Last Update: March 27, 2017

  1. Electric Car Ownership Economics
    1. Electric cars aren’t too expensive – you can own one for free
    2. Electric vehicle tax credits encourage adoption, help governments reach climate goals
    3. Electric cars drive cheaper, electricity is a cheaper fuel, calculating the cost of any fuel
    4. Electric cars are cheaper to maintain, no oil to change, no gaskets to replace, etc
    5. Saving on refueling time and other time costs associated with the cars
    6. How to calculate electric car cost per mile of range – which EV is more valuable
    7. Calculating effective trip speed – Fast charging cars more valuable
    8. Leasing insulates you against electric car price fluctuations
    9. Driving an electric cars is serenity, what’s “peace of mind” worth to you?
    10. Externalized car ownership costs that tilt the playing field towards gasoline cars
    11. Understanding car cost of ownership – gasoline, diesel, electric, etc
    12. Car cost of ownership models
  2. Altruism – Saving the World at What Cost?
    1. What’s the Cost of Inaction? Fossil fuels keep causing climate change
    2. Jeremy Jackson – Ocean Apocalypse – Naval War College Lecture
    3. Recognizing the future costs of climate change and resource wars
    4. What is it worth to avoid future climate change and environmental catastrophes?
    5. Peak Oil the long-term gasoline price (hint: UP) and electricity price (hint: STABLE)
    6. What’s your share of the cost of the global oil war?
  3. Don’t electric cars freeze up in Winter and become useless?
  4. Freedom from Fossil Fuels
    1. Biofuels – carbon neutral? sustainable?
    2. Environmental benefits of biofuels
    3. Will we get freedom from oil through fuel efficient cars and trucks?
    4. Environmental impact of Fossil Fuels and the Petroleum Industry
  5. Electric cars are safer than gasoline cars
    1. Chevy Volt battery pack fire in 2011
    2. Nissan Leaf car fires
    3. Tesla Model S car fires in 2013 and 2014
    4. Other electric car fires
    5. Lithium battery Flammability

Because they're quiet, and there's no engine with a couple thousand explosions a minute, electric cars have a soothing effect, which should produce positive wellbeing benefits.  What’s the value of our wellbeing? How valuable would be transforming cities from obnoxiously loud places, to a calm zone of tranquility?

According to the (www.euro.who.int) World Health Organization (WHO): "Excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people’s daily activities at school, at work, at home and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects, reduce performance and provoke annoyance responses and changes in social behaviour."

According to WHO’s publication (www.euro.who.int) Night Noise Guidelines for Europe, road traffic noise causes a significant disturbance to many peoples sleep. Disturbed sleep causes a number of unwanted health effects. A study published in the British Medical Bulletin says “Noise interferes in complex task performance, modifies social behaviour and causes annoyance” and that “Studies of occupational and environmental noise exposure suggest an association with hypertension”. According to the (www.eeb.org) European Federation for Transport and Environment, each year 245,000 people in the EU suffer cardiovascular diseases provoked by traffic noise, and there are at least 50,000 premature deaths in Europe due to traffic noise. NoiseOff calls Noise Pollution a “a public health issue that is adversely affecting the lives of millions of people throughout the world.”

These studies recognize noise impacts are not always readily obvious. Human nature being what it is, when a threat isn’t readily obvious we tend rationalize it away and say it’s not a problem. In other words, most people ignore noise pollution but that doesn’t mean its not a problem and that we don’t have to collectively suffer excess noise in our cities.

One connection is disrupted sleep, which can make us more tired than we should be. That’s not safe on the road, and could lead to a greater incidence of traffic accidents some of which will be fatal. The noise itself is a mental burden, and causes irratation or communication problems.

Traffic noise is the primary source of noise fatigue. Some of the noise is unavoidable, like tires on the pavement, but other traffic noise comes from engines. The very nature of internal combustion engines is noisy, despite all the effort by automotive engineers to reduce noise and vibration. An operating engine sustains several thousand explosions a minute, which of course will produce noise and vibration.

The EFTE recommendations are to reduce traffic speed (reducing engine noise), reduce traffic (reducing engine noise), change road surfaces to be less noisy, quieter buses and trucks (switching to quieter engines), smoother traffic flow to keep engines from emitting start/stop noise, and switch to inherently quieter vehicles. Most of these recommendations focus on ways to reduce engine noise.

Electric vehicles are inherently quiet without requiring any extra measures to mitigate noise. Instead, they’re naturally quiet, and free from vibration. It’s pretty obvious a large-scale switch to electric vehicles would make our cities quieter, and we’d all have less noise to suffer through.

 

About the Author(s)

David Herron : David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
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