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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?
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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, Informative) by RedBear on Friday October 16 2015, @06:06AM
You seem confused about a number of things, Mr. "I so smart, I think to thousands of years out unlike anyone else!" Yes, I read your other post below.
Electric vehicle batteries are so big and so full of valuable raw materials that they will be (are being) recycled to a much higher extent than typical household or personal device batteries have ever been. A lot of people seem very confused about this, but it just makes no economic sense for anyone to discard EV batteries.
Then, you make another common mistake in thinking that "rare earth" materials are rare or will run out in an extremely short period of time. Tell that to the guy building a $5 billion dollar plant to make the batteries his company needs to produce hundreds of thousands of EVs every year for the foreseeable future. Rare earths are quite common and will last hundreds of years even if we don't recycle them, which we will, especially lithium which is the bulk of what we need for batteries. They're called rare earths only because they are relatively "rarified" in the Earth's crust, which means that unlike other materials that can be mined more easily in concentrated form, we have to process through a lot of dirt/ore to find significant quantities of rare earth materials. But they are still abundant enough that we will not run out until long after our civilization has moved on to newer technologies and perfected our recycling procedures. That's really not something that should stop us from moving to EVs and away from petrochemical fuels. Reducing climate change is the far more pressing problem for our civilization right now.
Converting vast quantities of biomass to fuel is a dead end. Except for partially closing the CO2 cycle, it does nothing to decrease pollution. It damages soils by permanently removing biomatter, and wastes land area that should be used for producing food crops. That biomatter should be put back into the soil to build up soil fertility to support more productive food crops. One way of doing that is to use biomass in wood gasification power plants (to produce energy for our EVs) and then put the remaining "biochar" waste matter from that process back into our fields to enhance the soil's ability to hold nutrients and water and support beneficial microbial and fungal life, which in turn helps our plants grow quickly and abundantly and produce nutritious food. Among other very positive side effects this also can help us drastically reduce our use of petrochemical-derived fertilizers and lets us postpone the serious problem of "Peak Phosphorus" as well as reducing the fertilizer runoff that is producing huge oceanic dead zones and dangerous algae blooms that poison our waterways. What I've just described is already being done in various places. We need to do a lot more of it.
We already have an EV that goes nearly 300 miles on a charge and recharges at 300mph. It's working great for everyone who has bought one so far, and the relevant battery technology is increasing in energy density and longevity every year. The comparisons between energy density of batteries and petrochemical fuels are meaningless in practice. EVs are the future and there's nothing that can stop them at this point. You'll be driving one and loving it within 7-14 years, as will almost everyone you know. And many of them will no doubt have "VW" on the front.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ