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Do you think that Rivian vehicles could get the same hate that Tesla owners sometimes deal with?

JeremyMKE

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There will be memes.

People will make fun of the Rivian owners who bought a $70k EV truck for environmental reasons, driving with max ground clearance around town to get to the Whole Foods.
There will be days where this is me, and yeah you should make fun of me. Its funny.

I am not buying for "Environmental Reasons" because that is a simple moniker for a very complex answer.
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electruck

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Yes, electrification is about "the long game" not the immediate benefit.
 

daeHelkcunK

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The "save the world" part about BEVs that I do believe in is that, unlike ICE vehicles, they can get cleaner even after you buy them. With an ICE vehicle, it will never be cleaner than the day you bring it home. As components wear, it'll actually let more greenhouse gases into the environment. But with a BEV, even if you get your power from coal, today, you can clean up your power source, tomorrow. Whether that's subscribing to your power company's "green" tier where you pay a little more per kW/h to have your usage offset by 100% renewable energy, or maybe you decide to install solar on your home, or maybe the power company brings a new "green" generation station online and/or decommissions a coal plant.... The point is that the BEV vehicle remains useful while we work to clean up upstream power generation.
I tend to agree with everything you said but I think we can be short sighted with regards to battery disposal etc.
 

discsinthesky

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I tend to agree with everything you said but I think we can be short sighted with regards to battery disposal etc.
Here's the thing about the battery disposal argument that I think get's missed - there is going to be significant capacity available in used EV batteries. I think people are thinking they're going to be disposable (like most cell phone batteries are, not a good look imo), but there is just so little useful work that can be done by these batteries, even if you were able to extract them from every different kind of phone form factor.

Now contrast this with BEV batteries - massive capacity available (a mid-pack Rivian is nearly a half months electricity usage for our household). Even if they are no longer useful for mobile applications they still can have useful life left, thus Rivian thinking about how to make them in a way for smooth transiton to stationary second life applications. After they aren't useful for that, perhaps they still could be used for non-commercial stationary applications (cheap home storage for example). And finally after all those steps, you could consider recycling them, where you have a generally consistent form factor and lots of important materials (I think the size of these batteries is worth noting, you'd have to recycle X0,000 cell phones to recover the same amount of useful battery materials as you'd get from one EV) - given the expense of extracting and processing these minerals to produce the batteries in the first place, I think the market will grow around battery recycling in a way that doesn't really exist today.

And more generally, I think some folks are grossly discounting the environmental impact of that status quo. Sure, no mining operation is perfect (I'd argue they can be managed responsibly in a way that carbon can't), but rampant carbon emissions are a massive and timely issue that needs to be addressed (ideally yesterday). EVs go a long way towards getting us there, in addition to all the other performance benefits mentioned above.
 
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CommodoreAmiga

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Here's the thing about the battery disposal argument that I think get's missed - there is going to be significant capacity available in used EV batteries. I think people are thinking they're going to be disposable (like most cell phone batteries are, not a good look imo), but there is just so little useful work that can be done by these batteries, even if you were able to extract them from every different kind of phone form factor.

Now contrast this with BEV batteries - massive capacity available (a mid-pack Rivian is nearly a half months electricity usage for our household). Even if they are no longer useful for mobile applications they still can have useful life left, thus Rivian thinking about how to make them in a way for smooth transiton to stationary second life applications. After they aren't useful for that, perhaps they still could be used for non-commercial stationary applications (cheap home storage for example). And finally after all those steps, you could consider recycling them, where you have a generally consistent form factor and lots of important materials (I think the size of these batteries is worth noting, you'd have to recycle X0,000 cell phones to recover the same amount of useful battery materials as you'd get from one EV) - given the expense of extracting and processing these minerals to produce the batteries in the first place, I think the market will grow around battery recycling in a way that doesn't really exist today.

And more generally, I think some folks are grossly discounting the environmental impact of that status quo. Sure, no mining operation is perfect (I'd argue they can be managed responsibly in a way that carbon can't), but rampant carbon emissions are a massive and timely issue that needs to be addressed (ideally yesterday). EVs go a long way towards getting us there, in addition to all the other performance benefits mentioned above.
Agreed.

I've heard there are companies exploring turning old BEV battery packs into storage modules to pair with residential or commercial solar installations. Charge them up during the day, and rely on them at night or during a power outage.

I don't think we should slow down BEV adoption because the of the recycling problem... Instead, let's get some smart people together and incentivize the development of solutions.

Look at what we did, as a country, when we put our minds together to get to the moon. We've lost low-end manufacturing to other countries, forever. Let that go. We have the opportunity to have an engineering renaissance in this country and lead the next generation of high-tech green solutions. Let someone else make the white-goods -- we can design them.
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