this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Burning gas is so extremely bad that even throwing away your old ICE car and buying a new electric car is better than driving the ICE car until it „falls apart“. This was the research finding in Switzerland, but this result was so unwelcome that the research got hidden away. https://www.republik.ch/2025/06/11/amtliche-selbstzensur
Energy grid wouldn't survive quick mass EV adoption most likely. Heck, how would you even charge a car if you don't own a house - ideally parking places would have a slow charger where you could recharge car during night for cheap.
We’re blessed that it can survive the datacenters though
Seem like the greatest solution, these EV can also act as battery storage for renewables.
That's tricky though. Would you deplete it during night to have it empty in the morning? Wear expensive battery? Plus, I assume, car is disconnected from grid for most of the day (i.e. when you are at work).
But you park it at work there could be slow AC charger, to slowly charge it when you are away.
Placing solar on rooftop of car also seem as good idea
"solar-powered cars" have been tried many times because it's a great headline, but the math never works. Cars simply don't have enough surface area to capture a lot of solar power. The amount of energy is low enough to not be worthwhile, except in the most extreme edge cases.
You don't have to charge 100% using solar
Litte remarks regarding EV and not having a point of charge at home.
I have an EV but don't own a house to charge it. Neither have a charging point on my appartement parking or my office (too complex/expensive to install). So I delayed buying an EV during few years. But I did the switch last year and don't regret it at all.
The solution?
I found a charging station with good price at 7km of my place.
When I come back from office and I'm starting to be below 30% battery remaining, I go there and charge up to 90% during ~30 min.
I read a book on my tablet while waiting in the car with the music and air conditioning (as it quite hot currently) while charging at approx ~~80/90~~ 45 kW/h... A nice break before going home to be honest ^^
I really handle the EV like a classic combustion engine car but with a small tank. Instead of having 800km of autonomy, i have 400~450km.
The key is to have a reliable and cheap charging station near your daily travel. Best being having it at home but it's definitely not mandatory.
I'm currently at an average of 4.02€ for 100km driven and my charging station doesn't require monthly fee. Just register an account, associate your car once and now it's plug and charge.
I share your view regarding the grid, you need to prepare it properly and good charging station is the first step.
Edit: Fixed the amount I usually charge: it's more around 45kW per charge.
It's cool that charging works for you that good. However, now imagine~~g~~ a rush of new EVs storming your charging point at the same time of the day. And also imagine people driving a lot more than you, charging each day for half an hour - that's quite some time spent as charging point. While I agree that having a charging point at home is not mandatory, it's much much friendlier, specially in case of mass EV adoption where chargers would lag behind demand.
Seems pretty easy, instead of incentivizing and infrastructure around gasoline, you incentivize electric already. Data centers are already pushing this for their own use, why would it be impossible in your mind to do this for a transition to greener energy usage?
No, I don't think so
Everytime you bring it up, you get a whole lot of people with gasoline powered cars getting very angry. Sure batteries are not 'perfect', but they are a whole lot better in almost every way compared to gasoline powered vehicles.
The anger is less about how bad EV's are and more about being expected to buy a hilariously expensive EV when someone has a perfectly functional car. Make them cheaper and people will buy them, because other than the environmental aspect EV's just require less maintenance overall, making them cheaper to run.
I’d rather spend $100k converting an old ICE car to electric than give the auto industry another dime. The surveillance crap is literally a life or death decision for me. I have a 20y/o ice car I’ll likely have to convert, so no one try your dumb “new car math” with me.
If any fuckers want to make what I’m doing illegal, people will die.
Yes THERE is the issue that everyone seems to forget about new cars. I have a project car that I'm thinking will become an EV when it needs an engine because it will be so much easier to deal with. And it won't call home to the feds every day.
Old muscle cars converted to EV I think are so cool. There was a show that converted an old K10 truck and hid the batteries in the bed tool box.
A 80s station wagon, a Country Squire, or 70s luxury cruiser like a Cadillac or Lincoln would be awesome.
EVs, or just newer cars in general, are just so boring and cramped. Not to mention all the connection and surveillance concerns.
Boring, cramped, and almost impossible to see out of.
I think Ford straight-up sells an electric motor swap that will fit right in their older cars.
I have a weird little 4x4 that would be amazing if it were electric. I wouldn't have to worry about getting in a situation where the engine is tilted too much and it's simultaneously starving for fuel and oil.
I'd also like to know why Harley acted so ashamed of the Livewire. Probably one of the coolest things they've done up to the Pan America.
WARNING: PUI
I rode a Livewire on a demo day, and it was amazing. I'd never operated an electric vehicle other than a forklift before I rode that bike, I was ready for the lack of clutch but I wasn't ready for how fast it jumped when I first hit the "gas".
But then I saw the price tag. $15,000 would have been a bit too much, but it's a Harley. $10,000 I would have bought it. But they wanted $30,000 for it. That's CVO money for a short commuter or bar hopper.
The pan-am is a cool bike for sure, I sat on one the day I bought my Nightster and it was ~8k more, but I really considered the financial gymnastics because I would have loved it. I tried a sportster S, which has a de-tuned version of the pan-am engine. It was really quick but the seating position wasn't for me. The Nightster has mid controls and is very lightweight. It's a lot easier to ride long distances, but the Pan Am would probably be more comfortable.
Oh yeah, I forget how much H-D charges for new* machines. I've only bought 'em used.
Even in the US, there are now a handful of EVs that are price competitive. For example I believe Equinox EV is similar price to Equinox ICE
But I don't want the EV equivalent of an Equinox, I want the EV equivalent of a base model Corolla.
Chevy Bolt? I don’t know anything about it and didn’t bring it up since there’s no direct comparison to highlight price competitiveness. However it’s a reasonably priced vehicle marketed as a value for basic transportation.
But yeah everyone wanted to follow the Tesla model of starting out with expensive models serving a small niche. That worked for Tesla when there was no market, but you can’t expect to copy the approach that established the market when you’re trying to break into an existing market. Legacy manufacturers were stupid for trying so of course never reached the scale for profitability. But then they gave up before pivoting to affordable vehicles, and politics broke everything …… we know there are plenty of affordable value-priced EVs in the world, just not in the US due to politics and legacy inertia.
Didn't they cancel that model?
Yeah, at least twice, but they are making it again this year
So, not an available option.
Are making, not are going to
It's been announced a few times, and then the promised date has moved.
oh wow I didn't know that!
would make sense to give more a lot incentives for EV buying if so!
I wish they weren’t so expensive though.
IMO the biggest incentive of all is that the battery exists for the life of the vehicle and can be recycled at the end (the lithium inside does not disappear!), vs the gas which is literally burning money away.
That and there's only so much gas, once we burn it all up it'll take millions of years to replenish. Yea, you could say the same about battery materials, but those get reused for what a decade before they start to degrade? And the actual energy is free once we have the means to harvest it (wind, solar etc are all "free" infinite energy so long as we have the panels and turbines)
Isn't lithium infinitely recyclable?
Umm, AFAIK, we actually can't make more oil, so there isn't going to be any more gas, just work harder to find what's left. We absolutely should be moving to alternative energies to power civilization.
“Degrade” doesn’t mean “dead”. Once a battery pack has lost sufficient capacity to run your car, it will still have a ton of capacity for other applications. If you’re setting up some grid-scale battery storage, if you can get used packs cheaply enough why would you care that they only hold 70% of a charge? If you can buy two (or more) for the price of a single new battery pack you’re coming out way, way ahead.
And even if you then run those until they only hold 20% charge, it’s likely not all of the individual pack cells are evenly holding charge — some are likely going to be much better than others. So you can remove the “better” cells and reuse those in other applications. At once point in Japan Nissan was selling home power packs from reclaimed Leaf cells from “dead” battery packs.
It’s only once the cells get so bad they can’t be used anymore that you have to worry about recycling them. At that point recycling will likely become a closed loop (as it is with lead for lead acid batteries) — you no longer have to mine more lithium, as the cheapest source of lithium will be from dead cells.
We will eventually get to a virtuous cycle with these cells, but it’s going to take quite a while. Most of the EV cells manufactured to date are still in cars on the road. I wouldn’t expect to see significant recycling until maybe 2035 or 2040 at the current rate.