No, the Tesla Model S Doesn't Pollute More Than an SUV 559
thecarchik writes "In an exhaustive 6,500-word article on the financial website Seeking Alpha, analyst Nathan Weiss lays out a case that the latest Tesla Model S actually has higher effective emissions than most large SUVs of both the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and smog-producing pollutants like sulfur dioxide. This is absolutely false. Virtually all electric car advocates agree that when toting up the environmental pros and cons of electric cars, it's only fair to include powerplant emissions. When this has been done previously, the numbers have still favored electric cars. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, concluded in a 2012 report (PDF), 'Electric vehicles charged on the power grid have lower global warming emissions than the average gasoline-based vehicle sold today.' Working through every one of Weiss' conclusions may show a higher emissions rate than Tesla's published numbers, but in no way does a Model S pollute the amounts even close to an SUV."
Let's compare the two (Score:5, Insightful)
* Can you power a Tesla Model S with non-polluting renewable energy?
* Can you power a gasoline SUV with non-polluting renewable energy?
One should think about those two questions for a moment before saying that the Tesla pollutes more than an SUV.
Facts don't deter FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kind of a biased group? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like they say... Only Nixon could go to China. Regardless of the merits of their arguments, these guys ain't Nixon. Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Why on earth would electric car skeptics object to the inclusion of powerplant emissions in the calculation of the total footprint of electric cars???
- Jesper
Re:Kind of a biased group? (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of the merits of their arguments ...
Translation: I don't care if they're right or wrong.
Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Wake me when the Flat Earth Society [theflatearthsociety.org] disbands. You're never going to convince the "skeptics", and if by some miracle you did, they wouldn't be skeptics anymore.
Re:Kind of a biased group? (Score:5, Insightful)
Haters gonna hate (Score:5, Insightful)
Question: What is the payback period on a Tesla Roadster?
I've been asked these questions a number of times. The Electrical car hater beams, as he has clearly won the argument.
Fair enough - since the question was asked - "What is the payback period on a Bugatti, or Corvette, or even a Kia Soul or Toyota Corolla? "
Or even my Motorcycle, for that matter. I don't drive my motorcycle because of some great payback, I drive it because I want to.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you want to reduce CO2 emissions, it's a two-step process. First you have to get electric cars (or other alternative), then you need to get better power plants. If one of these steps happens before the other, it doesn't make it less good.
Tesla shorts, not Ford investors. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mainstream automobile industry is considered a long-term dead-money play.
Tesla stock was very heavily shorted by hedge funds. They are hurting now. And yes they'd say anything, and pay anybody to say anything to keep their money from going down the drain.
They were convinced 100% that shorting Tesla was a guaranteed win---in significant measure because they really believed their right-wing ideology. They thought that Tesla was a short-term dead-money play.
Remember the mostly slanted NYT article? Why, when everything else has been very positive? Because NYC's the financial capital. Who might be susceptible to pressure or lucre? People in the financial industry or in New York close to the financial industry.
Why the anti-electric car meme? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, what do people have against them?
I think they're the coolest thing out there, and they provide a way to stop importing oil from the Muslims.
It's well known that central electricity production is significantly more efficient that a bunch of separate internal combustion engines.
But why the hate? I know the NYT has a vendetta against the electric car - they're a bunch of scumbags. But why do normal people hate them?
Re:Let's compare the two (Score:4, Insightful)
True, the various wars in places like Iraq should be factored into the picture as well.
How much did those cost again?
Re:what about the batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this particularly or uniquely bad vs the lifetime environmental impact of steel and mining of metallurgical and power coal and oil? Are we going to count the much lower amount of engine oil used? How about the pollution from the trucks delivering gasoline? And the refineries? And the tanker ships?
Are we going to count the hills removed in West Virginia?
Re:Same as last time (Score:2, Insightful)
...once PWR mode is enabled.
At which point all efficiency goes out the windo...err...tailpipe.
Associations, tribalism (Score:5, Insightful)
There are studies that show "conservatives" here in the USA will buy CFL bulbs on their own (if they think) but as soon as you label them "green" or with other labels and slogans that have been associated as belonging to the enemy tribe, they will fuck themselves just to not have anything to do with the opposing tribe.
If you want things to get better you have to avoid terms associated by propagandists with tribalism and negative emotions. If you want the only have your tribe benefit and feel extra smug - then you continue to use the terms even after they've been ruined by propagandists knowing that the other tribe will harm itself in it's hatred of you. Depends on what kind of person you are. Me, I'm no Christian or Buddhist so I like to load things up knowing the fools will screw themselves.
the typical Tesla driver... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it "fair" to include the power plant CO2 emissions? Sure, why not...but understand that such is a worst case scenario, and does not necessarily represent the norm. Also, note there is zero effective method for being clean with an SUV, whereas with an electric you do at least have the option of getting solar, if you don't already have it. At the very least, you can choose to pay higher electric rates by choosing to buy renewable energy (most markets allow for this option).
Re:Tesla shorts, not Ford investors. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Same as last time (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true. With a good foot, you can have decent fuel economy in PWR mode.
It takes self-training, though. You obviously can't slam your foot down and expect 50 MPG.
That being said, I use ECO normally and PWR when people get stupid and I need to distance myself from mustangs or ricers.
Driving with a light foot is the same as keeping ECO on... and as shitty as mustangs are your prius isn't distancing away from them unless you just happen to be speeding and they happen to be driving within limit.
What kind of discussion is this anyway, where people try to argue that a Prius with 134 hp combined feels "reasonably fast" when compared to having 300hp?? what the fuck? 130hp is plenty to move normal sedan in traffic outside of autobahns but what the fuck do you have to be sniffing out of the tailpipes to try to compare the experience as equivalent as having over DOUBLE THE HORSEPOWER ? ? ? that's like some fella coming in with a ps3 and saying that "essentially it's as fast as a 3ghz 8 core intel with 16 gigabytes because it doesn't need to run an OS". you'd fucking get laughed at.
and don't even begin with the "but oooh electric motors have so much torque it goes like the wind"
not that the prius has anything to do with this article anyways since very few people are charging their prius's, coal power or not. it's a fuel efficient car which is just fine since most people use it with gas.
(plug in cars would lose all their appeal if their electricity was taxed at the same level as fuel for cars is by the way).
Re:Kind of a biased group? (Score:4, Insightful)
Irrelevant - private cars are not a problem (Score:1, Insightful)
The motor vehicle fleet produces (upper limits) about 15% of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Of that, the private (personal as opposed to professional transportation) is about 40-60% or so. So, perhaps 7% of CO2 emissions are from what people think of as cars, the stuff that is targeted by the mindless, uneducated morons we have put in power. So, electrical cars are possibly more efficient than SUVs, but they are not terribly more efficient than a regular car (Honda Accord seemingly). So, the savings in emissions by turning the car fleet into electrical vehicles - which can only be gotten from the 7%, I don't see Tesla Buses coming any time soon, is quite low. In fact, turning the entire worlds car park from gas guzzlers to Tesla Model S's would have something of a statistically insignificant impact on the total CO2 emissions.
Why, if changing the entire world fleet of personal cars into electircal vehicles will have no measurable impact on CO2 emissions, are all the environmental nuts yacking about this? Should they/you not be yacknig about something that can make an actual difference?
Re:Same as last time? Well, nope. (Score:3, Insightful)
"No technological breakthrough at all"? Battery technology has been getting quite a lot better recent years.
"there is ample evidence that this will occur considerably sooner than non-hybrid (and non-electric) vehicles, just due to the higher maintenance and repair costs of hybrid vehicles that poor people won't be able to pay"? Again, really? I would rather expect there is /less/ that can break on an electric car, as they are quite a lot simpler (not so sure about hybrids due to the complex transmission systems). But if you say "ample evidence", I say "citation needed"...
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you want to reduce CO2 emissions, it's a two-step process. First you have to get electric cars
Not true. Electrical cars will not reduce CO2 emissions with a reliably measurable amount. 2-3% theoretical percentage points at most.
then you need to get better power plants
This is where you start. This is where you work hard, and once you have solved this, you have solved the CO2 emission problem. Nothing else really matters. Go nuclear and we're all OK. It's safe (yes, it is) and it is quite clean (except for the mines). It is not renewable though, so it is a stop-gap measure.
A so-called "Hydrogen Economy" is petroleum fueled (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's an energy storage medium.
You use up power to isolate and store hydrogen (useful amounts of free hydrogen do not occur in nature) and then when you burn the hydrogen you get some of the energy back, with little or no pollution (other than a little water vapor). It's a slightly lossy process, just like any other energy storage method (batteries, water pumped uphill, compressed gas, etc.) and not a very attractive one for most purposes.
Raw hydrogen, being very small and light compared to other atoms, is difficult and costly to store. It migrates through most materials, you have to use exotic sealants and methods. It also has an extremely wide explosive/ignition mix range with air; compared to gasoline almost any concentration of hydrogen will ignite or explode very easily. So hydrogen carrying systems have to be built with a higher level of quality control to achieve the same level of safety as gasoline vehicles, and if you try to burn hydrogen in an engine designed for gasoline it will typically pre-ignite and perform extremely poorly, if it doesn't just blow the intake manifold right off.
Proponents and oil company shills like to brag about its high energy density, purposely misleading the public by calculating energy density per unit mass instead of by unit volume. In the Real World [tm] a vehicle can't carry around an infinitely large hydrogen storage vessel, so energy density per unit volume is what matters when you're talking hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. Here's the numbers:
Cryogenically stored liquid hydrogen = 2,600 Wh/l
Hydrogen gas at around 2,000 psi = 405 Wh/l
Liquid gasoline at room temperature = 9,000 Wh/l
Any line of reasoning that assumes hydrogen is a power source - rather than just a storage medium with very poor energy density - is unfortunately based on a flawed premise. Regular electric batteries outperform hydrogen rather significantly at pretty much every metric that's important when we're talking about individually piloted vehicles.
Re:Same as last time? Well, nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
The only reason we have hybrid passenger cars (as well as electric cars) is because the government agreed to pay part of the cost. And the only reason to do that is to hide the total cost.
There is a conspiracy, but it's not what you think. The conspiracy isn't about pollution; it's about money.
I suppose we have competing conspiracies, then. The total cost is hidden for any kind of vehicle. Gas companies are incredibly subsidized. Road maintenance is subsidized. Car manufacturers (gasoline, hybrid, and electric) are subsidized the world over.
I'm not sure I see Tesla's success as a conspiracy, unless everything ever has been a conspiracy.
Re:Same as last time? Well, nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
The concept of the battery-powered electric car has been tossed around for 100+ years, and it always failed on the marketplace until very recently.
What suddenly changed?
Batteries got better. Fuel got more expensive. And people started caring about the environment.
There was no major technological breakthrough at all
Tesla runs on lithium-ion batteries. Prius uses NiMH. You don't realise that they are better than the lead-acid batteries that used to go into electric vehicles?
There's no Moore's law for batteries. But vehicular battery technology does make incremental improvements every year. On top of the occasional entirely new battery technology.
The only reason we have hybrid passenger cars (as well as electric cars) is because the government agreed to pay part of the cost. And the only reason to do that is to hide the total cost.
The government LENT Tesla a big sum of money to be paid back over 10 years. They paid it back in about a year.
Re:Irrelevant - private cars are not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to have jumped from 15% to "no measurable impact", through some arbitrary divisions, that are irrelevant because ALL categories of vehicles are being targeted for efficiency improvements.
I don't see Tesla Buses coming any time soon
Allow me to help you out with your myopia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bus [wikipedia.org]
Why, if changing the entire world fleet of personal cars into electircal vehicles will have no measurable impact on CO2 emissions, are all the environmental nuts yacking about this?
Frankly, because they are more intelligent and have more insight than you.
The electricity is free excess capacity (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of ways to solve our commuting problem, and a combination of more walkable neighborhoods, bike-only transportation paths, better mass transit, and a more intelligent use of fossil fuels by eliminating the wasteful combination of millions of poorly maintained individual ICEs and our gas-powered supply chain. Even dumping the fuel in a less refined form during a process to make other petroleum based products would be preferable, because you'd be approaching 70-80% efficiency of energy conversion instead of the rather pathetic 30-40% of car ICEs.
That's the worst case scenario. We could follow Germany's lead and begin a serious effort to increase renewable capacity by using a combination of wind, geothermal, solar (panel and heat plants), hydro, and efficiency improvements. They powered half of their entire country on renewables last summer. Are you saying we can't do the same?
Incidentally, I don't know what is so popular about bitching endlessly as a response to any attempt to modernize the United States. It's the 21st Century. If it were 1900, you'd be arguing that electricity wasn't as safe as kerosene. It's time to join the rest of the world and stop hanging on to these meaningless bits of quickly aging tradition. Who cares if my car runs on electricity instead of gas? If it gets me to work and home five ways a week and to dinner on the weekends and we could build them in American factories and provide more jobs by converting gas stations into electric stations and at the same time probably solve the smog/asthma problems plaguing major metropolitan areas, what is the problem?
Re:Same as last time? Well, nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
The true cradle-to-grave costs of hybrid cars is not yet known. It will not be until they begin to hit the junkyards in large numbers--and there is ample evidence that this will occur considerably sooner than non-hybrid (and non-electric) vehicles, just due to the higher maintenance and repair costs of hybrid vehicles that poor people won't be able to pay (assuming that the manufacturer even continues to make key replacement parts, which they may not).
Jesus. People keep talking about this, and reliability / maintenance cost (eg: "expensive battery replacements") as a huge unknown. The Prius has been available in the US since 2000. That's 13 years. If they were being junked sooner than non-hybrids, we'd know by now.
Re:Same as last time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Same as last time (Score:5, Insightful)
Small fuel efficient cars have a huge problematic bug , that has never been worked out. They're dangerous, hard to spot, slow to get out of the way
As evidenced by your own statement it's the huge speeding behemoths that are actually the ones causing the accidents, even if it's those around them that suffer the consequences ... and yet you claim it's the small cars that should be removed from the road?