This may be a bit off-topic, but these comments are really eye-opening. I had no idea that anti-EV sentiment was so strongly held. Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology.
What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together.
It's seems crazy that in the 21st century the best option we have for the storage and transfer of energy is "let's burn stuff". We can do better than that.
I live in the UK and I'm 100% for it in theory, but 100% against it in practice.
I currently have an electric vehicle - the only kind of usage scenario where it works and is absolutely brilliant is charging at home. That's about it. Public charging is a joke, vast majority of stations either don't work, are occupied most of the time, or cost so much money to use that it would literally be cheaper to drive a diesel car.
We visited our friends some time ago in London for a few days(before lockdown). They live in an apartment so no way I could run a cable to the parking space. No problem I thought - there's a Shell station nearby with a charging point, several ChargeYourCar points at car park not far away, and I could see on ZapMap that there were two charging points on the street - and worst case scenario there are rapid chargers along the way at few motorway stops.
We got there and basically - all ChargeYourCar points were out of order for 3 days we were there, the 2 charging points on the street were only for permit holders(something that ZapMap didn't mention), and the one single charging point at the Shell station nearby was occupied every single time I checked. So we stopped at the motorway services in the end, where they had 4 rapid charging points - all taken. We waited 30 minutes for someone to leave, once they left the car wouldn't connect - had to ring up the number on the charger, finally the customer service advisor restarted the point for me and it started charging. Only another 45 minutes of waiting and we had enough charge to get home. Oh and the charge was literally £0.49/kWh(I pay £0.05/kWh at home on a night tariff) - I had a Qashqai 1.6dCi few years ago that I could fill up for that much and drive down to london and back.
Again, the car itself is brilliant. It is the future. I have no idea how people still drive around in cars that burn anything to move - they are loud, having to have gears is stupid, having to keep buying fuel is stupid.
And yet.
I can't imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I'm eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.
>I can't imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I'm eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.
They have much longer than 9 years to get the infrastructure right.
The average car age in the US is roughly 12 years old. I imagine is is roughly the same in the UK. That means even if they stop selling new ICE cars in 2030 the average car might still be an ICE into the 2040s. Assuming no further restrictions it probably wouldn't be until the 2050s that it would become truly difficult to find a used ICE car.
Obviously the UK would need to improve in the meantime, but they would basically have 30 years to get their EV infrastructure into the position it works for every car owner.
> They have much longer than 9 years to get the infrastructure right.
No, these seem like pretty solid questions to ask if you are going to be forced to buy an electric car, not just if society is going to go all electric. Unless we're trying to convince people to just stop buying cars altogether in 2030.
>if you are going to be forced to buy an electric car,
That was my point. You aren't going to be forced to buy an EV. The used market for ICE vehicles can be expected to be robust for some 15-20 years after the ban on new cars goes into effect.
Being forced to buy an old ICE car rather than a new one is still being forced to do something.
Newer cars will have improvements in other things besides motive power, like safety features. Are we going to force people who are not in a situation where EVs are usable, to forgo safety measures as well?
No one is being "forced" to do anything. You want an ICE car, you can keep your ICE car or buy another used one. I am sure when it comes to it, there will also be a thriving niche market to keep these cars roadworthy for even longer than the normal 15-20 year lifespan. That also probably includes aftermarket modifications to make the cars safer.
I'm also sure at some point someone somewhere might be inconvenienced by decisions like this, but we are going to have to just accept that if we want to combat climate change. Maybe you object to it for a political or ideological reason. However it doesn't make sense to blame that objection on the lack of currently existing infrastructure when it would be 20-30 years before we truly need that level of infrastructure.
> when it would be 20-30 years before we truly need that level of infrastructure.
I don't agree. Where I currently live, there are often waitlists for rationed time at workplace charging spots. The person who you initially responded to also has massive issues charging anywhere outside the home. We are already at a point where electric infrastructure is woefully inadequate to deal with the influx of EVs in the current market, which isn't all that EV friendly; this will be catastrophic once all new cars are required to be EV-friendly.
The correct choice to combat climate change would be to actually make credible, large investments in national EV charging networks, not pooh pooh the issue and tell motorists to eat cake.
You are miscategorizing my comment. From my first post:
>Obviously the UK would need to improve in the meantime, but they would basically have 30 years to get their EV infrastructure into the position it works for every car owner.
I acknowledge it needs to improve. However conversion of infrastructure doesn't need to be completed by 2030. A gradual increase in infrastructure over the next 20-30 years can get the job done and is eminently doable.
> I can't imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I'm eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.
This isn't what's "works for every car owner", this is "works for even a majority of car owners". The current setup is terrible, the current investment pace is terrible, and there are currently no actionable plans to do better. And here we are talking like a ban is supposed to be feasible and this is going to get bearable in a nine-year timeframe.
We're not talking about the conversion of infrastructure, we're talking about the existence of adequate infrastructure. Other countries with electric transitions have clearly put public funding for infrastructure in place, and that's why it's not punishing for them to mandate it, because they are already ready.
I don't know what to tell you. You are acting like I am saying something that I'm not saying. Here is a simplified timeline that would meet the criteria I am talking about.
2020 - EV infrastructure works for a minority of drivers.
2030 - EV infrastructure works for the average driver.
2045 - EV infrastructure works for all drivers.
Also I was talking about conversion because it isn't like the ICE infrastructure is going to persist in perpetuity. That real estate can be converted over to public EV chargers as the ratio of cars on the road change. Right now Tesla's fastest chargers can do an 80% charge in less than 30 minutes. If the industry is able to cut that in half over the next 20 years, recharging an EV isn't really going to be any less practical than refueling an ICE vehicle. We aren't going to need a dedicated parking space with a dedicated charger for every car by 2030.
I just don't think that the UK has announced any sort of substantial public investment that would enable what you're saying in 2030 to actually be a reality. The free market is not going to deliver an EV infrastructure that works for the average driver by that time period given current levels of investment; ergo, without public investment, a 2030 ban is unreasonable.
It is a mistake to judge what the free market is currently doing as an indication of what the market will do as the share of EVs on the road increases. That is why it is important to point out that it is possible for gradual change to be enough. However there is no way to really know for sure how this will turn out, so I guess we just have to agree to disagree.
You're wrong about the 12 years — that's the average age at retirement, so the average car on the roads is six years old, not 12.
But I think you're right about the bigger issue — Norway's further along the road, and has been able to fix the infrastructure enough that people don't complain much, and has done so in much less than those 30 years. There are complaints, e.g. about building coops that won't let people install chargers in shared garages.
I seem to find useful pages only in German now (I am in Germany), which I expect wouldn't help you much, but statista.com and wikipedia.org has both, and if you wade through all the irrelevant graphs on statista you'll typically see that total/new is in the low teens for western countries (I checked three now, e.g. 47m/3.4m for .de, almost 14y lifetime or 7y average age).
Nio's car is capable of battery swapping. There is a swap station and a robotic arm take out the battery from your car a change a new one in 3 mins. What is interesting is that they have this program where when you buy a car, you don't buy the battery, you pay a price for the car, then a subscription fee for the battery. And then you can do unlimited free changes at these battery stations. The idea is that you use the entire battery like "fuel". You don't care the ownership of a battery. They make sure the battery is always healthy and full of charge. It also allow you to upgrade to a bigger capacity battery on your car just buy changing a tier in the subscription. Back then nio cars were launched with 75kw battery. Now users can upgrade their car to a 100kw battery by changing a tier of the sub on their phone and pay more monthly fee. Oh you can also downgrade the tier too, say you don't need the single charge range of the 100kw, you can switch to the 75kw and have lower per month fee. China population mostly live in dense apartments, and many old apartments cannot be retrofited with car chargers. This is vastly different from the US where people live in houses. This system allow nio cars to be used like gas cars. And if your swap speed is fast, you don't need as many "energy refill" stations. The way I see it, it's really hard to get ev charging speed equal to gas refills. But it's not technically difficult to a build a robot that changes out battery fast. There was another car company that made a prototype battery change station that can swap battery in 1 mins. And you can always charge the battery as well. So fast charging, destination charging, at home charging for the capable. The combination is able to cover more scenarios and more flexibility. I think it will be interesting to see how this system gets developed in the future. See if it could work well. It will bring a new solution to this industry problem. So far, it seems to work well for both nio and consumers.
This seems to me the only way possible to solve the charging problem. Not only it neutralizes the need for charging stations in your house but it makes the refill out of your house easy as gas one. The problem again is the adaptability and compatibility , if we can make smartphone companies use the same cable good luck making car manufacturers use a common battery type.
> and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing...
It doesn't have to magically be "perfect" on Jan 1, 2030.
In the UK around 2.3 million vehicles are sold per year[1]. Which means in 2030 about that many electric cars will be sold, and so on for each year. The ICE vehicles that were sold in 2029 won't magically stop being used, they'll just slowly fade out.
So in reality they have until well into the 2030s (even 2040s) before the very vast majority of vehicles will be all electric.
Of course this is a big challenge, and it will require effort. Anything worth doing is difficult.
The other choice is we sit around and do nothing. I know which option I prefer. And at 38 years old, it isn't up to me. Talk to people who are 15-25 and ask what kind of air they want to breath and what kind of world they want to live in. This is a decision for them, not for us.
Maybe I'm engaging in magical thinking, but I can't help think after a policy like this is implemented, apartments without electrical service next to your parking spot will rapidly become virtually unlettable. Supply follows demand.
Houses could have their own charging stations. I guess all the cars will need to be charged during the night, in parallel.
Parking garages could add charging stations for all their customers and get paid for that.
Parking places on the streets could be equipped with charging stations, one per place. It's going to be more complicated than laying fiber optics but doable. It's a new grid as big as the current one and for higher wattage.
Finally, if you have to park where there are no charging stations, oops.
Gas stations that can refill N cars per hour will be able to recharge a fraction of them, bad news for those businesses.
Of course this is true only if we'll have to charge. If battery swap becomes common then the problem will be solved. Yet, the volume and the weight of a battery is still greater than the volume and weight of the gasoline storing the equivalent energy. The logistics will be more complicated. I expect to see power plants dedicated to charging: charge batteries -> load them on a truck -> deliver to "EV stations" -> bring back the exhausted batteries -> check if they're still OK -> loop again.
And following that assumption, the most recent version of the national electric code in the US calls for there to be a drop for a EVSE at every N parking spots in new apartment buildings (there's a formula based on how many spots). It doesn't require for an EVSE to actually be installed, but the building has to have the capacity for it. That's important because adding say 20 30 amp EVSEs is a non-trivial increase in the total capacity a building needs.
BTW, even a 30 amp EVSE isn't great in an apartment. Because commercial service is almost always 3 phase, you'll only get 208v. That's 6.2 kW. In my townhouse, I have a 40A 240V circuit (50A at the breaker, but the 80% rule means the EVSE only puts out 40A). That's 10 kW. A 61% increase.
Norwegian experience is that you only need on average 1-2 kW on a load balanced system (individual chargers are 22 kW). I hope the regulation allows for that?
How do you expect this to change? Whatever the downsides of electric cars, rampant global warming is clearly much worse. (And yes, stopping it will require more than just switching to electric cars.)
Perhaps if electric vehicles were mandated, fast charging stations would be more widely available...
Btw, that's not me arguing against electric vehicles. They are absolutely fantastic. I think in the next ~10 years everyone who can aford one and has a place to charge one should get one. There will be a massive shift towards them. I just don't see a total ban in 2030 to be necessary -the market will shift towards electric anyway, but if you are in a situation where an electric car just doesn't work for you for whatever reason, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to buy an ICE car. Especially since I imagine they will start being in minority by then, so their impact will be smaller and smaller every year. With a total ban you aren't solving the situation for people who can't work around the limits of an EV - you're just making them pay higher and higer prices on the second hand market for existing ICE cars(as pre-2030 cars are meant to be allowed for as long as they work).
I would also prefer a very strong carbon tax (or something similar like cap-and-trade) over a blanket ban on specific products, but I'm not sure it makes much difference in practice. Isn't forcing people to pay more on the second hand market more-or-less equivalent to adding a tax?
And, eventually, you'd need the number of ICE vehicles to be low enough that ubiquitous gas stations won't be economically viable anyway.
Norway has already shown the road to getting to mostly EVs. It costs money. But they can easily ban ICE cars because they've put their money where their mouth is.
Look, we're all trying to do something for the future, we're on the same boat. But you can't just simply waltz to mankind and actively make their lives measurably more miserable 'because future and polar bears', suck it up. People will react very negatively and you will lose the cause, maybe for good. In next elections some populist will win and revert any progress (I believe I don't need to put names here, do I).
It literally doesn't matter that everybody on Hacker News would agree with this, HN is definitely not a representative sample on many topics.
If you think mankind is smarter, look at politics of lately, look at covid-related deniers, folks rejecting masks due to some wacky conspiracy, 5g/chipping and so on and on.
Forcing folks like this while we give places like China, India or other polluters a free pass? Not only are people expected to pay the bill (research, transition), but it literally won't matter on global scale that they do.
UK going away from fossil fuel-powered cars will not affect climate change in any mesurable way. The way to go forward is to get everyone (or at least a majority of countries) to agree on a reduction program. Otherwise, UK's population will suffer for nothing.
Funny, one thing one hears in these discussions in Germany is: reducing the amount of CO2 emitted in Germany isn't affecting climate change in a measurable way. Now replicate this in most other countries... One has to start and other nations are going to quickly join in.
Yes it will, because the UK is hosting the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2021 at which a lot of vital decisions will be made or ratified.
By the same logic, we shouldn't spend money on the police to investigate murders in $TOWN because even if we did, it wouldn't down the global crime rate all that much.
I think you are correct and the responses are missing the point. But I don't think a petrol ban is forcing people to do anything. If it really would negatively individual transport, there would be a huge backlash. But I think the scenarios are realistic enough so it doesn't come to that.
Switching to electric cars will make the life better for most of us. Even ignoring the fight against climate change, they don't emit bad smelling and most importantly toxic exhaust, create much less noise. In most cases, they drive way better than ICE cars.
I'm all in favour for people to stop driving if they don't like it, I can't wait for the day where I can be among the few owners of a mechanical car that I drive when I need to relax, outside of the cities, just don't call what other people enjoy stupid, please
Before anybody jumps at me, I quit driving for commute or day by day activities 7 years ago and when I need a car now I use car sharing (I spent around 25-30 euros a month, it really is nothing compared to what I used to spend when I owned a car).
But please don't tell me that one of those electric smart is a real car
>>just don't call what other people enjoy stupid, please
I enjoy it too, my last car was a Mercedes AMG with a modified exhaust and a tune map. I loved it.
But no, it was stupid. The climate is fucked and I literally had a car where the ECU would inject fuel and cut ignition just to produce the loud BRAP BRAP BRAP noise when changing gears. Literally burning fuel to make a noise and not move the car forward.
Like, these two are not mutually exclusive. It was incredibly awesome and incredibly stupid at the same time.
For driving experience of course I would pick the AMG over my electric car. But it's not a sustainable position to be in.
But because we move too many things burning fossil fuel
Pleasure is never stupid, before considering driving stupid, there are many things I would call it first
For example drinking beer, to quote you "you are literally burning fossil fuel to produce something that poison you"
The war on ice is wrong in many ways similar to the war on drugs: it is punitive only for the final user.
Do you really want people to stop using cars?
Instead of putting public money in private companies to help people buy the expensive new electric cars, give the money directly to people to not use the car and see what they use the money for, so you can better understand what their needs are, instead of creating an artificial one.
Stop? Nope. Vastly reduce reliance? Yep. Remove all subsidy to this mode of transit? Yes.
Global warming in my opinion is only the tip of the iceberg of "things car-based society has hurt". The massive sprawl induced by subsidized car infrastructure has many societal impacts, pollution is only one small item of a huge list.
> Stop? Nope. Vastly reduce reliance? Yep. Remove all subsidy to this mode of transit? Yes.
We agree
You make an important point, the exact one that makes me doubtful that EV transition should be subsidized, again.
EV incentives will go to the same actors that created these conditions and is going to pay for the same infrastructure that made our cities a living hell.
Instead of banning cars, remove the need to use them.
Instead of subsidize car makers, subsidize the rethinking of the entire mobility plans
If people won't need cars, they won't use them
If people feel that they invested in new "safe" EV cars, even the young people who show no love for cars (not wrongfully) will start using them, because they are new, they are modern, they are safe and probably smell good too and for sure they signal that you care about the environment, so you won't keep them hidden in the garage, you'll use them as much as you can (also to maximize the investment)
Which will bring us to the same point we are now: much of the cities public real estate is eaten by roads and parkings while walking is disincentivized because everything useful, from IKEA to the shoe shop, are in some giant mall out of town unreachable without a car
We need to get rid of cars as a social need, EV or not, it is a really bad habit to rely on them other than for fun and the occasional emergency
Soon some madlad will create a kit with pedals, a shift knob, and some noise makers for under the car plus a sweet software patch that will perfectly replicate the manual petrol experiece.
A bunch of purists with then argue that despite the fact they can't reliably tell the simulated electric from the original in blind a/b testing that the original is still better because it has "soul".
It's already a thing in China - they created an electric car that has a clutch and 6 gears - that don't actually do anything, they are 100% simulated, including stalling the car. Why? For a training car, so people who want a manual driving licence can train on an electric car.
Engine braking is an important part of driving safely because it avoids losing control of the steering wheels and can be used to drive at constant speed or slow down on slippery surfaces (snow, ice, water etc.)
There's a reason if trucks are still mainly manual and even the automatic transmission in trucks is not the same used in cars (it's much more advanced and it's more a computer activated gear than simply automatic)
I don't understand your argument at all. Again, every single electric car(including my own) has a regenerative mode, where the car applies gentle resistance to the electric motors when you lift your foot off the throttle - I can absolutely guarantee that if you drove one you wouldn't see any difference between this and engine braking with a manual. It provides the same level of safety in slippery conditions as a manual would.
The reasons why trucks don't usually have automatic transmissions is that the torque needed to move such a huge mass would destroy nearly every traditional hydrokinetic transmission, only recently dual clutches have started getting good enough to be installed in trucks, and indeed most new tractors you can buy now from Volvo, Mercedes or Scania are all automatic. It has nothing to do with safety, it was a technical limitation. And for braking trucks have a separate engine retarder that has nothing to do with the transmission.
> where the car applies gentle resistance to the electric motors when you lift your foot off the throttle
are you chosing it or how much?
the answer is no.
you can't become an expert if you aren't allowed to control the parameters.
> The reasons why trucks don't usually have automatic transmissions is that the torque needed to move such a huge mass would destroy nearly every traditional hydrokinetic transmission
that's another point, automatic transmission is more expensive, less robust and increases the cost of the vehicle without adding any other benefit than being 'easier' to operate.
would you fly on a plane where the pilot only knows how to use the autopilot?
that's where safety comes in, when things take more time to master, people tend to become better at them
Manual gear is not stupid, it is simply technically superior (it costs less and lasts more).
That doesn't mean we should have levers and clutches, that's the simplistic view of wannabe futurists, trucks have something much more similar to a semi-automatic (with 10, 12, 13 gears) than a full automatic one.
Truth is car makers need to sell more cars and will gladly make them do all the work "automatically" so people don't have to learn how to do it properly.
If they don't do something now, the 15 years old of today will grow up without cars and in a generation cars would be a thing of the past (that would be great!).
How to make them survive? Well, first of all don't make them useless, make them electric and costly and cover the added cost with people taxes that go directly in car company's pockets.
Secondly make them "easy" and "cool" and "sexy" so that a teenager doesn't have to learn to drive, that's scary and dangerous, like... do you really still practice to learn? what are we, cavemen?
And make them as complex as possible, so that the price won't ever go down and a Renault Zoe will cost as much as a Tesla (a Model 3s cost about 35k, a Zoe around 33k. It's just ridicoulus!).
We live in the era of the iPhones where the promise is that anybody can do what any other people can do, even though there are people that spent their lives learning something and other that did not (I did not, for example).
Of course it is possible when what you can do is dictate by the manufacturer, because "it dangerous out there, think of your old parents! would you give them a smartphone that let them do whatever they want? of course not"
Would you give your children an ICE car?
With manual transmission?
Are you a criminal?
The whole idea that you don't know how to not destroy the planet and the car needs to teach you how to drive responsibly, while the same car has been built by those that profited from destroying the planet's environment, always fascinated me.
>>are you chosing it or how much? the answer is no.
Uhm, yes of course you are, at least in most cars you can chose the level of regenerative braking, the same you would in a manual car. The effect is the same as if you were going downhill and decided to stay in 4th, 3rd, 2nd or even 1st gear - it's up to you. The mechanical result of it is exactly the same as when using engine braking, so I'm really not getting what you're trying to argue here.
>>you can't become an expert if you aren't allowed to control the parameters.
Except that you are, I honestly think you aren't very up to date with what the current designs are, and almost certainly you haven't driven an electric car.
>>that's another point, automatic transmission is more expensive, less robust and increases the cost of the vehicle without adding any other benefit than being 'easier' to operate.
Again, you operate on "common knowledge" from at least 10 years ago. The "traditional" hydrokinetic automatic - absolutely, sure. But those aren't really being used in most cars nowadays. Modern Dual-Clutch automatic is as light as a manual, marginally more complex than one(because in fact is is a manual in operation), and indeed, has other benefts like improved fuel consumption and vastly faster shift times than any manual transmission can even dream of having. Again, I doubt you have actually driven one recently or at all.
>>would you fly on a plane where the pilot only knows how to use the autopilot? that's where safety comes in, when things take more time to master, people tend to become better at them
Sure, if your goal is to have everyone on the road be a professional driver, then yes, I 100% agree with you. I think people should be trained like in Germany, where a part of training is going on the Autobahn and driving at 200km/h+ for a little bit. I'd love that. I also think that my opinion on this topic is irrelevant because like I said earlier for most drivers this level of skill is unnecessary.
Funnily enough, the exact same argument has been used to argue against autopilot in planes though - that its introduction will lead to pilots becoming inept and unable to act in emergencies. And that has actually happened in at least one documented plane crash - the autopilot disengaged and the pilots couldn't figure out why and the plane crashed. But....that doesn't change the fact that overal the introduction of autopilot has decreased the amount of accidents by several orders of magnitute - it made flying safer for everyone, even if it meant that pilots are now slightly worse at flying without it.
>>Manual gear is not stupid, it is simply technically superior (it costs less and lasts more).
Yeah except that in practice it doesn't, because people wear out manual transmissions all the time by being crap at using it. My dad used to have a car repair shop and someone who isn't "passionate" about cars will destroy a manual by just being an idiot at how they shift gears.
People constantly break them by not using the clutch properly, shifting at the wrong moment, staying in the wrong gear for too long.....you physically cannot do this in an automatic, because you don't get to change the gears yourself - so in practice and for "an average consumer" they last longer.
Besides, I just want to point out - I love how you took my argument against a blanket ban on ICE cars, and you turned it upside down into an argument about manual cars and the love of driving. I have started by, and continued to argue that the ban is stupid because:
1) people will need ICE cars
2) There are enthusiasts who should be able to keep driving them if they already own them
For my enthusiast driving needs, please give me a good MX-5 or a roll cage equipped Impreza, any day please. But for most cars for average consumer shouldn't be anywhere near like that. They should be electric, they should be full of safety tech, and they should baby their drivers and passangers. Like, again, like I said multiple arguments ago - these are not mutually exclusive positions to take.
> and almost certainly you haven't driven an electric car.
Of course I did.
And if you compare features and prices, they offer a way worse experience than a traditional car.
I've also driven rally cars professionally and on track sometimes with semi automatic gears.
I just lack the vocabulary to talk thoroughly about it in English (sorry, I studied business English and then computer science, not mechanical engineering...)
The state of the art is absolutely better and has been for decades, but the state of the art is not what people drive everyday.
The most popular EV right now in Europe is the Renault Zoe, which honestly is good, but far from great (and you can buy the same exact car with an ICE engine for 10k less, it's 30% less!)
Smart EQ is on the rise given the small size which is a great quality in many EU cities, it's as bad as the ICE one. At least it's affordable.
Except for Tesla all the other offer a very bad experience for the price, even the BMW i3 is not what you would expect from a 40 thousands euros car.
> People constantly break them by not using the clutch properly, shifting at the wrong moment
As I said I grew up in a repair shop too, imagine what they do to their cars when the same people think that an automatic is easier to drive so they put even less effort to it.
They destroy every other piece of the car, irresponsible people will be irresponsible.
I am not rooting for ice cars, but for letting cars go as a necessity and think of something else.
Electric cars are just another way to keep producing the same old product in a slightly different way.
They give a false sense of security and of progress.
But we are gonna have a black market for hacks and modified parts (batteries probably) anyway and they will be as dangerous as the traditional cars we have right now for pedestrians and other road users.
The problem with cars is barely the pollution, it's the effect that they produced on our environment, especially the highly dense urbanized areas of the World
If they were harder to drive and operate there will be less of them around
We got rid of people dying by falling from horses by not riding horses anymore as a standard way to travel
How many people do you see flying a plane?
A Cessna is not more expensive than a high end Tesla
P.s. flying without autopilot is barely possible, using an autopilot without mastering flight first is unimaginable
P.p.s. the same people not using the clutch correctly are going to mess with the engine controls on their new electric cars. How is that going to be better? Are they magically going to be better at operating machinery?
Or will they care less because "EV are the future they almost drive themselves?"
P.p.p.s. the number of fatalities is constantly going down because there are more and more mandatory safety devices on cars, but the number of accidents is almost steady (at least in Italy) also considering that the number of km driven went down due to 2 global economic crisis and a pandemia in 20 years and the increase of restricted areas in cities. But, and this is the bad news, there were more cars in Italy in 2019 than ever before, 1.4% more than 2018.
In red goal for 2020 victim reduction, in black actual number of victims
I don’t disagree with your pessimism, but at the same time 9 years is an eternity to just install electrical infrastructure. Hopefully laws like this will put a fire under people’s asses.
On the other side, would anyone start a business to lay power cables under the sidewalks of a city and create tens of thousands of charging points and be able to start selling it fully only in 2030? Probably not unless countries, states or cities pay for the setup. Will they start doing it closer to 2030 if they see that the adoption of EV is ramping up? More likely.
While I fully agree with your points and I truly have set my expectations for long-distance EV-travel to be as cumbersome as yours (you have to plan for that, because you can't know in advance). Still, I don't think that is enough to be against it.
I live in an apartment and charging an EV would cost way more than gas. Even the cost of having a charging pole would be more expensive per month than I pay for gas (charging not included and likely also expensive). And, as you mentioned, be way more inconvenient in some situations.
But can't it still be worth it? It is just one, very minor, out of countless sacrifices we will undoubtedly have to make.
Buy a Tesla everything else is shit. Others need to catch up but it's going to take a while. If you buy a Nokia phone today it's not going to work as well as an iPhone. I'm presuming the electric car you have is from a company who isn't as good.
Their competitors aren't good enough. It's going to take them a while to catch up so yes, for the next decade, Tesla will have first-mover advantage. From what I can see in the market, Tesla and NIO are leading the charge, the rest of them should just file bankruptcy now.
With all this said, I am presuming what you have. If you tell me the car you drive, I can look at their stock and give you a more informed statement.
It’s not anti-EV sentiment. It’s anti-blanket-ban sentiment. Even a decade from now there will be some use cases where gas vehicles are a better fit than EVs. Instead of a blanket ban on new gas cars, it’s less coercive and more economically efficient to tax their externalities.
I’m not a fan of gas vehicles. The only car I own is a Tesla. Still, I’m aware that gasoline cars do have certain advantages and banning them outright seems more detrimental than taxing them.
The climate doesn’t care about economics, only total parts per million of atmospheric CO2. It is mind boggling it’s taken us this long to appreciate the gravity of the situation and new combustion vehicle bans are kicking in.
I’m sure even when crop failures and mass migrations happen, some will still complain about their rights to burn fossil fuels for energy. We pulled progress and growth forward through incurring an enormous energy debt (burning ancient sunlight for 100+ years), and now it’s time to pay it back.
> The climate doesn’t care about economics, only total parts per million of atmospheric CO2.
But behavior cares about economics, taxes change the economics, and behavior affects CO2 levels.
The devil is in the details, of course. Taxes would have to be high enough to get the behavior under control. It could turn out that, in order to get usage down low enough, the taxes need to be 500% of the cost of a fossil fuel car or 5000% of the cost of fuel. And maybe that's not politically feasible or something.
But my point is in order to dismiss the idea of taxes as a solution, you can't start with the idea that taxes won't have any effect. Governments all over the world use taxes to change behavior, and there are obvious examples of it working, like tariffs in trade wars.
Note that I'm also not saying taxes are the right solution here. This is really just a point of order.
I agree that economics can be used to incentivize certain behavior, my argument (poorly) worded is that such a policy (taxes vs outright bans) is no longer sufficient. Better economic incentives (carbon tax) might have negated the need for a ban, but we're beyond that point now [1].
A carbon tax is still pretty important. If you can only push through one of the two politically it's not clear to me an ICE ban is the right choice.
In ten years at the current rate of progress, EVs will be well past their tipping point economically and sales will crater anyway. If you add substantial carbon tax on the fuel, they're done.
And a carbon tax will help with all sorts of other emissions, transportation being only about 10%.
A new car sales ban does help car companies see the writing on the wall, but in the EU the direction is crystal clear anyway.
I feel like pointing at a graph of carbon in the atmosphere is an unfair response to the parent comment, who isn't denying the problem and is just talking tactics.
Well I took the time to reply toomuchtodo, so I'm just going to paste my response here.
It appears politically untenable in the US. But so does a new ICE ban.
Caifornia has passed a 2035 ban, but it has flirted with a carbon tax too in parts.
Canada has a carbon tax, and a 2040 ban. Australia had a carbon tax, with no ICE ban, but to our eternal shame repealed it when a conservative government regained power. India has an ICE ban scheduled and a carbon tax. Norway has their aggressive 2025 ban, but has had a carbon tax that covers about half their emissions since the 90s.
The EU doesn't have one yet, but I would bet a lot of money they will by 2030.
It's not clear to me that they're all that different in terms of political will required. The same countries are interested in both.
Although the specific level of tax that can be passed on carbon may not be sufficient for the desired result. An ICE ban is in theory blanket, although exceptions are going to creep in.
Right, but we also recognize that eventually the impact of something is so small that it's not worth banning. Why are Lamborghinis allowed to be sold despite emissions easily going into hundreds of grams of CO2/km? Because legislators have correctly recognized that the number of Lamborghinis sold each year, and the average amount of miles they are usually driven is absolutely negligable and has close to no impact on climate change. That's why small car manufacturers who produce few thousand cars a year have an exemption from the new emissions regulations enforced by the EU from next year - they just don't matter at all.
Once the market gets to a point where the sales of ICE cars are around few percent out of all, maybe even less - then there's no point in banning them at all. Clearly only people who absolutely need them are buying them, because no one else does. So....why ban them? And it looks like the market is absolutely heading towards that point anyway, with truly draconian fines in the EU introduced soon and general apetite for electric cars showing strong growth in the car sales. We'll be there in 10 years, full ban or not.
I see what you’re trying to get at, but look at Toyota (who sells about 10.7 million cars a year annually) trying to push fuel cells when EVs are the clear winner and there is almost zero hydrogen fueling infra (Honda and Fiat have to pay Tesla billions because they aren’t selling EVs in Europe, but still get to sell those combustion vehicles they do sell). I think market forces are important, but sometimes, when the situation warrants it (global emergency), you have to use the regulatory stick. We’ve run out of time for the Imaginary Hand to save us.
During World War 2, the US gov didn’t go to manufactures and kindly ask them to retool for the war effort. They demanded it. Similar situation, similar (but not quite as draconian) implementation. “You will build only EVs now, retool accordingly”.
Governments are even willing to invest in manufacturing and charging network costs, and green/central banks are coming with easy money. I’m unsure what other support you can provide at this point to make the transition smoother, considering petroleum consumption externalities are already unpaid for by the entire supply chain.
One way or the other, politics needs to send signals to the manufacturers and customers, where things are going. Yes, I expect the ban to be completely a token effort because people stopped buying ICE cars long before, but that might be triggered by this token now. Also, when discussing large scale infrastructure needed, be it grid enhancement or charge point creation, having this clear goal helps with the planning, especially when the government is involved.
The climate doesn't care also for political choices based on nothing else than PR
EV are cool, they make people who supports them blindly look cool too
Banning fast fashion is not, it'll make anyone who proposed it sound like a sad trombone or a "boomer" who wants to stop youth expression of inner self
But I know which is worse and I know that if we ban the first, we should obviously ban the other 5 years before
p.s. I do not own a car anymore (sold the last one 7 years ago) and I only make an average of less than 1 thousand Kms/year - this year I still have to surpass the 500 Kms - on rented cars (mainly inside the city, on electric cars)
I have no strong opinions on this other than that it's inevitable at some point. However, a theory:
Many of the HN crowd here are quite likely to live in an urban area, in an appartment without a fixed parking space. There is no 'charging at home'. Sure there're a decent number of plugs around - but for _everyone_? Not by a long shot. What this law is basically saying is that there will be no practical way for these people to own a car - not least without significant infrastructure work and public investment (and corresponding political will), which is, not always something you want to bet on. Given the healthy dose of skepticisim anyway - I'm not entirely surprised this is being received with less than universal excitement.
I've never found the need to buy a car in my life. I'm 34. I commute everywhere by bicycle, and my partner (who also doesn't own a car) and I get heavy things delivered. It is possible, and, for the sake of the planet, I really think that this is a great thing that we should be celebrating. Most people on the planet live in cities, and I really think that we should try to wean them off fossil fuels.
Sure - I lived in London for years and didn't own a car. I also commuted by bicylce and I thought it was great. Sometimes the highlight of my day!
But people in general don't like having their options constricted even if it's for the greater good. It's human nature and I think the best ways forward are to get people excited about the electric future. 'In 10 years electric cars will be so good you'll forget we ever bothered with petrol' would probably be a more effective way to get people excited. Unfortunately that'd need to come from a pretty credible source, and they'd get the credit for it, and so in the absence of that - just make this law! It's easy, and who will be around in 10 years (in politics) anyway?... That's why I'm raising my eyebrows a bit at this.
Heavy things delivered means you are contributing to pollution as well as anybody else
What's really polluting the atmosphere is not people's cars, it's the constant and unstoppable traffic of goods delivered from country to country for no real reason other than "economy of scale"
A friend of mine has asked for an eye pencil replacement the other day because it was delivered of the wrong colour
It costed a couple euros and came from Korea
They gladly sent another one and picked up the old one
For a two euros eye pencil
Imagine what the fashion industry produces when it moves the 30 billion pounds of clothes that every year are discarded in UK
Not to say that people don't pollute, but that the control should start on who produce the most pollution and also profit from it, not from the last ring of the supply chain
Definitely my personal feelings. I couldn't imagine the practicalities of owning an EV in central London. Assuming you're lucky enough to own/rent somewhere with some kind of parking - good luck trying to get them to install charging points. Most of the time it's a struggle to get the windows cleaned.
Whilst most of the petrol stations near me are pretty shabby - it's easy enough to get fuel.
The initial developer is probably bankrupt. The management company attempts to pass the charge to the flat owners (through a protracted series of letters), most of whom now live in the countryside because the rent from the London flat pays the mortgage on their 5 bedroom home in the countryside. They spend 2 years dragging out the process; arguing, challenging. None of the renters get to charge their car until about 2037.
Is there no way to have a special charge to flat owners in the UK? If it's like the US, it'd be through a HOA for the building. If someone wanted to fight it they'd have to go to court.
I could imagine a scheme where a bank lends the HOA the money but then deals with the court since dealing with that is much less of a pain for them than the random building HOA president.
That would be a reason to require electric outlets at each parking space a bit earlier than 2030. And of course, not every car is electric in 2030, hopefully only every new car.
But people do still buy cars, I assume voluntarily, so there must be some benefit for them.
I live in a urban area and my commute by public transport is twice as long as by car. Yes I know it's not something to be celebrating - but I am definitely and objectively better off by using a car.
> Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology.
I think people closer to the frontlines of tech understand better the problems with new technologies as they are implemented in practice, hence more people prefer having the choice to use older, less sexy, more time-tested technologies.
It depends at which scale you look at it. EVs are nice because you get less emissions locally, but in the grand scheme of things you just displaced the pollution and created new problems (lithium, cobalt and rare earth mines, battery recycling, power source, updating the grid &c).
> We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together.
The question is, is it enough ? It feels a bit like we're curing the symptoms but not their causes.
There are 1.5 billion vehicles in the world, we should strive to reduce their number, not continue to expand it, EVs aren't a miracle, 1.5 billion EVs are still a huge problem
The impact of electric vehicles is minimal compared to ICE vehicles. An ICE vehicle burns like 20 tons of fuel during its life time. An electric vehicle needs less than 10 kg of lithium, which can be completely recycled at the end of life. The next generation of Tesla batteries will be cobalt free and no lithium battery contains any rare earths. That is an urban legend.
Switching to electric doesn't mean to increase the number of vehicles, they are built instead of ICE vehicles. Ideally, we reduce the count a lot, but every single vehicle built needs to be electric.
Electric cars are a win in almost all countries already, but of course, if we want to prevent climate change, we have to convert energy production to be 100% carbon free, and that quickly. Basically every electric car bought today will eventually run on 100% carbon free electricity. Any ICE vehicle will run on 100% carbon.
I would like to start by banning all diesel...this is something that can be done immediately. All city buses can run an regular gas or propane, same with large transport trucks.
I'd like my city to become a bicycling paradise. It's the best way of getting around for under 30km.
It's merely about usability. EVs are great for short commuting hops, but offer no solution if you want to have a road trip with daily mileage exceeding the full battery range. Also note that the posted ranges are "under best possible circumstances", so factor in real-world use, battery degradation and not wanting the charge to drop below 20-30% for your own peace of mind, and your effective roadtrip range is sliced in half.
Sure, there are charging stations, but if you are traveling with kids, having an extra 1-hour break, could be a huge headache.
A common standard for batteries that could be quickly exchanged at a charging station, instead of charging them, could solve the problem 100%, but instead we see governments forcing less effective solutions into everyone's throat.
My husband and I took a road trip of 4,682 miles in a Tesla, with a dog. We stopped every 3 hours and charged for 30 minutes. It was not only possible, but easy, because those stops corresponded to lunch, coffee, dinner, and sleeping. The dog needed to be let out, I needed to stretch my legs, etc.
It's harder with kids. Tesla gets a reasonable range due to squeezing everything to the limit. Getting the same range out of a minivan-sized vehicle without tripling the cost of batteries would be rather tricky.
Also when you travel with kids, you make longer breaks when the kids need them. In that case, picking a random gas station nearby filling the gas while my wife runs everybody through the toilet and distributes snacks, makes things easier. Doing it exactly on schedule with a forced 30-minute wait in a fixed location would be much trickier.
I'm a technical savvy IT consultant with more than 10 years experience. I have dealt with automotive software for more than 5 years with various clients. Some of my perspective is based on that. I drive a diesel car currently and I plan to keep it as long as possible.
Depending on where you live, EV's may range from moderately practical to unrealistic. I travel to many countries frequently and have lived across APAC including India.
If you talk about a country like Singapore, which is very small in real estate (literally called a tiny red "dot"), sure. EV's are quite reasonable, also somewhat practical. It's good for daily commute or going around the island, sure.
If you talk about a country like India, then, it's highly impractical to own one. First, you need proper infrastructure across such a massive land area, which by itself could take decades to get right (currently, India doesn't have them). Then, you need to factor in the populace and thus the long queues you're going to be facing in the public charging spots.
Because India is such a vast country, if you wanted to travel from the southern most point of the country to the topmost (Kanyakumari to Kashmir), it's going to be impossible with just an EV and relying on public charging points. The charging time alone would add up quite quickly over such a long duration.
I do a quarter of that stretch frequently - Banglore to Kanyakumari or sometimes even from Chennai. It takes me 8 hours on an average including a 1 hour meal break. And the fuel stations are just so easily accessible across this entire stretch.
It costs me just $50 for one way and $70 for a 2 way journey of about 700-800 kms. If I was driving an EV, the best range I can get is about 250 kms (based on the options available in India and not quoting optimistic manufacturer ratings, but based on real world traffic conditions in India) on my Hyundai Kona. Charging to 80% takes about an hour. If you do the math, I'm going to be spending 3 hours just on charging alone. The cost for charging is also much more expensive compared to what I'm going to be spending on oil. It's a clear cut decision for me, especially when I have to travel long distances.
And I'm not even factoring the risk of what happens if my car breaks down in the middle of the highway, which a local mechanic will have no idea on how to fix. During my work experience, I have audited some of the code for some popular manufacturers out there. EV cars are actually not about battery tech, it's about software. They run basically everything from a software "engine". That actually scares me, especially because I'm a software engineer. The modern EV has a lot of things going down under the hood. This is so unlike my Suzuki diesel which is simply an old school car with a battle-tested ECU (the same ECU is reused across many models, manufacturers for decades now) made by Bosch. The code in there is very simple and doesn't try to do a lot. It takes care of firing the pistons at the right time, making sure the turbocharger doesn't overwork, it takes care of the locks and alarms in the car and that's about it.
It doesn't do all the "smart" stuff that a modern EV does. Like talk to the manufacturer telling them where I am exactly. Or when I should service my car. Or what playlists I would enjoy listening to. The infotainment system on my Suzuki is separate, for instance. There is no software "engine".
As someone who prefers dumb speaker systems and TVs instead of "smart" speakers and TVs, I prefer regular, old-school cars than the modern "smart" EVs. If they made a dumb EV, for sure, I'd go for it for my city use, but it still doesn't meet my criteria for long distance travel as explained above.
This is why I consider EV's highly impractical FOR ME.
And this argument about "let's burn stuff" - did you know many charging points consume power off the grid, especially in India? And many people like me who own the Kona, actually carry around a portable Honda generator in our boot (which runs off petrol) which can charge the car for worse case situations.
> What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago.
My point is, we are not there yet and we have to acknowledge that. You can't cast judgement on the rest who don't use an EV simply because it's not practical for them. That's elitist. EV's aren't necessarily "better" for everyone.
Letting people choose petrol and diesel vehicles is not "anti EV". I believe sales of electric cars will automatically eclipse petrochemical ones gradually, government coercion and suppression of individual liberty is not required.
The climate doesn't wait and doesn't care. it's better to accelerate the adoption of Electrical cars by any means necessary before the occurrence of apocalyptic events.
If the climate doesn't wait and doesn't care, then allowing wealthy people to pollute the ever-living fuck out of the environment solely because they're wealthy is even more perverse than placing the enormous burden on poor and middle class people to buy a new technology that has shit infrastructure.
Indeed, the Reuters piece notes, “The FT said the new timetable was not expected to apply to some hybrid cars which use a mixture of electric and fossil fuel propulsion and could still be sold until 2035.”
> Used cars, which were on the road before April 2017 and produce low levels of carbon dioxide emissions (the limit is 100g/km CO2 or less), continue to be taxed under the old system and retain their tax-free status, whether powered by petrol, diesel or electricity.
The UK is making sensible small steps. That quoted rule has ended and now only electric cars are exempt from that tax. We’ve had high fuel taxes for a while, though frozen lately for poor reasons, rather than the planned increases.
> Smells like "I am the good guy" political agenda
Looks like the only realistic plan. All the “fully electric by 2035” plans that hardcore environmentalists love to pass have zero chance of going into effect.
> 2035 is fifteen years from now, and good EVs are competative with ICE vehicles right now. I don’t see how that’s unrealistic
Irrelevant. Fifteen years is almost a political generation. Punting pain ensures a punt. It gives cover for doing nothing during the timeline. And when expiry nears, what is the harm of another decade,
A slow phase-in spreads the heartburn to a palatable level. One slow-burn strategy is a creeping mileage requirement. Another is hybrids as a Trojan horse.
TL; DR I bet I could win an election in any blue-collar district running against implementing an ICE ban in 2035.
What infrastructure is missing? People's homes have electricity. And the longest road trip you can do in the Outer Hebrides (Rodel to Ness) is 80 miles, so there's no obvious need for mid-way charging stations.
Install charging in every apartment parking space. Mandate it. Fund it. It will save the country trillions from lost GDP due to climate change, if GDP is what they care about.
Yep. Smells like "I am the good guy" political agenda. Environmental bills that accomplish very little. Go all-in on electric for real change.
There is absolutely not a chance that the UK could have EV charging infrastructure equivalent to the current network of filling stations in place by 2030. Hybrids can be filled as normal, operate on petrol on motorways and self-charge for use in town.
95% of BEV charging happens at home. UK has a national power grid. The big part is already done.
The number of super chargers you need in public places per car is pretty low. Can’t imagine with 100% saturation you would even need 10% of the gas station population to serve the country.
Presently happens at home - for those with off-street parking. Plugging in and charging overnight makes a lot of sense for those that a) do have that and b) don't do long enough trips to need to charge elsewhere. But that leaves out an awful lot of people. And EV ranges aren't nearly as long as the manufacturers quote* in any but ideal conditions with a single occupant and no luggage. So filling stations will still be needed and they will all need superchargers.
* Yes neither are ICE's but this isn't a problem for anyone because there are petrol stations everywhere
I'm all in favour but would quite like to know how much spare generating and grid capacity we have, and what the demand will be if all cars go electric. I get the impression we're not building new power stations fast enough but would like to know more.
Hybrids use _way_ less fuel than pure-ICE vehicles though; I was amazed at how less frequently I had to fill up my hybrid compared to my petrol car just from the ERS.
IIRC, the original ban was going to apply to hybrids too - in 2035 - but now the government are bringing the ban forwards by 5 years for pure-ICE.
Depends on the size of the battery and electric drive unit. Suzuki sells start/stop hybrids with a small battery where the electric motor is basically just an ICE starter. Also depends on how you drive it.
Unfortunately, this isn't generally true. There are great hybrids like the Toyota HSD system, which do save some fuel - still about 4 liters per 100km - but a lot of the hybrids are just for compliance and when run on their main engine, they don't save fuel, sometimes even use more as they are dragging all the electric stuff with them.
IMHO if governments want to meet their Paris Accord targets they should be focusing subsidies on getting the price of hybrids down to the level of the same model as a non-hybrid.
Reduces emissions in traffic and lights and helps build out charging infrastructure with plug-ins without an "over" reliance on stations.
Certainly also encourage BEVs, but I think an easy-is stepping stone is a needed given climate change.
Hybrids are the reason CO2 emissions increased in EU. EU offered so much incentives in the last years that companies bought them, but never charge them. They emit 400% of the CO2 quota that was allocated for the cars, it's the new type of diesel cheating that car companies use. I'm not against hybrids of course, just against giving incentives to buy them.
Hybrids are no win at all. They would have been a great idea, of more companies had followed the lead of Toyota, which is selling the Prius since 1998. At best, hybrids reduce the CO2 produces somewhat. But many hybrids are designed for pure compliance, not saving CO2 in real world usage.
But in any case, we don't need to reduce the CO2 produced by cars, we need to eliminate it entirely.
Society needs to get CO2-neutral urgently, and cars are actually the low hanging fruit as perfectly nice electric cars are already being sold. In contrast, we have very little ideas what to do about flying for example, except use precious bio or synthetic fuels.
hybrids were always a stop-gap technology on the path to full electric. With the price of batteries dropping so rapidly, hybrids make less and less sense.
I'll wager no manufacturer will be making them in a couple of years.
Hybrids are mechanically more complex than either an all ICE or an all electric car, so that's not ideal.
On the other hand, they have better range than either, generally, and keep the quick fillup time of an ICE, with optional short trip charging depending on equipment. Additionally range is good at slow speeds where electric wins, and at high speeds where ICE wins.
When the battery placement isn't criminally stupid (like c-max energi that guts the rear storage), the end result is a best of both situation.
I thought they were only allowed under the earlier, 2035 target, but when the target got moved to 2030 then the exception for hybrids disappeared as well? Or have they changed their plans again?
These are good news. However, one of the biggest unsolved problems of the EV industry is utilization and recycling of degraded battery pack cells. You can't simply take an old EV to a junkyard due to fammable and polluting chemicals in battery cells. Extracting and disassembling different types of battery packs is not something that can be done on industrial scale right now (unlike manufacturing). Only on the order of something like 5% of batteries get recycled [1].
Today each manufacturer is focused on achieving highest production efficiency with no coordination which leads to many divergent designs none of which are easy to recycle.
Are there are some new developments on the horizon before the world goes all-in and creates a new environmental problem?
Yes, there are. Tesla just announced building a recycling facility. In Germany, there are also active recycling companies. Old batteries have valuable resources, so there is a large incentive of recycling - as soon as large scale supply of dead batteries is available, large scale recycling will be done. But most batteries in current electric cars will live for quite some time before they need recycling.
Cool. So, funds have been appropriated to complete a national grid upgrade to support the switch along with a charging station network compatible will all manufacturers too?
...but the salient point is that if 80% of all passenger cars become electric, this would lead to a total increase of 10-15% in electricity consumption. (Far, far from the "order of magnitude" claim.)
And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.
Charging at home isn't an option for many people in the UK. In most cities there are a large number of homes that only have on street parking (mostly housing built prior to WWII which still makes up a sizeable amount of housing in the UK). One solution that has been proposed is for charging points to be built into street light poles.
I've never seen street light charging anywhere in Manchester - in fact the lack of on-street charging points is why I bought a hybrid rather than a EV.
Admittedly that was almost 3 years ago, but I still wouldn't have anywhere to charge it at home...
I’m assuming that there are still far more cars than there are streetlights. It might work, but god does it sound stressful never knowing if you’ll get lucky and find a streetlight parking spot.
They cluster them in at least 3's. If the three by my house are completely blocked (the cable is almost as long as the car), in use, or broken (one was kicked in recently, now fixed) and I desperately need a charge (which has only happened once) there are at 10-15 more within 5 or so minutes walk.
Ubitricity has shown a concept where they have smaller extender posts off the lamp posts, which I guess they'll be able to install if an area gets really busy.
There is this attitude from those in cities that us outside of it eat mud and bang sticks together like primates. I frequently am seen as uneducated because I have a west country accent.
All new street lights (as of a couple of years ago) have to have charging points built-in, (or perhaps it's every alternate one or whatever) which I think is good, and also a good way of ensuring a gradual increase rather than trying to set arbitrary targets each year and do random disconnected things to meet them.
Do you have a reference for this because it seems unlikely to be true. The difference in wiring guage between a 100w light and a 3kw is very significant.
Edit: this article talks about one street in London being the first to have car chargers built in an is from March this year.
The main difference is that (a) each street light is actually ~ 10W, and (b) the wiring is massively over-specified. Quoting from a local authority source for street lights, [1], the minimum conductor area allowed (for the 220-270 VAC supply) is 6 mm^2, for a total thermal current limit of around ~55A. If you have, say, 100 lamps on a single "ring main", you still only have a power draw of ~1 kW, where the cable is rated to 55 V x 220 A ≈12.1 kW minimum.
Tesla's new fast chargers support 250kw peak per car. So even 12kw is nothing to write home about. How many poles is that shared between? If it's more than 4 then it's not really enough. I suspect the reason the conductor is over specified though is to avoid voltage dropping outside of the 10% range it's allowed.
3kw is a trickle charge. Even the previous generation leaf had a 24kwh battery. From flat to fully charged would be overnight. 60kwh is more like what you need for similar range to a petrol car.
I lived in London for 20 years until I escaped five years ago, 15 years in a terrace street where parking occupancy was 85% or higher most of the time (except when Google last scanned it) and almost 100% in the evenings.
It was sometimes hard to get parked here never mind near your house or by a lamp post. Take a look at the street on Google street maps (Link below). These are old houses built over a century ago and many are now multiple occupancy with 1-3 cars per house. Counting lamp posts and cars (when full) there's probably one lamp post to every 15-20 cars. So lamp post charging is not going to work practically here and this is typical of many such streets.
I'm less worried about grid collapse and more worried about localized hot spots leading to localized failures. What happens when everyone in my neighborhood comes home and plugs in two Teslas? Looking at the markings on the transformers, I don't believe we'd operate through that. Luckily that doesn't seem catastrophically difficult to fix in a place with a good utility company. But we're on PG&E, so it'll probably rust out and catch fire before it gets an upgrade. Maybe UK providers are better.
Presumably this would be solved with time-based energy pricing to incentivise people to use electricity at times with lower load (which is often at night: perfect for EVs)
Yeah, but oftentimes loads (e.g., A/C or cooking) are not shiftable. And since there's no "EPA drive cycle" for TOU pricing or marketing standards, everybody quotes the lowest-possible rates that aren't representative of your marginal cost to consume. It's really anti-consumer.
Imagine if everything adopted this model. Gas at the pump changes price mid fill-up. You'd fret that you'd be gouged for a million dollar gallon in the moment that you glance away. Or if there were TOU in addition to data caps on your internet connection - streaming a movie might be more expensive than you bargained.
So yes, in principle I agree that pricing everything to the most-granular and timely degree is economically correct, but it's also absolutely exhausting as a consumer. There's only so much cognitive burden to be tolerated. At some point apathy takes over.
Tesla generally doesn’t start to charge until like midnight (you can adjust it). If you can handle peak noon AC load, you can definitely handle middle of the night BEV charge load. It does hurt some generation strategies such as solar, but it plays nice with Vaseline generation.
> and most people will be able to charge their cars at home.
No, most people in the UK live in terraced housing with no assigned parking spot - it's hit and miss whether they get to park outside their house or not when they come home from work. You also can't trail cables across the sidewalk (or pavement, as they say over there) - that would upset the disability people, for one thing.
In Germany, its about 25% of the cars which don't have a regular parking spot only, I would be surprised if the numbers in the UK would be vastly different.
However, everywhere where in-street parking is regular over night, there should be power outlets at the street side. They are quite common in the scandinavik countries, as even ICE cars used to be plugged in over night for heating the motor.
It’s not just the building of distribution points, which can be at home. It’s the sheer overall volume of electricity consumption going up per household, sometimes even an order of magnitude.
Most electrical grids will need to be upgraded to accommodate this. This is doable, but costs money and takes time.
...but the salient point is that if 80% of all passenger cars become electric, this would lead to a total increase of 10-15% in electricity consumption. (Far, far from the "order of magnitude" claim.)
And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.
We can also work back from first principles here. According to [0] we can see in 2019 the UK consumed 20.8bn litres of diesel and 16.2bn litres of petrol for non-commercial use. Taking the energy consumption of 10 KWh and 8.9 KWh of a litre of diesel and petrol respectively gives us an annual total of 3.4x10^11 KWh.
Dividing this number by 8760 (the number of hours in 2019) gives us 40,203,196 KW, or 40 GW total energy consumption. Assuming that electric vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE, gives us about 8GW of electricity needed to replace all petrol and diesel consumption in the UK.
According to [1] the UK's peak consumption is currently 61.9 GW with a theoretical maximum of 75.3 GW. So to replace all non-commercial fuel used would be 13% of the peak usage.
According to [2] the UK's total electricity generation in 2019 was 323.7 TWh which is 3.237x10^11 KWh which is roughly equivalent to the total energy value for non-commercial diesel and petrol calculated above. Assuming again the 5x efficiency gain that would mean a ~20% increase in the amount of energy that would need to be generated.
> And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.
I expect this is the part which will require more investment than anything else, as it will mean electrifying office car parks — the UK is further north than every American state except Alaska, so winter sunsets happen before the work day ends.
It certainly shouldn’t be impossible, but the current UK government is prone to acting as if they can make things happen just by saying so rather than spending money or doing any planning.
It isn't in the UK. There is very little surplus capacity in our grid. We started moving away from coal and subsidising green power years ago, and there has been chronic underinvestment in some areas as a result. A few years ago, it was a massive issue, things have improved (particularly now with falling demand) but it is a legitimate concern in some cases. Also, remember that the UK will need wind, solar doesn't work, and it isn't windy all the time (despite parts of our country being relatively windy).
You seem to be confusing generation capacity with grid capacity. Generation capacity might be a problem, but it's solvable with relatively simple solutions. (Build more power plants, buy in power from Europe.)
No, I am not. The underinvestment extends to the grid (the UK has trouble replacing power lines/maintenance, let alone moving towards adding new capacity...the UK has very few detached houses so this is going to be complex).
And "build more power plants"...so simple...part of the problem is that actually building more power plants is more complex than just typing a post out or observing it should be true. This is linked to the issues that I mentioned in the previous post (when the govt moved towards green power a decade or so ago, investment went through the floor...more recently, they have introduced price caps...the reason why the UK hasn't built power plants is because the govt asked companies to build them, and they said no...which is why the govt has had to hand out big subsidies to nuclear).
Btw, if you aren't familiar with something, ask more questions (I know this because I used to work as an analyst, and part of my coverage was these companies) rather than assume that someone has made a basic mistake. The power market is local, not global. What is happening in the US isn't happening everywhere else (the UK is far further down this road than anyone else).
Ok well all I know is that over here, in The Netherlands, it’s the companies that maintain the actual grids that are saying this. Our grids are already fairly heavily loaded, and it needs upgrades to accommodate the increase in demand. Both from EVs as with other projects to migrate away from fossil fuels.
The summary is that if there were 4 million vehicles charging overnight, it would cause a total of 20GW of electricity. Our current total consumption (including industry) is 33GW, so this would cause a significant increase in electricity consumption.
I don't know the precise UK numbers, but a complete switch to electric cars would mean 20% more electricity consumed from the grid. This is not a huge increase, in most places the grid should be completely fine to sustain the extra load. Especially, as car charging is wonderful for grid balancing, you mostly wouldn't do it in the moments of highest grid demand.
Yes, residential electricity consumption would about double, but that isn't a huge challenge for the grids either. The biggest change would be adding some more transformers which provide the 230V to households. But as the changeover to electric cars will take like 20 years, this is absolutely doable - and in Germany the electric providers started already the planning.
That myth buster is bollocks. It only flies numbers and has no substantiation on the figures presented. It's only a feels good story.
Their numbers don't add up. My apartment consumes around 400kWh a month. Assuming I charge a Tesla with 82kWh battery and I use it all in a month, the additional energy consumption is: 82/400 = 20%. And that is only on the fat chance that I will be driving less than I do today.
So prove me wrong.
It's physics. All the energy that the cars consume has to come from somewhere. And people will drive more especially because the car is now somehow 'green'
Private electricity consumption is only a small part of the total electricity consumption. While private consumption might be doubled when switching to electric cars, 20% total increase is a reasonable expectation (in Germany it would be somewhat less than that).
Increase in total capacity is irrelevant when people want to charge their cars _at home_. The circuits for residential areas need to take into account the increase in capacity.
And when private electricity consumption is very small, wtf was with the move to LED lighting for and the ban of incandescent bulbs?
Increased demand for homes can be handled by adding more transformers. The lines are fine, but the number of homes per segment behind a transformer needs to be reduced. This is already ongoing in Germany for example.
And the switch from incandescent to CFL/LED did save a lot of energy in total, both for residential and business applications. I once read the number that the net load was reduced by 1 GW due to the change. That is a reasonably sized nuclear power plant.
According to [0] the UK actually does not need to upgrade the network. I would also check [1] - the government task force that coordinates this. This is also interesting article: [2]. The company I work for is also engaged in a project that would allow using fleet of EVs as a power storage. (e.g. buying energy when it is cheap - during wind peaks and selling when it is expensive, but I dont know much about that project.)
The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points. There’s also a big rollout of charging points built into existing lampposts - by tapping existing power lines these are very cheap to install. The chargers are run by a few different networks but you pay for usage so it’s quite possible to just sign up to them all and carry 2 or 3 cables.
The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points.
How many people live within a circle of "a few hundred metres" in London? It averages 4700/km^2 across all of Greater London according to Wikipedia, it will be denser in the middle. How many cars is that? TFL says average of 0.3 cars/person. So that would be 1410 cars or 235 per charging point.
Poor people aren't going to be affected by this. They're not buying new cars. This ban us on the sale of new vehicles, a second hand market will exist after the fact.
The demand for second hand cars is already there. In 2030 people aren't going to turn around and say "wow hmm I all of a sudden want a second hand combustion engine car" and find themselves priced out. The first people to be priced out will be the price who buy cars 2-3 years old and drive them until they need a major repair. Realistically, there's 20 years before the full impact of this policy will be felt at the bottom of the used car market, and the "poor" (who are a large group) will be hit by this law. That means there is 20 years to come up with an incentive or a solve.
It's easy to dismiss progress with a one line snarky quip on the internet, and this is a hugely positive move.
Petrol prices will make running ICE vehicles impractical, seems likely a lot of filling stations will be removed as the forced transition to centrally controlled and permissioned hybrid/EV transportation is gradually increased.
I would guess most people will not buy an used ICE car in 10 years when they can also buy an used electric car. The people into ICE engine sure, but they are not that many and rarely buying economical ICE cars.
My Nissan LEAF (pure EV) is almost 6 years old. It's going to be near-valueless (selling for parts) within another 6 years due to battery degradation [and not starting with that much range in the first place]. That's after one major battery-out warranty repair by Nissan already.
The last two ICE cars I had, I bought them when they were 12 and 9 years old, rather than planning how to get them parted out at that age. I've very much enjoyed having an EV (especially as the guy who turns the wrenches), but they don't last anywhere near as long as ICE cars without major infusions of cash for the battery.
My next car is very likely to be another 6-10 year-old ICE car where I'd probably never consider buying a 6-10 year-old pure EV.
LEAF went the cheap route of battery with bad thermal management. I think current generation of other BEV should get you at least 10 years. Not going to yet match my 16 year old Honda I have in my driveway as my backup car, but getting closer!!
All of that's true, but largely not helpful to the working poor who today can buy pretty reliable 15-20 year old Corollas, Civics, CR-Vs, etc for $1500-3000 and expect to drive them for 5 years or more and have them be every bit as useful at 25 years old as they were when they were 25 months old.
"other BEV should get you at least 10 years" isn't nearly the same as "will get you 25 years if it doesn't rust out or get crashed".
Sure, but do realize those 25 year old cars are likely polluting 2-10x more than modern cars. The sooner we can get the oldest cars off the road, the best chance our planet has.
Looking at wikipedia [0], a 6 year old nissan leaf has a range of 75 miles to start with, and it was a minor iteration on the first generation of the nissan leaf. It looks like 2016 was a major upgrade to the leaf, so I'd be curious what the resale of a 2014 vs 2016 nissan leaf looks like when they're both out of warranty.
> The last two ICE cars I had, I bought them when they were 12 and 9 years old,
You're comparing technology that's had 100 years to develop, with the first iterations of EVs. You're right in that a current 2 year old EV likely has a much lower resale value than a 2 year old ICE vehicle. But remember that the Model S has been on sale for less time than the time between now and when this ban comes into place. Buying a 6 year old EV right now seems like a terrible idea, buying a 6 year old EV in 2035 will likely be a very different story.
I hope your last points are correct as the EV experience has been overall good.
I fear that we might instead have a time period where fundamental battery technology (or our ability to harness it) will not permit a retention of 75% of range over a 20-year period. It might be like the cars of the 50s though 80s which rarely made 250K miles without major engine service.
Cars used to have 5 digit odometers in miles and it was a noteworthy event to “roll one over”. Now, the worst crapbox you can buy will do 100K easily and many of the Japanese imports will do 300K miles with a few external accessories being changed along the way.
The great thing about batteries is that they _should_ be serviceable. It looks like a replacement leaf battery for your car is available for ~5k, which is stupidly expensive for a repair for a 6 year old car (that will hopefully be 8 or 9 years old when you do replace it). One would hope that within 10-15 years that follow up legislation has been passed to either make these parts affordable/user serviceable, or to have them standardised. In an ideal world, all cars would use a standard set of batteries, and instead of waiting 40 minutes for a fast charge, you just "swap" your battery with another one and keep going. 40 minutes later, your old battery is usable by someone else.
Of course, we could find ourselves in an apple-google situation where the cost of the cars themselves is reduced to a price point that a mass market can stomach, and the cars are "disposable". That thought makes me sad.
I think a lot of the disposable nature is related to the auto repair shop rate being $130+/hr to the customer and assembly line labor being $35/hr to the manufacturer. (And of course combined with "people like shiny new stuff".)
It also makes me sad, both from an ecological standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint. I see a lot of people making car payments that are $400+ for 72-month loans. (The average car loan length in 2019 was 69 months for a new car and perhaps an even more astonishing 65 months for used cars.)
Then, because they have a loan, they have to have expensive collision insurance and maybe even gap insurance. Then, because it's an expensive liability they see everyday, they feel like they have to take it to the dealership for repairs (to "protect their 'investment'"). Some people feel like they need to build a little house to protect it (which needs a curb cut and associated extra land usage), etc.
If it were more commonly accepted to drive a "millionaire next door" 15-year old Camry or CR-V, I think we could go easier on the world and on people (maybe except for people who work in the automotive new-car supply chain).
Until then, I can be happy that people buy so many new cars so often, because if they didn't do that, there wouldn't be any cheap used cars for me to buy and DIY-repair to avoid the shop rate and parts markup. :)
I, like 17% of the UK population (approx. 10 million) live in rural areas. I'm six miles from the nearest supermarket and shops and public transport is non-existent. (Once a day type of thing). Prior to lockdown and wfh I was commuting 200 miles a week in a 18 year old Diesel that I bought for £500.I couldn't cycle (too dangerous), walk (too far) or bus (no bus).
Round here many people drive Diesels for their economy (11% extra energy per gallon compared to Petrol) though currently with the Diesel price premium over Petrol being roughly 11% more that's no longer true but diesel engines do last longer.
I'm not opposed to EVs but I don't think there'll be cheap ones like my Diesel if ever or at least for a long long time. And no one has said about future taxes on EVs. All that ICE fuel tax revenue will have to be replaced as it dwindles away. The 800 LB Gorilla in the room that no one mentions is "pay as you drive" I suspect.
Just because the technology doesn't work for 17% of people right now, doesn't mean we can't make an improvement for the other 83%. An anecdote, but I live in a city centre, quite close to a primary school. There are multiple range rovers parked outside in the mornings and afternoons. Living in edinburgh, your primary school is assigned based on your post code, so these kids are being driven less than a mile to school in 2L SUVs, in an area where the roads are gritted, and it's snowed a handful of times in the 7 years I've lived here. From speaking to my neighbors, most of the trips my neighbors make are less than 10 miles, and even at that, it's only an occasional 30-40 mile trip to one of the nearer seaside areas. _all_ of these trips are feasible with an EV.
> but diesel engines do last longer.
"Longer" kind of doesn't matter these days. Sure, a diesel engine will literally never die, however my first car was a 1.4L peugeot with 260,000 miles on it. The engine and chassis were the only parts that hadn't been replaced by the time I got it, which is 25 years of your current mileage.
> I'm not opposed to EVs but I don't think there'll be cheap ones like my Diesel if ever or at least for a long long time.
A person commuting 200 miles per week, driving an old, heavily polluting car is likely to be one of the most affected by these changes. People with your driving habits are the reason that regulations like this have to exist in these forms. Poeple will hyper=optimise for their own benefit, as all of the externalities aren't costed. At the very least, buy a post-2008 diesel with a DPF in it.
True. I checked a better route planner, a great app to plan electric vehicles trips, and driving from Brighton to Glasgow today in 2020 is 7h10m of driving and 36m of charging with a tesla model 3. Let's round up to 1h of charging. I don't think it is a problem today, and even less in 10 years with better cars and a bigger charging network. Sure you may lose some time because you will have slightly longer breaks, but it's fine in my opinion and don't forget that electricity is cheaper than gaz (unless you charge to 100% on Ionity without using a car from a Ionity constructor).
Uncontrolled mass migration (Thanks Tony Blair) under New Labour added five million people over a ten year period. Guess what, many drive cars. So yes, it has affected transport.
When I see people blame more drivers for traffic, the only culprit I can see is a failure to extend public transit accordingly. A huge number of people drive in New York, for example, for lack of a better alternative, not because driving is more convenient, cheaper, or in any other way better for them. Blaming car traffic on the number of people in a densely populated area is futile, and any place that has grown reasonably with its population has also abandoned the notion that cars should be the default mode of transportation.
Carless household # has been increasing in the uk. Helping the poor by enabling them to buy new fossil cars after 2030 won't have very good bang for the buck.
I'd heard somewhere that the idea that the national grid would need upgraded is vastly overstated but doing some back of the envelope maths does seem like it could potentially be a problem.
My workings were 32 million licenced cars, 40kwh each (obviously bigger batteries are already available but you'd hope not every car would need charged from scratch). Works out as over 1000gwh, you'd have say 10 hours to charge them so you could bring that down to 100gw. Average electrical consumption in the UK is about 30gw. I appreciate it's a gross over estimate as most cars won't do nearly that many miles every day.
Average mileage in the UK is typically around 10k miles. A 40kw battery nets somewhere around 200 miles, so needs to be fully charged perhaps once per week on average. That cuts the above significantly but it's still of the order of the UK's current average consumption.
I accept that but for the moment there is no centrally organised way to do this, car charges have timers and the like built in for sure, but that is asking a lot to expect everyone to set it. The majority of people will come home and plug in. This should be easy to fix but it is another thing which needs to be rolled out and working in the next 10 years.
In Germany, if you have a heat pump you can get special discounted rates if you let the utilities company switch off the pump for some time during peak demand. The same scheme could immediately be used for electric car charging. Actually I expect the utilities to be a big pusher for charging infrastructure, which is then controlled to even stabilize the grid.
This isn't exactly a new idea though. This has been done in the past in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater). And rollout of smart meters is already in progress.
And also: considering the progress that’s been made with EVs in just the last 5 years, project that out and it’s going to be a situation where you’d have to be mad to buy a gas car over electric in 2030. That’s a full 10 years from now. New gas cars won’t be price competitive by then.
If you don’t believe me just take a look at what Volkswagen is doing with their upcoming EVs.
So, sure, they’re being “banned,” but I really do wonder who in their right mind will be wanting to choose a gas car for a brand new vehicle in 2030.
Improving the grid is not the same as building gas stations. Petrol can be moved in advance and stored. A gas station is essentially a big hole underground filled with inflammable liquid, plus filling a tank is fast enough (compared to even 15min for a partial supercharger "refill") that you can build them away from densely populated regions.
A parking lot downtown, with 500 car capacity, might need several hundred kW of power at peak every day (50 km * 0.15 kWh/km * 500 / 8 hours = 475 kW). Anything above 100 kW requires MV distribution and a local transformer. At least they could allow people to book their charging slot and stagger the charging of all those cars, though. There are worse cases.
Ski resorts will have people visiting for a day on the slopes, possibly after a 100 miles drive or so, and needing their cars charged by the time they leave, maybe 6-7 hours later. But at least these are in sparsely populated regions, and often close to hydroelectric dams too, so it's not impossible to bring more electric power. By the time those people go back home they will have to charge as well to get ready for next day's commute the though.
In fact, every night people will come home and charge their cars. In this case (unlike the parking lot) there is no centralized distributor that could try to stagger the charging of all these cars.
And perhaps it will only be a couple days a year on long weekends or bank holidays, but there will be cases when a condo with 100 flats will also need a sustained power of hundreds of kW for several hours... and all other boxes of flats will have the same need on exactly the same day.
This means building lots of HV and MV transformation stations (which are not exactly cheap) in densely populated regions. Where are the plans to estimate this need and to build this infrastructure?
Yeah those are solutions, I'm just struggling to imagine that infrastructure being built in time to not be a major inconvenience. Unless it is built I could see the attraction of not wanting an electric car in 2030.
We should be encouraging people to keep their car for longer and to use it less. Even electric cars have most of the negative externalities of regular cars (with the emphasis moved around a little). The UK government should make life without car ownership viable and the default option for most people. What does this mean in practice? It means reallocating road space from cars to pedestrians and cyclists; legalising and properly integrating electric scooters; creating a functioning rail network, potentially with new lines and (least sexy of all) affordable and frequent bus services, including in rural communities.
>Citing unidentified industry and government figures, the FT said Johnson now intended to move the date forward again to 2030 in a speech on environmental policy he is expected to give next week.
>The BBC reported a similar plan earlier on Saturday, without giving any sources.
So it didn't happen yet, but they think it might. Why not just wait a few days to report it when we have something more concrete than anonymous sources?
This is how policy is proposed these days. “Anonymous sources” brief friendly reporters, who float it in the mainstream. If it gets shot down, the big speech is replaced with a neutral one; if obvious gotchas are pointed out, the speech is tweaked to pre-empt them; otherwise, the speech happens, friendly reporters are happy, and the policy basically is set out to get on the books as a non-event - which is a big win for a government.
Indeed, it’s been known for a long time that when the BBC say “sources close to the Prime Minister” they mean “Dominic Cummings, who is too slippery to put anything on the record”.
Yeah, it's a tradition that stretches way back, to the Blair years at the very least - when "King SPAD" was Alastair Campbell, also known as the main inspiration for the character of Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick Of It".
I bought a car recently. 100% petrol. Didn't even think of EV. Why should I. It costs more. It weighs more. There is no infrastructure. It has a short range.
Also bought and new apartment recently (Germany, in a big city). There is no chargers in the underground garage, no infrastructure whatsoever.
How should I visit my family/friends, leaving far away? Plan additional 2 hours each way to charge a battery.
In this case I didn't even look at the Plugin Hybrid. Why? Above points apply. Trunk is smaller!!! Horsepower?
I'm not against it. I could consider Plugin Hybrid, if I would have charger dedicated for my parking spot.
But IMHO, governments are approaching this from the wrong angle. Instead of fining manufacturers , and increase taxes, focus on the infrastructure, and the rest will follow.
This is a good idea. This will give time to create the needed charging points and to implement price regulation to eliminate the rampant price gouging at many places.
They will also need to implement a progressive ramping up annual licence for gas/diesel cars that will prevent the emergence of an enduring repair and maintain the gas/diesel cars - without which repairs could keep them going for another 20-30 years - which will gut the process.
That said, there should be a path for converting a ~5 year old otherwise good car, via the e-skate conversion process so someone can convert their great gas/diesel Mercedes into a reasonable e-car.
It can and should be done.
Within city limits the car could be expelled in 10-20 years in favor of public transport. The car should be used as means to more distant travel. Fuel can be stored in far away placess and gas stations refueled intermittently and dynamically per season. Expanding the electricity grid capacity to far away places or countries seems impossible considering current world grid status.
So for a few years after the compulsory usage of EVs socioeconomically non urban centers will probably have a hard time.
If batteries plummet in price everyone will buy EVs anyway. If not whoever is in government the will quietly let it slide. They mandated all new houses to be energy efficient a decade ago, but somehow it never quite happened.
Not to "hate" on the government, but 10 years to anybody in the government is like 1 year in the private sector. A lot of places run in government institutions with lifers still work on paper. PAPER!
I interviewed at a government job in my area a several years ago before I got into tech and the guy I was talking to told me when he took over, he spent his first few months just converting everything to digital formats. All because the guy in it previously didn't want to learn how to use a computer. Since the position was an agency arm of something in the penal system, there was no oversight besides the people that essentially paid him to make certain reports for higher ups to then make available to the public.
Is the learning curve going to progress that quickly? The Tesla Model S came out in 2012? How much has it improved by 2020? 100kW instead of 75kW? At the same price?
Yes, I know soothsayers claim battery packs are $100/kwh, but even at those prices, we are seeing $100k pickups with roughly equivalent capabilities to a $45k ICE version. Factor in 200k mile lifetime with 20mpg and $3/gallon fuel, and an electric pickup is still a hard sale.
I’m skeptical the industry will make a 2030 deadline.
The market, not the government, should decide the transition time. If gasoline and diesel fuels have such strong negative externalities, the state should tax these fuels until hybrid and electric become compelling alternatives. These top-down, non-market edicts damage the ability to the market to find appropriate resource allocation via the price mechanism and thereby make everyone worse off.
>The market, not the government, should decide the transition time.
No, the market will continue to completely screw the environment unless the government steps in.
>If gasoline and diesel fuels have such strong negative externalities, the state should tax these fuels
Petrol and diesel are already heavily taxed, at £0.58/L (at current GBP/USD exchange prices that works out at $0.76/L USD, whereas the equivalent tax in the US is $0.05/L).
>These top-down, non-market edicts damage the ability to the market to find appropriate resource allocation via the price mechanism and thereby make everyone worse off.
Oh the holy market! Can't disrupt the holy market, even when it's destroying the planet.
> No, the market will continue to completely screw the environment unless the government steps in.
What makes you believe that?
> Petrol and diesel are already heavily taxed, at £0.58/L
But people are still using regular gasoline cars. Why might that be?
> Oh the holy market! Can't disrupt the holy market, even when it's destroying the planet.
The market is what's given us the modern technological civilization that made the computer you're using to post your comments. Top-down control has always made us worse off in the end.
The UK is doing this too, in multiple ways. Vehicle excise duty for vehicles 2001 onwards is based on CO₂ emissions. Fuel duty too. And on top of that you have the low emission zones and London and two more cities next year, where you can still drive, but have to pay a (steep) fee if your vehicle isn’t to up to the right standards.
Setting a date well in advance is also helpful for production planning, it gives the market some certainty in developing their products for the cutoff, and this has to be done early to be useful.
The government works in cooperation with industry. Putting a timeline on something that's already happening is pretty simple and prevents the prisoner's dilemma problem among competitors. Anyway, the government already controls tons of subsidies and regulations on the fuels and car industries, so it's not like there's a pure market signal to be had here.
The problem with just raising the fuel taxes sky high is that the poorest part of the population is struck the hardest, they can't just buy a new electric car and have no way to avoid the fuel costs.
This should not be a blanket ban. Actually I don’t think they would even need to implement any policy at all. By 2030 I would expect electric cars to be so economical that it’s the only viable choice for the majority of people.
Not to mention that there will still be plenty of valid use cases for ICE cars in 2030. Need to go anywhere without the charging infrastructure? Need to travel a long distance? Need to travel in an emergency like a blackout?
The other part which is just kind of sad is that this is another nail in the coffin for the hobby of building and modding cars. Parts supplies will dry up and working on older cars will just become more and more prohibitively expensive. It’s already happening. To be honest when a car is just another computer it ceases to be interesting.
> this is another nail in the coffin for the hobby of building and modding cars.
I confess ignorance about this hobby, but I had imagined it might be easier for a hobbyist to build an electric car than an ICE one (once the parts become more available). I thought there were fewer moving parts in electric cars, and maybe fewer fluids (gasoline obviously being the big one)?
The electronics are a big hurdle. Also, electric cars tend to be pretty locked down. I doubt it’s easy to upgrade a battery pack in an EV. Or switch motors.
Turbo cars are usually pretty easy to get extra power out of. Want a different sound? Get an exhaust. Slap a bigger turbo on. Etc.
I haven’t looked much but most “modded” EVs I’ve seen required a whole team.
Many hobbyists don’t enjoy electric cars. I really liked the idea of a Tesla model 3 before I drove one. The fact that electric cars are being politically “shoved” up our throats doesn’t help there. That just creates more hatred. Also let us not forget how hard it is to charge them for many people. Many newer cars already have a lot of engine choices canceled because of questionable emission laws. It all just increases the dissatisfaction with politics from car enthusiasts. It is theoretically easier to make an electric car faster, but in practice that needs hacking of software etc and is a far cry from what tuning cars was/is. Also tuning electric cars is very expensive and there is less diy. There surely are people who enjoy tinkering with electric cars but those are probably more IT nerds than car nerds.
Choice is cool. Ever heard of hydrogen internal combustion engines?
I consider the ban to be more like a political signal to all involved parties to get going. Like building the required charge infrastructure. To accelerate the development which would happen any way, but might be to slow to react on climate change.
I would be interested which actual need for ICE cars there would be in 2030. Good electric cars are already quite comparable today and they keep getting better. Electricity is available everywhere, "charging infrastructure" can be created by installing a socked on the outside of buildings. Long distance travel is already no problem and in a blackout, you cannot refill your ICE car either, because fuel stations require... electricity.
Judging on how many modding projects, like converting old ICE cars to electric, do exist, car modding might get even easier.
So they want to restrict everyone's movement? No longer can you just travel around Europe by car. There are some good Top gear episodes showing the issues with recharging.
In before all the Tesla/EV apologist team downvotes this truth into oblivion.
Tesla managed to create a good coverage of western Europe in 3 years. If there were a complete ban of non-electric cars in 10 years, that should be enough time to make sure there is good coverage of charging stations. Besides, hybrid cars (unfortunately) still can be sold.
It's good coverage along highways. The peak usage of energy might change completely in residential areas if everybody has to charge their car every night for several hours (230 V * 16 A means you will not even refill 20 km/h).
Edit: not sure about the downvotes, anybody care to explain? Did Tesla build superchargers in random 10-20000-inhabitant towns far from highways?
A car in Germany on average only travels 40km/day. Only a fraction of the night is needed to recharge that. Individual cars might have quite different travel distances, but for the grid, the average distance matters.
It's peak usage that is a problem, the average doesn't matter much if everybody charges from 6 PM to 8 PM, does it? Is the grid sized for 50% of the households sucking 3 kW at the same time?
Peak usage also means that uncommon cases are going to be a problem. For long trips I am not sure that the supercharger networks can scale.
When travelling for vacation, for example, planning multiple 30-60 minutes stops at the supercharger station might not be feasible (and the fastest charging only fills the battery by about half of the capacity, so that means more stops) and there's also going to be a problem with waiting times without massive infrastructure improvements. Right now a typical highway gas station has at least 5 pumps and it serves one customer in 3-5 minutes. That is roughly 60000 km-vehicle per hour. To reach a similar capacity, a supercharger station would need (at 30 minutes per 300 km and 150 kW per station) about 15 MW of power and its own high-voltage transformer.
Yet this capacity would be needed only when everybody moves for spring break or summer vacation, and it would be vastly more expensive than a gas station. Is it feasible to have such a thing every 50 km of highway or so?
Peak usage is not a problem. Why should everyone charge from 6 to 8 pm? People will charge when electricity is cheapest. Also there are already discounted rates for heat pumps where the utilities can control the running times to help balancing the net. Actually, electric cars will stabilize the grid by being charged automatically when the grid has a lot of supply and not when there is a shortage.
So if it's cheapest from 6 PM to 6 AM they will start charging (absent any control from the utility) at 6 PM approximately.
I am interested (genuinely :-)) in standards for grid to appliance communication and on which countries have those discounted rates. Would I lose the discount if my commute is longer (so I need a continuous supply throughout most of the night)? Are they tied to specific wires coming in the building?
Also did anybody run the numbers on the power that would be needed by a supercharger network comparable to current highway gas stations?
There are already several standards in place for this. For many decades, the utilities send a signal modulated on the electricity line when cheaper "night" rates are available. This was created to increase the night load as the slow power stations struggled with reducing their power output. There was a special heating system designed to use this, which would heat up over night with cheap electricity and retain that heat for daytime heating. This signal could immediately be used for charging control. And of course the signal would be given only when there is more supply than demand. Certainly not at 6pm. But after 8pm private demand starts dropping strongly (which is mostly generated by cooking).
Smart meters are also already deployed to offer time dependent rates, those could be used for smart charging and for heat pumps there is an active control channel for direct control by the utilities. All that is already in place. Of course this can be done selectively, so if needed, some cars could start charging at 8pm, others at 10pm and so on.
This has nothing to do with Tesla, and the Top Gear EV story (from 10 years ago? technology may have improved slightly) was entirely fabricated. So much so that Tesla had to sue.
Ah yes, Top Gear, the foremost trusted source in the electric car industry. Like how they faked their Tesla running out of battery when it didn't and then getting sued over it.
The UK Conservative government as currently run by Boris Johnson? Well, yes, of course they do! It's hardly a secret. They literally boasted that they'd got rid of Freedom of Movement as their first achievement of Brexit (under Theresa May at the time).
What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together.
It's seems crazy that in the 21st century the best option we have for the storage and transfer of energy is "let's burn stuff". We can do better than that.