The important paragraph that most people probably care about:
Soon, Google Maps will default to the route with the lowest carbon footprint when it has approximately the same ETA as the fastest route. In cases where the eco-friendly route could significantly increase your ETA, we’ll let you compare the relative CO2 impact between routes so you can choose. Always want the fastest route? That’s OK too — simply adjust your preferences in Settings.
If it's optimizing for combustion cars it won't be a perfect match for electric. The ICE route will penalize intersections and hills due to engine idling and lack of regenerative braking.
You can't turn it off in the EU. The configuration is reset as soon as you power off the car. Considering this, assuming your claim is true, there should be vast amounts of damage to vehicles in the EU, which there isn't. In other words, the stop-start system causing significant damage is just one of the many myths popular among motorists.
I happen to be one of the people who didn't like it until I got used to it. The reason is simple - if you'd been dependent on an unreliable car in the past, starting the engine is associated with all sorts of uncertainties. Starters in particular seem to be the part that fails the most often in pre-stop-start cars. With each start there's a chance something will go wrong. This then translates to a bit of anxiety every time you hear the engine start even in situations where the probability of failure is insignificant.
I should have mentioned that my experience with stop-start is only with manual transmission cars that start the engine upon touching the clutch, sometimes before it is in full contact and usually before I'm ready to release it. If I'm going for a fast start I start the engine preemptively by lightly touching and releasing the clutch.
The other commenter's frustration with automatic transmission vehicles that start the engine upon releasing the brake sounds valid to me, especially if there isn't a convenient way to start the engine preemptively.
I have used two cars with start/stop: Renault Megane and VW Polo. Both were diesels and had automatic transmission.
Both of them started the engine just before my foot leave the brake pedal. I think they sensed the rate I eased them and decided that I'm going to roll.
I also drive an automatic Focus as my daily driver which doesn't have start/stop and didn't have a noticeable difference in their driving experience during stops, TBH.
Maybe some cars have different implementations and algorithms. A brand had on demand stop IIRC. You pressed brake a little harder to command the car to stop the engine.
My cars are too old to have the start/stop system but I've experienced it in rental cars and my immediate reaction is that I don't like it - especially the lag between when you move your foot from the brake pedal to when the engine actually starts running.
It wasn't so bad with a manual transmission (~2016 Mini Cooper) as I often start to ease off of the brake pedal as I start to depress the clutch, so once it's time to give it some gas, the engine is probably running.
That lag felt extremely annoying and potentially dangerous in an automatic ~2018 Volvo S90 though. Maybe I move my feet faster than the average person, but if I quickly moved my foot from the brake to the gas, the car would just sit there for a split second ... wait for the engine to start ... and then start moving. I know it's a low probability, but I definitely felt as though that car would give me a lesser chance of a making a successful evasive maneuver if, say, I noticed an out-of-control vehicle hurtling towards me.
My newer car has features to help offset this, including brake assist or whatever fancy name they call the feature. Remove foot from brake pedal, engine starts. The key is that it stays in neutral and the brakes remain applied until you hit the gas. You just have to get in the habit of removing your foot from the brake that split second earlier so the engine is running and ready when you want it.
This is how I feel about it as well, although if I think about how slow my current old car accelerates maybe it's not enough of a difference to matter.
If I understood it correctly, Mazda specially optimized its engines for this. They align the pistons during the stop, so they can start 2x faster (~0.5sec IIRC), so faster start, more comfort, less stress on the engine due to start & stop.
I think with the latest iterations, the damage part is not that definitive.
The tesla nav system has a lot of the data for this.
It just does not let you specifically route for energy use. You can choose to route for money (tolls), charging stops or traffic if you enabled online routing.
When you plan a trip, it has a page that shows a graph with predicted vs actual energy use. If you keep the "actual" line above the "predicted" line, you will make it, otherwise you may not.
Thing is, the predicted line clearly shows the route ahead with the slope of the curve mapping against climbs and descents.
If you read the manual it says:
"The calculation is an estimate based on driving style (predicted speed, etc.) and environmental factors (elevation changes, temperature, etc.)"
If I say to hell with the CO2 emissions and pick the fastest route always, will YouTube and Search direct me toward more climate change-oriented content? :-D
If we've learned anything from all of this it seems pretty clear that it'll start suggesting coal rolling videos and ads for a carbon fiber empty tube to replace your muffler.
We have taxes already in the form of taxes on every gallon of gas that's sold. 50 cents or more per gallon depending on the area. It's great if you're rich and successful and work from home in tech to argue for higher taxes. Not so much when you have no choice but to travel for work and you have to spend several hundred dollars a month to do so.
I grew up in Europe. American petros prices (and petrol taxes) look extremely cheap to me in any case.
> Not so much when you have no choice but to travel for work and you have to spend several hundred dollars a month to do so.
People always have choices on the margin.
In any case, I am not arguing for a higher total tax burden. Eg I'd be very happy for the CO2 tax to be distributed equally to all voters. Or for petrol taxes to substitute for other government revenue.
Eg in my adopted home of Singapore there's a cap of about one million cars on the road total in the whole country. To operate a car, you need a Certificate of Entitlement (CoE). Each CoE is valid for ten years. Each month approximately 1% of CoE run out and are thus re-issued via an auction.
We also have pretty high pretrol taxes.
But overall government revenue is only about 15% of GDP.
I intended my post mainly tongue-in-cheek (hence the emoticon). I'll probably stick with the defaults unless it really takes me out of my way or does something like avoid freeways.
The beauty of CO2 taxes is that I pay more at the pump (at least till I can afford a Tesla) and the state gets an incentive to grift off of climate change.
This is a great example of why I figured Google Maps for navigation. I don't use Maps to express my environmental values, I use it to get from A to B the fastest way. If they default to something else, they are actively getting in the way of why I would use their product. I have no interest in activist software.
I have no issue with this. The bigger issue I have with Google Maps is that it makes zero effort to avoid dangerous routes. If two routes for a ~45 min drive are within 30 seconds of another, why would I want to risk death by taking the one with an extremely dangerous left turn through oncoming traffic? It makes zero sense.
This looks like a governmental issue in my eyes: it's the government's responsibility to ensure that the roads are reasonable safe and the traffic reasonable regulated, not Google's. If a route is dangerous, something should be done with the route itself (not the suggestion). But if Maps' suggestions breaks regulations and propose an illegal route, I agree!
The roads are mostly reasonable and safe. There are always going to be turns and intersections that are more difficult than the others. Google (and every other consumer map provider for that matter) has a habit of picking unnecessarily complex routes to shave a few seconds. Unnecessarily routing through difficult intersections and using a dozen side streets to cut the corner off a route are just specific examples of that.
You've noticed Google Maps do this? I personally find Google will take the simpler routes even if sometimes a faster route comes up while driving. Sometimes on a longer drive I'll see it is showing a greyed out route I could take that is sometimes even 5-10 minutes faster but it won't suggest it to me.
No whereas with Waze it is a lot more aggressive and it will take faster routes and shortcuts even if it means taking a gravel road to save 30 seconds.
But what you’re saying is all roads that technically conform to standards are equal in safety or should be. That does not seem realistic or practical. For example windy mountain roads vs urban freeways. Or unprotected left turns versus protected left turns. Should unprotected left turns be made illegal.
Why can’t a third party routing software assess safety? It’s not a realistic expectation to expect all roads to be equivalent in safety.
> [...] it's the government's responsibility to ensure that the roads are reasonable safe [...]
Even if you agree with that, it's still not the governments responsibility to make all possible routes exactly equally safe. (That's actually not possible, for any non-zero level of risk.)
So even if the overall risk was low and in some sense reasonable, you might still want to pick the less risky route.
Also keep in mind that different people have different risk appetites.
Where and when does the driver's responsibility come into play? Do we not have a social contract of following rules we already agreed on, or set by the Gov? What else did you want Gov to do?
> they are actively getting in the way of why I would use their product
No they aren't. They're being completely transparent about this and giving you the option to keep the old behavior with a one-time settings change. So what's the problem exactly?
Google also explicitly says that it only does it when the ETAs are very close, so realistically, it will still be doing what you want. It feels pretty extreme to write such an angry comment about maybe getting a route than 1-2% slower.
I agree it's a bit vague, but realistically I would hope/think it's never more than min(2%, 5m). It obviously won't be 2m slower on a 4m ride, or 30m slower on a 5 hour ride. I don't think any reasonable person would say those are "close".
Wasn't intended to be angry. It's more frustration that I used to love Google Maps, but over the years it just gets less and less useful. I can't see street names like I used to, for instance. Now I have to have the overhead of choosing a route, when I used to know that the default is the fastest. Sure, I can turn it off in settings. But at what point does this get to be Windows Explorer, where the first thing I do on a new Windows install is invert pretty much all the settings?
I guess maybe I'd like a little bit of say in how the software I use gets updated. I don't know how that would be implemented, but this got me thinking that maybe there is a way that this software thing could be move a little closer towards a partnership than the autocratic "hey we're going to arbitrarily change this piece of software you use frequently". (You can see similar thoughts with people complaining how Big Sur uses more space, or the complaints when GMail changed things to be less dense.)
Hypothetically, given the choice between a 10 minute, higher-environmental-impact route and an 11-minute, lower-impact one: Are you really going to take the literally selfish, worse-for-the-planet route to save one minute? Wouldn't you like to make a small "sacrifice" (the choice is only given when the ETAs are similar) that might help slow the destruction of the only environment we have?
I don't think it's fair to call it "selfish". If I am someone who only drives a few thousand miles a year or even less (this is actually true for me), then wanting to save a minute or two isn't exactly selfish compared to a person who drives 10-20k miles a year. You can't really judge on the scale of one trip.
I'm fine with the feature though as long as it gives an option. In fact, I would enjoy having the new capability to optimize for fuel economy.
Actually no, if there are 10-20k people like me only driving a few thousand miles instead of 10-20k miles per year we'd be much better off! (which btw is the average in the US)
You aren't going to shame me over a few miles when I make a concerted effort to drive 1/10 of the average American, sorry.
But hey good news, Google is abandoning remote work and making its employees drive to and from work every day probably negating any benefit from this feature whatsoever.
To literally answer your rhetorical question: dark patterns. Not that I think the behavior is wrong - choosing the more energy efficent of two comparable manuevers just makes sense in general. But "Changes to default behavior to change consumer outcomes." are literally dark patterns and rhetorically likened to mind control whenever they want to cast a company or industry as a villain.
"Dark patterns" is what we call it when it's done in the interest of the company, and usually against the interest of the consumer. In this case, being for the public interest, it's aligned with the much more benign "Libertarian Paternalism" approach outlined in the book Nudge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_%28book%29
If addressing climate change relies on people changing habits against their selfish interests, then we are doomed.
The externality should be internalised with a carbon tax. It's the simple, most obvious solution and it will cause selfish interest and ethical choices to align when it comes to carbon emission.
A tax will always be passed on to the consumer, even if the govt taxes Ford, it will just make the car more expensive.
Using game theory, a question could be "how do we get Ford to make more electric cars, improve efficiency of electric car production, and incentivize them to advertise electric cars?"
My take is that businesses drive change, not consumers. On the whole, consumers are told what they want.
This is not making sense. Credit is necesarily coming from some place, that is in most likely tax revenue, so it is mostly in same as a tax but with more steps and smaller direct impact. Also not correct, some tax can often be absorb by producer. You are making wrong question: goal is for to reduce carbon not producing more electric cars. This is possibly meaning different mode of transport, some things maybe remote, bicycles, trains, others. Carbon tax is enabling persons to make decision about best outcome and create the minimal of economic damage. Our needed outcome is createing tax for cost of carbon capture for every ton made of carbon in atomosphere. In ideal, this become a method for which any business can starting carbon capture, can receiving a simpel certification. Any person is then capable of finding any other person for to do his carbon capture and then producing appropriate credit form for government. This has making of capture all carbon in eventually and also creating lowest price with insentive for new developing technology.
When the carbon tax* was introduced in Australia our tax free threshold was increased from $6k to $18k which more than covered the increase in costs caused by the tax.
*This has since been repealed, a decision I strongly disagree with.
I believe canada proposed doing it by taking all the money collected through the carbon tax and giving it equally to all Canadian citizens. This would mean everyone gets back the amount that the average person paid, making it so the average person sees no change in their level of taxation. (It also has the effect of turning it into a highly progressive tax)
When you propose a "green credit" instead of a "carbon tax", what do you mean? Is it just a different name for the same thing, or would it work differently? If it would work differently, then HOW? I'm assuming that a carbon tax would put a fixed tax per weight of C02 released charged either to the end-user or somewhere higher in the value chain (eg: a gas tax).
I'd want to put driving-less on similar footing to buying a fancier car.
A carbon tax does that automatically with no extra bureaucracy.
(I'm all for taking the proceeds of a carbon tax and distributing them equally amongst all voters, if you want to make the whole thing revenue neutral for both the government and the 'average' consumer.)
Not pinning the onus on individuals, but instead addressing the leverage points such as the corporate emissions regulations and enforcement mechanisms that exist today.
I think that is a false dichotomy, GP might care and want to change habits, but considers car exhaust such a small piece of the problem that it isn't worth changing driving habits. I'm not saying that is right, simply pointing out it isn't certain GP doesn't value changing habits.
If you need the extra 5 minutes, it seems possible to turn the feature off or ignore it. It seems pretty dumb to me too, but at least it will bring some awareness to climate change, right?
>>I don't use Maps to express my environmental values
Actually, you do. Your environmental values happen to be efficiency (Km/hour) trumps efficiency (Km/gram of CO2). You wish the software to continue to express only your environmental values. It is an activist stance nonetheless.
This is complex and will vary significantly by person. But for anyone the answer is almost certainly non-zero. Even if only marginally. And the trend seems to be increasing.
The second part of your comment, seems to assume only one kind of action is possible. Others might say, great let's do both.
I cannot respond to throwawayboise directly because of thread limitations.
On its face, this argument is clearly wrong. "Absolutely nothing", is not equivalent to extremely little. Especially when, as in the case of Google Maps, there is a large multiplier.
Elections are a different beast. Assuming first-past-the-post system where impact is only at the margin (50.0001%).
Whereas direct action on CO2 production is incremental. We can argue it's not enough, but we cannot argue it is literally nothing.
> On its face, this argument is clearly wrong. "Absolutely nothing", is not equivalent to extremely little. Especially when, as in the case of Google Maps, there is a large multiplier.
It makes sense to look at these things normalised per-capita.
So for Google, making a small change has a big impact per-Googler, but it's still a small change per-capita.
Making a small per-capita change is still a small change overall.
Though we might agree on the first premise below, there is an error in subsequent logical consequences:
"small changes alone are not enough" -> "only big changes can work" -> "small change X ought not to be undertaken"
To me parts of this looks like the fallacy of the excluded middle. To claim that X has some merit is not to claim that X on its own has sufficient merit. I apologise if you are not making such an argument, but throwawayboise and arsome certainly seem to have been. And such arguments are far from uncommon.
I do see your point about scale and multipliers but I believe efforts like these are important not only for their admittedly small yet not negligible impact, but also to help establish a foundation for the next steps that should be taken.
In the eighties, the cost-effectiveness of wind-power was way off the charts. However, you'd quantify it. Per turbine, per $, per power consumer. Turbines were just small and inefficient with few deployments. Now, many incremental improvements later, the same technology is in the right ballpark. It's a good thing those pioneers like Vestas didn't just give up when the absolute impact seemed far too small.
> "small changes alone are not enough" -> "only big changes can work" -> "small change X ought not to be undertaken"
I agree that this is wrong.
To make small changes do a lot, you have to have a lot of them.
You can still judge small changes by how much bang they provide for the buck. (Or more formally, employ the standard marginalist framework of economics.) A small impact is fine, if the cost was small, too.
Wind-power (and other renewables) are a bit complicated too judge on these historic efficiency measures, because there was so much government interference.
(I think government should perhaps tax CO2 and other emissions, but not offer any subsidies. I want eg turning the lights on less be on the same footing as switching to 'green' energy suppliers.)
(I also don't think the government subsidies for wind and photovoltaic actually helped that much in the long run. Eg as you can see, once the subsidies ran out, the photovoltaic industry mostly left Germany for China.)
There is absolutely nothing I can do individually that will have any impact whatsoever on CO2 levels or the climate. Nothing. One person's activity is simply too small a contributor. By the same token, whether I vote or not, or who I vote for, is also irrelevant in the outcome of elections.
The quoted paragraph clearly states that the lower-emissions route will only be given by default when there are multiple routes with a similar ETA. So it will never tell you to take a route that takes longer just to reduce your emissions, without also telling you about the shorter route with higher emissions.
Since you have seemingly already abandoned google maps due to their activism before reading this story, what were the other reasons that made you quit?
Because the fastest route doesn't have to be the shortest route. Where I live, it's often faster to drive in the opposite direction of my destination to get on a highway. It's generally slower (by a tiny amount) to take surface streets.
The only thing that matters for your car's carbon footprint is how much gas you use. So regardless of time, if you have more gas in the tank at the end of your trip, your carbon footprint is lower.
The faster you go, the more your fuel efficiency decreases. For the most part this is due to wind resistance, because there is a velocity^2 argument there(ie if you double your velocity, you quadruple your wind resistance). Your engine is also designed to operate more efficiently at certain speeds but that is less directly quantifiable than wind resistance.
So you might be able to get 40MPG while doing a steady 40 mph, but only get 20MPG when doing 80mph.
So if you need to go 40 miles, if you can do it at 80mph it will take you 30 minutes, and will cost you 2 gallons of fuel. If you do it at 40mph it will take you 1 hour and cost you 1 gallon of fuel. So in this contrived example the longer trip has a lower carbon footprint.
In the real world, there are rarely two parallel roads going exactly the same place but just with a different speed limit. Usually you need to drive out of your way to get onto a highway to make your trip go faster. On the other hand driving directly at a slower speed usually entails more starts/stops at traffic lights which eats into your fuel efficiency. Google is probably in a good place to answer the question of how fuel efficient is a given route because they have so much data about average speeds, accelerations/decelerations required/ etc.
For long distance driving speed is key. Highways can be faster even when they are indirect. This is what the OSMAnd "Fuel Efficient Way" routing is based on. It biases towards the shortest routes that may have lower speed limits. This is nice for road trips and bicycling, but can be quirky with city driving.
Yes, though like many other American reactions to the oil shock, this was pretty silly.
High petrol prices automatically discourage speeding. (Just as a carbon tax would.)
Of course, the US also had price controls on petrol. And the ensuing long queues and fights at the petrol station.
Their anarcho-capitalist utopian neighbour [1] to the north did not enact price controls for petrol, and subsequently did not see any queues or fights.
It looks like part of the carbon footprint model is based on road inclines and traffic congestion.
For example, a super-fast route that's up an extremely-steep incline on the way may technically be faster from point A to B, but would be less carbon efficient than taking a slightly-longer route that is flatter.
Driving a Chevy Volt (with an 18 kWh battery) makes you very aware of the different fuel-costs of different routes -- I very often have a choice of driving "over" or "around" small mountains (~hundreds of feet of elevation change, not ~thousands), and you can easily see the battery drop as you go up, up, up and it doesn't always recover much going down, down, down.
Going up and down mountains should be mostly a wash, apart from these small losses.
What's really eating into your battery in a way you can't recover with regenerative breaking ever is wind resistance.
Routes that make you drive faster for longer cost more energy. (And given the way wind resistance works, for the same average speed, a variable speed is more expensive than a constant one.)
Optimal regenerative braking recovers like 2/3 of the energy lost, and suboptimal braking -- for instance, if you need to decelerate more rapidly because of a bend in the road -- is worse.
Every 100 feet of elevation change amounts to ~1% of the battery capacity of a Chevy Volt; a couple of small mountains, with lots of ups and downs, and it's easy to lose 5-10% of your range versus taking a more level route, 5% if you brake well, 10% if you brake poorly.
[Which is not to say that hitting the thruway doesn't also kill your range fast.]
Idling downhill costs less gas but may lead you in the wrong direction for a short while, vs going over a hilly route where you must accelerate uphill more often.
As a simple, unimaginative example. I'm sure you can think of others if you put in the time.
Everybody is trying to explain that it's fine or that you should care or whatever, but the real counterpoint is that Google doesn't care what mapping app a few motivated cranks use.
What if they released the exact same product as "minimize fuel cost if it doesn't take more time" and set that to default? You can still change to "fastest" if that's your preference.
My personal annoyance: their walking directions assume you don't know parkour and there isn't even an option for that
It's a near-truth, told to own my selfish tendencies while I'm on the topic of somebody else's. The truth being that I don't want that info from google, rather I delight in beating its time. I do wish that I could dial in a walking speed, though, and so do people with reduced mobility.
If you read the article, there's an option in the settings to not have this option "forced" on you. Even when it's "forced", it's only defaulting to more carbon-positive routes when the ETAs are comparable, so it shouldn't have much of an effect on whether you care about the feature or not.
