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there's always rickshaws...

 

And there will be way more of those than regular cars in heavily populated areas in the future.

 

There's a problem with that - flying. The common alternative to flying is driving, and driving is massively lower in carbon emissions than even the most efficient airliner.

Taking my Prime on a driving trip - and burning a bit of gasoline along the way - with my family of four reduces CO2 by a factor of 10 compared with the alternative of taking an airliner somewhere.

 

I can't remember which thread it was in, but I've earlier made the prediction that the Honda EV Cub motorcycle is the one. That is, it's the EV destined to change the world. I expect it to sell in greater numbers and cover more fleet miles than anything else.

The density map almost works as a public transportation availability map. It's not perfect. Germany isn't as dense as India but they've got a much better rail system, for example.

Low density routes are the bane of public transport systems. I think we can fairly look to some real innovation in dispatch management, dynamic routing and automation to improve the situation. To that end, life was never easy in the American West. I think history will show that for a while, it got only as easy as spending a lot on gas and tires.

Bringing it back to electric pickup trucks: We're still going to need small short-range haulers. The mistake I see is in overbuilding the creature comforts that would support long trips.

Even just changing the way range is advertised would help. I'd like to see one claim "50 mile range" and have it be understood that this is 50 miles pulling an 8000lb sailboat up a 6% continuous grade at -30°F on the battery's 10th birthday. You might go further without those loading conditions. The point is I'd rather be sold the gritty truth than a fluffy lie.

 

didn't you mean cigarette boat?

 

I've seen it commonly cited that a modern airliner can deliver roughly 80 seat-miles per gallon. That's fantastic vs. one guy alone in his Tahoe, but not-so-good against a family of 4 in a PHEV.

 

Nah I specifically typed 'sailboat' because with that giant keel most of the boat is out of the truck's slipstream. More work.

 

Electric planes are in their early stages of development... As Elon Musk explains in a portion of Joe Rogan's nearly three hour long podcast there's two stages to flight that require two different propulsion systems if you aren't using fossil fuels... The initial stage that's very energy intensive is getting up to the 30-40K foot altitudes. The second stage, which requires way less energy is traveling, or rather slowly descending to your destination once you get up to that altitude. Musk has no plans to build airplanes anytime soon, but from an engineering perspective, we need to rethink air travel because fixed wing aircraft just like ICE is a very old way of thinking and there's so many more ways to do it than that.

 

It's more nuanced than that. Most airliner-sized jet engines are quite efficient, many have long been at the 40% level only recently achieved by groundbound piston engines.

Cutting the duration of travel (via higher speeds) can help the traveler to consume fewer resources at the destination. A few less room-nights in hotels matter. Less wasted food from fewer meals taken in the restaurants that need to sell 1500 calories per plate to break even.

Safety matters too- air travel is (presently) far safer than anything we do on the road. Lots of consumption, waste and carbon emissions can result from a road accident, emergency response, damaged vehicle repair/replacement and injury recovery. It all adds up.

 

Safety didn't matter to Boeing did it... They decided profit was more important... I'm sure if you add up all the costs related to those two plane crashes and divide it by the hundreds of lives lost, a simple fatal car accident would be pennies on the dollar compared to how much was collectively lost due to their corruption.

And your duration of travel time creating less waste because of faster speeds is the same arguments the railroads first used. But instead of it making existing travel more efficient, it made it so people and goods could be transported way more often and the amount of people and cargo being shipped went thru the roof...

Also your previous reference of car driving and plane flying doesn't make sense... Here's a more clear version of emissions:

 

Yeah, and heavily limited by batteries. I've been flying all-electric model aircraft since 1986 and I've followed this closely and done the math a lot.

He's basically wrong about that, if that's what he said. That's only true for the shortest flights (under 30 minutes) and they don't get that high. For most flights, the primary energy use is in cruise, and long-haul flying is common and growing. The average length of a single departure is around 1,000 miles and almost all the energy used on such a flight is used in cruise. Those little-looking jet engines on your wings (some like the GE90 aren't so little) might be putting out 15-50 megawatts continuously in cruise. Think about that and multiply it by the number of hours in your flight and by the number of engines on your plane.

No more efficient ones, though. Single-rotor helicopters are ~10 times less efficient, and multi-rotors are worse than that (rotary wing efficiency basically goes inversely with rotor loading). Fixed-wing aircraft are far and away the most efficient way to fly.

Eviation knows this and that's why they are using every trick available to make their commercial electric airplane as efficient as possible - V-tail, pusher, props on the wingtips that counter-rotate relative to the tip vortex, non-round fuselage shape, carbon, modest speed, everything. This is because being ultra-efficient is the only way to get any sort of range out of today's very-low-energy batteries. And even so, their range is going to be like 600 miles - well less than even the average commercial flight, not to mention the long-haul monsters over 10 times that length. That means, I'd need to land once for energy to get from Denver to LA, not to mention something like LA to New York. it's maximum range is something like Denver to Kansas City or San Diego to San Francisco.

 

You should have read the note under the three-stars and remembered that I was comparing to my Prime with family of four.

 

You also have to remember that in the civilized world where they heavily invest in public transit, the most common alternative to flying is by high speed to medium speed rail... In the US it's so uncivilized that the rubber, oil, auto & truck manufacturers colluded amongst themselves to buy up alternative mass transit and shut it down because the profit margins from doing this were too big to resist, which has been incredibly destructive to quality of life in the US.

 

The traffic factor increased precisely because the efficiency was increased. That's what happens in open markets.

Not an entirely serious suggestion, but I thought lighter-than-air craft had the fixed-wings beat.

 

I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to Leadfoot, but yet again you just don't get it....

 

The goal of flying is to get there faster, not slower.

I was the one who made the comparison to flying.

 

I was replying to leadfoot's reply not yours! All your hyperbole about how great you are about knowing everything doesn't make for good conversation... That's why I was replying to leadfoot!

 

So you replied to him whereas you were replying to my point.

Yeah, makes sense.

I just did the math. My last trip would have been 1,400kg of CO2 by airliner and 160kg in my Prime, and that ignores the fact that my ground trip had 8 stops instead of 1.

 

See, now you guys have me wanting an electric plane that trails a seven mile electrical cable to pick up grid power from catenary wires along its ground track. Heck, even if it only had that to get up to cruise altitude and a cutover to onboard batteries it would still rock.

Awesome truck thread anyway!

 

There's very little that's open about the capitalist markets... It's the most destructive ideology that's ever been created and closes off the needs of the many for insatiable greed of the few. For only $50K in bribes to congress the O&C land grant gave away every other square mile from the midewest all the way out to the Pacific Ocean to build railroads... That and many others corrupt deeds in the name of the "open" market have decimated the planet and impoverished humans and others species beyond anything we can comprehend and is rapidly pushing the whole planet to the breaking point.