Everyone deals differently with uncertainty. If you have two options, one where you can win $100000 but the chance that you win is 5% and the other is $10000 and the chance is 20%. Which one would you choose, do you want to take the risk and maybe get the big prise or do you want to play it safer?
In engineering you too have to deal with risk. In many cases you have precautionary actions that you can take to avoid the harm. If the impact will be high but the certainty will be low, do you still need to take precautionary actions or not? Risk is therefore often measured as harm multiplied with the probability that it will occur. These questions do people deal with when they talk about risk management. Precautionary cautions cost money, so when is it efficient to invest and when is it better to just accept these risks? It is a hard question, because when you are talking about the safety of a plane for example, the question above is translated as how much money is one life worth? I would say that one life is of course more worth than money, so you should do everything what you can to save lives. But this is not realistic. But you can always look for safer alternatives, for example when you know a nuclear plant can really harm many people than you could look for an alternative like wind energy where the risk is much lower.
Safer alternatives means innovation and that means risks. Look for example at the electrical car. Their maintenance costs are lower than a conventional vehicle and that would mean that more people would buy electric vehicles and therefore the CO2 emission would decrease. However, what the study of Institut für Automobilwirtschaft (IFA) did not take in account was the change of battery after ten years. This study was over a period of eight years. When you would do the study over a period of ten years the maintenance cost of the electric vehicle would be much higher than of the conventional vehicle, because the costs of the battery is the biggest cost of the electric vehicle. Another big constraint for the electric vehicle is the charging time. It takes a lot of time for the electric vehicle to be fully charged. Also there are not a lot charging stations in the Netherlands. The last constraint for the big adaption of the electric vehicle is the range of the cars. The range of electric vehicles are not that big so you cannot take an outside country trip. The government tries to lower the costs of buying and using an electric vehicle by taxes. This means that you pay lower taxes because your vehicle’s CO2 emission is lower than that of a conventional car. You do not have to pay BPM and MRB (mottorrijtuigenbelasting) if you have an electric vehicle. You can even get subsidies to buy an electric vehicle or a charging station. This is done to lower the risk of a low adaptation rate of the electrical vehicle in the Netherlands.
So do you take the risk to buy an electric vehicle or not?
