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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2429 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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That’s like asking why conservatives are so angry about electric vehicles. It turns out they have the bandwidth to judge more than one thing at once.

People who hate Russia’s stance on homosexuality probably also distrust it for invading Ukraine, repressing political dissidents, and generally pretending that it’s still the Cold War. Sometimes one or another is in the news. In this case, it appears to be due to updated laws criminalizing the rainbow flag as comparable to al-Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, the Azov Battalion, and…Meta.

To be fair, I am baffled by conservatives being mad about electric vehicles. I had a conversation with my dad where we talked about my wife's electric car, and Dad said he would never get one. Which I said makes sense, as he lives on a farm so he has very different car needs than my wife and I do. He replied that even if his car usage was different such that it made sense to get an electric car, he still wouldn't get one.

I didn't get into it with him cause I value family harmony, but I just can't understand that mindset. Why not get an electric car if it makes sense for your needs? Just to own the libs or something? It seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face to me. I get opposing electric car mandates. I get not getting electric if the cost-benefit analysis isn't favorable. But I don't get opposing electric on principle.

Opposing electricity is encouraged in communities that encourage being personally prepared, from my anecdotal experience. The common conception is that in an apocalypse/national emergency/act of war, electricity will be unreliable and so electric cars won't drive.

We discussed flow restrictions on showerheads last week, but I think the conservative view here sees electric car (mandates) coming from the same voices that brought us water-saving showerheads, and expect similar results. Sure, there might be some modest improvement in residential water usage (which is pretty immaterial outside of California, Nevada, and Arizona), but it comes at a cost those writing regulations refuse to admit, and so there is an expectation that we'll all be stuck with terrible cars "for the environment".

See also being forced to ride the bus ("take mass transit!"), or use CFLs back when they had terrible spectra. The conservative view here fears being forced to take quality of life hits "for the greater good" by someone who has drastically different values defining quality of life. On the other hand, I think (good) LED lightbulbs have proven themselves better than incandescent in almost every way short of an Easy-Bake oven, so it isn't always a miss.

The reason electric cars exist, except for Tesla, is due to a mandate to destroy normal cars forever.

Accepting the car means accepting the mandate’s legitimacy. It’s that simple.

Why is Tesla the exception?

Tesla was the first manufacturer to make a non-concept level electric car that was actually better and desirable instead "like regular car but shittier because it's electric".

This doesn't answer the question of what makes it less shitty than the other electric cars. Or is this just about how things were 10-15 years ago?

The question was "the reason electric cars exist", ie. why did manufacturers start building electric cars?

Back when Tesla hit the scene with Roadster and then Model S they were the only electric car manufacturer who tried to make an actually good car with clear benefits (performance, styling, driving experience). Meanwhile every other manufacturer made an electric car that was worse than regular cars where the selling point was just "for the environment!". Of course Tesla's success forced the other manufacturers to react and start building actually decent electric cars.

Does this mandate also exist in China, where EVs make up about half of new car sales?

When you asked this question, did you expect the answer to be "no"? I had my own suspicions, but I spent about 20 seconds googling.

A looming crisis is brewing in China, as hundreds of thousands of unsold, polluting gas-powered vehicles may be rendered unsellable due to incoming emissions rules. The new Chinese emissions rules were announced all the way back in 2016 and are set to go into effect in July.

China plans to phase out conventional gas-burning cars by 2035. This second one is older, so I don't know if they pulled a California since it was published. Apparently individual Chinese provinces are moving faster to ban ICE. They're also subsidized by the state.

In America learning to drive a car is a rather formative experience, and they're crucial for mobility in rural areas. How should we expect rednecks (and those sympathetic towards them!) to react when Washington D.C. or California start fucking with them, their availability, the specs they're allowed to have?

@SubstantialFrivolity

For the record, I strongly oppose a ban on ICE vehicles. Let the market decide if they stay or go. An EV happens to make sense for my wife and me, but I will never ever be ok with mandates.

But since you know the mandates exist, why are you baffled people opposed the project? Shouldn't it make perfect sense to you?

Pollution restrictions are not per se a ban on gas cars. If restricting exactly how many noxious fumes cars may emit counts as "fucking with the specs" then that war was lost in the 70s with the clean air act. Nevertheless, gas cars have prospered since the seventies. I don't think it's reasonable to expect zero restrictions on what are textbook externalities, no matter how great the private benefits of cars are.

The ICE-only phaseout is more like what I was thinking of, so thanks for the link. Although I personally like hybrids a lot, I can understand people being upset about it.

Hybrids are also a straightforwardly superior technology to pure-play ICE for pretty much every use case except long-haul freeway driving. They're not backyard-maintainable, but nor are modern ICEs. (And the backyard-maintainable ICEs of the late C20 were so polluting that in a world where alternatives exist, they really shouldn't be allowed in cities or suburbs).

I still miss those illegal German diesel engines that cheated the emissions tests though. Performance competitive with petrol, and you could get from London to well past Edinburgh on one tank of diesel.

They're not backyard-maintainable, but nor are modern ICEs.

My sense is that the Toyota Dynamic Force engines are still mostly backyard-maintainable (there will always be a question of level of effort as well as some specific sub-systems), and they're pretty darn efficient. Seems they got there with just good old fashioned design optimization and only a couple additional computer-controlled subsystems.

Noah Smith has written about this. Basically, instead of looking at global warming as an engineering problem to be solved, the environmentalist left took it on as a moral crusade, and as a justification for left-wing policies in general.

Then due to negative polarisation, right-wingers moved to opposing it (owning the libs, basically).

Probably the best way to get your dad to buy an electric car would be to talk about how based Elon Musk (and therefore Tesla) is.

I’ve said before that Trump can single-handedly ruin nuclear power for decades, not by opposing it, but by convincing Democrats that those Greens are useful allies.

Toxoplasma is real.

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