"Combustible mixture of the arrogant ignorance in science and financial- political power will blow up into our faces." - Carl Sagan.
At gridlock boredom, I took a squint left. "Look, Tesla is right next to us!!" I poked my friend in the unshared excitement. Then I gazed at the front wheel to see how engineers handle the hushed extra weight but hyped agility – banal oversizing (still, suspension failures have been reported). The driver's smug grin at me said,"You can't afford it..." Traffic moved. He jerked and halted as traffic stopped in just 15 m.
Showing off, he wasted 40Wh, damaging the battery with peak current and the environment with brake pads and tire rubber dust. Though it's only 0.05% of Tesla's full charge, this energy suffices a kilometer walk, 4 km ride on an e-bike, or 10 km in FELA - enclosed power-assisted trike.
Humans have evolved reasoning, some of which is in some cultural patterns. The rest is habitual unreason becomes ecocidal to the degree of a threat to our civilization.
Energy use per capita correlates with the advance of civilization. However, the true measure must be the energy efficiency while conspicuous consumerism and waste is a sign of civilization's decay. Average North American consumes twice the amount of energy than West European "coinciding" with much higher incidents of obesity; 60x of a Nigerian's!! Up to a third of the energy is used by transportation, 75% by private cars.
We need personal mobility, not cars. FELA would meet this need in terms of performance and comfort. As for excitement and safety for all, FELA beats cars, too.
In life cycle assessment (LCA), effective speed, accounting for time spent on the job to cover transport expenses, justifies vehicle use. FELA’s effective speed is 3.5 times that of the other conventional modes of urban mobility except for ebikes (estimate below).
The Faster Car on Datasheet, the Slower it is in Real Life.
With the price of a car, every cost, whatever it is - service, fuel/energy, repair, insurance, etc. goes up. The sum of all those costs is Total Cost to Own a vehicle (TCO).
Unless you are one of a few lucky who can’t help but enjoy your working hours, they are subtracted from your life. Suppose you are choosing a personal mobility mode, whether it's gonna be a car, or Tesla 3, riding transit (not to bother with the extra items in household) or FELA, you run a spreadsheet like this:
Total Costs of Ownership, TCO, and Effective Speed
Initial Data car EV Transit ebike FELA
Vehicle price, in $1,000 30 40 1. 10
Specific energy, Wh/kg 10000 200 200 200
Insurance (age/sex/experience..) $ 4,000 5,000 0 0
Capital cost (bank interest loss),%/y 2 2 2 2
Inspection, $ (1% of price) 300 400 10 100
Taxes for road maintenance, $/y 200 200 0 0
Obligatory service to keep warranty, $ 300 300 0 0
Vehicle efficiency Wh/km 1400 250 12 4.0
Gas or electricity price, $/kWh 0.14 0.10 0.10 0.10
Mileage, 10000 km/y; LIB capacity 60kWh (EV); 500Wh (ebike or FELA
Annual vehicle repair costs, $ 1,000 500 20 20
Li battery service life capacity, MWh 60 0.5 0.5
Parking, $/day 20 20 0 0
Road tolls, $/day 10 10 0 0
Gas or battery price: $1.50/kg; $0.14/kWh
LIB cost, $ 15,000 125 125
LIB mileage, in 1,000km 240 41.7 125
LIB oil change cost per km, $/km 0.01 0.063 0.003 0.001
Tires, $ 600 600 100 150
Tires cost per km, $/km 0.030 0.030 0.005 0.008
Service per km, $/km 0.035 0.094 0.008 0.009
Standing Costs (just to keep it) car EV transit ebike FELA
Depreciation 20% of remaining value/y, $ 6,000 8,000 200 0
Insurance, $/year 4,000 5,000 0 0
Financing/Loan interest, $/year 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Inspection (1% of remaining value) 240 320 8 100
Car tax, $ 300 300 0 0
Cost of capital $/year 600 800 20 200
Total Standing Costs, $: 11,140 14,420 228 300
Running Costs
Fuel or energy, $ 1,909 250.00 12.00 4.00
Annual service or pass for transit, $ 650 1,225 2,000 80 85
Repair or upgrades, $ 1,000 1,000 100 300
Parking, $ 5,200 5,200 0 0
Tolls, $ 2,600 2,600 0 0
Fines (speed/parking.. Tickets), $ 300 300 0 0
Car wash, $ 50 50 0 0
Total Running Costs, $/y : 11,710 10,630 2,000 192 389
Total Costs of Ownership, $/y 22,850 25,050 2,000 420 690
Effective Speed assuming $30/h wage
Working hours to cover T.C.O., h 762 835 67 14 23
Average speed, kph 30 30 10 30 40
Travel time a year, h 333 333 1000 333 250
Total commute-related time a year, h 1095 1168 1067 347 273
car EV Bus Ebike FELA
Effective Speed, km/h 9.1 8.6 9.4 28.8 36.6
As you can see, the driving time is only 30% of the total car-related time. City traffic estimates show that a car with tripled agility averages only 8% time-saving. That raises effective speed by a negligible 2-3%, even assuming no extra costs from added agility (it's B.S. - just look at TCO for "muscle cars"). A significant cut in that 30% involves huge capital for building and maintaining "faster" roads that get zero in a decade due to the "induced demand" phenomenon.
Developing the "counterproductivity" concept, Ivan Illich, to all the above time sinks, added the time in health care wards because of a car crash, in the oil industry to fuel cars...etc., and he got 6 km/h for the real (effective) speed of a car, i.e. you're better off just walking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich.
Uncertainty of the input data I’ve used is in the +/- 10-15% range, but that won’t change the scary for car-junkies conclusion:
Attempts to improve car-centered infrastructure or make better [autonomous] cars are environmentally unaffordable, even disastrous exercises in futility.
The extra fuel costs, wear-tear on the chassis, speeding tickets, and crashes from driving faster would offset the 2% increase in effective speed many times over.
In contrast, any increase in trip speeds for e-cyclists or FELA pilots increases effective speed with 90% efficiency. That is the huge justification for the added complexity of the human-machine synergy rover, FELA. And another implication:
Limiting speeds for pedelecs (e-bikes and FELA are of this type) by 25kph puts a big damper on social progress.
The excellent news for G-force addicts is that a retrofitted with the 100 times smaller than Tesla powertrain FELA will give you even more "high" from the synergy of you and the machine half of your weight.
The effective speed estimate shows that our cars do not save us time for joy, don't make us more accessible to our loved ones, or make us healthier, fit, or happier.
What do you think about the effective speed estimates and conclusions from it?