this is the exact kind of misinformation that prevents progress.

Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn. No one is missing any forests or trees. What you are missing is that the cost savings in fuel are so large with any EV that by itself, the money saved is an extremely compelling incentive to many people.

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SkeuomorphicBee a day ago | parent | next [-]

You are wrong and right.

Wrong because Brazil DOES fuel cars on sugarcane alcohol. Most petrol stations in the country have pumps for sugarcane alcohol, nearly all the ICE cars sold in the last two decades have a flex engine (in the past you had to chose when buying the car if you wanted a alcohol engine or a gasoline engine, now the engines just takes whichever you trow at it and adjusts the injection accordingly), and roughly half the personal vehicles in the country run daily on alcohol. That fact has softened this oil crisis a tiny tiny bit in the country (when oil is expensive many people just pump alcohol instead of gasoline).

And right that electricity is much cheaper than gasoline or alcohol, so people are changing to EVs because of the cost savings in fuel. In fact electricity was already much cheaper even when the price of oil was down, what was holding back EV adoption in the country was never the price of oil, but the relatively high purchase prices of EV vehicles (the average upper-middle-class Brazilian can't afford a Tesla like an American or European can), but the latest batch of basic EVs (like the BYD Dolphin-mini/Seagul) started to break that barrier about one or two years ago, and are now on the top sales charts.

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BoppreH a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn.

In Brazil "ethanol" is sold separately from normal gasoline, and as far as I know it's entirely made from sugar cane, without fossil fuels. It's why flex cars are so popular there, since they can use either fuel depending on what's cheaper.

Meanwhile, you can't buy 100% corn-based fuel in the US.

	▲	eldaisfish a day ago \| parent [-]
		sure, but Brazil is a net importer of refined petroleum. That exposes them to the global oil price. Even though you cannot buy 100% ethanol in the US, the US alone is responsible for over half of global ethanol production, mostly from corn. Regardless, any EV will almost certainly be cheaper to operate on electricity, rather than using corn, petroleum, or sugarcane for fuel.

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washingupliquid a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> this is the exact kind of misinformation that prevents progress.

lol

> Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn.

Brazil has been building cars which can run on 100% ethanol since the 1970s.

These are not obscure facts; this is common knowledge the US teaches to schoolchildren.

In the US gasoline is a 10% ethanol blend, sometimes 15%. E85 is available only in some midwestern states (I've NEVER seen it for sale anywhere on the west coast) and it's only good for flex-fuel vehicles, which most manufacturers stopped building ~ 10 years ago when the free money from the government shifted towards EV incentives.

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idiotsecant a day ago | parent [-]

Ethanol is not a good fuel source for something like a personal vehicle. Corn and rice based ethanol are barely energy positive and can be slightly carbon positive.

Sugarcane-based ethanol does have a strongly negative carbon footprint and positive energy but ICE engines are notably less efficient overall that large utility scale cogen plants, even after you factor in transmission and distribution losses.

Making sugarcane into ethanol is good. It's less clear that distributing that chemical feedstock to a zillion people is a net benefit. Just send the electrons and keep the fuel at the plant.

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SkeuomorphicBee 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Ethanol is not a good fuel source for something like a personal vehicle.

It is about as good as gasoline (or better), Brazil has been running a good chunk of its personal car fleet on sugarcane alcohol for decades. Yes, EVs are better than ICVs, but there is nothing uniquely bad about ethanol that makes it worse as a fuel source for a personal vehicle than any other combustive fuel.

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washingupliquid a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	idiotsecant a day ago \| parent [-]
		A low cost 120v charged EV is a wildly practical thing for everything other than very long distance travel. They are simple to maintain, require fewer spare parts, and have fewer parts to fail in general. Don't think Tesla, think golf cart and trailer. There may be places where grid access is impractical, in which case chemical fuels are a decent alternative, but as africa has shown solar microgrids are also quite effective and enable a ton of additional economic activity. EV utility vehicles match quite well to the second and third world, when they benefit from sufficient economy of scale. I don't know if we're there yet but we're very close. These things are getting quite cheap.