Upvoted, as I see you were downsmashed because you spoke of realities, not "where we want to be".
What you say is true. I find "everyone EV now!" proponents, often just use handwavy platitudes when given "I can't" info. For example, for many, many people ... range is a vital, and sadly an electric EV preventive thing.
When told this, EV absolutists often blather on about why a person is wrong, and do so while ignoring that person's reality.
The same is valid for cost. If you are poor, and can barely afford a truck for work, telling someone to spend 2x or 3x for a EV variant is exceptionally unfeeling, unrealistic, and elitist.
What we need to do, is be open to solutions to help people switch. One is H2, which has multiple cars with extensive range on the road, yet EV absolutists will start going on about green or not h2.
While at the same time ignoring that all excess power in the US, currently comes from fossil fuel!
Until the last fossil fuel shuts down, that is excess kept running by EV needs.
But you see, the goal is not where the battery charge, or h2 comes from, it is where it can come from!
We can 100% make green h2, just as we can eventually fully purge fossil fuels from our electric grid.
And it takes decades to move cars and transport from fossil to alternative options. We are doing it in parallel. So that one day, when we are free of fossil use, all our cars will already be fossil free!
Including poor people driving 20 year old cars!
It’s not 2-3 times more for an EV: the average American truck buyer dropped $46k last year. You can buy a Leaf or Bolt for half that much and you’ll save many thousands of dollars in maintenance and fuel over the life of the vehicle. Yeah, perhaps 10-20% of truck buyers do something those vehicles can’t but most of the sales are fashion accessories for men who like to cosplay as ranchers. Given how much of the population lives in non-rural areas and doesn’t haul cattle for a living, switching to EVs buys a lot of time to find solutions for the hardest use cases.
Similarly, the reason hydrogen isn’t talked about more comes down to two reasons: it’s not competitive and it costs a lot more. Right now a huge number of people can buy an EV and charge it at home - if your commute is the American average or less, you don’t even need a 240V plug for that. If you want to buy a hydrogen powered car, you’re paying twice as much just to get started and you can refuel at a total of 60 places in the entire U.S. and Canada, most of them in California.
That might be worth thinking about but for the other problem: most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. This is why there’s so much astroturf presenting it as a good future choice: the hydrocarbon industry can profit now while claiming that green sources will happen real soon now.
Yes, you can envision that we’d have solar powered H2 plants or something but that still hits a lot of incompletely solved logistical problems—it’s hard to contain and ship—and immediately runs into the question of why you wouldn’t instead have that solar power charging the much greater number of EVs which are much easier to support.
Here we are again. People "don't need" that truck, so buy a small ev, it is cheaper!
Meanwhile, I specifically referenced prople buying trucks for work.
And if they do not, a small gas powered is far cheaper that a small ev. Remember, I referenced poor, which means save NOW!, or where do you think all that well known credit card debt comes from.
Planning for future maintenance costs takes a back seat, when poor.
And so here we show an elitist, hand wavy response. Telling the person referenced as "need a truck for work", no, you don't!
Yes, I’m aware. It’s still true that most people do not need a truck for work, even if you look exclusively at the subset of people who buy a truck for work. One of the interesting things about getting out of affluent areas is that you see far fewer trucks – go somewhere poor and it’s a lot more small cars because they cost less to buy, maintain, and use half as much fuel.
Again, it’s not that _nobody_ uses one but that it’s a much smaller fraction of the total market. We can reduce emissions considerably without inconveniencing anyone and over time all of the used EVs on the market will improve the low-cost options.
What you say is true. I find "everyone EV now!" proponents, often just use handwavy platitudes when given "I can't" info. For example, for many, many people ... range is a vital, and sadly an electric EV preventive thing.
When told this, EV absolutists often blather on about why a person is wrong, and do so while ignoring that person's reality.
The same is valid for cost. If you are poor, and can barely afford a truck for work, telling someone to spend 2x or 3x for a EV variant is exceptionally unfeeling, unrealistic, and elitist.
What we need to do, is be open to solutions to help people switch. One is H2, which has multiple cars with extensive range on the road, yet EV absolutists will start going on about green or not h2.
While at the same time ignoring that all excess power in the US, currently comes from fossil fuel!
Until the last fossil fuel shuts down, that is excess kept running by EV needs.
But you see, the goal is not where the battery charge, or h2 comes from, it is where it can come from!
We can 100% make green h2, just as we can eventually fully purge fossil fuels from our electric grid.
And it takes decades to move cars and transport from fossil to alternative options. We are doing it in parallel. So that one day, when we are free of fossil use, all our cars will already be fossil free! Including poor people driving 20 year old cars!