That just sounds awful to me, I absolutely hate cycling I mainly did it as a cheaper and healthier way to get to school maybe I’d like it if I didn’t have a super cheap bike. But I had a friend that would go on 6-8 hour rides every day.
I’ve never heard of this before but I highly doubt we have it in Canada.
The main draw back of cycling instead of driving is that you have to do everything on it, you have to limit groceries to whatever fits in a backpack and do groceries almost daily for example.
It has higher emissions to manufacture than a gas car because of the battery but in the long term it’s more eco friendly than a gas car and electricity is way more efficient than gas. Not gonna try and pull numbers out of my ass but $1 of electricity will get you a lot farther than $1 of gas
That’s like saying the carbon footprint of sitting at a computer and programming is bad. You’d pretty much eat the same amount of food whether you’re cycling or driving a car.
That is why I ride a velomobile (this model to be precise). I’m never wet, I’m never cold, it goes 25/30 average without too much effort, and it holds 4 big bags of groceries in the trunk.
I’m not a big fan of traditional cycling unless the ride is short and the weather is nice. I’ll ride an upright bicycle if I have to - typically when I fly somewhere, I’ll take my foldable Brompton with me as checked luggage. Or I’ll take the Brompton onboard trains and busses. But given a choice, I’ll use the velomobile.
What Rosco is saying is that the majority of the world gets it’s electricity from fossil fuels (mostly natural gas now) and the losses over transmission lines are significant.
Less than 10% of the petrol produced is used to power tankers, trucks, and pipeline equipment to move it around, and they’ve gotten good at preventing it from evaporating during storage and transport, so you’re getting 90% of the energy density out of the fossil fuels you source.
Meanwhile, you would be lucky to retain 70% of the electricity you source (also from fossil fuels) because much of it is lost in transmission and conversion as heat. Ultimately, electric cars being “eco-friendly” is a smokescreen by the fossil fuel industry to keep doing what they’ve been doing for more than a century. They just do it outside of the population centers and away from prying eyes.
Now if you happen to be part of the minuscule percentage of the population that is able to source/afford truly “green” energy from solar, wind, geothermal, or nuclear, then maybe you would be better off using an electric car.
Wtf that thing is basically a car, I’ve never seen something like that. I’m not even sure if that’s be allowed on the roads here, pretty cool though
Oh yeah I didn’t really think of that, I didn’t picture that countries that still used fossil fuels using electric cars but I guess there are still a lot of them (and I don’t really know which or how many)
