Future Cars: Electric and Autonomous Vehicles

[Mdcastle]

Sounds good to me, and while we're at it we can remove all the EPA mileage regulations that make cars more expensive too. I don't think that many people will want to spend $30,000 on a car without test driving it at a dealership, so the free market will keep them in business.

[kiliff75]

Unless we have a price on carbon, EPA mileage regulations actually help the price of the car more closely reflect the total cost to you and to society. Why should other people pay for your pollution? Seems like a more reasonable market if the full costs of the vehicle are included in the cost, and behavior changes to minimize things that have negative impacts on society (driving cars with low gas mileage and high carbon emissions).

[Mdcastle]

Because as a society everyone subsidizes everyone else. You don't see me complaining about subsidizing the people that live in Otsego instead of Bloomington, or that make the choice to have kids (by far and away the most carbon intensive thing you could ever do). Or about how people from the city go out to shop at car dealership in the suburbs instead of having that low value land use in the city for city people.

[VacantLuxuries]

The difference is capitalists never care about negative externalities that are created in the process of their profiteering. We need regulations to help fix the world from being one giant garbage dump at the convenience of Pepsico and Exxon.

Using regulation in order to preserve an obsolete business model is regulatory capture, and it's the sort of crony capitalism I thought capitalists hated.

[tmart]

Transportation is the largest sector of carbon emissions in Minnesota and may even have started to trend upwards again in recent years, so the state pretty obviously has an interest in acting to cut them. Based on the powers the state has, I can see a few options:

• Regulatory approach: adopt CARB regulations (since we're not allowed to write our own) to mandate manufacturers shift to EVs faster
• Market approach: put a price on carbon emissions (as a fuel tax, or a cap-and-trade system, or an increase in upfront or annual registration fees) to make EVs (and car-free options) become more cost-competitive with fossil-burning vehicles and incentivize private companies to invest more in zero-emission tech
• Subsidy approach: pay people to scrap their fossil-burning vehicles, and/or offer tax credits for buying new electric cars/bikes/etc
• Infrastructure approach: instead of focusing on reducing emissions per mile, reduce the total miles traveled, by building out more transit infrastructure, cutting transit fares, and reducing public infrastructure capacity for cars (removing urban highways and free parking, introducing filtered permeability in cities, turning general lanes into bus lanes, etc)
• Land use approach: focused on reducing total mileage, similar to the infrastructure approach, but instead achieves it by locating housing, businesses, and jobs in communities where getting around without a car is easy
• Denialist approach: prioritize cheap cars and cheap gas for the next few years, take no (or only token) action regarding transportation pollution's impact on the long-term stability of the state's climate and environment, and hope that someone else solves the problem for us

Obviously I'm not proposing the last one seriously but a whole lot of GOP and a handful of DFL state senators seem to be. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The others are not mutually exclusive by any means and while we each prefer some over others (not a fan of subsidizing new car purchases personally), the most effective plan probably involves a mix of all of them.

[Bob Stinson's Ghost]

The biggest obstacle to transitioning away from gasoline powered transportation is the fact that oil is priced and traded in dollars. This gives the US a lot of global clout which our leaders are unwilling to surrender. Protecting the the supply of oil provides a rationale for maintaining our gigantic military. In a post petroleum world it will be very difficult to justify maintaining 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers.

[SurlyLHT]

I would love for a Twin Cities community to take advantage of this local company to show the potential for the vehicles. Anyone on here have great ideas for implementation?
"The commercial segment of Polaris Inc. has been making electric low-speed vehicles in its GEM business for years.
Now the Medina-based company is partnering with Optimus Ride in Boston to make those vehicles autonomous"

https://www.startribune.com/polaris-exp ... 600040161/

[MNdible]

I've suggested this before, but I feel like a great opportunity will be for some of the major employers along SWLRT to bridge the "last mile" gap between stations and their offices with technology like this. Presumably much cheaper to run these than to purchase and maintain parking structures.

[mulad]

Is anyone aware of efforts to require some amount of charging infrastructure in apartment buildings, either in specific cities or statewide? The last place I lived at least had some standard 115V wall outlets, and there was someone who had a Tesla using it fairly regularly. At 2-4 miles of range per hour, it isn't a whole lot, but it could still provide well upwards of 10,000 miles of range annually. Level 2 chargers would be better, since they'd at least double that, but probably aren't as necessary as people might think.

[alexschief]

Yes, Minneapolis' proposed new parking regulations would...

Require electric vehicle charging for new parking
o 10% of spaces for residential, office, and hotel must have L2 chargers
o 5% of other non-residential spaces must have L2 chargers
o Most spaces will have a requirement to provide electric vehicle charging infrastructure that helps prepare for an increase in future use
o Smaller residential developments are not required to supply chargers, but must be EV ready