Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe?
Converting a car to also run on natural gas costs a few hundred dollars in South America / Europe but after that the benefits are:
- x2 cheaper travel expenses
- less harmful emissions
Since the US is rich in natural gas wouldn't it have been more environmentally conscious to convert the hundreds of millions of petrol cars to also run on natural gas instead of digging up tons of minerals for brand-new electric cars?
> Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe?
There are many fleets which use natural gas. Municipal buses, city garbage trucks, etc. There, they only need to build up one (private) CNG refueling station in the city.
With a passenger car, you need to plan your trip to find public CNG fueling stations along the route where you need them.
The boom in natural gas production is a recent occurrence. Go back a couple decades and natural gas was far more expensive. Back then, propane was the obvious alternative to gasoline for vehicles, until the price for propane spiked and natural gas fell.
But more importantly, CNG is only a half-step forward, still leaving us dependent on a single fossil fuel. Battery electric vehicles are far more practical thanks to being easy to (slow-)charge almost anywhere, getting us off of fossil fuels entirely, reducing mechanical complexity/maintenance, and being far more efficient (burning the same amount of natural gas in a power plant to charge your BEV will give you far more range than burning it in your converted car engine).
- First of all, there is no natural gas fuel standard
- Safety, there are no safety standards. If there were, tanks often used in other places, such an upgraded would be more expensive
- Rolling out refueling over the whole of the US/Europe would be difficult. Most places in Europe don't have these cars.
A better and safer alternative to natural gas would be methanol. And because of the US ethanol policy, the US already has a surprising amount of Flex Fuel Vehicles.
If you could have a bunch of fuel standards for ethanol/methanol and a vehicle standard for those fuels, depending on the price, people could buy different mixes.
Converting gas to methanol is fairly efficient and can be done directly at gas production sites, sometimes with gas that would be vented instead. But there isn't a big market for methanol right now.
In China such standards do exist M20 and so on. However sadly there methanol vehicles usually use methanol made by coal.
The US would have had much lower fuel cost if they had a strategy of methanol and ethanol at the same time, and require all vehicle to be FFV. Standardizing M20/E20, M50/E50 fuels for example.
However all of this is now no longer very useful as car market is rapidly switching to electric.
For some trucks using generated fuel might be useful. Dimethyl ether would be great for long range trucks and ships rather then hydrogen.
On lose power and internal space on the conversion.
The US car market does not seem very concerned with economical ROI, so any argument based on costs is useless. The emissions part seems to hold for some people, but electric cars already won here.
Even here on South America gas is getting out of fashion, replaced by electricity. The costs are still high enough that there is a large market remaining, but it is constantly decreasing.
There are not enough places to fill a natural gas car. I know of a few, if you buy a natural gas car you plan all trips around filling up - and a lot of trips you have to reject.
For every public natural gas pump I know of, I know of 50 public EV chargers. Plus in the worst case you can plug an EV into a regular outlet (overnight you can get enough range to get someplace with a faster charger).
I'm no expert but I think when cars are converted, they can run on both natural gas and on gasoline. Gasoline is used to start the car. Wouldn't that solve the range issue?
Obvious problem in USA is availability of natural gas at gas stations, but that is a chicken and an egg problem - would be solved with more demand.
Can you explain your reasoning? There are a number of reasons that natural gas emissions (after burning) are less harmful. Not least that there is a higher proportion of hydrogen so for a given energy output there are less carbon dioxide emissions.
Methane emissions from incomplete burning, and also from upstream.
Methane emissions are an issue with basically all uses of gas that has been underestimated in the past and only in recent years it's more widely recognized how problematic that is. A lot of the "gas is greener than X" messaging from the past is simply no longer true if you consider methane emissions.
Methane emissions from oil extraction aren't negligible either so it depends on your point of reference. It's almost certainly better to burn methane in a power plant and use BEVs where possible but that's a long way from possible in heavy goods vehicles for example (they will need batteries measured in MWh for a start).
There are also many dimensions to emissions, global warming potential is important but from a personal point of view I worry more about the impact on my children's health from the other emissions like particulates, NOx and aromatic hydrocarbons.
but they are less. You can half the co2 emissions with very little investment. However, this cannot be ultimate solution and is probably too little too late.
Bill Gates was prescient about many things we are living with right now - video-on-demand, online shopping, "wallet PCs" (smartphones), voice recognition, "social interfaces" (Siri, Alexa). I recommend his book The Road Ahead (1995).
To give you some background on why your original post might've been considered inflammatory - the author of the blog you shared has openly said "V is something that should be ignored until it dies into obscurity":
> the author of the blog you shared has openly said "V is something that should be ignored until it dies into obscurity":
I didn't know this -- that's very harsh, and I don't agree at all. I see that that comment was made after the reviewing blog posts, however. I can get that the relation between V and them has soured.
That's the one I initially replied to, sharing my view as an outside observer. It would probably serve V well to handle such popular blog posts in some way. Like put up a blog post refuting the points in the article, and then link to that or something. Something to undo the damage to the language's image by those posts, and (re-)inspire confidence.
The other way is probably to be "so good they can't ignore you". That would be great, always good to have more great tools.
> My advice is - check out the language and make up your own mind. In the end this is a tool, not a football club.
I completely agree -- and people should try it for themselves. I guess my point is mostly that if the community's exposure to a language is those blog posts, they won't be inclined to try it. And if those blog posts don't get handled in a graceful and confidence inspiring way, the community won't "update" its view of the language.
Hey Tozen, are you alright? It might be good for you to take a step back and relax a bit.
I have been nothing but civil and open-minded, I have not smeared vlang in any way, I have merely been asking questions as an outside observer.
You, on the other hand, have been aggressively defensive, and have been projecting an almost paranoid "everything and everyone is against vlang" attitude. I almost start thinking that you are the one trolling me.
If not, I sincerely hope you will take a step back and assess the situation and yourself -- and try to relax a bit. No single programming language is worth getting this wound up about.
Please do not post flamewar comments to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
D and Nim are great mature languages. If you think they're suitable for the domain you're working on and reach out for either of them, you're not gonna go wrong. They have large communities and you'll easily find answers to your questions.
I wouldn't call Zig established, though. Zig's compiler still crashes on valid code and compared to V it still doesn't have an online playground, a package manager, hot code reloading, a REPL, etc. even though it's twice as old.
V's syntax is similar to Go. However under the hood V differs from Go. For example:
- V has compile-time memory management similar to the Lobster programming language.
- V has zero-cost interoperability with C.
Check it out and decide for yourself. If you already know Go, you can learn V in an afternoon.
4 months of severance + 2 extra weeks for every year of service i.e. 20 weeks (~5 months) if you've been there for the last 10 years. So ~9 months paid holiday in total. Not bad at all.
I don't mind languages getting hyped but seeing posts every week on the front page of HN about an unstable esoteric language with 0 adoption - yes, it's getting tiring.
simplotek is most probably a legitimate user annoyed by Zig news. I don't agree with their point, for what it's worth, but at least it's an opinion shared earnestly, unlike the troll.
Converting a car to also run on natural gas costs a few hundred dollars in South America / Europe but after that the benefits are:
- x2 cheaper travel expenses
- less harmful emissions
Since the US is rich in natural gas wouldn't it have been more environmentally conscious to convert the hundreds of millions of petrol cars to also run on natural gas instead of digging up tons of minerals for brand-new electric cars?