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17 comments on Over a barrel - a new vision needed
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17 comments on Over a barrel - a new vision needed
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I don't get it Neil, you want the government to legislate away the ICE but not have any regard to the planning and development regimes which have shaped and beeen shaped by the mass ownership of cars in the last 50 years!
There is a lot to be said about letting markets operate without governments messing it up. The price of oil is doing its job in alerting the market to a problem.
If cars with ICE's become too expensive to keep on the road then they must be replaced by something else and the range of options is from walking to your BEVS and PHEVS.
Walking is a proven and reliable mode of transport that existed long before the wheel, so I think we can safely count that as deliverable. BEVS and PHEVS?...not so much. I'm going to reorganise my life around living much more locally, and I'll hang on to my ICE car for as long as possible, driving it as infrequently as I possibly can. There is an old bloke in my town who is filthy rich, but he still drives the same XA Ford Falcon that he bought new from the showroom in 1972. If he can get 36 years from an XA then I reckon I could get at least 20 from VZ Commodore thats bought and paid for. I'm simply not going to buy an electric car with dubious battery technolgy and non-existent savings when comparing total cost of ownership.
If there is an energy crisis and people have totightne their belts, many of them will do the same sums and decide that an EV is just going to be an expensive novelty that won't replace the ICE car. The market will speak and the manufacturers will respond by not making them. Then what?
Hi Termoil,
You are distorting what I said, how is legislation to improve vehicle efficiency x2 "legislating away the ICE"?.
Walking was the only method of travel in the European middle ages, so villages were generally spaced 3 miles apart, because a 6 mile round trip was considered about as far as most people would be prepared to travel. Now some people walked across Europe, but they were the exception.
Our cities cannot function as they exist now or could exist in the next 25 years without some form of individual transport and some mass-transport. Both are needed. At best we may be able to go half-way to having a city-wide Metro in 25 years. So we will need at least 50% of the VMT that we have today, based on cities in Europe with much better mass-transit than is likely to be build in Australia or NZ, and higher population densities.
If you think we will have 50% of todays oil supply available in 25 years you are very optimistic.
If you want to keep a Commodore parked for the next 20 years, that's your choice. I sold my 1989 model Commodore a few years ago for scrap, because I couldn't afford a vehicle using 14L/100Km, and replaced it with a 6L/100 Km vehicle. If you think petrol is going to be 50cents/L, I made a poor decision, but if its going to be >$2/L it was a good decision.
The least painful solution for a post peak-oil world will be to replace ICE vehicle transport with electric. I doubt that there is going to be much choice, it will be electric vehicles, electric trains/trams, bicycles or walking. Then again, we could go back to good old reliable wood and coal burning steam cars or horse drawn transport! I wonder how I will manage using my Lap-top on unreliable Li batteries?
Neil,
The steam driven car was never that popular and I think it is a useful analogy for the electric car. It couldn't compete with the horse for either range or versatility and therefore never really achieved the mass market it needed in order to scale up production and bring down costs. The electric car may be doomed to the same fate. The old technolgy may simply be too dominant to defeat and people may adapt to travelling a lot less, reorganising on a scale that is adapted to the available fuel supply or simply abandoning the living arrangements that require them to be dependent on personal mobility.
I like you reference to European villages. In some way we are going to have to re-create our villages even if they exist within a larger city. I like to concentrate on what can be achieved rather than wishing and hoping for a techno fix (electric car) that has so far proven illusive.