Note that "EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane ... probably less than $10k." is a pretty good description for the electric cargo bikes that are already starting to emerge.
I would love to see cities and towns adapt faster to accommodate things like this:
The Car-Replacement Bicycle (the bakfiets) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
How to Transport Kids by eBike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCvx65egUDE
This American Mayor is Creating the Ultimate Biking City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVWv9O0qQ4
[1]: https://na.urbanarrow.com/ [2]: https://onomotion.com/en/ [3]: https://www.babboe.co.uk/ [4]: https://www.carlacargo.de/products/ecarla/
Also, others made the point already about rent for the space to park on (most likely outcome would be high taxes and rent for RV parks (don't think they'd be much more efficient than regular housing on a sqft basis, especially if you're not putting them on top of each other, Ready Player One style).
I can't speak for everyone but the way I would circumvent that would be to buy a piece of unrestricted or minimally restricted land that allows an RV as a primary dwelling. This requires some research on youtube among the existing RV nomads. Non-farmable land is very affordable. Some states are stricter on this than others and some counties within those states also vary a bit. Land is an investment vs dumping money into rental space. A few acres of land, some solar panels on the RV and some next to it should provide enough power to get by. The missing piece is water and one can plonk down a large water tank and have a truck come out to fill it every 3 to 6 months and/or do rain capture assuming one knows how to implement proper filtration. Some states promote rain capture and some ban it. Many RV's already support composting toilets and have grey/black water tanks. Some states will require installing a septic system, whereas some states have rules on the books but nobody to enforce it. I would suggest also having an EV motorcycle or street legal side-by-side for going into town for groceries. That requires some research as well as to which of those is supported by that state/county/province. For internet there are 4G/5G modems specifically designed for RV's and boats that have multiple external roof mounted antennas and can use multiple SIM cards.
Plenty of people/road-nomads already do this. They have a piece of land that is their legal domicile and sometimes they just stay put on that piece of land. My preference if I went this route would be to have a hybrid RV for times when solar is not cutting it.
The downside of all this would be finding people that can perform advanced maintenance on the RV and staying close enough that a towing job would not be crazy expensive. Some mechanics can bring a subset of their tools out to the remote location. I would suggest researching RV's that are based on common platforms. The upside is that one could research which states have the most conducive weather, taxes, laws, culture, etc... and if any of that changes, just buy land in a better state, pack up your solar panels and move there. When the market is right, sell the previous few acres of land and the old tank. Tanks are affordable and it's easier to just buy a new one than to clean and move the old one. Another potential downside to putting an RV in the middle of nowhere is that when dodgy people find out someone is alone and isolated, they become a target. One has to be ready to defend themselves. Try to find a piece of land that is not visible from any of the roads.
My recommendation is just learn how to repair the RV yourself. RVIA has an online cert program you can take for $300.
I know how to repair RVs and I just had to pay $6700 to repair a $55K RV before selling it. Do not underestimate how expensive RVs are to pay someone to fix.
The people that build "custom schoolies" are especially on their own unless they are part of many forums/facebook groups of schoolies and can find a mechanic that knows how to work on school buses.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53fkkxc-IWw [video, annoying music]
- Busses. How do you make them half width? (or perhaps, uncharitably, do you think public transportation is worthless?). If busses stay the same width how do you write the driving regulations for mixed width vehicles and retrain the driving public so that fatalities do not skyrocket.
- Bulk delivery vehicles. Same as above.
- Half width means less vehicle stability at speed. Reducing vehicle height is constrained by human size. Worse stability means reduced speeds to reduce fatalities. Consider San Francisco, where a large proportion of the city cars are from commuters traveling 30-60 miles per day. What are the rules for commuter roads with mixed width vehicles?
- Reduced width would likely mean smaller wheels, increasing rotational speed. Tire and brake pad wear is now a non-trivial factor of car pollution. Half width vehicles would / could make this worse.
Or public transit becomes an enormous fleet of half-width on-demand driverless microcars
A desiel semi is much lighter than an Electric Semi is. That's why Tesla Semi hasn't launched yet. They are currently trying to change the regulation for maximum allowances on US Roads from 10k to 14k.
The Delta-V on an electric vehicle has the problem that the battery scales more proportionately to weight and range than a desiel equivelent. Desiel gas has a tremendous amount of energy stored so compactly that is impossible to match with electric batterys.
On the other hand Volvo (and Scania) launched electric trucks years ago and I see them driving around all the time. So whatever is preventing Tesla trucks from launching it is related to them and their design and goals, not a fundamental problem with the concept of electric trucks.
It's basically a thought terminating cliche at this point.
Hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense and cheap. It’s possible to pack so much more energy in such a lighter, more compact space with them that the overall vehicle can be dramatically lighter and have longer range at the same time.
Additionally, doing so is so cheap, it often more than makes up for any efficiency issues, especially if the comparatively better end to end efficiency (and lower pollution and maintenance costs) of a EV comes with convenience issues like reduced range, lack of infrastructure, etc.
For mid-sized commuter vehicles, it’s trending more and more towards EVs as prices drop, charging infrastructure improves, and usage patterns make it convenient (such as at-home or at-office charging).
It still has a way to go for things like commercial or heavy recreational trucks, RVs, etc. It also has a way to go in smaller vehicles like Motorcycles, where the reduced range (due to some pretty fundamental weight limits) makes them more suitable for moped like inner city commuting or very short range trips.
And that’s compared to normally aspirated gasoline. It’s harder still to beat diesel, especially if super/turbo charged which has better energy efficiency, higher energy density, and except for some jurisdictions cheaper fuel prices.
Heavier vehicles cause exponentially more damage to roads. It’s not like building roads is an energy free exercise.
They are also significantly more dangerous in traffic collisions. That kinetic energy has to go somewhere when you crash.
Electric cars with current battery tech will only be a stop gap solution until we get something like induction in roads for longer distances.
Personally I think the Dutch and Danes have a better solution already with low tech bike infrastructure and electric or pedal bikes.
It’s cheaper, requires less maintenance and makes their populations healthier.
As for the RV, you still need parking and most people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. Most cities are already strict on RV living, especially long term local RV living; if it became even more popular, they would become even more strict. RV also are impossible to insulate, as a result, frequently follow the weather; majority of people don’t want to be constantly driving around to find and adjust to a new location.
I think you need to see the problem in terms of "bigger, more protected bikes" rather than "tiny cars"
In fact, you already have no right to drive whatever kind of vehicle you want on public roads. There's no part of daily life that's more regulated. And there's no interesting argument about freedom to be had here. We build the roads as a society, so we have every reason to make rules about what kinds of vehicles are allowed on those roads.
Today, we allow an absurd range of plainly unsafe vehicles on our roads, but I think the status quo is untenable. As technology makes the cars safer it's going to be harder and harder to justify allowing giant vehicles piloted entirely at the discretion of flawed humans. In a world where the car knows you're asking it to speed up into a crosswalk full of children and can prevent you from doing it, it's basically absurd to insist that the car should instead respond only to the driver's whims. What I'm trying to say is that size is just one aspect of this. We need to entirely rethink what we're allowing on public roads.
Largest issue is not even death and pollution, it’s that they literally enable culture division and isolation - which is toxic to real progress.
It has already happened. I drive an ebike in Paris almost every day. It's even smaller than a "half vehicle" and has absolutely zero protection, save for the helmet. I wouldn't trade an ebike for a "thin car" though, because an ebike can go anywhere. It's an incredible level of freedom.
Some people are already driving smaller cars than I imagined we'd be comfortable with, but I can see ways to ease more people into the idea of trading their safety for a smaller car. High gas prices help, but things like reducing lane sizes just enough to make driving smaller cars feel more comfortable, but not enough to be too dangerous for larger vehicles, increasing the amount of small car only parking spaces, and lots of advertising money would probably convince a lot of people small cars are what they want. If car manufactures start making more and more tiny cars (especially inexpensive cars) many people aren't going to have much of a choice. I'm pretty sure most of the American public could be sold on it eventually if someone were willing to spend the money.
There's no need to imagine what that that would be like, because the situation has existed for years already: what you describe is just everyday reality for motorcyclists.
A few people with "camp mode" is a complete different proposition to millions of people with mobile homes. Not to say it couldn't be done, but cities would have to become mobile labour camps and the infrastructure costs would be significant - mostly the cost of space formerly used by brick and mortar real estate.
And owners would be charged rent for use of facilities. So that $70k is not going to be rent free.
How is living in an EV RV any different from living in a motor home today? Most people want an actual home/apt not a cramped car with no space, its not the same thing at all.
They're still going back and forth in the courts but Mountain View, LA, San Diego and probably other such places that become the next target will probably fight this legally, for the same reasons they fight any other type of cheap housing.
The infrastructure to fast charge EVs at home will require power grids to be of much higher capacity.
Also all the fossil fuel that we burn now needs replacement by non fossil fuel sources - other than Nuclear nothing can deliver.
We already know how slow the world is at re-embracing nuclear, so don't hold your breath just yet
> the world's largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are electric
What about cruise ships, freighters, freight trains, and aircraft carriers? They're diesel or nuclear-powered. Or maybe nuclear still counts as having an electric motor, just with a nuclear generator instead of a battery?
> only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core
Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
Available in Europe since 10 yrs ago. Not a rare sight, but not super-popular either.
Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric)
With small cars in a city core these cars rarely go faster than 40 mph and on average about 30mph with traffic lights so you don't need the separation that you would want on a freeway. Several vehicles like this are already available or under development. I suspect that a Smart Car would come very close to meeting this spec already.
> Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
1. Trains derail, crash, etc.
I live in a city that's a rail hub. We probably have a derailment every couple years even with annual rail/rail bed maintenance. They will fix the rail, the roads around it, and have everything back up and running in less than 2 days. You spill some diesel and it sucks to clean up. You spill Li and you walk into "environmental disaster."
2. Money. When it's cheaper, then they'll get serious.
To the last point it's similar to fleet vehicles for large fleets. You see a lot of pledges to go all-electric by 20XX. That's because replacing a fleet requires a TON of capital already, and fundamentally changing the vehicles is an order of magnitude higher.
Think about a delivery hub like the post office. They have a network already established for purchasing gasoline, delivering it, local storage, refueling process, etc. They have operations built around it.
You now likely have to have parallel infrastructure for electric, which means negotiating major power consumption with each local power company, purchase of new or adjacent land, buildout, etc. Can you refuel in the same time window to not effect operations? If not, can you shift operations without impacting customer experience?
Now, you will see companies deploying all-electric in niches, especially when it opens up new market opportunities. Those tiny urban vehicles could enable vehicles to go where they could not before, reducing time spent walking. And that might have a shorter timeline than autonomous drones that don't run old ladies over.
I think even more than cruise ships and freighters, the biggest all-electric vehicle impact would come from all-electric airplanes. They still haven't gotten off of leaded fuel (see #2). The emissions there are massive.
But I think #1 will be a barrier there too. And the bureaucracy will slow it way down just like it did with unleaded jet fuel, which exists now, but is essentially unused.
And I guess a theme I'm coming up with is that electric is cool and all, but won't impact big % points of emissions until it's adopted by cargo, not human transport.
And cases like trains and large ships that are electric, but fuel the local electric with local power generation bring up the other big point: How would we even begin to power cargo? It's orders of magnitude more massive than consumer vehicles and it's growing so fast that supply can't meet demand.
Anyway, whatever. I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be an expert on any of this, and I'm rambling.
The battery concept is kind of dumb and a relic of IC engine thinking. For local urban journeys you could half-size the cars, provide common power, and add automated navigation to optimise density and efficiency.
Getting rid of batteries would hugely lower cost and weight.
Cross-country is a different problem, of course.
It provides a lot of flexibility.
Battleships, Oil tankers, Oil rigs, container ships, nuclear submarines... Are all NOT electric.
EDIT - think of nuclear submarine as a swimming nuclear power plant
i don't think anyone's going to bother
i think we'll just all do what paris did and kick them out, rather than to try to create a whole new batch of differently-sized ones
what about parking, that will just become another ever increasing form of rent.
First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.
Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.
Remember, you read it here first.
EDIT ... a few typos