The real issue isn't the demise of manual transmissions. It's the upcoming demise of transmissions entirely as electrification continues it's march towards ubiquity.
You need a lot more mining and environmental destruction to get enough batteries for replacing all cars with electric vehicles. Kind of wondering if maybe one day we could have safe micro reactors that can power vehicles.
A similar amount of mining would be required for the steel, aluminum, and plastic needed to build brand new ICE cars. And ICE cars require constant mining of petroleum just to use the car. The key difference with electric cars is that mining is not necessary to use the car (as long as you charge it with renewable electricity).
The environmental damage from the use phase of ICE vehicles dwarfs the environmental damage from their construction, because use is continuous and ongoing while construction only happens once. Getting rid of the continuous pollution of ICE cars is a major win.
Well given that the current approach is to dump emissions directly into the atmosphere, I'll take the alternative.
Obviously EVs are a suboptimal solution. The real solution to transportation energy use is to switch to walking, biking, and transit as the principle mode of transportation,while switching freight mostly back to rail.
If you could just walk or bike where you wanted to go (ie, land use is good where you live), than these problems become much smaller.
Seems promising. The lead candidate previously for matching cobalt without the cobalt was lithium-vanadium-phosphate, but it has a variable voltage output that makes it difficult to work with.
While that is often true, it isn't always the case. If you are using a lot of gas (driving a lot, high consumption), replacing it with an electric car can very quickly be more environmental friendly. If you are not using a lot of gas, like only driving your car infrequently, keeping your old car running might be better though.
What would very quickly mean? Do you have some data perhaps on the breakpoints regarding this? I'm not dismissive of your statement, just want to see some data.
the amount of metal harvested to achieve ubiquity electrification is nowhere near enough... this march could take quite some time if we don't invent something new fast
