this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
850 points (95.9% liked)

Fuck Cars

9677 readers
1071 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com -3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Why the fuck would someone compare a shitass lawn mower to performance road hardware?

Because I didn't feel like making that comment a copy paste of my other comment.

CO2 is only a small part of the story

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/greenspace/story/2011-09-28/mythbusters-asks-are-motorcycles-greener-than-cars

the motorcycle used 28% less fuel than the comparable decade car and emitted 30% fewer carbon dioxide emissions, but it emitted 416% more hydrocarbons, 3,220% more oxides of nitrogen and 8,065% more carbon monoxide.

So yeah. Not exactly great. And btw our option on those hydrocarbons have changed a LOT in the last 13 years when this was published. See the decline of diesels post dieselgate.

... Did you even click your link? They didn't even mention CO2.

Greenhouse gasses are the primary issue. The waste heat you produce with a car is nothing compared to what the sun is pelting us with. It's the greenhouse gasses that trap in the heat from the sun (and your engine). Even bothering to mention it is hilarious.

I had to look it up because it's not even something I bothered to consider. According to this calculator my car produces about 404,000/4.04 x 10^5 watt hours of heat going through 15 gallons/56 liters of gas. The solar constant aka energy entering our atmosphere is just over 1360 watts per square meter. In that same 6 hours the sun is gracing us with 8100 watt hours of energy, and in total 1.041 × 10^18. Or hell the energy just getting to the ground near me averages out to over 5kwh a square meter over a 24 hour period. Unless I'm road tripping my car absorbs more energy than its engine outputs in a given day.

Engine waste heat is nothing.

Also that's just looking at global warming related things, there's also there's NOX and it's extremely harmful to human health. Euro 5 standard rates both bikes and cars at 0.060 g/km. Cars obviously need a lot more oomf to get going, yet they still have the same maximum output.

Have you done your own moto maintenance? What bikes have you got?

It's been a few years since I've owned a bike (mostly dirtbikes but some street). My last bike was a ~2011 Ninja 650. But I've worked on them since I was a kid up until maybe 5 years ago? I do however do all of the maintenance on all of my ICE (cars, mowers, scooter thing etc), and what I do care about is the emissions and their effects.

[–] RubberElectrons@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Well, fuckwit, good job on proving that you know how to multiply a couple of constants and volumes together, congrats!

Consider the amount of energy that goes into welding a large automobile frame, casting high carbon conrods and crankshafts, producing all the plastic that goes into the 3100lb ~~clown tank~~ dodge ram you drive since you're no longer safe on two wheels.

Holistically, quite a lot less energy goes into production of a motorcycle, and furthermore is tremendously easier to recycle in comparison. The much lighter mass from a smaller frame means less tire particulate, less brake dust, and equally important, less time idling in traffic because of lane splitting.

Quality thinking in systems analysis is why engineers make money, versus fuckwits who merely multiply a few constants.

Fuel pump pressures need to creep up to afford DFI (direct fuel injection) which has made up a lot of modern ICE efficiency and emissions improvements. The real solution long-term is electric, but energy density in the batteries needs to creep up a bit, which I'm waiting for with Samsung's new solid state batteries.