376
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
376 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
59081 readers
3109 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Self driving cars are great and all, but can we get someone seriously working on alternative fuels? EV is really pretty unsustainable. All the resources going to build batteries that are unrecycleable is a massive waste in my opinion. And the unless something drastic changes, the ranges that are needed for logistics and America aren't going to ultimately fix anything.
If they can create an alternative fuel that is significantly less polluting, or figure out how to make hydrogen less explody, the existing infrastructure worldwide of gas stations can still be efficiently used. And hopefully there will be a to retrofit existing vehicles to use this alternatives.
Is this actually the case?
My understanding is that EV batteries are actually very recyclable, up to 90%. I imagine it's more labor intensive than your conventional lead-acid batteries though.
I mean, shouldn't we be working on both? Just because they're working on one, that doesn't necessarily mean they're not working on the other.
They also are working on alternative fuels in a big way. Japan have made some incredible leaps with hydrogen/ammonia based production and fuels, and solid state batteries are looking to be pretty game changing. The EU also included a huge budget to invest in green fuels research (likely because of automotive companies lobbying for it) so plenty is being done. Even if EVs aren't the best currently, increasing the size of the market for them will continue to create investments in serving those markets more efficiently, so we absolutely should keep investing in both.
I'm not an expert or anything, but I doubt we'll see a price-competitive synthetic fuel in the time it takes for renewables to become the standard. Renewable electricity gets cheaper as more panels and turbines are built, so it makes some economical sense too.