There's a huge price difference between electric cars and gas fueled cars here in Norway. Gas fueled car buyers have to pay both 25 percent VAT and an additional tax on purchase. Buyers don't have to pay neither of those taxes if they buy an electric car. The singer of the group A-ha, Morten Harket, bought an electrical car in 1989 and refused to pay road tolls and ignored all the subsequent fines. That got a lot of attention, and Norway ended up having very affordable electrical cars compared to gas fueled cars. Norway is one of Tesla's main market.
Similar in California and other states. The states typically tax gasoline and since electrics don't use any they are implementing special fees on electric vehicle purchases to make up for lost revenue.
One would think that the savings in pollution (not only for the car itself, but the transport of the fuel, pollution from refineries, etc.) would offset any lost revenue from gas taxes.
What makes this really nonsensical is that many states still have electric vehicle rebates. They give you a rebate of a few thousand dollars to reward you for buying an electric vehicle but then charge you a few hundred dollars to punish you for buying an electric vehicle.
I mean, I think it's OK to charge vehicle owners some kinda usage fee to reflect the cost of congestion, road wear, traffic accidents etc., but it's very poorly implemented as is. An obvious solution seems to be to tax tires which are the dirtiest part of an electric car, need to be replaced moderately regularly but not too often, and which wear down in proportion to the amount and and intensity of use. Offroaders and people who want to do donuts or drive like speed racer will need to replace their tires more often, but taxing tires avoids bureaucratic/administrative overhead.
There are already taxes on tires, but they seem pretty nominal. I think you could hike them substantially (eg to $10 or $20 per tire) without upsetting too many people if you scrapped or reduced some other fee or abolished the necessity for a piece of paperwork.
Edit: as some pointe dout the real wear comes from trucks an dother big commercial vehicles. Tires are already taxed by vehicle weight class, but I'm proposing increasing the fees for that in order to simplify bureaucracy elsewhere.
Tires last too long to make this practical, I think. Let's say a set of tires lasts 30,000 miles. California's current gas tax is 67c/gallon. Let's assume a very efficient 40 mpg. That's 1.6 cents / mile. You'd need a $500 tax on a set of tires to compensate. if you did that, though, you'd need to prevent people from importing tires from other states, which is tricky to do.
You could have a special "California tyre" which has a state approved logo on the side, and require all cars registered in the state use them.
They could be designed to last however many miles the state likes by putting more or less tread on them. And have a very obvious marker they are worn out so police can easily give tickets for people driving on worn out tyres.
The way Sweden and other countries do this is through a car ownership tax, where things like address road usage, traffic accidents, state own parking and other aspects get funded. Gasoline is then taxed independently, so when people buy a electric car they still pay the car ownership tax. On top of those are congestion and road tolls.
Last time someone on HN discussed the Australia law I asked if Australia had a car ownership tax. It seems that they do, but that the money isn't enough to support road maintenance. Seems the easy answer to the new Australia law would be to increase the car ownership tax, lower the gasoline tax to match the increase, and then you don't need a special law for electric cars. No need to reinvent the wheel.
UK is similar, except roads are upkept from general taxes, for all road users, including cyclists, pedestrians, and of course horses (it’s the UK after all). Plus car ownership tax, and petrol tax.
It’s the common erroneous argument of angry drivers against cyclists: get off my road, you’re not paying for it.
General taxes is the big alternative. When the sum from petrol tax goes down you need to fill in the missing difference in the budget. Electric car owners don't feel targeted by general taxes. Taxing the fuel was a decent way in the past to move the taxation closer to the party that utilized the roads, but in the future we will need to find a different way.
As a side note about angry drivers, I actively try to avoid being angry with cyclists. They have to be outside in the rain and cold, while inside the car it's pretty nice. I can wait.
> As a side note about angry drivers, I actively try to avoid being angry with cyclists. They have to be outside in the rain and cold, while inside the car its pretty nice. I can wait.
Honestly I think it should be collected by insurance companies. You’re legally required to have it in basically all states so they’re effectively an arm of the gov’t, (and the BMV can collect it if you go the self-insurance route since you have to put up a cash deposit) plus your insurance company needs to know roughly how much you drive your car and so can charge proportionally.
I was under that impression that it _might_ be the case that tire/brake dust pollution was misdirection started by the oil/gas industry? Anyone more informed than me know the real answer to this?
In the UK tax is paid explicitly per car, in tiers of engine size (for passenger cars) and I should assume emissions / weight for commercial vehicles. Petrol is heavily taxed (by US standards), but that’s everywhere in the continent.
I like the idea of taxing tyres, as it explicitly taxes mileage and pollution. Would it create weird incentives? People running on tyres too long to avoid the tax? Reusing old, more polluting tyres?
Maybe we should just tax on mileage. In fact why not at the pump/charging station...
You could have something similar to dyed diesel for tires, where, say, orange tires are untaxed and can only be used on private property/off-road, and regular tires can be used on public roadways.
You can never win arguments about how you define taxes. If it causes you financial pain it's gonna be felt as a punishment. I think lawmakers and statist types far too often mistake the rationale as 'the good thing we want to do with this money' rather than 'why you as an individual need to pay yet another tax or fee that we could have funded some other way.'
I don't think taxes should be too low and don't mind paying moderate amounts of tax, but I do think the number of taxes should be as low as possible to maintain legitimacy in the population. Nobody likes to feel nickel and dimed to death, so it's better to have a small number of predictable and easy to understand taxes than an endless variety of fees that add up to what feels disproportionately burdensome for the public. Policymakers need to remember that very few of the public are economic rationalists with pocket calculator brains.
> If it causes you financial pain it's gonna be felt as a punishment.
So...when you go to a restaurant and eat, paying feels like a punishment?
When you go to an amusement park, paying the entry fee feels like a punishment?
When you pay for a plane ticket...a new appliance...a movie...?
No, the only reason that "taxes are a punishment (or theft)" is a meme _at all_ is that there are a bunch of entitled, privileged, well-off folks who have decided that they have theirs and they don't want to spend anything that will improve or support society.
I've gone through these arguments a few times, and ... yeah, the naivete on the other side is profound. You're right that I won't "win" an argument with someone who espouses that, or at least I won't convince them of anything, but that's due to them ignoring reality.
In this particular case? A usage fee, for cars, that supports roads, for cars? Seems pretty damned natural-consequences to me. You're paying to use something, not "being punished" in any way.
Road wear is disproportionately caused by heavy vehicles; one study estimated that "one 18-wheeler is equivalent to the impact of 9,600 cars". The gas tax is primarily a subsidy designed to support the trucking industry.
Or you can think of the trucking industry as subsidised. Trucks are used to haul goods to shops yes? Taxing them more will just increase the price of everyday goods and services (that depend on goods to function), it will unpopular among just about everyone but the rich (who won’t feel the impact of the price increase much).
You're not wrong, but this is the part where capitalism is supposed to encourage people to use methods that cost less in externalities. Businesses should pay for their externalities or else they aren't competing with each other fairly.
The question of who it is a subsidy to is important, but it is better to directly give them a subsidy than to skew the upstream market towards vehicles that damage roads and cost a ton of money to repair.
I doubt we'll get there though, I admit that we can't get anything effective done. And we'd need to effectively keep prices from rising at the register to even the playing field for infrastructure expenses.
There is nothing we need but food and shelter, which is not the main payload for those trucks.
While some people might enjoy some of the useless consumerism crap that's moved from China to your closest shopping center via trucks, I enjoy driving my old petrol car through the landscape and to the track.
Now let's all step back, calm down and compromise. :)
Taxes are a form of punishment, they're a tool to discourage certain behaviours relative to others.
Whether roads are funded by road taxes or primary school fees doesn't matter - if we want to promote a behaviour we subsidize it; if we want to discourage it, we tax it.
Whether and how the books balance in the background isn't relevant.
Technically we want to punish people for driving a car. Electrics are of course better than ICEs, but they're still a lot worse that cycling or taking a train. It would of course be nice if the infrastructure wasn't optimized for cars...
I don't think income tax is there to punish you for having income: even with the tax higher pre-tax income results in higher after-tax income. But even if road usage linked fees were a punishment, it is against car ownership in general, which seems fair to me. The relative incentive of electric over gas is still there.
That's a simplistic view of one type of tax. If everyone in a community wants the city government to build a recreation center, and then government levies a tax on the citizens to pay for building/operating the center, are they being punished?
Oh my god, no they aren’t. Taxes are a tool for society to function. They can be used to discourage things, sure, but they are not a punishment in most cases. Do you consider paying for your meal at a restaurant a punishment? Give me a break.
Then why are you not charged for napkins at a resturant? Regardless of need how the fees and taxes are distributed does lead to an effective discouragement - which is synonymous with punishment. It doesn't need an authority to impose them. The punishment for not unzipping your fly when peeing at a urinal is peeing your pants.
A tax on electric vehicles isn't necessary for society to function. It's just a medium for adding money to what is already more graft. So yes, it is effectively a tool to direct certain behaviors. As are all VAT and luxury taxes.
Income taxes are the major part of the income that society needs to function. The rest of the lot are just punitive ones, like estate and wealth taxes.
> One would think that the savings in pollution (not only for the car itself, but the transport of the fuel, pollution from refineries, etc.) would offset any lost revenue from gas taxes.
It does, in social impact sense (gas taxes in the US are universally way too low to cover the impacts).
OTOH, diffuse social benefit doesn't pay for road maintenance, and states have legal and practical requirements for short-run operating budget balance. The right solution would probably be increase general taxation, in a way that misses the low end (e.g., bump income taxes, but not the lowest brackets), to cover the costs.
The ideal would be to dramatically tax petroleum products (at least covering the massive environmental and social costs of air pollution and global climate change from their use), also tax cars (and especially large trucks) in general to fund road maintenance, and (a) distribute the proceeds from petroleum taxes uniformly to every resident, while also (b) better funding public transit, building bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure, etc. This would encourage people to move away from environmentally unsustainable modes of transportation while not unduly harming the poorest.
I have a Tesla in CA and am only familiar with the electric vehicle credit (not sure what it is, I haven't looked into it) and the "you get to use carpool lanes" rule for EVs.
California's vehicle registration fee factors in several things, the most influential (I think) being price, which is probably why Tesla registration is higher than most gas cars. I've seen $500+ registration fees on ICE trucks.
Because in the states if you didn’t do that a bunch of idiots would accuse you of disproportionately taxing the poor since they can’t afford electric cars. Social justice at its finest.
It's a short-term / spiteful / envious-response action resulting in long-term harms.
As I've already noted, the complaint is common across the political spectrum. From the Left, it's usually couched as a minority / inequality argument that such policies disadvantage poor minorities. From the right, it's more usually aimed at latte-sipping, college-educated, elitist liberals.
Whilst there's some truth to both portrayals, the underlying reality is that the common weal is served by developing (and trialing) alternative technologies and solutions, and building out necessary infrastructures. If there are inequities that arise out of them, then other taxation and spending parameters can be adjusted to achieve a net-neutral economic impact, or to offer / promote conservation and efficiency options which are better suited to minorities and/or the white / rural poor.
Note that the whole divide-and-conquer tactic is also very often supported at least in part by the interests directly harmed by such initiatives: traditional fossil-fuel powered automobiles, coal producers, and the like. Look beyond the engagement at the front to see what the generals are scheming and whom they're manipulating to their own advantage.
>> disproportionately taxing the poor since they can’t afford electric cars.
There are many layers to this. Rich people, people who own houses, have a better time with electric cars than poor people who rent apartments. Poor people also cannot afford to replace a car every decade. They shy away from tech such as batteries that have life expectancies less than a decade. Certainly few second or third-hand buyers want to purchase a battery pack with only a few years left in it. So the separation between gas an electrics isn't all about sticker price, but it is about money.
More the fact that many states fund road work with a gasoline tax, this makes sense since it's got a decent correlation on how much use somebody gets from the roads. Electrics don't do this so states will come up short as more electrics get adopted otherwise.
My understanding is that road damage scales with the fourth power of the weight over the axle but fuel usage does not scale in the same way. In particular, heavy trucks do the most damage and of consumer cars, electric cars do more damage as they are heavier. Of course the people who most require roads to be constructed tend to be people trying to drive to or from their homes rather than large freight carriers who mostly require maintenance of highways.
They need to get taxed somehow (they still use public roads after all). Just build it in to registration costs. Yearly inspection takes the odometer, charge based off km at registration time. No need to over complicate it.
It's impossible to exemplify the truth of that statement more clearly than this: The current Australian Prime Minister, who was Treasurer at the time, brought a lump of coal into Parliamentary Question Time[0].
How is Norway handling the increased use of the electric grid? I ask because Elon noted the US power grid needed to double output to handle a full is transition
While we have a lot of hydro power, the grid itself is not ideal. There are several regions which are quite constrained in terms of how much power they can import from other regions.
For example, recently there's been quite high electricity prices here (as in most of Europe) due to lack of rain. However this only affected the southern half of Norway[1], as the northern part had a fair bit of rain but limited distribution lines to the south.
There's been quite a bit of talk in the news about how much we need to spend to upgrade our grid for the future. It's not gonna be cheap...
First, it’s great they have so much green power generation. I didn’t realize that.
In addition to generation there is local distribution. Power lines, transformers, etc. Is there any information on that part of it? I wonder if they needed to upgrade their grid.
Yep, we've just added a new 1.4GW interconnect between Norway and the UK. I believe it's the longest undersee interconnect in the world. Hopefully more will follow, I think more interconnects over greater distances are really important to help smooth out both demand and supply issues with renewables.
They aren't necessarily generating it -- sometimes they're just storing it. When we produce too much electricity from wind turbines here in Denmark, Norway buys this at a negative price (to offload the Danish grid), stores it (using pumped hydroelectric energy storage), and sells it back into the market when prices are positive again.
I’m not aware of any pumped hydropower, but we can buy cheap and use less of the stored water when prices are low. The dams have capacity to store water on a seasonal timescale. However with shifting weather patterns and more renewables these margins may become strained. This winter we may have to import not only to handle peak loads, but also because some dams may run dry.
Very interesting. In Canada, it will take years to recoup the price difference for buying an electric car even with government incentives. 25% VAT + Extra tax seems to work.
And in parts of Canada apparently you have to pay additional taxes if you buy an EV, i.e. there are disincentives as opposed to incentives. Sold as being an effort to balance the lack of revenue from EVs skipping the various taxes on gas. E.g.: https://electrek.co/2021/10/04/canadian-group-satirizes-sask....
That's mostly because of the lack of midmarket cars.
I bought a used sub-$20k electrical car a few months ago; it can be done. The market needs pressure to create cars in that price range; right now EVs are mostly luxury cars. Tesla is not the car we should be aiming for; what we need are things in the class of the E-Golf, Kia Niro, FFE, Fiat 500E etc. that are the size of a Corolla and cost 20k CAD or less.
Until that's common on the market, the value proposition is flawed and nobody is buying an electric car to save money except for people who buy used cars that someone else has eaten the depreciation on (like me), or people who drive a LOT. Everyone else is basically buying these things as luxury items, and the cost doesn't matter, especially when you can get near-0% financing over 5+ years.....
You also need to make it realistic for people to own EVs without also owning a single-family home. My wife and I probably would have bought a PHEV, but we lived in an apartment so ... we went Hybrid instead.
As it is the EV subsidies are really just helping homeowners buy luxury cars which seems a little backwards
This is a great point. I would have loved to buy an EV (or trade in my current gas vehicle which I don’t use all that much for an EV), but the logistical annoyances of charging it in a busy city appear to be substantial.
> As it is the EV subsidies are really just helping homeowners buy luxury cars which seems a little backwards
The goal was to drive scale so that the price would drop, this has been successful. In the US the federal subsidy phases out after 500K. Tesla and GM have both passed that and have models that are less than the US average for a new car of $40K.
Many non-tree hugger analysts project that upfront EV costs will be equal to ICE by the middle of the decade.
If you think of it from the manufacturers perspective it makes sense. Supply of batteries is constrained so of course they are going to use them in cars they can make the most money from. This problem will solve itself over time.
This is why I think it was a mistake not to use plugin hybrids as a stepping stone to full EV's. They might be marginally more complex but you could make five times as many cars with the same battery capacity.
A used Chevy Spark is a great car if you don’t need more than 100 miles of range in a charge. I love mine, and it’s unbelievably zippy in terms of torque/acceleration.
Yeah, used EVs depreciate quickly. I'm comparing new Tesla Plaids to the C8 Corvette and due to depreciation its looking like the C8 will be much cheaper, and much more fun to drive. The C8 will drop 30k in 5 years according to C6/C7 data, whereas a Plaid will likely drop 70k. If I spend less than $800 a month on fuel the C8 is cheaper.
Currently C8s are appreciating their first year, which is really weird.
The Model S is really chonky at almost 5000 lbs, which is the same as a 4Runner.
> Currently C8s are appreciating their first year, which is really weird.
Why is that weird? That seems typical for new, extremely popular cars where supply isn’t meeting demand. It happened years ago with the PT Cruiser, and when Mini (re-)entered the US market. It’s happened with Teslas too. Right now it’s happening with the C8 Corvette and Ford Bronco, which are both really tough to find on dealer lots. In 5 or 10 years, they’ll have depreciated like more typical used cars. The tough part is guessing when supply will become sufficient (and values will drop).
That funny about the Mini, because it's such a shit car. I thought it looked like a fun little car but I drove one yesterday for the first time and it was garbage. Interior is crappy lightweight plastic too. Do some research on them and you'll see that they are trouble-prone as well.
Oh totally, I understand why its happening, but from a statistical point of view its hard to model. eg. If a car appreciates 20% in the first year, when it usually depreciates 20% does this affect its 5 year depreciation, or does it regress to the mean?
Yeah, not sure about that. Currently, used Model 3 LR AWD from 2019 with around 10k-20k mileage go for just a few grand cheaper than what I bought it for (new) in 2019[0].
current used car market is supposedly historically high vs new - probably better to do a longer or earlier comparison before making conclusions, esp. if comparing a fairly new 'used' vehicle
I was leaning towards the C8, rather than the Tesla.
It's bigger picture thinking, warmer summers, snowier winters, and turning major metropolitan areas back in coral reefs. Sadly, SF is too hilly for most of it to drown. Freedom is a full tank.
Well enjoy it. I’ve had a Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 with upgraded turbos and later a 2004 Audi S4 V8 with exhaust. Had a little Saturn Sky redline too. It’s all a lot of fun for sure. I’m 37 now though and thinking more about the people around me. Happy driving a Honda now and trying to make things better for all people. Freedom is helping others. I hope some day you get there.
Many of the people who need the food bank have jobs. Wages just aren’t high enough for some. You could donate a few hundred dollars and make a world of difference for a lot of people.
Agreed! We have subsidies for electric vehicles under a certain price, but imo prices just get inflated to "what the market is willing to pay" + "value of the subsidy"
Isn't that intended? That extra revenue should also come with extra pressure to deliver cost-efficient products as new parties may want a share of that sweet subsidy.
Initially it may look like the subsidy is just throwing out money, but if the subsidy is kept around for a while it becomes a bounty for future competitors.
That's certainly not how it's marketed, at least. A lot of the communications on it have been "Take advantage of our subsidies and save!".
If this is a business-side incentive versus a consumer-side incentive, I personally would much rather they just give them the money directly based on sales and avoid the dishonesty of making folk feel like, even after "savings", EVs are expensive.
What does "years" mean in this context? Considering we're talking about cars and not something that you would replace within a month, recouping the price difference within 4-5 years would still be okay.
It's a bit ironic that Norway is able to buy all those electric cars because of all that oil money they make. Production of electric cars still costs more than that of fossil fuel cars.
Norway has a fiscal deficit every year, in order to cover the deficit we're allowed to spend a couple percent of our holdings in the Oil Fund to. To my understanding, this is done by selling assets on a monthly basis in exchange for Norwegian currency by Norges Bank. [0]
One could argue that the government would not be able to offer subsidies on EVs without that option.
Other stuff is free/reduced toll on roads, lots of free charging, often cheaper parking on public spots, can use the bus lanes in heavy traffic (probably soon going away now that half the cars being electric would block the buses).
> There's a huge price difference between electric cars and gas fueled cars here in Norway. Gas fueled car buyers have to pay both 25 percent VAT and an additional tax on purchase. Buyers don't have to pay neither of those taxes if they buy an electric car.
You're talking about a tax difference, not a price difference. We have the same taxes here in Denmark and our EV sales aren't anywhere near Norway's level. Probably because the actual prices end up being roughly equal, but the EV usually has lower range and takes longer to fill up compared to the equally-priced gasoline car.
Would be interesting to eventually hear Elon Musk's thoughts on Norway's role in Tesla's success. We were a very big market for them in 2013-2018, one might suspect critical.
With half the Teslas made going to Norway for quite a while, I think indeed it was a key to their success.
Not just the numbers, but also the geography and climate. Make a car that can be used for a long trip any time of the year here, and you're set for most markets.
There's a reason why car makers come to Norway and Sweden to test their new cars before launch.
He was an oil expert who met a Norwegian au-pair in London, they got together, married, had a sick kid so they decided to move to Norway, and because he had the whole day before he could take the train from Oslo to her hometown, he decided to visit the Ministry of Industry to get leads on oil jobs...
Norway's management of their oil reserves, or more specifically, the profits made from their oil reserves[0], is another lesson in running a country that Australia has failed[1] at even recognizing despite its vast mineral wealth and therefore applicability to future economic stability and strength.
That was a great read, thanks. I loved that they highlighted the role of a proper regulatory body as a key factor in the success of the oil industry in Norway.
It will be interesting if there comes a point where ICE vehicles are such a small minority of all vehicles, that supporting infrastructure (petrol stations, traditional mechanics, oil change services, etc) starts to collapse and disappear.
There may still be some infrastructure for special use cases like long haul trucking or industrial vehicles, but it might become untenable for the average consumer to own an ICE vehicle, just like it was painfully difficult to own an EV before charging stations became widespread.
When that happens, it could further accelerate the decommissioning of old vehicles.
Well it will happen eventually if countries go 100% electric, but I doubt it will affect the average consumer for a long time.
Fuel stations make most of their profits from non-fuel items (in my country, fuel stations sell some of the best coffee), and people will still need those when commuting or travelling. In Norway some fuel stations have started to convert pumps to EV chargers [0], however there isn't really much cost needed to keep a couple of fuel pumps around. Petrol can last a few months in tanks, and diesel can last up to a year.
People are still going to be using petrol for motorbikes and gardening equipment for a long time, and diesel is going to be used by trucks and construction machinery for even longer.
They make profit on non-fuel items because they already have fuel-buying customers to upsell to. These two are co-dependent and are likely to fail together. Once people don't have to come to refuel, the store next to the pumps won't be in a convenient location any more.
Simply swapping pumps for EV chargers may not sustain a good-enough business. EV charging needs about 30-60 minutes. Current 5-minute shops that sell cigs and energy drinks aren't an attractive destination.
I think it's more likely that malls and supermarkets will add EV charging and take over both sides of gas stations' business.
(This is based on first-hand experience. My nearest fast charger is at a gas station.)
I'm not sure the traditional gas station format will make sense long term. Charging an EV takes longer than an ICE vehicle, what are people supposed to do with an extra half hour at a gas station? I think people are more likely to want to charge at a grocery store or restaurant.
In my country fuel stations are very popular as (apart from train stations) this is the only place where the shops are allowed to stay open after regular business hours and sundays.
Of course. But a key difference is that the electric grid seems to be drastically more decentralized than fuel pipelines.
Pipelines for liquid or gaseous fuel have a huge upfront cost and maintenance requirements compared to running power lines, so the incentives are to build them as big as possible.
Taking down a power station is certainly a viable attack vector, but the damage caused by losing a single station is drastically more manageable than losing a key pipeline that a massive region of the continent needs to feed continuously from to keep civilization running.
This is not even accounting for the further decentralizing and ruggedizing effect that comes when every rooftop subsidizes their own energy needs with solar and batteries.
> Taking down a power station is certainly a viable attack vector, but the damage caused by losing a single station is drastically more manageable than losing a key pipeline that a massive region of the continent needs to feed continuously from to keep civilization running.
It depends on which power station.
For instance, in my country, something like a tenth of the power of the whole country comes from a single place, the Itaipu hydroelectric dam. Most power from it flows through just a few power stations. In 2009, a weather-caused triple fault at one of them left half of the whole country, and the whole neighboring country, without power for a few hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazil_and_Paraguay_black...).
(Not to mention that the long-distance HVDC power lines used to bring power from distant hydroelectric dams like the Belo Monte dam and the Madeira river dams do also have a "huge upfront cost and maintenance requirements". Given that the power loss is lower at higher voltages, and these dams are so far from the southeast where most power demand is, the incentives are to build them as big as possible.)
Do you not remember the massive blackouts in the last 50 years? Entire regions of the USA and Canada have gone dark from time to time. California teters on the brink regularly. Remember last winter's troubles in Texas? It's not really any more stable than fuel distribution IMO.
They could use the huge battery in their car to charge devices and some people used them to warm their garage - something you can't do with a petrol/diesel car without, you know, dying.
The electric grid is vulnerabe to widespread and long-lasting outages, and has a history of multiple such events. Texas in the current year (weather and capacity induced), Puerto Rico ongoing following Hurricane Maria in 2017, "rolling blackouts" (induced through manipulation of the energy markets) in 2000, numerous regional blackouts through transmission and distribution failures dating to the 1960s.
Major concerns are SCADA attacks against control systems themselves, or physical attacks against regional substations which could cripple distribution for weeks or months.
And you want to ignore the inconvenient reality that civilization has managed to keep running all this time? It's plainly not the problem you imagine it to be.
Wars with localized collapses of civilization certainly happened before.
Life in freshly conquered Berlin was pretty harsh, especially in the first winter. There was a famous street graffitti that said "I envy the dead because their hands aren't freezing off."
And (admittedly depending on what type of housing you live in) you can have your own solar on the roof, set up to still supply you even if the grid is down.
Hollywood is doing society a disfavour by misrepresenting the apocalypse. EVs and bicycles are the true modes of transport when trouble starts.
Yeah, Mad Max movies show people fighting in the sunny desert over drops of oil to run their cars when solar panels and an EV would have been royal. 8^D
Yeah, and this should be a huge incentive for Governments to implement rebates and things to encourage more EVs. Our Federal Government in Australia is very strongly captured by lobbyists for all sorts of multinational companies, and some of the big ones are the oil & gas industry, so there's little movement here, but when you really think about it, having the sovereign capacity to fuel your vehicle fleet instead of relying on foreign oil (and increasingly in Australia, foreign refinement of that foreign oil) is a massive advantage.
In Norway yes, because everyone is pretty well off. Currently that would only help people with the highest incomes. And for those it often isn't too relevant if you get a $20,000 tax break. Companies don't care anyway because they can completely write them off and they also have parking space for chargers. So adoption happens mainly here.
Doesn't seem to become reality yet, Norway is really an exception here, their great wealth helps kickstart adoption massively.
> before charging stations became widespread.
They still aren't and there are no solutions for infrastructure and growth is still severely lacking and disappointingly slow. There is also no solution for people without a dedicated parking spot, which is especially common in cities.
Ferarris don't contribute at all to global warming relatively. The many Gulfstream's and 747's the wealthy own are actually statistically significant in terms of impact.
Heck, I know they're hybrids but just look formula one. The total emissions of every car, from all sessions at every single race in a year combined produce less emissions than a one way flight from London to New York. Which is then completed negated by the fact that the drivers all take private jets around the world
i don't think that's a good comparison. think how many flights a single F1 race "causes". Not just the team members, theirs cars and equipment, but the millions of fans traveling to races around the world.
There is no carbon neutral fuel before we have a surplus of carbon neutral energy. Currently, any kWh you use to synthesize fuel could instead be used for something else. It's probably less carbon intensive to keep on burning regular fuel, because it takes a lot of energy to make synfuel.
Of course it's nice that they subsidize R&D for synfuels (we might need them for niche applications after all), but selling them as "carbon neutral" is just greenwashing.
How do your links counter my argument that any kWh spent on creating synfuel could be used for something else instead and as long as we don't have a surplus of carbon free energy all the carbon free electricity used in this way needs to be compensated by fossil fuels somewhere else in the grid?
I don't think this argument makes any sense. Just because there can be better uses for additional clean energy, does not make the additional energy any less clean.
By this definition, no source is clean, because there are always "better uses" for energy.
The honest way is using the average CO2/kWh for the grid you're plugged into (including the CO2 emitted for constructing the power plants with some discounting function) to estimate how much carbon your synfuel releases.
The House of Saud, for some time, has attempted and failed to diversify away from oil wealth for when the time comes they can no longer rely on it. Norway, arguably, will reach that point soon (as they’ve bootstrapped electric mobility and can now deprecate existing petroleum supply chains, both for domestic use and for export).
Be like Norway and use the time you have left selling a natural resource wisely, because bans and cross border tariffs are coming, and you’ll be left with what you could build during your transition when the revenue dries up. Hopefully as a country, you don’t end up empty handed.
(Norway also supplies the UK with a large amount of clean hydro power, roughly 690MW continuous, through a newly commissioned underwater HVDC transmission line, so it’s not all dirty fossil exports)
How much of Boeing's aircraft fleet on which you worked is powered by those same fossil fuels?
Hypocritical facile criticism is hypocritically facile.
What's notable about Norway is that back in 1968, as the country was first becoming aware of its oil wealth through the newly-realised North Sea deposits (shared with the UK), the country had the foresight to tap the advice of an Iraqi ex-pat who advised the country to invest its oil funds for national growth, infrasturcture, and sustainability, and not squander it in corruption and gratuitous expenditures as so many other countries had and would.
The consequence is that we can now face the ironic but heartening fact that, yes, an oil-producing and exporting country is now positioned as amongst the more prepared for a post-fossil-fuel economy and civilisation.
If you find yourself in a lifeboat with limited supplies and rations, it's not unwise to make use of those rations. It is unwise to squander those rations for purposes other than reaching safety. And it's extraordinarily unwise to criticise those who are using those rations to achieve a safer state.
How much oil is needed to produce a single electric vehicle? What I am getting at is we will need oil extraction for a long time. While we can move away from burning it for heat, we still need it for the production of most plastics. This doesn't even begin to touch on oil's use in the extraction process of all the other metals used in car production.
We also need oil for road building. I don't see that changing anytime either. After all, asphalt production produces far fewer greenhouse gasses than cement. Concrete roads have their place but the vast majority of road miles will be made with asphalt for the near future.
Given that all the plastics and most synthetic fabrics are petrol derivatives I don't think it'll ever die.
90% of everything in your direct line of sight probably contain petrol derivatives. From wall paint to shampoo, your t-shirt, phone, chewing gums, toothpaste, rugs, shoes... We just can't sustain our modern lifestyle without it
A combination of both really. Also included is the transportation of raw materials to production facilities. To be fair, however, these costs exist for non-electric cars to some degree.
Asphalt is itself very energy inefficient, and finding a replacement is rather important. Quoting kurzgesagt, the impact if manufacturing an electric car is equal to just two meters of asphalt road.
On top of that, asphalt is very easy to recycle and is likely the most recycled material on the planet by weight. My original point was that we will still need to extract some oil for a long time into the future.
> How much oil is needed to produce a single electric vehicle?
And wood energy was used to jumpstart the fossil fuel energy age. There was a transition period before fossil fuel energy became the dominant way to extract more fossil fuels. Now wood for energy is economically negligible in advanced economies.
As a Norwegian I totally agree with you. It is not just unethical, but stupid to invest so much in searching for new old fields. When demand for oil drops, Norway could have a Kodak moment.
> Norway has a sovereign wealth fund (valuation: 1.4T in USD) that is setup specifically for this eventuality.
That's not much - $25K per person over 10 years, and with an average income of $70K per person, and something like half of their economy is energy (most if not all social programs are funded from energy production).
If oil were to stop tomorrow, they'd have around 10 years before the money runs out. (Maybe a bit longer since kids don't earn money.) And if they have to replace all the social funding, they'd have even less time.
Norway is relying on slow reduction in demand, and time to transition their economy. Will they have it? It's far from certain. I feel like Norwegians rely too much on this fund to save themselves, rather than transitioning away from oil now.
There are lots of pushes to move the fund into carbon-neutral or negative investments, which would likely grow as the fossil fuel economy swan song starts.
However, I find it a bit disingenuous to chide Norway which is doing far better than much larger countries like the UK, US or Germany in transitioning to renewables.
I am not worried for Norway (though when the North Atlantic jetbtream shifts they will likely suffer) - I'm far more worried for the poor and marginalized peoples - they will suffer far more.
It's no surprise that thought leaders are worried about climate change impacts. Some will perversely benefit (politicians who are anti-immigration will gain populartiy because climate migrations are clearly defined by US defense dept as a likely result from climate change). Others may benefit by providing mitigating solutions to climate change itself that alter economies.
The income from the wealth fund doesn't need to replace oil income forever, it should be used to invest in growing other parts of their economy. For example, Equinor is getting into offshore wind and carbon sequestration both of which use similar competencies to oil production.
Anyway, they are still extracting oil and probably will continue to do so for a couple decades. That gives them time to grow their wealth fund and gradually transition their economy. They are at a huge advantage compared to other oil exporters.
As I see it, Kodak saw the writing on the wall pretty early, started R&D for digital camera ahead of the pack, and actually built the first working digital camera we know of. But it failed to put as much weight behind the new product line as it did on the money making ones.
That's basically a text book example of the "strategy tax", which isn't about stopping profit from existing products, but to let new concepts cannibalise legacy products.
In which way do you see Norway hitting the brakes on new technology and future trends to protect the oil business ?
Geezus, must be nice to have that kind of rainy day fund. Grossly over-simplifed: "Shut down the economy? Oh well, here's 80 billion dollars to keep everyone fed and warm."
Stopping it would be useless, it'd just increase production from oil wells of other countries. They could invest that money into accelerating green technology.
To a first order effect, stopping production would decrease supply, increasing price, and therefore decreasing demand and therefore overall oil usage, shifting some energy to alternative sources.
Of course second order effects might dwarf that, like the fact that increasing prices would incentivize oil extraction in currently unprofitable locations. That extraction may or may not be more carbon-intensive than Norway's (though probably more if it's currently unprofitable).
It sounds punchy to say "Norway should stop extracting oil" as much as it does to say "It doesn't matter whether they do or not since someone else will", but the reality is much more complex than either of those simplistic zeroth-order approximations.
Precisely. If oil prices get high enough, the Canadian oil sands will begin to be a profitable operation again, and will scale back up to take advantage. At this point, while we're still weaning off of oil - for probably the next 50 years - we need the lowest carbon, least cannibalistic sources of it possible.
Infrastructure takes time to build. A short term price hike in oil costs isn’t going to change how many cars Tesla can manufacture tomorrow. Near term you can build up infrastructure to extract more oil from the same well faster than you can build a new car factory.
The only real change from such a policy is how quickly wells will run dry, but I hope we can abandon oil long before running out is a serious concern.
Only if there was a large pact of countries doing so. But even that would be dubious, since OPEC and other groups would just increase production. Also there are many oil resources that can be tapped with a slight increase in the prices, so really Norway would just be handing production over to countries like Canada, where local governments would be only too eager to sell the more expensive product.
I've not owned a car for many years, always get trains and always try live in places where it's fine to walk or cycle. Inner cities, now in a rural village where I'm close to most amenities.
Recently I went on a road trip my partner (who really wanted to go), the whole time I couldn't stop thinking about how stupid of an activity it was given what we know about our future if we stay on the current trajectory. While driving I was looking around at hundreds of thousands of other people doing the same thing and just got me down.
The idea of hundreds of millions of machines driving around emitting carbon dioxide and other pollutants is just so stupid it's hard to imagine we collectively accepted the idea in the first place.
It's really hard to believe that none of the externalitiez are factored into the absolutely insane cost of climate change.
However, I guess what I really wanted to say by writing this comment is, at least there is some hope :)
Scandinavia in general takes global warming more seriously than most other countries on the planet. And so this isn't strange at all. The whole of Europe is amping up alternatives to petrol- and diesel-based transportation, from e-bikes, cargo e-bikes, e-scooters to Teslas and electric Porsches (Taycan), and anything inbetween.
Their tax structure on vehicles is such that a loaded Tesla costs about the same as a Civic - the taxes (that are exempt on EVs) are quite massive on new cars.
Norway is wealthy thanks to selling fossil fuels. Norwegians feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to stop selling them.
This is essentially performative environmentalism from them. Still, it will help other countries by throwing up unforeseen problems in all-electric ground transportation, and some solutions.
I don't think it's a country of virtue signallers as you think, just people who like to get the best bang for their buck. And gas cars as well as fuel get taxed so much, that buying electric makes sense for them.
Who would've thunk, economic incentives help!? Sadly in many other places the deciding economic incentives are the ones the politicians get from the oil and ICE car industry.
The claim is not that the individuals buying cars are signalling, it is the public policy (incentivizing individual EV ownership while exporting carbon emissions) which is hypocritical.
Norway also spends a lot of energy criticizing foreign regimes for attempting to follow the same path as Norway; prosperity through natural resource extraction. It’s great that Norway has gotten rich enough to turn the corner, but not every country is so fortunate.
arguably, taxes are the government's way of making the decision for the people, so if by "Norway" gp more accurately meant "the government of Norway", you haven't refuted their claims
We (as in the Norwegian population) have voted for politicians supporting this, though. At the election a month ago, it was just a thousand or so votes from being an incredible amount of green representatives.
It’s a matter of some pragmatism. At least their sovereign wealth fund is trying. As much as I wish all nations would take more serious action on the issue, it would seem self defeating for a small nation to step out too early ahead of larger nations in cutting off a major source of revenue. Meanwhile, maybe they’re doing better with the profits for themselves and the world by directing their wealth fund as they are.
Which is a political decision made in a democracy, not a law of physics. Norwegians chose to do this. (Yes, a relatively small subset of people are actually empowered in a democracy, but it's the least-bad system known, etc etc).
Not only there was no referendum that allowed Norwegians to decide if this was their political volition, but political volition alone is not enough to tax something. If it were, everything would be taxed, because you can construct any 51% against any 49% on any topic and add a tax.
If you want to know what Norwegians really think about the tax, make it optional and see how many people pay for it.
> If you want to know what Norwegians really think about the tax, make it optional and see how many people pay for it.
If you want to see what Norwegians really think about paying for things in stores, make shoplifting laws completely optional, and replace cash registers with tip jars, and see how that works out.
Norway has been doing a relatively good job of investing their oil revenue into technologies and infrastructure that will carry their economy through the end of oil and hopefully help reduce global warming.
Given their relatively contribution to the total global production and OPEC's supply management to control prices, it is unclear if a halt in Norwegian oil sales would raise prices significantly enough to matter. There is an argument to be made that is is better for Norway to capture those profit and invest them into the research we need to reduce oil dependence and sequester CO2.
I don't think that the electric car adoption is purely driven by environmentalism. Norway has extremely cheap energy that makes electric cars much more economically attractive.
I don't think that the electric car adoption is purely driven by environmentalism.
On an individual level basically no one in Norway buys an electric car due to environmentalism. It's 100% an economic decision. Buying a new gasoline powered car today in Norway simply doesn't make financial sense no matter how you look at it.
It seems the answer is yes. There are two refineries. According to https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/terminals-and-refineri..., Mongstad (the larger of the two) has capacity: "Petrol (gasoline) production at Mongstad is 4 times Norwegian domestic consumption"
One way to avoid the resource curse is to use the bounty of the resource to develop diversified dependencies/capabilities for a future when that resource runs out or is devalued.
The UK and Norway found oil in the North Sea around the same time. Norway used that revenue to create the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. The UK squandered it on tax cuts.
That's an awful lot of money. The US National Debt is around $80K per US citizen. The War in Afghanistan cost around $7K per US citizen, based on numbers from Wikipedia.
It is however much more spread out. Driving from the northernmost to southern most town of New Mexico is ~700 km. Driving from the southern most to northern most town of Norway is over 2300 km, or about the same has from the southernmost town of New Mexico to the Canadian border.
It's not about the max travelable distance in the country but the max distance actually traveled for most trips. The higher density (and population concentration in the south) reduces the latter and makes maintaining a charging network much more practical (their high adoption rate also help a lot with that.)
Edit: The reason why this is the important measure is because what people care about is how often their trips require N charging stops not the maximum number of charging stops they might have to make.
But what about those living in the north, in the Fjell, and those working in remote spots such as forests? Are those really served well by EVs, and is it really all that sustainable to subsidy EV?
What a weird forecast, this is like saying "Bitcoin will hit $100k in 3 months." by looking at the price graph. Since people will still be allowed to buy such cars so far, I doubt 100% will ever be reached...
I still cant help but think about how wasteful cars are.
We basically have these giant energy hungry machines who just sit idle and take up space 95% of the time, and when they are utilized, it's mostly for a single passenger with almost zero luggage.
Pretty misleading title IMHO - from the 3rd para of the article:
"In the first eight months of 2021, vehicles without any type of electrification – battery electric vehicle, plug-in hybrid, hybrid – made up less than 10 per cent of (9.66 per cent) new car sales"
So by 'electric', they mean what are commonly referred to as 'electrified' vehicles, and by ICE, they are actually referring to pure gas/diesel cars. I have news for you - hybrids still burn gas!
> seven out of every eight cars bought and sold in Norway a used car. The NAF’s numbers show that of the 357,176 ownership registration changes so far in 2021, electric vehicles only accounted for 12 per cent.
And their definition of electric cars includes hybrids (whereas I think most people interpret it to mean fully electric). So they're obviously doing great but the vast majority of the vehicles in Norway are still ICE only.
Either people here don't like the truth or they can't be bothered to refute your claims. I don't see how electric can be the way forward. Cars are certainly no fun anymore.
Does anyone have a pointer to studies on the effects of electric vehicles in the used car market?
I ask because the lifespan of current batteries seems to be around 8 years (going by manufacturers' warranties), and the battery pack amounts to approximately 30% of the price of the car. So people buying an used electric car will likely face a large maintenance cost after a while.
That's off. A typical new EV gets ~250 miles of real world range on a full charge and has a battery with very similar chemistry[1] to what you have in your phone. So over a putative 200k mile lifetime, it's going to see about 800 cycles (2e5/250) of battery usage.
800 cycles is about what a typical mobile phone sees in two years, after which most are seeing some moderate degradation (70% of new condition is fairly typical) but are still quite usable. And in fact a car spends much more of its time being recharged well before reaching full discharge (where consumer electronics runs dead a lot), so it would be expected to do somewhat better.
It's not really a problem, basically.
[1] Though we're seeing an increasing number of vehicles delivered with LiFePO4 cells. This chemistry has somewhat lower energy density and higher internal resistance, but has the advantage of an estimaged hundreds of thousands of cycles lifetime. Those will never wear out until long after the mechanical parts are dust.
These new cells give the possibility of being recycled and rebuilt into a few cars in a row. Would be great for the single most expensive component of an electric car to be used over, maybe dropping performance/cost class as they go.
People tend to thing EV batteries are a binary thing, they are either working or broken. This is not how it goes.
An EV battery loses capacity faster in the beginning, slower later on. The falloff is perfectly predictable and easily estimated. You can check the health of a battery pack with a free app and a $10 OBD2 reader when buying one.
Yes, the maximum range will be lower than it was new, but it's up to the buyer if that is something that bothers them.
Compare this to the process of buying an old car. There's no way to know what kind of crap oil the previous owner has put in. You can't tell what shape the engine is in without actually opening it. The gearbox might just decide to break one day, the clutch might be on its last legs and the pistons might just come up for air some sunny summer day to enjoy the weather.
The only way to check for faults is relying on educated guesses (bring a friend who knows the specific type of car or take it to a shop for evaluation).
The difference between an ICE and EV is that ICE needs money frequently (oil changes, belts and chains and whatever wear down), an EV has That One Big Repair coming up at some point. And the price of batteries is steadily going down.
For example you can get a 3rd party battery for a Nissan Leaf _today_ that's 30% larger than the one that was in it originally. Just think what we can do in 2030.
Like changing a broken automatic transmission is a cheap thing.
That happened to a friend of mine, who was quoted around 50k NOK (~6k USD) of a car he bought used for twice that. Fortunately for him, it turned out there was one week left of the 5-year "new car" warranty so he didn't have to pay after all, but that was sheer luck.
There are a handful of independent shops that can repair a battery for much less than full replacement cost. I think that will get better as EVs become more common.
I’ve seen a stat that most cars only last 10 years in the US. If that’s because we crash or destroy them than the problem is almost non-existent. I own a 25 year old truck but they aren’t very common, so I assume that’s just anecdotal. I’m also not sure if that stat included trucks. I can’t find it to reference it.
Unless they programmed it to go bad as soon as the warranty expires I wouldn’t be so worried about it. The Tesla model S is about 8 years old now for the earliest models and I don’t think I’ve heard about them going bad.
I think that would cause them to drop by ~70% over 8 years, at least for normal to high mileage examples. I'm not sure if this is actually any worse than what would be typical for an ICE vehicle, though?
It's good that Norway may hit 100% electric EV. But with ~20% of their economy based on oil and gas production, it's hard not to think of it being funded largely by exporting pollution elsewhere.
There has been a similar big bump in the uk (to 17% not 100 but still...). How much of this is that a lot of legacy companies can't produce anything because they can't get chips?
