20+ moving parts versus 2000+ moving parts. Will EVs become way cheaper?

Cheap EVs are very much a reality, just look at the range of budget EVs from China available for under €5k

Will you be able to get a 4 seat EV that can travel 400+km for those kinds of prices?

Probably not, car makers have gotten pretty good at selling people cars they don't need and I doubt they'll stop

Plus as you mentioned, governments make a lot of tax money from higher value cars and there isn't a huge incentive for them to change this

However, there's a strong possibility that car ownership might become a thing of the past for many city dwellers. Small car rental services using cars like the Citroen Ami seem to be getting more popular.

Go Car in Ireland seem to be doing well, and if you don't need a car for commuting then it's probably more cost effective to sign up for a car sharing service like that

By the end of this decade. Car ownership could be a relic of the past. Petrol/Diesel cars non existent. Petrol stations gone.

Livestock industry on the way out also.

By the end of the decade? Doubt it, maybe by 2050

If you want a great example of urban planning in favour of public transport and cycling or walking, look at the Netherlands

They have a very good division between main roads for cars and pedestrian oriented streets. In fact they've a whole plan around this setup

But it's taken over 30 years to get to this point, and that's for a country which is generally knows what it's doing

For our banana republic it'd probably take 60 years 😏

Again, the whole self driving thing is a bit of a sham. A lot of the companies doing research into that lost huge amounts of value over the past two years

Basically investors are realising that true self driving cars are a lot longer out than had been previously advertised

And then when we get self driving cars, who's going to pay for them? They're not exactly cheap in terms of sensors or computing power. It seems more cost efficient to just put a load more buses on the road

Oh for sure, I feel like all the armchair urban planners who say buses are great should be forces to sit at the back of the number 4 from ballymun for a day

In fairness, the folks are very generous, I've never been offered so many drugs in my life 🤣

Not so great on the 41 from Swords, every time I get it on a night out to Dublin there's a fight on the bus (no, I'm not involved 😜)

Maybe I just have bad luck

One of the problems is that per capita Ireland spends very little on public transport compared to other European countries

So we have expensive tickets and rubbish services for it. Also because we have a very spread out population, many bus routes are difficult to make a profit on

At least when they move to electric buses they should be a lot cheaper to run, and things like V2G for bus fleets can be a good money maker on the side

Haha, I used to get the 4 into town from DCU a fair bit. One time we ended up sitting at the back chatting to some homeless guys. One of them probably offered me drugs a dozen times 😂

I think he was giving it away for free as well, generous man. Although he'd just settled a court case againt Dublin Bus for €50k after he got run over by a bus, so maybe that explains why he was feeling generous

He also showed us the foot where he'd had 3 toes amputated after the incident, kinda wishing I'd taken up the offer of the drugs before he did that 🤮

Anyway, back to EVs...

Jokes aside, you've hit on one of the big issues with relying on new techologies to fix climate change, which is that it takes decades to bring products to market and deploy them at scale

We only have until 2030 to achieve a massive reduction in emissions, so basically we've got to work with what's available now

Kinda lends itself to my comment above about better publc transport and urban planning. It's definitely the better plan for the future, but it'll take 30 years or more to implement. Whereas changing the vast majority of transport over to electric is something that's doable with current technology

Similarly, nuclear power plants might be "clean" and "reliable" (spoiler alert, those statements may have been embellished a bit 😏), but it's taken France 14 years and €19 billion to build their latest reactor, and it still isn't finshed

You could install a lot of wind and solar and still have change left over for batteries, pumped hydro and infrastructure upgrade for EV chanrging and V2G with that money and still get it done by 2030

Oh I'm talking about bog standard nuclear fission

Wasn't even thinking about Fusion 😁

There's been a lot of people ringing the nuclear bell recently and while I'm not opposed to nuclear power, I feel everyone talks about the advantages without speaking about any disadvantages or how it won't help fix any of the problems were currently facing

Everyone always points out France as the leading nuclear producer and to be fair they did a pretty good job of building reactors in the 1970s, but there's no point in looking at older designs because no-one is going to build them now. You can't use those as a point of reference, you have to look at the latest which is Flamanville Unit 3, which by all accounts is a bit of a debacle

Hinkley Point C is the same design and it also facing major delays and cost overruns, so it isn't an isolated case

Abundant nuclear power in France is also creating a few other problems

• Cheap energy has led to France having some pretty poor energy efficiency figures. Same happens in the US and other countries where energy is historically cheap
• Nuclear is best suited to baseload power, where a constant load of power is supplied. It doesn't respond to changes in demand very well
• Consequently France has very poor ability to respond to changes in demand, which can be extreme in winter due to poor energy efficiency. They're dependant on being able to export or import lots of power
• If every country in Europe went nuclear, then this ability to respond to demand would disappear, or would have to be met with gas turbines, and we're back to square 1
• Also worth noting that 30% of France's 94 reators are offline because they hit operating problems or have been shut down because they weren't econimical to run

While I'm ranting, here's a few interesting facts about the current (self inflicted) gas crisis

• You may have heard the idea that every time of plenty contains the seeds of the next famine? Turns out the gas industry skipped this lesson
• Historically most gas contract were done on a long term basis, buyers would buy gas for 6 months or so ahead and lock in a set price to insure against fluctuations. This is what would be called the common sense approach
• A few years ago (~2016) there was an oversupply of gas, so the spot price of gas went really cheap. All the gas traders decided to ditch their long term contracts and just buy the spot price because it's always cheap right? It works as long as the gas price doesn't go up (spoiler alert, it did)
• Then we had a cold winter in Eurasia which cut into reserves. On top of that, the pipline from Russia is experiencing "issues" (read into that one as much as you'd like), Norwegian output is down and strong demand from Russia and China is driving up prices
• Spot price shoots up as a result, and consequently energy prices go up because there's no reserves or long term contracts to provide price stability

Sorry for the massive rant, just wanted to get that off my chest 😂

Smart phones have no moving parts but still break down

I'm a bit out of the loop on Nuclear power, and don't want to sound all Eamonn Ryan, but is there still the issue of dealing with the radioactive waste? (e.g. The spent rods that still have really long half-life that need to be disposed of somewhere other than the Irish Sea)

Yeah but that goes back to my comment about inventing our way out of problems. Modular reactors have been around in concept form for decades, but the technology never took off or scaled. Simply put there wasn't any market for it

On the asumption that changed, and modular reactors made financial sense, it would still take decades of development and testing to become a viable product

Haha, there's the battery swap market showing it's head again 🤣

I have no flags nailed to any mast but that 20+ moving parts figure sounds like a load of b*oll*ox

True, the '+' makes the number irrelevant.

Might as well say that both ICE and EV are 1+

Hopefully not, but that's the way the world seems to be going. Don't fix it, throw it away. Cheaper to buy a new one. Only a few people can do limited repairs and they charge a fortune 🙄