Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

JKenH

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Definitely the data, especially as Tesla has 100's of thousands of cars out there right now collecting a ton of data every day. They are clocking up billions of miles of data v's at best millions by other companies.

Their big bet though is going with cameras not LIDAR due to the limitations on LIDAR in bad weather.

I've no idea if Tesla will pull this off, but they seem serious about autonomy in just a few years, and have just bought Deepscale AI, a small company but top talent and lower power running of neural nets, also their first products leverage data coming from cameras, which circles us back to Tesla.

Hyperchange article on Deepscale purchase with Galileo explaining potential reasons/benefits.

Regarding autonomy, it's essential for cheap taxi's, and cheap taxi's might displace most owned transport from cities if it gets cheap enough (per mile).

Tesla's already have lower crash rates per mile, and even lower again when autopilot is engaged, so fully autonomous cars should be far, far safer in the medium term - might even force us out of the driving seat via insurance costs!

Maybe we will end up with autonomous driving zones where the road infrastructure is suitable taking over automatically once a vehicle enters the zone. This might have myriad benefits such as control of speed and distance between cars for optimum traffic flow, lane control, simultaneous launch at traffic lights, convoy driving

Martyn1981

Short FT article on investments in FF v's RE.

Clean energy shares streak ahead of fossil fuel stocks

JKenH

Latest new car registration figures from SMMT. Tesla has slipped out the top ten but sales are up as are BEV sales generally. If we assume that ‘Other imports’ is Tesla then they took just under half the September BEV sales compared to two thirds in August.

https://www.smmt.co.uk/2019/10/new-car-market-declines-in-first-nine-months-of-2019-as-brexit-fears-hold-buyers-back/

pile-o-stone

Thanks for your attempts to keep this thread on topic Ken, very much appreciated.

Good to see the takeup of BEVs increasing.

zeupater

mmmmikey wrote: »

But isn't that a massively complicated way of solving the problem?

Hi

It's really a case that the solution is overcomplicated yet the benefit is oversimplified & overstated at the same time ...

When a 'personal use' vehicle is empty it's parked and therefore not consuming energy or taking up space on the road, neither of which are the case of an autonomous 'TaaS' vehicle - the example given in the post you quoted doesn't allow for this as it could easily be argued that 35 Millon vehicles with 5% usage could be replaced by 12 million with 30% usage or 24 Millon with 15% usage ... whichever is the case, the fact that empty vehicles will be travelling must be a logical consideration!

HTH
Z

GreatApe

JKenH wrote: »

Fuel duty should be scrapped and replaced by “road pricing” to herald the rise in electric cars, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

The IFS said Government revenues from fuel duty, which is just under 58p per litre and worth almost £34 billion to the Treasury, will all but disappear if the UK achieves its target of almost all cars being electric or zero-emission by 2050.

This means the Government should urgently review how it taxes car travel to take account of the “societal costs” from continued congestion that damages the economy, accidents and noise, according to the IFS.

It said the “ideal” approach would be a system of “road pricing” with charges varying according to where and when drivers travel.

Similar to congestion charges, motorists would pay more to drive at peak times or in busy areas but it would cost less than now to travel in less congested areas. It says a “stepping stone” to such a system could be a flat rate tax per mile driven.

“There is an advantage in acting quickly: it will be much harder politically to introduce such taxes only after revenue from fuel duties has fallen much further and many people are driving hybrid or electric cars in the expectation of paying little tax on them,” said the IFS.

Sales of plug-in passenger cars achieved a 2.1 per cent market share of new car sales in 2018 or 212,000 vehicles, up from 1.3 per cent in 2017, and 0.86 per cent in 2016. If hybrids are added, it takes it to six per cent.

Rebekah Stroud, co-author of the IFS report, said: “Cuts to fuel duties over the last two decades have contributed towards revenues’ being £19 billion a year lower than they would have been. Another 2p cut, as reportedly mooted by the Prime Minister, would cost a further £1 billion a year.

“The bigger challenge is that revenues are now set to disappear entirely over coming decades as we transition to electric cars.

“The government should set out its long-term plan for taxing driving, before it finds itself with virtually no revenues from driving and no way to correct for the costs – most importantly congestion – that driving imposes on others.”


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/10/03/scrap-fuel-duty-introduce-road-pricing-herald-rise-electric/

Per mile charging (10p a mile) quite data complex and a bit intrusive certainly doable

Much higher road tax (£60 a month) simplicity

But yes the report is correct this should be done sooner rather than later or it will be politically difficult to go from zero to £35 billion per year in taxes for EVs

1961Nick

JKenH wrote: »

Latest new car registration figures from SMMT. Tesla has slipped out the top ten but sales are up as are BEV sales generally. If we assume that ‘Other imports’ is Tesla then they took just under half the September BEV sales compared to two thirds in August.

https://www.smmt.co.uk/2019/10/new-car-market-declines-in-first-nine-months-of-2019-as-brexit-fears-hold-buyers-back/

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Tesla's figures aren't supply limited by the TM3. Until that's resolved, we won't really know what the demand actually is.

Solarchaser

Yeah I'd definitely agree about supply limitation for Tesla.

The road taxing will come, but it cant come for a few years, because the government need to tempt people into EV's with the cost savings to offset the mileage anxiety.
Only when EV's are getting to the 50% mark of all road transport, and people have realised how much they are saving, will the government be able to tax the EV's

Martyn1981

Solarchaser wrote: »

Yeah I'd definitely agree about supply limitation for Tesla.

They are all over the place (so to speak ), lately doing well in Australia, and setting records in the Netherlands where the TM3 took ~15% of the whole new car market.

So they seem to be 'doing' bursts, or something similar, in different countries, with monthly sales varying massively. Plus of course, they only have about 25k - 27k TM3's each month for the whole World, so when the greedy Netherlees pocket about a quarter of those ...... ?

Still, Chinese bookings from the US are now coming to an end, as production starts to get ready in the Shanghai Gigafactory, so more for everyone else perhaps in Q4 / Q1(2020)?

The Netherlands Surpasses Wildest Predictions For Tesla Model 3 Sales

What fun, and we haven't even started on the rumours that Tesla has been sandbagging the info on the TMY, and may start production earlier next year.

Roll on the disruption, and if TAAS holds it's horses, roll on my not so new Tesla in about 6yrs time.

Martyn1981

Really this a bit of PV news, but I think this thread is more appropriate as it's about lower energy homes.

Low carbon tech ‘vital’ to Future Homes Standard as solar’s role is talked up

Option one would deliver a 20% reduction in carbon emissions through “very high” fabric standards. Option two would deliver a 31% reduction based on both better fabric standards and carbon-saving technology such as solar PV, the consultation says.

In the consultation, the ministry said option two is its preferred option as “it would deliver more carbon savings and result in lower bills for the householder".

The document suggests that under option two, an additional £4,847 would be added to the build-cost of a new home, with savings on energy bills of £257 a year. This drops for flats to £2,256 per flat, with carbon savings also dropping to 22%.