued growth is going to be unsustainable at the scale of millennia. But, conversely, even that which seems an insane luxury of conspicuous consumerism would be insignificant if we could mirror the historical 3% growth with 3% contraction until human population levels are at 1% of where they are -- an hundred million globally, rather than the ten billion (with rounding) where we're at today.
Make all forms of birth control free with no questions asked (beyond, of course, medical necessity) paid for with taxes, make IUDs and silicone plug vasectomies required for attendance at public school the same way we already require vaccines, do it on a global scale...and pretty much all our civilization's problems magically take care of themselves by the end of the century.
And, no. There's absolutely zero chance that we'd face extinction because birth control is the norm and only the oddballs have children. Make birth control the default from childhood with the option to reverse for those who're serious about wanting children, and we'll never lack for new generations. It's the current situation that's driving us to extinction....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday October 16 2015, @07:42PM
First of all, thank you for that fascinating link about The Natural Step, I'll look further into it.
About the sustainability of battery technology: any chemical reaction has exactly the same composition of elements as before the reaction (law of Lavoisier [wikipedia.org], conservation of mass, incidentally his books are out of copyright and some are available on Gutenberg).
So you have to ask: how is it done today? what happens to the Lead and the sulphuric acid in my car battery, when the battery died and I exchange it for a new one?
The answer is, of course, that they get sent to a factory where new batteries are made from the broken old one, and only very small losses are incurred in this production cycle, because lead poisoning is a no-no in countries with environmental rule of law.
The same goes for more expensive battery technology (LiFePO4 with Lithium, or Vanadium flow battery).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 16 2015, @11:37AM
This, more than anything, is why the transition to EVs is going to be especially abrupt: they are a dream to drive. After you've driven an EV going back to an ICE is like reverting to horse & buggy. Just plug it in at night and don't worry about anything else, and most people have already developed that muscle memory from plugging in their smartphones at night.
Washington DC delenda est.