The shift to electric vehicles could cost the UAW 35,000 jobs in the next several years according to their own study.
Electric cars require fewer parts, workers and time to build.
This does not appear to be hype or exaggeration. An engine requires thousands of parts while electrics are hundreds. While material issues need to be solved for EVs to be produced in such quantities, what to do about surplus workers?
35,000 jobs lost in 5 or 10 years is nothing to sneeze at.
Maybe we can employ them making chargers? Soylent green stations.
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Rick C.
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An pretty accurate way to evluate jobs is to look at raw costs. EVs cost more than ICs. Ultimately that means more labor, up and down the line. Maybe not UAW jobs, but still jobs.
I think your analysis is very one dimensional. EVs have more costs in mate rials, cobalt, nickle and copper cost a lot more than steel. Also the issu es of assembly in an EV are simpler. You completely ignored the fact of ha ving so many fewer components to be assembled.
By your analysis a copper sheet would require more labor to produce than a hand painting. Just because it cost more.
While labor is always a factor in costs, it isn't a constant proportion and is not even a significant factor in some.
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Rick C.
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That copper touched a LOT of machinery along its way from the mill (whether from virgin ore or recycled scrap) to your hands.
It probably didn't have labor directly applied to it, no. Not like the old days when a smith beat it with a hammer a million times. But indirectly, there may well be more man-hours in it from the operators and managers running the equipment, mills and supply chain, or the amortized labor of the engineers and technicians who designed and built the machinery.
I mean, really -- it costs literally nothing to dig ore out of the ground. Here's a shovel, have fun! Resources are almost free*. It's making use of it that costs capital (shovels, trucks, separators, smelters..), or labor, or both. Every process, every product, is value-add!
*A statement itself worthy of argument. Mining sites tend to be low cost land, and tend not to be widely inhabited... or tend not to cost much to the local governments to, ahem, relocate said inhabitants. Or in some cases, can be mined laterally.
Did you know there are hundreds(?) of oil wells in the middle of LA, to this day? Hidden inside nondescript buildings, they do directional drilling, slowly extracting the resources under the city. The mineral rights, to which, probably aren't all that cheap, but I have no idea how long they've been held; they might well have been a pittance back in the day.
May not work as well in countries with unlimited vertical property rights...
I figured someone would want to trace the history of every bit of work that went into making the copper. However the same analysis can be applied to the hand worked painting. So this is a degenerate way of looking at the is sue... likely from a degenerate thinker.
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Rick C.
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sands of parts while electrics are hundreds. While material issues need to be solved for EVs to be produced in such quantities, what to do about surp lus workers?
The issue is what percentage of the fleet will electric vehicles be in the future. My guess is it will be very small, so it will have little effect on the workforce. Also, families will find it very difficult to rely on EV fo r their sole mode of transportation.
e next several years according to their own study.
ousands of parts while electrics are hundreds. While material issues need to be solved for EVs to be produced in such quantities, what to do about su rplus workers?
e future. My guess is it will be very small, so it will have little effect on the workforce. Also, families will find it very difficult to rely on EV for their sole mode of transportation.
LOL I don't understand why people are in denial about EVs. By "fleet" I a ssume you mean car production? Talk to Ford who will be introducing new EV s next year. Ford will have a Lincoln SUV as well. In fact, the Ford boar d fired the CEO in part because he wasn't moving fast enough.
GM is planning to introduce 20 new all-electric vehicles by 2023.
Isn't it pretty clear that the auto makers are in line for the conversion t o EVs?
If you think EVs aren't practical for families you are just kidding yoursel f.
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Rick C.
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-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
I don't get this more copper argument. I would be suprised if EV's use much more copper than an ICE powered car - once the main motor has been wound you have no starter motor in an EV and they tend to have less copper in the wiring looms as well due to many more peripherals being of the intelligent variety. And a hell of a lot less aluminum for the block.
e next several years according to their own study.
ousands of parts while electrics are hundreds. While material issues need to be solved for EVs to be produced in such quantities, what to do about su rplus workers?
e future. My guess is it will be very small, so it will have little effect on the workforce. Also, families will find it very difficult to rely on EV for their sole mode of transportation.
Anthropogenic global warming is already enough of problem that they won't h ave a lot of choice.
The US, Canada and Australia have per-head CO2 emissions of 15 metric tons per year, 14.9 metric tons and 16.2 metric tons. More densely populated adv anced industrial countries come out under ten tons - and they have to get t heirs down a lot too.
Moving people over to electric cars is going to be particularly important f or these countries.
** Be much like re-arranging the deck chairs on the proverbial...
EVs need electric energy, masses of the stuff. So major upgrades to power generation capacity ( like 3 or 4 times now) and matching upgrades to the entire power grid - at huge public expense.
Excluding the nuclear option, cos warmies all hate it, doing this requires 3 or 4 times more coal to be burnt.
Spare me the PV + huge batteries nonsense - that cannot possibly work on such a scale in most places at a sane cost.
EVs are still a novelty item, be far easier to get folk to by smaller vehicles ( not SUVs ) and use them only sparingly - else share or rent as need be.
Taxing petrol and diesel fuel heavily would do that quick smart.
In the UK 40% of cars are parked on the street without access to electricity.
My local power distribution company has a published strategy:
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There are many problematic areas which might or might not be practical/economic to solve.
For the foreseeable future, this will be a representative experience: "A colleague who lives in London did charge his car from his terraced house and covered the cable, which ran across the pavement, with basic safety kit to stop passing pedestrians from tripping up. He okayed everything with his council but ultimately his neighbours weren't happy and he decided to give his electric car up."
If you live in rural areas, the EV might not be practical due to the limited range (a few hundred km).
However for urban dwellers the EV range becomes sufficient.
Electric cars, trucks and busses will in increase the life quality in city centers due to reduced noise, elimination of sulphur and other pollutants and reduction in small particles.
Even if the electricity needed by EVs is made in coal fired power plants, these can be built outside cities and high smoke stacks can be used to effectively filter out most of the pollutants and spread out the rest to a large area. The pollution levels in city centers at nose level will be significantly reduced.
If nuclear power is used to power the EVs, a nuclear power plant can supply about one million EVs.
At least currently, EVs s are parked most of the time and do not need to be charged at a specific time, so unreliable sources such as wind and solar can be used to charge these vehicles.
the next several years according to their own study.
thousands of parts while electrics are hundreds. While material issues nee d to be solved for EVs to be produced in such quantities, what to do about surplus workers?
the future. My guess is it will be very small, so it will have little effe ct on the workforce. Also, families will find it very difficult to rely on EV for their sole mode of transportation.
I assume you mean car production? Talk to Ford who will be introducing ne w EVs next year. Ford will have a Lincoln SUV as well. In fact, the Ford board fired the CEO in part because he wasn't moving fast enough.
on to EVs?
rself.
That's not an insuperable problem.
Somebody with a better crystal ball would see the council cutting a slot in the pavement, burying the cable and putting a socket into the kerb.
Parking meters already have power connections - in Canada you plug your car into them to power the heater that stops the radiator from freezing solid.
Wrong. The energy used to drive US cars around is about 3O% of the US generating capacity.
The grid may need to be beefed up a bit, but that's going on all the time, and we won't move to electric cars overnight.
Solar power can do it. The nice thing about electric cars is that they have got batteries, and they spend 95% of the time parked.
Any rational scheme will put electric car charging points in every place that they get parked, and a smart meter on each charger that allows the cost of the charging current to be billed to the person who is running the car.
As was pointed out in 2008
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the batteries in electric cars are just what the solar energy business needs.
If we get close to 100% electric cars, the batteries in the parked cars will be able to deliver three times as much power as the grid, and will be able to soak up all the embarrassing extra power that the solar cells will deliver during the day.
Whether the grid will be able to persuade enough car owners to let the grid extract some of that stored power over-night is an open question.
When we last debated this here Rick C was sceptical, because it wouldn't fit the way he uses his car.
The electric cars provide the huge battery - if you've got enough of them.
They can't work without it, and the fact that cars spend 95% of their time parked means that their batteries are at least pontentially availalbe to do the job.
Poor data. I think my case is typical. My car takes about 6kWh for my 22-mile commute, my house uses about 28kWh/day. By national statistics my wife and I account for another 25kWh more, at work, stores, infrastructure, etc. So my car requires 6/53 = 11% more, not 3 to 4x. If we'll need 10% more electricity in the distant future, when most cars are electric, that doesn't sound too hard.
Rick C wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
Not if you count the control electronics
It is not just that.
The entire drivetrain is different.
Also, no thermal or proximity considerations need to be made for a bladder of flammable liquid or an extremely hot exhaust and exhaust line elements passing near it.
The basic car of any type is the carraige and the suspension and steering and braking parts (and lighting).
Powerplant is a different animal.
And you were wrong there too, as an electric powered vehicle has control elements for the motors and they have parts too. The difference is that their hundreds of parts are pre-assembled before the productoion line, and simply go in as modules.
In fact, entire driveline elements can be pre-assembled. That makes their assembly line capacity much faster than a normal automotive build.
I'd say they could build cars of the line to the tune of hundreds a day. Likely considerably faster than ICE driveline builds.
Aside from the unibody assembly segment, the entire thing could be automated to the point where human utilization is only where certain fastener elements are found to be difficult to manage with machine vision, etc.
As they perfect touch sensitivity in robotics, they may well overcome that (fastener lead in) issue, and remove humans altogether from final assembly lines.
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