Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
GRA said:
Amazing, I provide a single quote from a book I've read multiple times and have handy and you have never read, and yet you can infer from that single quote all the details I've left out (because I'm not going to type the entire book, or even the relevant chapter on commercial vehicles) and tell me what the book says. Tell you what, once you've actually read the book, or some of the others I've mentioned (also "Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America" by Michael Brian Schiffer, and although it covers a wider field, "Bottled Energy: Electrical Engineering and The Evolution of Chemical Energy Storage" by Rich H. Schallenberg), if you want to argue with me about the data or the author's conclusions, I'll be happy to oblige. Until then, you're arguing from a position of ignorance, and it's not worth my time to provide you with all of the info you're missing; you'll have to read them for yourself.
Well you caught me there. I did NOT read the book, because it seems rather obvious that owning multiple vehicles will always be more expensive. And those were the options back then. Renting a gas vehicle only for the times you needed it wasn't an option.
No, you're ignoring (because you haven't read it) the changing use patterns and other factors that also affected the transportation system as a whole. In a horse-drawn age, cities were more compact. All long-distance trips were done by rail (or water), with the horses just taking care of the last mile or two of delivery, and the whole system was matched to the requirements of horses. BEVs were well-matched to those, but allowed an expansion of the area that could be covered. Simultaneously, though, as people bought more cars and roads were built to allow them to drive them, cities spread out more (i.e. the beginnings of car-based sprawl, which streetcars had already started), and BEVs couldn't cover the now even larger delivery areas in the same time, while ICEs could; ICEs were faster, because of their greater range and multiple gears, but also because they were lighter and were able to switch to pneumatic tires earlier than BEVs could. Also, as more and more people bought cars, the need for home delivery dropped, as people just drove to the stores themselves and the need for delivery trucks for small businesses waned. Until DoorDash and the like, who'd heard of a grocery store making deliveries? It was common over a century ago, before fading away until reappearing recently. With the exception of autonomy and connectivity, every single variety and usage of BEVs was tried back then. It's amazing - every time some company announces a whole new way to use BEVs, invariably someone did it 100-120 years ago. Battery leasing, MaaS including subscription services, quick charging stations, swapping, and on and on.
Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
This was what you originally cited (which doesn't require me to read the book):
"As noted above, David Kirsch's "The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History" has comparable costs of BEV delivery vehicles vs. horses and ICEs. Within their best radius (in between the other two), BEVs were cheaper/mile. But ICEs could cover all three radius rings, so even though they were more expensive at shorter ranges, companies with only a small fleet came out ahead because they only needed one type of delivery vehicle instead of two or three"
Just from the wording alone, it's clear that the capital costs of the vehicles was factored in by the businesses making the purchasing decisions. And that shows a higher cost/mile as opposed to a lower _operating cost_ / mile (implied by the first line of the quote). Anyone with any clue about what was available can see that without relying on "studies".
Except that battery service, which often included battery leasing, then as now reduced the capital costs of BEVs, since you weren't paying up front for the battery. You also outsourced battery maintenance to specialists. You have to realize that the typical business only had 1-3 delivery wagons or trucks. If one of your trucks is down, a BEV can't cover an ICE's route, but the reverse isn't true.
Now that they were delivering over a larger area, range, time and flexibility, i.e. operational capabilities rather than cost, were the critical factors, and the market for BEV trucks shrank further, even though they remained less expensive to operate
within their capabilities. This is much the same situation we have with rail (and water) versus truck transport now; trucks are more expensive per mile than either, especially for bulk commodities, but they're also a hell of a lot faster and more flexible and can provide door-to-door service, so they're widely used. It's notable that it's companies like UPS, with huge vehicle fleets, that can afford to experiment with AFVs of all types and specialize. Same goes for bus fleets - sheer size makes specialization practical.
Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
Speaking of studies. It's been billions of miles since the last AP mis-use fatality. Isn't it becoming clearer that the roads are actually safer with Tesla's rapid iteration path versus waiting for the perfect level 5 autonomous vehicle?
Billions of miles? Did you miss this post in that topic:
https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=22213&start=590#p576858
Maybe Tesla has enough cars on the road now that they can rack up billions of miles in the past 6 weeks - IDK. As soon as Tesla is willing to turn all their data over to an independent agency for verification and that claim is confirmed, I'll be the first to say so. For now, any such claim remains so much PR fluff, and I don't put any more faith in it than I would any other company making such claims.
BTW, I've never said that we have to wait for L5. What I've said is that we have to have acceptable risk, and as I recently read somewhere, historically acceptable risk has been defined as consent. There's no practical way to get the consent of every single driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist or whoever else may be put at risk by AVs, so we have to do it as a society, i.e. via government monitoring and regulation, rather than having a company make that decision. IMO, NHTSA has fallen lamentably short in that.