Some context for Americans as a dual US/EU citizen: for many people, especially near cities, electric cars are already far more practical in the EU than gas cars. And they're far cheaper and more available than they are in the US. A lot of cities in the EU, even in Eastern Europe, have car sharing services that are 100% electric cars. Anytime I need a car in Europe, I just use an app and walk a couple minutes to the nearest electric car. They're pre-charged, have a range of 3-400 km, and are far faster and easier to drive than gas cars. When I spent some time in the US recently, and had to rent a gas car, I felt like I was using ancient technology. It was so sluggish and inconvenient and more expensive.
I say this because most Americans have the impression that the US on the cutting edge with technology, but in terms of electric cars, the US is really far behind.
> And they're far cheaper and more available than they are in the US
Ekhem, I think you live in a really wealthy place in EU, maybe Norway that subsidies electric cars so e.g. plumbers are driving Teslas.
But in the real world, electric cars are too expensive for normies to buy.
Car sharing - OK, that's available - but I'm yet to drive such car, because in in city in Poland there are only few such cars available (for a normal price) to drive. And I would like to test them out - but not at the price of driving to the other side of the city.
Car rental - tried that - either not available or too expensive to rent (trip to Italy last year).
Dude, you're not in contact with the reality of most people. Most europeans outside of the blue banana buy second-hand cars, which are 99.9% gas cars.
Everyone is, in fact, aware of the price hike of new gas cars to try to make electric cars competitive. Not so long ago it was possible to buy new gas car <15k.
There used to be a large network of electric cars in Warsaw by one of the utilitiy companies, Innogy GO. They had a few hundred cars, very nice BMWs (i3 and i3s), decent prices but, sadly, didn't survive the lockdowns and folded in early 2021.
Could you share more details about this? I have seen different misuses of carbon credits mechanism, this one seems quite novel and creative (in a negative way).
A lot of that depends on having access to relatively cheap charging at home/work. If you only have the public chargers, I really doubt the TCO is cheaper for an EV.
I bought my used 2012 Nissan Leaf in 2015 for $6000. I left it sitting uncharged for 8 months while I travelled and lost no discernable range, I have done absolutely no maintenance other than tires and windshield wipers, and I can sell it for $6000.
Low range, uncooled battery unsuitable for fast charging (degrades - Nissans own words), chademo and type 1 charging sockets only? Plenty low priced ones with bad batteries (funnily enough most from Norway), battery replacement more expensive than buying another car ($6K).
That's not bad. And I'm assuming from the fact that it's a Nissan Leaf that you're in the US. I looked into buying a Leaf at one point, but I was afraid that the battery of a used Leaf would give out.
“In the real world, computers are too expensive for normies to buy”. Was true once too, but things move fast.
A huge difference is going to be in four or five years when currently new cars start really showing up on the used car market. At the same time, there will be more entry-level priced new EVs (in part because of laws like this, but also just the normal technology development cycle)
That is a common fear, but no, it’s not matched by real-world experience. Modern battery tech should usually last the life of the car. The batteries are often fairly modular, so if some individual cells do unexpectedly fail, often the battery can be fixed by just replacing one of 20 or so modules.
European climate has a big range, you have Greece/Spain and you have Norway.
And countries in the middle have few months with temperatures below and at 0 degrees Celsius.
The TCO of a Tesla Model 3 is less than that of a Toyota Camry over a 15 year period. If you can afford a new Toyota Camry, you can also afford to finance a Model 3 to take advantage of the TCO savings.
If you can't, then you should be buying used. But in that case the phaseout of availability for new vehicles doesn't affect you.
> The TCO of a Tesla Model 3 is less than that of a Toyota Camry over a 15 year period.
Nobody can know this because the Model 3 was introduced mid-2017, so the very oldest ones are now only under 6 years old. We need to wait until 2032 to have 15 year data on just the first year production run logevity and TCO.
In that case nobody can know it about any car, except maybe a Lada. You can't buy a brand new 2007 Toyota Camry this year, and the 2022 Toyota Camry is a very different car than the 2007 Toyota Camry.
> You can't buy a brand new 2007 Toyota Camry this year, and the 2022 Toyota Camry is a very different car than the 2007 Toyota Camry.
That is not how TCO over 15 years is calculated.
You need data for the same fleet of cars over 15 years, you don't buy the same car over and over for 15 years. It's not relevant that the 2022 model is different, the TCO is for the 2007 model year cars (using 2007 as the example).
So for a 2007 Camry, we could poll all owners of Camrys built in 2007 to get data about their TCO over the past 15 years. We can't do that for a Tesla Model 3 since nobody has owned one for 15 years so there is nobody to poll yet.
A 2022 Camry is not going to have the same reliability as a 2007 Camry. It might be better, it might be worse but you don't know because they are two very different cars.
The TCO for cars is based on projected reliability, whether it's a Tesla or a Toyota. It's a mathematical model based on incomplete data in both cases.
I feel this a general phenomenon on HN. Someone living in a specific European country will describe a specific good thing about their country (or even just their local area), and then extrapolate to the entire European Union.
18% of Hungarians live in Budapest, and 73% of Hungarians are in some urban area.
The land itself isn't driving anywhere.
This is kinda the opposite problem of those who reject immigration "because {insert country name here} is full" — unless you're living in a city-sate it isn't even remotely full, it's just that most of the people have chosen live close to other people, which both makes it feel crowded and means that goods and services which kinda need high density environments are actually fine.
And what is the definition of some urban area in Hungary? Do you really believe a small towns with 1000-10000 inhabitants have electric car rentals available?
First, why are you reaching for what is by definition the smallest group?
Second, I just looked up Hungarian towns by population, in that range, first one I found was Ráckeve, it has three car rentals.
I can't tell what engine types the two which aren't "fancy old-timer VIP cars" rent out (and not only because even Chrome refuses to offer to translate for me), and you might not count the location anyway because it's on a short distance train line to the capital.
Making a prediction from the number of vehicles in their publicity shots and the penetration of electric car sales, I'd guess even odds there's at least one electric vehicle, in that location, at the moment, that gets rented out.
Looking at the google maps aerial photos of some of the places with population of 1k, I wouldn't count such small places as urban. I'm not sure what definition Wolfram Alpha used when I asked it for the number.
If you haven't noticed, Hungary only has one really big city(Budapest, around 1.5m people), the second biggest has around 200k people and from there on there are mostly towns under 100k population size. What they call a town starts at 1000 people (the smallest number I have used).
Why are trying so hard to make believe something exists when it does not?
Please believe that average Hungarian(or European) is not living couple of minutes away from an electric car rent company. What user 'yosito' wrote is a figment of imagination. If you don't believe me, there are many Europeans here who are telling you he is wrong.
Can't reply to yositos reply, so replying here instead. Exactly
Specifically, "Anytime I need a car in Europe, I just use an app and walk a couple minutes to the nearest electric car." - I doubt that's the case for the car majority of Hungarians.
I know it's not the case for the majority of Swedes. I live in Gothenburg, the car mecka of Sweden/Northern Europe. We have electric car rental if you live in the city center (along with the other 10% or so of the inhabitants). I actually live quite close to the Volvo factories. Nope - definitely no 2 min walk to pick up any electric car rental.
Hungary is pretty small. You can drive pretty much anywhere in the country from Budapest on a single charge. And there are charging stations all over the country as well. I've personally driven all over the country in an electric car with no issues... well, except a few times when I ended up off-roading in a tiny Volkswagen by mistake and almost getting stuck in the mud.
In 2021, Germany had 15.6 plug-in EVs per 1000 people, compared to the EU average of 11.0 and the US figure of 6.2.
If you're not interested in cars, you may need to look more carefully to spot them. Here in Denmark, there are plenty of Teslas around, but there are also EVs from normal brands (VW, BMW, Volvo etc) which go unnoticed, except the lack of an exhaust pipe.
Look especially at new cars, 31% of new cars in Germany are electric.
Generally speaking, in southern Europe, electric cars are very expensive (prices start at 2-3 times an annual salary), electricity is expensive, and refuelling is complicated. There are no pre-charged electric cars anywhere; electric mopeds are available, but they are slow and have a small range. Are you sure you're in Europe?
I live in southern Europe, electric cars are 15 to 20% more expensive than equivalent ICE cars. They also get government subsidies which makes the difference much smaller. Considering the lower TCO because there's lesser need for maintenance, lower road tax, occasional free parking, and the fact that PV in homes are very common here I think owning electric is generally favorable.
Yes electric cars are more expensive but the initial investment is not that different from buying any new diesel or petrol powered car.
Well, there are also some of us EU citizens, born and bred in the EU, who still love the concept of having our own car, waiting for us in our garage.
We also like, from time to time, to drive thousands of km during leisure trips (read: driving to a holiday destination while hopping from a nice place on the way to another) without being constantly worried about the battery range.
Oh, and we appreciate our car being designed with comfort in mind (read: spacious) rather than range (read: see those ugly dome-shaped Prius).
> And they're far cheaper and more available than they are in the US.
But they are still very very expensive! In Germany for example:
- Kia Niro EV, crosover/mini-suv, 47.590 € (ICE with mild-hybrid 32.590 €)
- BMW 3 wagon, ICE, starts at 46.300,00 €
So no, thank you. If I have that much money I will buy anything but expensive, lower class EV.
For people with a low budget, probably cheapest wagon option is Dacia Jogger, starting 16.900 €. Find my reasonable priced, decent sized wagon for someone who can afford max 20k loan for a car.
So no. If prices of EVs don't drop by 20%, and range (real, not on the paper) doesn't increase to at least 450 km in light winter conditions then I don't want to see an EV, although it's cool to drive.
Also I live in a pretty new building, 5 years old in a really big city. We don't have chargers in the underground garage, although there is close to 200 apartments here.
Ugh, no. There are a lot of EVs, but they are much less practical for Europeans that for Americans, because they can charge them at home, and we usually can't. And car sharing in Europe (and probably other region too) is an extreme hassle - it is very expensive (unless you can make a super optimized multi stop same day route, basically a lot of trips same day), it is not widespread yet, and you can get hit with huge car damage fees many days/weeks after the trip, for pre-existing damage. And for travellers it is close to impossible due to drive permit restrictions.
It's when you mostly live without a car but occasionally need one for transportation and day trips. You usually can rent them by the hour or day and as you said it's a slightly different user experience than traditional car rental agencies.
I know some people who use public transport / (e-)bikes exclusively but every once in a while want to visit a relative out in the wood or make a bigger purchases which would be hard to transport otherwise (some of them also own a cargo trailer for their bikes).
It's not a majority by any means but for some people it work
They would have to maintain and store a basically unused car otherwise.
I've been driving electric cars exclusively for about a decade and this week I am borrowing my father's new expensive audi to do him a favor and "sluggish and inconvenient" is not critical enough!!
These cars are just dangerous. Trying to accelerate rapidly to make a merge? Actually impossible. A stoppage in traffic is coming? Just mash the brake pedal hard.. Maybe they have a deal with brake pad manufacturers... Sitting at a stoplight and want to fumble around with something? If you accidentally slip off the brake pedal, the DEFAULT behavior of the vehicle is to GO. What kind of design is that? Not to mention the gas station 'experience'
> EU countries approve 2035 phaseout of CO2-emitting cars
That's quite a misleading headline from Reuters - they're not phasing out C02 emitting cars, they're banning sale of new CO2 emitting cars. Existing CO2 cars will continue to be legal, although probably become much more expensive to run than electric cars, and of course could be outlawed by further legislation.
Which is effectively a phase-out of most CO2 emitting cars by 2050, if the ban doesn't change people's purchasing patterns (which it will, but it's hard to tell how)
I agree, but just as an optimistic counterpoint: It seems like we might be lucky enough to get quickly to a point where recycling perfectly good ICE cars to make EVs will be the smart move for the consumers pocket and the planet.
Theres not much point in talking about it while everyone is still making up lies about running out of lithium, barcoding poor people and eating bugs, but the cleaner air, demand response benefits, reduced imports of fuel, and superior experiemce seems likely to overtake the natural aging out of existing cars as it accelerates over the next decade.
At a certain point, fuelling an ICE car simply wont make sense, just as working coal plants are closing because the coal fuel costs more than building new renewables.
It is 25% of global emissions. We’ve had 50 years to deal with this. Coal is such a dirty source of power. I’ve been told renewables are competitive for at least a decade. Something doesn’t add up.
This has a few effects, a key one being that stable countries with low cost of capital can lead on deployments.
They first displace new builds, then later they close existing plants.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
As your article says:
> The world is close to a peak in fossil fuel use, with coal set to be the first to decline, but we are not there yet," said Keisuke Sadamori, the IEA’s director of energy markets and security.
We could definitely have done better, but if I was one of those weird Marvel comic aliens judging the human race we're looking likely to scrape a C on climate change, which is nice. Lots of good work by a lot of people involved. Sadly a lot of it was effort spent on combating lies and stupidity, which drags down our score, but such is life.
Hopefully we'll have learned some lessons for the next global challenge we face.
Yes, I have learned my lesson. Next time I hear an optimist feed me a bunch of bs, i’m going to explain that they’re completely wrong, and people should hold the “optimists” just as accountable as the climate deniers.
Time to admit you were wrong. Being wrong has a huge price.
I replaced a 2003 Saab with a Tesla Model 3 and for our driving (about 40k km per year) the price difference between electricity and petrol ALONE makes up for the leasing payments.
That appears to be not that fuel efficient, though, right? For instance, a 2020 Honda Fit will do 36MPG [0], meanwhile a 2003 Saab would do around 20MPG [1]. Depending on where you live and the usage of your car, I can imagine electric cars being much cheaper overall, even though the starting price can be much higher. I should note I live in a Third World country where electric cars basically don't exist yet, so I'm not aware of the day-to-day realities of using electric cars.
Saab is weird, it has really bad fuel economy in the city ~12L/100km but on the highway it's alright, around 7L/100km which is not great but not far off from modern cars.
My wife has to travel about 360km round trip between cities, which with the current fuel prices is at least 50EUR. Same trip with the Tesla costs usually around 3 EUR when charging at home during the cheap hours at night and has never cost more than ~15EUR even during the crazy electricity prices and/or fast charging.
The title is not misleading at all, as a phaseout is not a ban, but a gradual transition. And as the lifetime of cars is limited and there will be no new CO2-emitting cars to replace the ones that go away, this ban of new sales will see these cars removed completely at some time, gradually. That's a phaseout.
Usually when a year is given for a phaseout, that's when the phaseout is supposed to be completed, not the point where it begins. The current headline is misleading in that it suggests that ICE cars will be phased out by 2035, instead of that they will begin phasing them out starting in 2035.
> Usually when a year is given for a phaseout, that's when the phaseout is supposed to be completed,
Citation needed.
I see no evidence whatsoever that your claim is true, and it wouldn't even make sense, because with this kind of gradual phaseout you don't actually have control over when it is completed.
All the media reports of this particular phaseout report it exactly like the Reuter's article, so that's a lot of counterexamples right there.
Here's another one: "As a result, in 2009, the department announced the eventual phase out of the 1.5-inch-diameter fluorescent T12 tubes. The mandate said production of the tubes would have to cease after July 14, 2012. "
Again, the only dates mentioned in the phase out are production and import bans.
Very different domain: "North Carolina legislation enacted on November 18 phases out the corporate income tax starting with tax years beginning in 2025,..."
So the date that is mentioned is the beginning of the phaseout, not the completion.
None of the examples you give refer to their subjects as <year> phaseout, and none list a year at all in their titles. All of them go out of their way to clarify that the dates they give are referring to the beginning of the process, which wouldn't be necessary if that were the default interpretation.
> I don’t think that EV implies software overkill. I hope that some brands will carve out a niche for simple EVs with real buttons and low “smartness”.
As of now EVs are synonymous with software overkill. Hence your hope that some brands WILL carve out a niche.
I hope so but i'm not optimistic. I can't think of any electric car that doesn't have a horrific UI full of "smart" features i don't want and would pay to not have. Even a car that doesn't require subscriptions to turn on basic features seems like a very optimistic ask.
Someone already mentioned the, VW e-up! and it has a sibling called Skoda Citigo iV. They do belong to the "very tiny car" segment, but you can get them without any screen at all! Google some interior pictures. (Both not sold anymore, but you can find them used).
I think for a brand that does as simple and cheap cars as possible there's Dacia. They have the electric Dacia Spring which is also a small car. It does have a touch screen though. Only available in some select European countries.
Edit: Actually, the touch screen in the Spring is only the "Plus" version, so you can be touch-screen free! :) But the Plus version also has DC fast charging, so you probably want that anyway.
It will be difficult as big manufacturers will lobby to relabel smart features as safety features which will make it hard to sell a car with a low safety rating. (This is already happening, squeezing out the makers of cheaper cars.)
For some definition of "simpler", sure. You could also look at it that an EV requires a functioning, efficient global system of engineering design, mineral extraction, and manufacture. There are very few countries that could claim they can make an EV 100% domestically, and the only one that comes to mind has been working very hard to put themselves in that position.
Like with CRTs, the only thing that simple about IC's is that the networks and systems have been developed over the last century or so. As an innate technology they're massively more complicated.
For most nations - even without the shit were destroying our home argument - EV's look like a better long-term proposition than having to buy oil from some of worst regimes on the planet on an ongoing basis to run a transport system.
If you buy a car with a gas engine in 2035 it'll be stuffed full of electronics too. This is independent of EV vs gas. If you want to keep driving your 2011 vehicle because it doesn't have a bunch of garbage in the infotainment system then you'll still be able to do that.
You'd be talking 1970s or before, then? Anything from the 80s onwards has had plenty of electronics present. And generally been more reliable for it. Ftr I've owned and fixed hundreds of cars, and modern ones are much more reliable and need less servicing.
Even pre-1970, it's hard to think of any combustion engine being "really simple" tbh. They may be more repairable if you have access to spare parts or a machine shop, but constructing a new engine from scratch (or even a mid-level rebuild) is decidedly non-trivial even if you don't have any electronics at all.
> You'd be talking 1970s or before, then? Anything from the 80s onwards has had plenty of electronics present.
No, it's completely different in the last ~decade.
Certainly cars back into the 80s (some brands into the 70s) have electronics but they are completely independent and simple systems. You had individual wiring to every device and for the most part (usually 100%) independent circuits for every component.
This makes things very easy to diagnose with just a volt meter, easy to replace and even easy to completely rip out some subcomponent if you didn't care for it (or it became too expensive to repair). All the rest of the car was independent of that one component so everything keeps working.
This simple contruction is true into the 00s for most brands/models.
Current cars have integrated everything into a common bus and everything is controlled and monitored by opaque software that can't be diagnosed or fixed outside of factory tools.
For example even something as trivial as replacing the starting battery on newer BMWs (possibly other brands) requires special electronic tooling to reprogram the computer. That's just the tip of the iceberg, nearly nothing can be done in newer cars without access to factory electronic tools since everything is interconnected and hidden behind proprietary software control.
I have cars from the 80s, 90s and mid-00s and all of them require nothing more than a voltmeter to diagnose electrical problems. That's no longer true with new cars.
> modern ones are much more reliable and need less servicing
That's mostly true. But once they do require servicing, it's becoming nearly impossible to DIY so you are at the mercy of how long the factory cares to support your model.
I used to own a mid-00s (so not even that complex by current comparison) BMW and electrical glitches from the interconnected fragile electrical system were common. Even though I normally do everything in all my cars, there was nothing I could do without access to factory diagnostic tools so had to take it to the shop. Eventually the technicians there basically gave up, diagnosing things was so difficult that even with all the factory tooling they estimated tens of thousands in labor just to figure out the problems. I had to sell the car for scrap value since it was unfixable.
Give me simple cars from the 80s and 90s, I can keep those running forever myself.
In theory, electric cars are simpler. Fewer moving parts and all that. But _modern_ cars are full of electronic doodads. Theoretically there is nothing stopping someone from developing a barebones electric car.
Theoretically no, but practically the big manufacturers lobby to label smart electronics as safety features, so if you want to sell a simple car, you face the uphill battle of explaining why it scores low on safety ratings (which are mostly a checkbox-list of smart features).
Once you've used the necessary amounts of up-to-date electronic design techniques and components to build the battery management, motor controller and charging systems in your "barebones" EV, adding some multicolour lighting and a touchscreen is a tiny step.
Me too, but they were unsustainable. I really think when it comes to technology we need to think about sustainability first. We can't just look at something and think "ooh shiny", or "ooh convenient". We need to first ask about sustainability and trash it if it doesn't cross the first hurdle.
It's like our grandparents discovered an endless supply of food, built their lives around it and forgot how to farm. Our parents realised the supply wasn't actually endless, but it wouldn't run out in their lifetime so they just kept eating and becoming more dependent. They worked out how to eat less of the food, but they just ended up eating the same and getting fatter instead. We were born into a world utterly dependent on it but critically aware that it's running out and we need to stop. Sure, I'll miss the food too. Who wouldn't? But it's not coming back.
Are there any new petroleum cars that are really simple and have little electronics - perhaps the ultra cheap, mostly Chinese city cars - but car manufacturers have been putting more and more electronics into vehicles long before electric cars
> The European Commission has pledged, however, to create a legal route for sales of new cars that only run on e-fuels to continue after 2035, after Germany demanded this exemption from the ban.
Sounds annoying, but I had to skim through looking for a definition of "e-fuel" since it was not a term I was accustomed to.
Found it:
E-fuels are produced by synthesising captured CO2 emissions and hydrogen produced using CO2-free electricity. They are considered carbon neutral because the CO2 released when the fuel is combusted is balanced by the CO2 removed from the atmosphere to produce the fuel.
And also learnt that they're also called "electrofuels" [1].
That makes it sound less horrible, except that such production doesn't exist yet at a sensible/interesting scale as far as I understand.
Nevertheless, e-fuel cars are still a step back compared to electric cars: electric cars don't pollute while they're running, but may still generate pollution depending on how the electricity they are charged with was produced, e-fuel cars produce both tailpipe pollution and potentially also electricity generation pollution. But I guess that due to how horrendously expensive e-fuels will be, these vehicles will be so rare that tailpipe pollution won't matter much...
e-fuel cars also generate noise, sound pollution. Sad that Germany prevented us from getting rid of that noisy redneck revving his expensive engine in the middle of the city.
Also Italy and Poland supported Germany on this. I suspect that the real motivation is that the automotive industry in these countries creates loads of jobs both directly and indirectly. Electric cars being simpler and needing less maintenance will kill positions in the 10s of thousands.
Not just that. For huge part of Polish population new EVs will be unaffordable. ICEs got more expensive in the recent year, but that still much lesser than EVs.
Nothing electric is ever simpler and requires less maintenance than the mechanic version. Idk where you get that from.
I made the mistake to buy an electric oven, super modern type.
The number of times it displayed an "E" for error in the display, I stopped counting.
Any electric component will not only last less longer but also be more error prone and will need to be repaired more often.
Electrical car are documented almost everywhere with lower maintenance cost than gas prices, mostly because there are fewer moving parts and fluids. You can hardly compare anecdotical issue related to electric oven with macro statistics on gas and electric cars.
Exactly, I live on a very active street and the daily noise is killing me softly.
Especially those "punks" with their motorbikes or pimped engines and exhausts.
Silence is a luxury I don't have. Only at night between 2-4AM.
I've recently started wearing a full ear headset to dampen some of the noise.
I wish I could just move out, but other flats cost double the price.
Which country? I'm in Japan, and the cult of noisy cars/motorbikes here is both disgusting and hopeless (given the planned disappearance of ICE vehicles), but very ingrained (among both middle-aged and young men). Moreover it's actually illegal (law limits engine noises to 80dB), but police seems to have given up.
Ideally I'd move to a country with more regard towards silence, calm and cardiovascular health of citizens.
Maybe at highway speed. At city speeds I am constantly taken by surprise by electric cars that come from behind while I'm cycling (in the Netherlands, for context, where I'd estimate that at least 25% of the cars are already electric, in the city in question).
> That makes it sound less horrible, except that such production doesn't exist yet at a sensible/interesting scale as far as I understand.
To me it sounds less horrible, because it sounds like fantasy technology that will not be economically feasible in the end so the end result is that this exception doesn't actually matter. Suffers the same problem as the whole carbon capture thought experiment.
I have written that before: They only talk about Efuels because that sounds fancy. What they really mean are probably biofuels, i.e biodiesel and ethanol (not that that would make it any better).
Is either that or Germany letting their automakers that have not been able to adapt to the new EV era just die... and nobody wants to see what is that impact of that over the whole European economy...
According to [1] Volkswagen was the third largest producer of EVs in 2022, only behind BYD and Tesla. And BMW and Mercedes Benz both are in the top 10. It's not like German automakers have been sitting on their hands or would just die. The problem is not so much the automakers themselves but their suppliers. Those employ far more people, and EVs just don't need a lot of those parts.
It's not the automakers. Those have long since started to transition to BEVs and do offer some attractive options which are produced at scale and can often be seen on the streets where I am (not near any of the OEM headquarters). They have also mostly stopped R&D on ICE technology
The issue is with the suppliers and suppliers of suppliers which are a backbone of German industry and some of which cannot transition away ICE technology.
Of course e-fuels are not going to safe them anyway but their lobbying caused this.
The automakers did put up initial resistance, some Japanese brands still are. But this particular political compromise is just a libertarian party needing a workaround to avoid to be seen banning something that everyone knows will be obsolete by that time anyway.
The EV transition is accelerating, this is just the minimum that could get cross EU support in law today. But individual countries already have their own phase outs.
They provide good alternatives, indeed, but Tesla is still the most sold brand in Europe, and anyone living in Central Europe cannot deny that Tesla is by far the most dominant EV brand. The reason behind it is that there is pretty much nothing in that price range that offers the same as a Model 3 or Y... However, Tesla has sold more vehicles than the ones they can provide support to, so all their service centers are collapsed due to their dealership policy...
The European brands need to be more competitive, and although they are on good track for it, I think they are a bit late to the game. Is either that or people noticing that the after sales support of Tesla is inexistent and they start to value the perks of the legacy automakers.
That's because European brands offer more models so your top graphs are fragmented. This is how market competition looks like - having a choice of models and brands not just a single Tesla 3.
On top 10, European brands together vastly outsold Tesla - VAG group for example outsold all Tesla models in EU last year.
We'll be needing any kWh of green electricity we can get, and wasting it on inefficient e-fuels is dumb and wasteful. But I guess everybody has the right to be dumb and wasteful, so here we are.
First huge part of the population should learn to use the right and middle lane.
I'm not often zooming on the highways, but how many times I overtake cars driving 130 kph in the right lane, where someone is driving in the middle lane 120 kph, and the next truck in the right lane is 1km away.
Also I'm not FDP voter, but I'm definitely pro no-limit. There is little no-limit patches anyway, traffic often doesn't allow driving faster than 160. Construction work all the time everywhere.
These are people specifically coming to the Northern Territory to legally drive at high speeds on unlimited road sections ... therefore directly relevant to the assertion that unlimited speed sections don't see additional road deaths.
A more thoughtful evaluation would need to consider the unique isolation of the NT roads, the nature of actual traffic (road trains, first time tourist drivers, etc) , the nature of the road (long slow deceptive curves, dips, washouts, etc), relatively low traffic (and then suddenly a cluster).
As I recall the NT was unlimited for "ever" (well, since cars first arrived in NT) outside of towns (as a Territory and not a state), then limited, then conditionally unlimited (and now perhaps limited again).
One consequence of having unlimited roads was an increase in people driving beyond their abilities on roads they were unfamilar with (eg: Japanese dentists with no long open road experience driving super cars).
If that area is unlimited „outside of towns“, it’s rather different from unlimited-in-proper-highways.
Unlimited on a regular road is stupid. Unlimited in an isolated highway with no crossings or same level intersections is nice.
Driving culture is important too. Somehow I wasn’t tailgated on German highways and supercars were happily waiting for me to get out of the way. Meanwhile back at home with 130km/h limit it’s common to do +10 and get tailgated with flashing left turn signal by those who want to do +20. But maybe they’d wait too if they knew they could speed more in an empty section down the road?
> Unlimited in an isolated highway with no crossings or same level intersections is nice.
In reality, in Australia, in NT and Pilbarra it causes needless death.
I grew up in these areas and I have no personal issue with others of similar background driving at whatever speed they feel comfortable - I've drafted a light aircraft at 70 m/s ( 252 km/hr ) at a 3m ground clearance along such highways for extended periods of time (geophysical survey | fun) .. but they are dangerous in ways that newcomers don't account for.
These are mostly single lane either direction highways .. if you over take a loooong three trailer road train (common on nor'west and NT highways) you might be surprised by an oncoming car that was initially invisible in a road dip ahead .. and at very high speeds next to a very long truck there are very few options.
I can add further examples of the many ways people screw up on country roads but see no real need to labour that point.
Suffice to say I agree that unlimited on open roads is nice .. but it's not always safe when you factor in other drivers, mixed traffic types, and most importantly mixed experience levels, tired drivers on 12+ hour hauls, etc.
I've worked St Johns volunteer ambulance in remote areas and I'm all for fewer deaths that could have been avoided by lower speeds and better driving practices (taking breaks, not drinking on road, taking bennies, using mobiles, etc).
> These are mostly single lane either direction highways ..
It does not sound lik a highway.
Around here, highways are opposite lanes separated (and usually multiple, with very very few exceptions), banned slow traffic, no single-level intersections, usually fenced off wildlife.
Like it or not it's a highway, an Australian highway - two lanes, one in each direction, unseperated, with soft shoulders that can wash out.
Some fences now and again, mostly unfenced, kangaroos abound, emus run across, cattle will wander (although they are usually with fenced areas (albeit ones that can fall)).
Wherever "around here" might be, unless it's the Siberian expanse or very few other places, it's unlike most of Australia (outside of the handful of Capital city metro+suburban areas) which is vast, empty, and unpopulated.
Western Australia is larger than 3x the size of Texas with a population of not much over two million of which nearly all live around the main city with most of the rest in the south west corner.
Out in the rest of the state and across into the NT the pop numbers are low and the distance between towns are high.
This information might cause you to rethink the unlimited speed proposal.
On the up side police presence is generally low to non existant, on the down side police and ambulance support can be hours away in the event of accidents .. or rogue outback murderers flagging down tourists.
Then Australian highway is an entirely different thing than highways in europe and our discussion is meaningless.
I stand corrected that German highways with unlimited speed are better driving experience than eastern european counterparts with a limit. Highways in european sense.
Well, your side may have been meaningless but I've had a clear and solid understanding of both the German Autobahn and an Australian highway from the outset .. I'm glad you've caught up.
To reiterate, the highways in the NT of Australia were completely unregulated for many years as an area with no state government and no federal road laws until relatively recently.
People frequently drove at high speeds legally for many years and staged legal high speed long distance races on its roads.
In recent decades roads there have been regulated with sections at times being unlimited.
The primary issue with unlimited zones, IMHO, is people driving beyond their ability - in the sense of beyond their ability to react, to see ahead, to understand the nature of the road (ie. dips, curves, what it takes to actively straddle a hard road and soft shoulder and maintain control), beyond what the mechanics of their car might be capable of.
Yes, but Germany compensates with good traffic rules and good driver education (one of the harder to get driving licenses around the world, with 18 hours of mandatory theoretical classes, practical classes, and theoretical and practical tests that cost you around €2000 overall). Going by [1] Germany has the 15th lowest per-capita traffic-related death rate, less than one third that of the USA.
Using SUVs costs more money, more resources, cars are heavier, tyres bigger, more are resistance, more fuel usage. And number of people buying bigger and bigger cars is growing. Number of people driving really fast is relatively low.
I would rather ban SUVs than anything else. It's upsetting to hear people complaining about climate change, pollution, voting for the Green party because of this, and then instead of a sedan or wagon they are going for a SUV which uses 3-4 liter of fuel.
What makes you believe it won't be a thing (or a rebranded version of it)?
Unless any of the European countries (even the larger ones) wants to be crushed by the economic weight of the US or China they better stick together.
Even most Euro-skeptics seems to get it by now.
The fact that Russia is removing itself from the game of economics and has voluntarily killed of European dependency on their gas is reducing inner EU conflict.
Not saying it necessarily will fall apart but there is a possibility. UK is already out. Hungary and Poland are very nasty EU members for lack of a better term. The tension is growing.
Personally I would much prefer EU to *reset* to bare free-trade, free-movement, no-borders ethos, removing entirety of central regulations and central governance.
> Whether EU itself will be still a thing in 12+ years to enforce this bullshit ban is another question.
You are correct, the EU is going to break up, definitely before 2035, and probably sooner rather than later. We are at the beginning of a serious financial crisis, this time it's a sovereign debt crisis, caused by going to negative interest rates in 2014 (among other reasons).
I my EU country (Slovakia) 40% of people live in flats. In my suburb lives 25000 (95% in flats) and there is 1 charging station for 3 cars on the entire suburb. There is 0 chance to meet the goal by 2035.
In 2035, if a pro-russian party SMER promise withdrawal from EU and allows gas cars again they will have landslide victory and can start importing cheap Russian gas.
When 95% people live in flats, the density is high enough for public transport and walking to be more efficient than cars for most usages... I'm also from Slovakia, and I can clearly see here that gas cars being cheap led to public transport, biking and walking being deprioritized outside big cities... When I was a kid my family didn't have a car, it was in a town with ~40k people, we biked or walked everywhere.., 15 years later there's 3 times as much cars in that town even though its population meanwhile dropped to 35k...
Gas cars being cheap is also the reason why no-one buys electric cars here, which in turn is the reason why few charging stations exist as there's not enough demand... Also there's a huge market for used cars in Slovakia which means this won't really be that huge of a problem by 2035 as this goal is only about new cars...
It's really not that hard to build charging stations.., most public lightning lamps can accomodate a charging station for one or two cars (there are some like this in Bratislava already).., And I'm pretty sure they will be covered by some EU funding scheme sooner or later, so businesses will probably even have an incentive to build some so that they can charge for their usage...
Flats doesn't mean there's no parking, the cars still have to park somewhere, either parking garages or lots. From what I've seen most Eastern European countries have parking lots on old buildings, and often underground parking garages on new ones. In both cases adding chargers is possible with the right incentives and subsidies.
>In both cases adding chargers is possible with the right incentives and subsidies.
Incentives/subsidies may take care of the economical aspect, but the big one is the technical aspect, installing a charging point is the less relevant issue.
When you add a charging point you add (considering contemporaneity and what not) at least 1/5 or 1/4 of the nominal charging power, i.e. every 50 kW recharging point you are going to need at least 10 kW more.
When you multiply these by a "functional" (as in there are enough charging points for all the cars around[1]) number of charging points the amount of (added) electricity needed is impressive.
Besides producing it (with some zero emission method) you need to transport and distribute it, and level peaks.
[1] I have no idea of what the "enough" ratio should be but likely it is in the 1:50 - 1:100 ratio, 1 charging point every 100 cars imply 15 cars charged in 24 hours (24/7), which sounds to me very optimistic
> From what I've seen most Eastern European countries have parking lots on old buildings, and often underground parking garages on new ones.
Underground parking on new ones - correct.
Parking lots on old buildings - kind of, old buildings were built at the time when fewer people could afford cards -> much less parking spaces than cars.
25000 people. Let's say half have a car, that's 12500 cars. (An upper bound for sure).
12500 cars. Let's say 100% of them needs charging in their parking lots. (Clearly an upper bound too!)
1200 charging stations. 3 today. Let's say zero today.
2023-2035 = 12 years.
That'll mean 1200/200 = 100 chargers installed PER YEAR.
If you think your suburb can't install 100 chargers PER YEAR you should flee the country, because that's quite bad. A competent electrician can install 2 to 4 of these chargers for standalone housing PER DAY. I know because my company is in this business! (https://dryft.se)
> A competent electrician can install 2 to 4 of these chargers for standalone housing PER DAY. I know because my company is in this business!
Surely you know then that the hard part is not wiring up a connector and attaching it to the wall, assuming there was enough capacity in the existing wiring. No doubt 2-4 of those can be done in a day.
When you have to tear down the sidwalks and underground utilities to increase capacity, it takes a bit longer.
Tesla built one of their charging stations not too far from here, it has maybe 6 to 8 charging spots. Putting up the posts with the cables took just a few days. But the whole project took about six months with the sidewalks and parking lot torn up!
The title is incorrect - this isn't phasing out gas cars entirely by 2035, it's stopping sales of _new_ gas cars. Once all new cars are electric, that'll create a slow switchover over the following decade or two.
With all major automotive OEMs switching to electric anyways, regardless of what the EU says, cars will not be the only thing getting more expensive after leaving the EU. GB serves as a great example of the degree something like Brexit can screw up a whole economy.
In Germany new residential buildings have to be built with parking space for the residents, and I now often see those either having chargers or being planned with the later addition of chargers in mind. Condo buyers also see this as a selling point, so there is market pressure (not sure how this looks on the landlord/tenant side yet).
But we have lots of residential buildings from the 50s and 60s still used, so it will take a couple decades for that to really have the required effect. My guess is that parking spaces with chargers will become a differentiator for shops and employers within the next 15 years.
Conveniently Slovakia is small enough to make it possible to improve already well-functioning public transport to eliminate most personal reasons to use a car. What's lacking is money and political ambitions.
Meanwhile government employees here have to drive their private cars during the winter because the electric cars supplied by the employer can't handle the cold. I'm curious how planned the date is with respect to the consequences. This will shake everything from mechanics to handling crisis such as weather catastrophes or war as in Ukraine. Will we have enough batteries? Will we become dependent on China? Will the average Joe afford a car or will it become a privilege for rich people? Where will we get the power from when we barely can supply existing infrastructure and companies are denied permission to expand? Will we have hundreds of thousands of charging stations on the streets? Lots of questions I'd love to see the answers to.
The thing is that was mostly done via government price manipulation (decreased VAT and other benefits). Now after VAT is back to normal sales of EV vehicles there drastically dropped.
Also, that article is from February, about a 1 month change in sales in January when the subsidy was dropped. On Dec 1, anyone who had near-term plans to buy an EV would obviously push to buy before the loss of subsidy in Jan. And by corollary, anyone who buys in Jan is probably highly price insensitive (rare) or had the purchase forced by other events (like their current car was totaled). This change doesn’t say anything meaningful (positive or negative) about the intrinsic value of EVs in Norway. There is no way to infer any kind of “normal sales of EV vehicles” from this data.
You should try googling, all those questions have been answered. There are YouTube videos summarizing the academic research in an approachable way.
Or, catching onto the zeitgeist, try asking ChatGPT, it's almost certainly absorbed answers to all of these.
edit: Your question about average Joes returns:
> The cost of electric vehicles (EVs) has been decreasing steadily in recent years due to advancements in technology and economies of scale in production. As a result, the price of EVs is now comparable to many traditional gasoline-powered vehicles, and in some cases, they can even be less expensive over the life of the vehicle due to lower operating costs.
> However, at present, the upfront cost of EVs is still generally higher than gasoline-powered vehicles, and this may make them more difficult for some people to afford. This is especially true for lower-income individuals who may have limited access to financing or tax incentives that can help reduce the cost of EVs.
> Nevertheless, governments and automakers are implementing policies and incentives to encourage the adoption of EVs and make them more accessible to the average consumer. For example, many countries offer tax credits or rebates for purchasing an EV, and some cities are providing free charging stations and preferential parking for EV owners. Additionally, as the production of EVs continues to scale up, it is likely that the price of EVs will continue to decline, making them more affordable for a wider range of consumers.
> Overall, while the cost of EVs may still be a barrier for some people, it is expected that the transition to electric vehicles will become increasingly accessible and affordable as the technology continues to improve and become more widespread.
As an aside, it is stunning to watch ChatGPT already incorporated into casual online discourse. That technology is truly earth shattering. It will change what it is to be human.
Volkswagen just announced their next generation electric car that will be similar to the normal Golf/Polo and cost under 25k€ (which would be quite normal for an ICE car like this). I would be positive that the cost will go down significantly (and yes even taking into account that batteries might be exchanged to provide a functioning market for used-cars).
For the last 20 years battery cost per kW/h has fallen around 10% average every year. ICE engines have thousands of moving parts driving up the complexity and price, while electric engines have what, 3 moving parts?
It is inevitable that the electric cars will take over, ICE engines just can´t compete on price.
Or maybe we should replace individual mobility with useful public transport, as electric vehicles are not a general solution due to all the issues you're pointing out and many more.
There is already massive work planned on that axis across the EU, with multi-billion investments in various important (at the EU and local levels) transit projects.
That works great if you are living in a major city. Once you become even remotely rural, public transit becomes a massive problem - turns out point-to-point connections do not all converge on the same entry- and exit points.
Which leads to an even more overheated market for flats in major cities and even more incentive of rural voters to vote for whatever radical party promises them a radically easier way of transport outside of major population centres.
This can be done, but it will take decades and major construction activity. Which may be constrained by the fact that steel and concrete production is CO2-heavy too. (And not just that, AFAIK the Netherlands put very strict limits on construction activity because of nitrogen emissions from the construction vehicles.)
In the West, a lot of the middle class settlements have spread thin and wide, making public transport inefficient. Redensification is possible, but complicated - it involves a lot of people moving and at least some of them losing their gardens.
Meanwhile, construction of new railways or upgrades of existing tracks (including light rail) meets heavy NIMBY opposition on every step, even in countries where rail is widely used for commute (such as in Czechia).
In contemporary developed civilization, it is much easier to ban than to build.
The use cases don't overlap for a lot of car's usage. And the only people pushing public transports are people who never use them daily, because if they did they would know how bad it is to have train delay or cancelation twice a week, strikes at least 3 times a year, issue with tramway hitting cars or people fighting inside it, not to mention the permanent insecurity and piss odour in the subway.
All the issues you mention could be solved by more investment in public transport. I'm assuming you're from the states — try taking public transport in a country where it functions well, and see if you change your mind.
> All the issues you mention could be solved by more investment in public transport.
No. Insecurity won't go away just because stations look nicer. And for trains the problem is not investments, it's the civil servant mentality of people working there that don't give a shit about users and want to work as little as possible. The national railways company is well known for being a sinecure (it was personally confirmed by my brother who was told not to work too hard -- he was already not working a lot -- when doing an internship there).
And I'm not even talking of the huge ticket prices, the machines not working, the lack of accessibility (better not have a big luggage or god forbid being in a wheelchair), restricted hours when the services are working, etc. There is a lot of things to hate about public transportations, at least when it's not done properly. It's fine in Japan but even there there are issues, Kyoto buses for instance is a shitshow.
> I'm assuming you're from the states
You are assuming wrong, I'm from and currently living in France.
Anything else individual to be replaced by communal? Like, maybe, everything? Or just the cars? There are countries already implementing what you believe is right. Please emigrate over there and enjoy.
Arguing against a strawman is not a useful discussion technique. I was talking about public transport exclusively. Go to London or Tokyo and ask people living there if they would prefer to exchange the tube/Tokyo metro with individual cars.
It's funny how in some threads you've got people panicking that there will be no work left to do because of AI and in others people panicking that twelve years is far too short a time to make a change like getting rid of cars.
That's impossible to achieve. Not in 12 not in 50. It's not possible to cover with public transport all the places where cars can go. It's not capital nor operationally possible.
What we will have is another strong wave of population concentrating in cities. Any economic activity outside of beaten paths will be very expensive.
Because we are freaking retarded with housing in the west, people will lose the freedom private cars can give (because for most modal income people in europe, electric cars are simply not feasible), prices will increase even more. This happening while we have to deal with ageing and climate change, thus modal incomes will become efectively poor. Millions of rent slaves who have no savings and purchasing power, nor ability to scape because they can't move to live elsewhere where prices are lower, and commute to their job.
Of course a combination of market + planning could, potentially solve this (kind of). But it's not going to happen because in Europe pensioners and near-to-be-pensioners rule everything, and they are so selfish and so short-sighted that they will dry public budgets until they collapse the system.
The future of Europe is basically set in stone. France and Spain are very clear examples of what's ahead for everyone else. France on how a good chunk of the population is completely stupid and blind to the problem, and Spain on how politicians are willing to sacrifice a country to please pensioners.
> OP said "most" not "all". Rental cars for the occasional exceptions, ownership for whoever has to use them regularly, that's still basically fine.
You can't cover most either. It's only feasible for high concentrations of population.
I live in a place with a lot of population dispersion, and I see how my regional government struggles with this, for good reason. In other regions of Spain where the population is extremely concentrated this isn't much of a problem, but we do have much more economic activity going on in the countryside.
> Purchase price, or price per km? Because that's a very important difference.
> Electric is already better on the latter, even if battery costs fail to get cheaper with more scale.
It doesn't matter if people has no capital to purchase a car. In Spain (which definitely not the poorest EU country) second-hand cars lead the market. And almost nobody buys second-hand electric cars, and we all know why.
In brand new cars you can see Dacia leading the table many months.
You can try to fool people with tricks like pushing prices of gas cars up but people has no infinite pockets. Maybe in the blue banana region this is not a problem, but for everyone else a car is a tool, and it has to be affordable, easy to reapair, and last for quite a while.
Nobody in this situation is going to buy a 25k car (expensive) with extremely expensive repairs, and this is not even taking in account the extreme rent-seeking practices most brands have been practicing this years.
Even stupid people learns over time. Youngster can't afford cars in Spain. They theoretically can. If you have a job you can buy a 25k car, but you know what comes afterwards. It will sink a lot of the money you have, any problem and you'll be fucked, insurance, increasing taxes for everything, etc.
At least a second-hand Ford Focus is cheap. I can travel to the other side of the country if I need to. I can hop on it and go on a trip without much planning. Any problem means I can get my car into any repair shop and they know how to deal with it, and parts can be sourced relatively cheap.
> You can't cover most either. It's only feasible for high concentrations of population.
That's already most people all by itself.
> Nobody in this situation is going to buy a 25k car (expensive) with extremely expensive repairs, and this is not even taking in account the extreme rent-seeking practices most brands have been practicing this years.
100% with you on that; but I'm not expecting electric cars in Europe to cost that much in 2035. You can get them less than that already in Europe, and my expectation for future EU:2035 is closer to the market in China:2022 than to anything (say) Tesla is pushing.
oh we are in a covid lockdown. you can't get on this bus!
oh it says here you have emitted a lot of co2 this year. you can't rent this car until next year!
oh you were in an anti-goverment demonstration a few months ago so we know that you are headed to another one. you can't move from your 15-minute city!
> oh we are in a covid lockdown. you can't get on this bus!
Around here that seemed to be by virtue of the bus drivers not showing up because they didn't want to get ill. Nowt to do with whatever conspiracy theory you've been mainlining.
Also no causal connection to electric vehicles etc.
> oh it says here you have emitted a lot of co2 this year. you can't rent this car until next year!
Definitely hypothetical.
Also electric vehicles can be rented. Quite a few go past my flat each day.
So again, no causal connection to electric vehicles etc.
> oh you were in an anti-goverment demonstration a few months ago so we know that you are headed to another one. you can't move from your 15-minute city!
The first part of that is being done (or at least proposed) without any connection at all to electric cars or public transit.
The second part — the idea that 15 minute cities are about control — is a propaganda piece designed to rile up people like you. The reality is they're merely a fairly mild proposed planning policy to put stuff people want near those people who want that stuff, they have nothing in them about preventing people from leaving when they want to go further.
> That's impossible to achieve. Not in 12 not in 50. It's not possible to cover with public transport all the places where cars can go. It's not capital nor operationally possible.
It doesn't have to. A lot of population is urban and curbing car use in cities will be a massive improvement. So would proper train infrastructure to get between cities.
A lot of the economic activity needed to sustain cities happen elsewhere. Like farming, for example. But you also need wood, all kinds of rocks, sands, etc.
"Spain on how politicians are willing to sacrifice a country to please pensioners".
Funnily enough that is exactly what Macron is also doing, because the under-discussed part of the current reform is that it does not put in question the current pensions which are absolutely massive based on what french pensioners paid in.
But of course when you bring it up these people will try to gaslight you into the idea they built the society you enjoy today, unironically pretending that when they entered the job market in like 1965-70 Europe was still in ruins after WW2, and you simply don't want to work hard like they did.
Germany spending 100 Billion Euro to buy weapons... how many houses would that have been?
1 billion is 1000 million
100000 houses if one house costs 1 million to build, which it doesn't.
I don't agree with your pensioners hate. You will be old too some day, if you live that long. And you'll be happy to not have to filter through trash cans so you can afford to survive.
But that would be a regress of civilization, not progress! The civilization progress is to have much more private transport and also somewhat more public transport.
Some people bemoan cars as a 20th-century anachronism. They forget that trains/trams/buses are from the 19th century and were superseded by cars. The e-scooter for hire is truly a 21st-century innovation, though. That, and the self-driving car.
While private horse transport did exist for hundreds of years before that. Yes, it was slow and going longer distances was expensive. Yet the idea of personal transit is very natural.
I hope so, but I'd caution against just treating national economics as scaled up personal economic. Whoever makes the factory for the electric busses needs to talk to whoever makes the factories that make the batteries, who in turn need to talk to the miners, who might be anywhere in the world so you need to be confident about regional geopolitical concerns…
Governments do this all the time, I'm sure it will be fine; but the details don't really fit into a comment box.
Public transport won't substitute the need or desire for private cars. Improving public transport's impact will plateau at some point because people will always value the privacy and benefits of using their own private car.
You will never be able to create transport system where people take a bus in front of their door step, to the grocery store and back on demand.
You don't need to take a bus to the grocery store if said grocery store is itself in 5 minute walking distance from your doorstep (or have said groceries delivered)... I buy 90% of my own groceries from one of the 3 stores on my street or using deliveries, only take the bus for the rest, usually max twice per month and then I don't really mind that the bus only comes once in 15 minutes instead of "on demand"...
I switched to off-grid solar last year, and one thing that became instantly clear is that I'll never have enough panels for an electric car, crikey, even running the oven can be a challenge.
I really wonder how Europe is gonna manage the extra grid demand given decades of under investment in energy production. More cables to countries still investing in nuclear?
I dont read news sites (apart from HN of course), but from the link title I get the gist.
Sure it's possible to build massive renewable systems across Europe, but these large projects require governmental commitments that exceed elected time frames.
For example one of the first things we need if we are to phase out CO2 driving is a decent inter-European rail system. Even going capital to capital can be hard. And since we are running full speed into AI unemployment, let's make that rail system for free, and save some universal benefit payments. I think the free train trials in various countries this year already proved very popular.
Do you mean running the oven at night on your own solar panels without a battery? Because at full production, you would need just 4 panels to run a decent domestic oven.
A promising solution is vehicle-to-grid, using the battery in your car to store and draw solar energy from. It all depends on where you are located and what your energy demands are though. I can provide all of my yearly energy needs with about 14 panels, which includes heating, but not a car (I don't use one), but I'm not off grid.
oven is 2.6kW, hob is 6kW (induction), my panels are 455W each. I am in the process of switching battery tech to li-ion, but they dont like the high resistive loads. I havent researched EV too much, but I cant imagine trying to charge 40kWh?
I was tempted to stay grid-connected, but the max energy I can sell back, is limited to what grid energy I use. i.e. they still get all their extra fees.
I am not sure where you live, but in the northern of Italy it's really possible.
I have installed a 12kW system in 2018 with 20kWh of storage. I also have heat-pumps for sanitary hot water with a 100L tank and AC in summer + an EV. I admit that in winter or particularly cloudy weeks I still need to get some energy from the grid, but 1) that's likely because the house I am in was built in the 80s and the thermal insulations is terrible compared to modern materials [1] and 2) if I were to put something like dual photovoltaic-thermal hybrid panels [2] likely that wouldn't be an issue anyway.
Sure, I get good energy production most days, but those cloudy days feel like 50x less? I added battery capacity for a day or two of cloudy weather, but I think the only way to add an EV would be to use the grid as the battery system, similar to what you do. For hot water I use a solar heated system, which removed a chunk of resistive load from the PV system.
I would think an electric car would pair really well with off-grid solar - you can charge the car with excess energy during the day, and pull from the cars battery for power at night.
Sure it's a big power draw, but you can significantly downsize your battery system, which is presumably also a big power draw.
Or do you not have a big battery system now, and only run the high energy appliances like the oven during the day when you have lots of power?
>Or do you not have a big battery system now, and only run the high energy appliances like the oven during the day when you have lots of power?
Yeah it is a small system so far, so I even serialize some of my usage, but I dont see the point scaling it up too much, since the cloudy day generation is so poor. So rather than EV I probably go with an eBike.
It's not just energy production. The generated energy has to be transported places. This whole thread is littered with the idea that you can just add charging ports to light poles, parking lots, etc., all backed by the idea that electricity comes from the socket in the wall.
Indeed. I noticed that difference traveling from the UK to FI especially. The small place there had a 3 phase supply, with multiple resistive load heaters, and a split inverter which was okay down to about -15C, and then you just had to burn electrons. I cant imagine many European countries having the grid infrastructure for something like that in every home, plus an EV in the driveway. I guess that's why much of Europe is still burning natural gas.
I got down-voted heavily on reddit for this idea, but I still think it's genius: Everybody gets a card with their yearly CO2 budget stored on it. For filling up your car at a gas station, but also for consuming electricity, taking a plane or buying stuff (except low CO2 food) a corresponding amount will be withdrawn from your card.
The card is credited weekly, so you can't overspend too much of it. Your saved credits will decline slowly over time. Of course all has to be balanced considering socio-economic factors.
The great thing is you can sell your credits to rich people, so it would even reward you for staying at home giving you sort of a minimal income.
I may be wrong, but 2035 is very near and the phaseout seems (to me) like very difficult to achieve.
The only zero emissions are EV's and - besides Norway - they represent today only a very small percentage of vehicles, there are of course no problems (besides possibly the scarcity of some materials) in increasing the production of EV's, but the issue (as I see it) will come when plenty of vehicles on the road will be all electric, the need to adapt the current electric grid and adding the needed recharge points (be them private or public) seems like not having been taken into consideration or plans for it are way too optimistic.
Poland calling it unrealistic seems appropriate.
There are, besides the risk of having too expensive new cars, a lot of other possible downsides, influencing the market of used cars, and creating a "recharging divide" among different countries but also among different cities/locations in a same country.
It's not difficult to achieve. It's Europe's only solution now. This is not about CO2-emission, it's about politics. Europe used to control a good part of the world fuel and also had a pipeline to Russia. They no longer have a pipeline and also lost lots of their control on their colonial countries.
They have no choice but to find alternative energy sources. Look at what's happening politics-wise in the middle-east.
It’s going to be hard to do, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Ambitious goals like these that actually direct society towards improvements are exactly what we need to tackle climate change, not more foot dragging and excuses.
I guarantee that a significant percentage of the new cars sold in the EU in 2036 will still emit CO2. Reducing CO2 emissions is absolutely something we should do, but the 2035 deadline is totally arbitrary and disconnected from objective reality in terms of manufacturing capacity and charging infrastructure. I predict that as the deadline approaches many exceptions will be granted for plug-in hybrid vehicles and rural areas with limited infrastructure.
"The European Commission has pledged, however, to create a legal route for sales of new cars that only run on e-fuels to continue after 2035, after Germany demanded this exemption from the ban."
How would someone build an engine that explicitly only run on ethanol and which would reject any mixture which contains gasoline, such as E85.
The same way they control other emissions: locked-down software in the engine control system. Possible, though often illegal, to circumvent.
Edit: the software can detect if the engine is running on ethanol or gasoline (or mixed) by looking at the air/fuel ratio, which is set using the oxygen sensor in the exhaust. It's called flex-fuel. Quite simple for the software to only allow operation on pure ethanol.
Unless I can get 700+ km out of a (fully charged) EV I'm not getting rid of my cumbustion car. I mean I am okay with a small compromise (currently I can get up to 900km from a single tank), but having to charge 2 or 3 times (especially in winter), each 2+ hours, for a longer cross-country holiday is a no-go for me.
I hope they will keep exceptions for e-fuels, or cars used by companies. EVs are just too inconvenient (unless you live and work in a big city and own a house)
Interesting. Will this be replicated in Africa, Asia, LATAM or even the US? The EU as a whole is wealthy enough to test this premise (full electric) and let the rest of the world know the results of this.
I'm wondering what would citizens from each EU country say about this?
Speaking as an American: Likely only the cities, the coastal ones at that.
The rest of the country is far more concerned with practical matters that, for now, can only be satisfied with the energy densities only found in fossil fuels and combustion engines. The reasons for this stem from lack of EV infrastructure to low population densities to trans-continental travel ranges to simple lack of political will and more.
Thanks for the insights. I don't think I'll see any way these policies being implemented in Asia, Latam, and Africa. These continents need to go from developing economies to developed economies and that could be achieved using fossil fuels (just like the US and the EU did last century).
This means no food insecurity, good electrical services, efficient logistics, etc... things the EU and the US are used to by now.
Electric cars are still far too small for taller than average families to drive. Until there's a viable SUV alternative for 4 6ft+ adults to fit comfortably I don't think electric will take off in the US.
The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.
Renewables and stored heat batteries will cover night/low wind loads. Geothermal in the north.
Public transit options will continue to improve, electrified bikes make them an even more viable alternative.
We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles.
> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles.
As usual, everything's just fine for the wealthy, with a new top-end Tesla with its nice big range, and parking/charging space on your own land. The wealthy people will probably be able to demand at-work charging at their 6-figure-salary tech jobs too. Not likely for the more average worker.
Many people will be stuck with old/basic models of cars with smaller/degraded batteries. Many people are unable to charge at home due to living in apartments etc. And right now, many people are entirely priced out of the EV market, as the used EV market is still small.
Also consider that filling up a petrol car takes ~2mins. Charging an EV takes 10-20x that. It's a huge time cost to have to sit around near a public charger, let alone having to queue to charge. And then there's the near-certainty of public chargers price-gouging like crazy once the demand is sufficiently high.
For a large chunk of the population, this transition is going to be painful (If we survive another decade of 'omnicrisis' to even reach 2035 without world war, total collapse, or mass uprising of some kind, that is)
Public Transit > Cars for both individuals and society, if the infrastructure is there. Maybe we could devote more energy and resources on developing and improving that infrastructure before 2035 so that cars, electric or otherwise, are less necessary?
Public transit only works in cities. And only in cities where crime is mostly under control.
Many people don't want to live in cities, especially during times of crisis (when they become increasingly dangerous places), and we're living in a seemingly permanent state of crisis.
There's a big difference between 'accessible by public transport' and 'practical to get to a workplace by public transport'
Most small villages in the UK have some sort of limited bus service, which can be useful for pensioners and other none-working people who need to get to the nearest town/city occasionally, but the services are far too infrequent to be useful if you've got to get somewhere for a specific time on a regular basis.
97% of the population lives in cites. A suburb is still a city, it just isn't very dense. However most suburbs are dense enough to support good public transit as the few cities that have tried it have proved. In Sweden there are farms that get a bus every hour (which isn't good transit, but since the rest of their network is so good people ride it anyway for their rare trips to farms, and farm kids ride it since they don't have a car - the parents of course will drive)
Yes, there are farms in a Sweden that get busses every hour. There are also much more densely places in cities where busses stop going after 6 pm, or you have to book the bus after 6 pm a day in advance.
In general it's not that good. I've lived in Gothenburg for 30 years, the second largest city of Sweden. It takes me 10-15 min to get to work by car (inner city/business district). It would take me 40-60 min by bus. I know a lot of places that are worse.
Consider who climate change is going to impact most? The climate transition, mass migrations, ecosystem collapses etc are going to hit the most vulnerable people the hardest.
Everything always hits the vulnerable people the hardest, as that's basically the meaning of the word. We can't use that to justify policy, since then any and every policy would be justified.
Climate change is likely to hit vulnerable people in the tropics the hardest. Europe did pretty well during the Medieval Warm Period. We should absolutely take steps to reduce CO2 emissions, but a slightly warmer climate is unlikely to be a disaster for poor people in the EU.
> Many people are unable to charge at home due to living in apartments etc.
We will solve the charging problem by running simple L2 240V AC wiring to plugs/poles on the street. It will cost a little bit of money and billing will have to be sorted, but compared to the vast hidden costs of maintaining the roads and urban parking spaces (let alone the costs of not reducing fossil fuel usage) it's basically a rounding error.
It's not even much power: the average European driver travels 32.9km/day. At a (Tesla) usage of 166wH/km that’s 5.461kWh/day, or 273W continuous average power draw assuming most people drive for 4H/day and park the rest of the time. More than a streetlight, but not that much.
> It's not even much power: [...] that’s 5.461kWh/day
I wouldn't call that not much power. My average (over past 10 years) entire house usage is around 15kWh/day. So that's nearly 40% of the usage of the house. But if there's two drivers per household now it's about 75% incremental power usage per household. That's pretty substantial.
Drivers are already using substantially more energy to power their (highly inefficient) ICE cars. The question here is not whether we'll use more energy, clearly EVs will use less. Similarly the question isn't whether power grids will need an upgrade, that's already in the cards as part of the EV transition. The objection raised by the OP is simply whether we can deliver 240V AC electricity to the physical streets where cars are parked, and the answer is "yes, with modest civil engineering."
> We will solve the charging problem by running simple L2 240V AC wiring to plugs/poles on the street.
The problem will be most likely solved by letting a private company with a local near-monopoly on public charing install chargers in on-street parking and apartment car parks. This private company will then charge several times the market rate for the electricity to use the chargers, several times more than wealthier people are paying to charge their cars.
That's fine. Average Joe will live in a 15-minute city and find that all his needs are covered without a car!
Edit: I am being a little sarcastic, although I really like the idea of a 15-minute city and would happily live in one. I'm also priviledged to live in a country that largely developed before the car, and thus most cities are intrinsically capable of being 15-minute cities.
However, I say this to point out what is clearly true - there is no way for every citizen to own an EV. The "15-minute city" types of vision are how this will be addressed.
A purpose-designed '15 minute city' might be great.
But applying the concept to existing cities, it so blatant that it's just a big stick to bludgeon car owners with, and there's zero intention of providing significant new amenities within a 15min walk of... everyone.
It could just lead to more people fleeing cities and seeking rural freedom, especially those able to find WFH work.
This is one of the many neighbourhoods in my country and many other european ones, with a large parking lot with a lot of cars. All there cars now need ~5 minutes at a gas station every 600-1000km.
53% of our country works outside of their place of residence, ~20% of people even drive more than 40km to work (and 40 back), and ~10% more than 60km one way.
So, this means that a rather large percentage of people will need to "only charge their car for a few hours" every two days. And again.. where?
If you have a house with a garage and cheap electricity, sure, you can. If you don't (as many not-rich people don't), you're basically fucked.
And 2035 is not some distant future project... if you want to retrofit all those parking yards with chargers, you literally have to start doing it today... also build a bunch of nuclear power plants too, because if we do it the german way, by digging coal, we didn't do much.
The GP already address that "We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles."
On the other hand, yeah, it's time to get started for real to install plugs.
That studio shows US prices. Keep in mind prices are widely different in Europe. For example, gas is about twice as expensive where I live (about 1.9€/L currently, but it varies by country) than in the US (looking it up, it's a national average of $3.4/gal today, or $0.9/L).
But if we installed plugs and made electric cars cheaper, people would transition to electric cars without force by regulation and mandates. Now we have a hard deadline, no plugs, no powerstations, and again, the poor people will be the ones who get fucked by those mandates (since the rich can charge their cars at home in their garages, and the poor live in large apartment buildings with large parking lots with zero chargers.
That seems like the opposite of what’s going to happen. Surely the hard deadline (assuming not crazy Governments) means that there will be a huge impetus for rolling out this infrastructure? Will it not literally be one of the key drivers of such investment?
But they had many years to start building the infrastructure, and they didn't do anything. People with electric cars here park infront of a Lidl (store) and sit in their cars and read a book while their cars ar charging, because there is not enough charing points. Even some parking lots that have a few charging stations are pretty much useless for most, since Johnny comes home from work, gets a spot near a charger, plugs in, and the car will stay there until the next morning, even if it's charged by 2am (who's going to move their car at 2am?).
If they built the infrastructure, many people would already switch, because it would be probably cheaper... some did in the first wave, because many workplaces installed a charger at a 'premium' spot near the building entrance just to show off how 'green' they are, but with two charing spots, as soon as the third coworker got an electric car, daily phonecalls "your car is full, can you please move it, I need to charge mine" have started and made it a pain in the ass.
I prefer the carrot approach to a stick one... build it, and people will come, instead of forbidding it, and people will be forced to use a worse alternative (for many).
> This is one of the many neighbourhoods in my country and many other european ones, with a large parking lot with a lot of cars. All there cars now need ~5 minutes at a gas station every 600-1000km.
I am not sure I understand your point here. You are showing a residential car park that is a very nice location to install multiple slow chargers for cheap. The only reason this is not done at the moment is that there are not enough EV around, but otherwise you are looking at a small investment for regular revenues on electricity sale (or you can get your building association to buy some and keep the electricity as cheap as possible)
Be careful about this kind of studies, and even more about news article about them. While this one has a bit more data and is doing less mistakes than the usual rogue journalist study we see once in a while, the electricity cost they used for residential charging is wrong: they use at least very high prices for home electricity, in one of the worst state in the US for electricity pricings without using off-peak prices.
> And 2035 is not some distant future project... if you want to retrofit all those parking yards with chargers, you literally have to start doing it today... also build a bunch of nuclear power plants too, because if we do it the german way, by digging coal, we didn't do much.
Yup, that's the point of this bill. To provide guarantee to the industry that they won't be building these chargers and power plants for nothing. Now they know that the market will shift towards EV with hard deadline in 2035, and you can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of the cars on the road I'll be EV by 2040/2045.
They said the same thing about ice cars in the beginning. I can feed my horse everywhere. I need dedicated fuel stations? Madness! /s This will take time and if demand rises, so will the supply.
Regulating the supply chain for car and battery manufacturing and electricity generation is not trivial, but can be tackled and is perhaps easier than refreshing the fleet of cars. While making the fleet electric you can work on the energy mix in parallel. With combustion engines, there's a lot fewer options to work with.
There are solid models for comparing the footprints of ICE cars and EVs (including models and studies funded by car OEMs, like my employer). Most of them will show you that there's a higher upfront CO2 footprint to manufacturing an EV and therefore a certain number of miles driven until the EV "breaks-even" compared to an equivalent ICE car. There's a lot of factors that read on it - the manufacturing location of the battery (due to local energy mix and shipping overhead) is a major factor, as is battery size, cell chemistry, etc. Once thing that's immediately noticable if you look at the studies done from 2015+ is that the EV industry has managed to outpace basically every prediction for 2020, 2025, already. The trajectory and velocity is good. I'd back that horse. The market can do a lot once it gets going.
Not just car manufacturing, a lot of industry is moving from europe to china due to energy prices,.. some literally moving production there, and some left unable to compete in price with china made products.
If we're talking energy generation, we can already forget about solar, since most people will be charging their cars at night... unless the bad scenario plays out and people will be forced to wait in their cars after work every few days to recharge them... but during winter, that's tehnically 'at night' too, since there's not much sunlight left.
I believe that there is a time and place for electric vehicles, but forcefully mandating them without the infrastructure to support them in just short 12 years is way too optimistic. Germany is literally demolishing villages to dig coal for electricity production, everybody is way too afraid of nuclear, and two charging points per 100+ car parking lots are not enough. Even if we start building nuclear powerplants now, it will take 10+ years to get them to produce power (which is funnily enough the main excuse to why we are not building them now, even though we know we'll need them then too).
I might be a pessimist, but i prefer an approach where we build the infrastructure first, and people see all the charge points and lower price and buy electric due do that (instead of a mandate).
Can you think of a historic precedent where we ever built infrastructure at scale first without clear incentives or regulation, though? I'll humor you on the preference, but what's the chance of pulling that off? If we had that kind of foresight and predictive planning, we may not even have a climate crisis on our hands. For example, the problems with solar you cite could be mitigated to some extent with grid storage infra too - that we however haven't built in advance. I feel policy making is needed here to advance.
You don't need to build all the infrastructure before you introduce electric cars, but you don't ban ICE cars before you have everything built for electric vehicles.
Otherwise, we've done that with many areas, including ICE cars... we didn't forbid horses, cars were just better, and gas stations, repair shops, etc. followed the needs of the drivers.
We also didn't ban kerosine/whale oil/... lamps, we just built the electric infrastructure and people used electric, because it was better, cleaner, etc.
So, build power plants, to bring electricity prices down, since they're already way above the pre-covid era, build more charging station, fix the grid, so people have incentives to put solar on their roofs, build charing stations and incentivise private sector to build them too (in parking lots where workers park). So, cheap and conventient (car charging while at work, for cheper than gasoline) and people will slowly switch. Once enough people drive electric, the others will follow, since there will be less and less gas stations, less ICE cars available in general, etc.
A few years ago buying an electric car was great... the office building i work in built 2 charging spots right by the entrance, and you could charge your car there for free, and it was right by the entrance and reserved for electic cars. So one guy bought an electric car and we were all jelaous... free energy, premium parking spot. Then another guy did the same, and they both parked there. Then someone else bought one too, and tree cars, to charging stations, and one of them coulndn't charge his car anymore. One of them would literally come way too early just to get a charging spot, while the third one had to wait for one of them to leave, to charge his car for an hour or two atleast. With hundreds and thousands of electric cars, the situation is even worse.
Not to mention the electric grids are getting overloaded, meaning they cannot add charging stations anymore until the grids have been upgraded - which will cost billions and years. This goes on top of a huge surge for renewables and getting rid of the dependency on gas - solar panels, heat pumps, infrared panels, electric stovetops and, indeed, electric cars.
The will is there for sure, but we're running into real capacity issues. We can only go so fast.
And the pessimist in me is saying it's too little, too late and we've passed the point of no return decades ago; no amount of switching to EVs will stop the polar caps melting (removing the ice means less sunlight is reflected), the permafrost melting (exposing sequestered plant material, their now decomposition releasing co2 and methane), and with that the glaciers melting (raising the sea level and lowering the salt content, causing the gulf stream to slow down / stop which will make the north colder and the equator warmer)
I don't know the lifetime expectancy of gas and oil central heaters, but i'm guessing that many will fail and be replaced with some kind of electric powered ones between 2024 and 2035, needing even more electricity in the winter... plus reduced battery efficiency for cars in the winter, meaning even more.
In the U.K. the average car does less than 30 miles a day. Charging overnight would require a draw off less than 1kW. Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone. My shower this morning was nearer 10kW.
>Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone.
Indeed. When people's kettle usage was much more synchronised (ie, when TV advert breaks were a shared experience by most people), they had to build a power station just to cover this scenario (Dinorwic pumped storage). "Power station" is also quite generous, as it is only storage, and therefore is a net loss to the power grid.
Even the most optimistic person has to admit that there's a limit to what can be done spread the additional load of 40 million EVs each needing to charge ~10kWh per day without grid upgrades and investment.
Except the grid can cope with peak usage into peoples housing when the ovens are on etc.
Sure you may need some more power stations, but the actual capacity for the wires, substations etc can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.
>can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.
Not necessarily. At the scale of the national grid, a kettle is a very short-term load. I can't imagine that it would go well if 30 million homes decided to leave their ovens on all night.
As a USian who uses my kettle multiple times a day I'm a bit jealous of your fast boiling kettles. It can take minutes to boil a full kettle at our measly 1.5kW limit.
Just checked. 7 minutes 30 seconds to boil 1.7L :(
A lot of people in the UK use on street parking. You're not allowed to run a wire across the footpath even if you happen to get the spot outside your house. The current plan seems to be to make every lamppost into a slow charger, but that wouldn't be enough for everyone to replace their petrol vehicle.
As someone that provides more energy to the grid than I draw from march to october, using solar panels I could afford in large part thanks to the economics of an electric car, it really bothers me when people use this argument.
During peaker plant hours I'm pumping 3-4kW to my neighbors, actively reducing grid demand..
When my car charges itself at 4am, it is using base load nuclear that needs a destination.
Also, using renters as the excuse in a wealth argument is disingenuous. That is an entirely separate poor financial decision. My house was purchased for 7 years of what my rent was costing when I bought it in 2012. In today's rent the figure would be much worse.
You need a charging port literally every two meters on all residential streets in all cities in all of Europe, because most people park outside and have no driveway/garage available.
Also you charge ever 300 miles if you have an expensive luxury EV with a huge battery, which is definitely way beyond what the vast majority can afford, especially on EU salaries.
Well, in the peak you won't be able to charge your car due to all slots being taken with hours long queues, when you need to drive NOW. I don't think you realize how great throughput gas stations have with few pumps, compared to place where you need to park your car for X hours. 300 miles maybe for top models, but I don't think current generation of cheapest (=most popular) electric cars will be charged every 500km, nobody sane drives from full to empty.
Electrified bikes require a bit more than just being available for purchase for often price of used basic ICE car. You need serious improvement in width and density in bike lanes, and they can't be shared with cars (or scooters/motorbikes). Many cities will struggle with that, unless removing car lanes completely.
The oil infrastructure is everywhere because we had 150 years to develop and deploy it as needed.
All this and much, much more to say - these are good moves, in right directions, but 2035 is utterly unrealistic even for rich countries, while eastern half of EU is far from rich and generally look at this Brussel activities as... clueless to be polite, very very polite. We can force it earlier than reasonable a bit, just a bit, but at costs which are insane while most of the world still burns coal and everything else like there is no tomorrow. Hard to explain to family with kids where parents earn equivalent of 800$ that they should buy this new electric car for 40k just to get to work because some bureaucrats thought that's the only way.
> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.
The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge. They're not as rotten as the US grid, but still - barely any smart capability, no realtime insights anywhere but on the generation and distribution level, no small-scale dynamic load management...
To support even 10% of an electric vehicle fleet getting plugged in after people arrive at home, not to mention large-scale small renewables, grid operators will have to do extensive upgrades. Street transformers need real-time load monitoring, PLC support must be present everywhere to make sure all the components of the grid can still talk to each other, and vehicle chargers and solar inverters need to talk with the grid as well.
>The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge.
This is not a problem. Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand. In the past they were upgraded at sufficient speed and economic model of that upgrade was reasonable. I do not see, why we won’t be able to continue the same way. We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.
> Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand.
Barely. Grid regulation has exploded in cost in the last few years.
> We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.
A lot of infrastructure has been barely, if at all, maintained for far longer timespans. The 2018 fire, for example, was caused by a worn-out hook that may have been at least 88 years old [1]. What makes you think that utility providers will do the necessary upgrades in that time?!
Because our infrastructure isn't in much better shape, not since the EU all but forced privatization and the new owners focused more on shareholder returns than on maintenance.
I don't see what's reasonable about asking a streetlight installation designed to handle at most several hundred watts to suddenly provide several kilowatts.
Those installations are in the process of being converted from sodium vapor to LED, that should free up a few watts.
And this doesn't have to be fast-charging. Combining a few hundred watts over night and at the workplace could be enough to cover the daily commute.
Assuming you live on a motorway and your local streetlight used 500W, and was converted to an LED that draws practically nothing, that frees up....about enough juice to add 20 miles of range over 12 hours. No wonder no-one bothers with this scheme.
That's merely the capacity that was freed up, it doesn't account for additional spare capacity in the wires. And I said "overnight and at the workplace", which should cover more than 12 hours.
Maybe it's a bit tight but it should be enough to alleviate charging stops on most days. If you're going to make longer trips then may be a stop by a fast charger may be needed.
There isn't additional spare capacity in the wires that were designed only to power the light. While they almost certainly are rated for a bit more juice to deal with intermittent power surges and an appropriate factor of safety for design use, you still need that buffer for any application that draws 500W, so you can't persistently run above that level.
And if you're charging when you park at home and at work, unless you find someone who works at your home and sleeps where you work, that's going to be around 2 streetlights per car, and even that's assuming 100% street parking with optimally arranged streetlights. For context, there are currently about 6 cars per streetlight in Europe, and their current total power consumption of 35 TWh/yr would be able to provide 20 miles of range per day to just 16% of that number of cars. Of course streetlights aren't normally running 24/7, but even if you triple the power usage (which the streetposts might not even be able to handle) you're still at less than half of what you'd need at a minimum. There's really no way around building substantially more charging infrastructure.
1. What additional spare capacity? Why would any particular electrical installation (here, streetlights) be designed for about an order of magnitude more carrying capacity?
2. One of the original motivators for near-universal lighting of roads was to use the night-time baseload of power stations that could not be turned off (ie, nuclear and coal). Now that we use much more intermittent sources, this "free" energy just doesn't exist. It may be that switching to energy-efficient street lighting just makes up for this shortfall, leaving no spare power.
I nearly forgot the other fact about street-lighting. It was widely adopted at a time when there was a lot of night-time baseload that couldn't be turned off. Now that we use more intermittent sources, there just isn't this "free" night time power to be used.
I’m also going to guess that people drive on average far less in the EU than in North America where I imagine a lot of critics are framing their mental model of the issue.
A quick search suggests that the average annual distance in the US is about double.
> Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.
The amount of turn-over of cars, daily, or even hourly at gas stations today is insane. As soon as you hit 50%+ of call cars being electric, there will be a % of those charging 24/7 (any hour/time of day, for possibly multiple hours). That's going to hit the grid. Hard.
Now imagine in 2022/2023 where governments in the EU are giving citizens cost of living payments, money off their energy bills. And that's today. Apparently because one country invaded another. But people were scared they couldn't "heat their homes" let alone charge their cars. Whatever you are paying for electric today just times that by 3/4 because that's the realistic cost once EV's are the main vehicle on the road.
As soon as EV's take off and become the "norm" the costs for electric will skyrocket. Wouldn't be surprised if it costs 1-2+ euros per kWh.
It's nice to be able to hand wave away the problem. "A few hours" is "10 hours", and the instantaneous energy for each of those is very high. When I charge my EV it doubles my normal peak electrical usage (in KW, instantaneous) and quadruples (or more) my average KW usage.
In my new neighborhood a set of ~5 homes is connected to a 50 KVa transformer. Those five homes charging a single vehicle each at the same time is enough to overload that transformer even with zero other demand. That's a real problem.
My understanding is that we're talking about a doubling of demand. Are we ready to double all of our electrical generation and transmission infrastructure?
I don’t understand the downvotes. These are specific datapoints we have to wrestle with to make this transition, not a position on desirability of any of these things.
Oh indeed, it's just where do you draw the line? If a car has a very small range-extender engine that's only used occasionally, the occupants' exhalations could rival it!
Hybrid cars are already a thing — and a neat thing at that, I'm glad they exist — but I'm not the one who gets to draw the line, and the people who did, have done so with (hopefully) better forecasts than I have access to.
on one hand I welcome a more quiet street and without the gas smell.
on the other hand I can't tell if it's really better for our habitat and actually less CO2 producing, because you need to produce those batteries and you have to "load" them, transport them, and what is more efficient than direct conversion vs remotely generated power that needs to be transported to a vehicle.
I think it's mostly a lie, a feel good lie that don't help anyone except those wanting to wrestle power from established companies.
A paranoid guy might even say it's a plot to destroy Germany's car industry.
The reduction in localised air- position is huge, yes - real world studies show impressive improvements even with a small displacement of internal combustion cars [1].
As for the other but, no, it’s not worse overall. With a somewhat clean grid, it does take something like 20,000km before you’ve paid back the carbon cost of building the car, but after that, it’s far better. This should improve, too, as things like green steelmaking start to come online.
Even on grid using a ton of coal, ev more than compensate extra co2 generated during battery production.
On the not so green us grid (average of us), ev save 50% co2 over their lifetime.
But the grid is greening and so they are saving more and more. In france it's a factor 5.
ICE as the dominant form of locomotion is dead. People don't know it yet.
Of course some will be used for specialty work, but they will become a rarity in our lifetime.
First and foremost, the german car industry already shifted towards producing EVs, and really don't want to see those investments dwindle now, the plan is set and clear, execution and changing production lines just takes a while to execute and they're in the midst of it. No conspiracy needed here, its simply false to assume that a "plot".
Secondly, the _real_ solution is to get people to use public transport and build up those capabilities (depends on demand to verify investments). In most places of europe, you can get to nearly any destination you want without a car at all, and we need only carsharing pools in case you really need it.
So the optimal transition is public transport/scaling that up, and only have EVs as a fallback for edge cases or special circumstances. Replacing every single individual ICE with an EV is still harmful for the planet, even though its at least not CO2.
You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy! <- welcome to the new world. All cheap Dacias (cheap European car brand) will be gone. So the mobility for lower income people. With automotive industry gone European de-industrialization will be already far far ahead. And afterwards Europe will loose all the significance in the world.
Regarding Dacia, they have an EV, the Spring, which starts at 20k euros (without counting in a 5k "eco bonus", so around 15k), meanwhile their cheapest other car is the smaller Sandero at 12k. 12k/15k isn't a massive difference over the lifetime of a vehicle.
I see Sandero at 11300€ and Spring 22750€. “Eco Bonus” is 4500€ and is being phased out.
Personally I will have luxury car afterwards too. But I know enough less fortunate people still driving VW Golfs from 2002, 2005. They will have hard time. They are not interested in crazy expensive cars with 120 km winter range.
The problem is that Germany isn’t California. There is winter and roads are covered in salt. And old cars rust through and are not road worthy after few welding sessions anymore.
You are getting it wrong buddy. Europe lost most of its significance in the world. They are not making any software, hardware and cars that are coming from Asia are now at par except for Germany. Europe has a strong dependency on fossils and these sources are becoming less certain. (ie: Russia and potentially the middle-east).
Europe could just accept that and become a third-world bunch of countries.. or try something ambitious and actually move from fossil fuels. If Europe can pull this off, they might find their standing again in the world.
Well, to be fair, Europe is still big on tourism, and these bold projects it dares to endeavor, if nothing else, will contribute to increasing its touristic significance (by setting it even more apart from the rest world and thus making it more exotic of a destination). We won't travel much, given our ideals of curbing the emissions, but that doesn't mean others will share this self-limitation and won't visit us, right?
You would be surprised how mobile you can be on a simple, fixed gear bicycle: My granddad made multiple trips a year using such a bicycle from Essen to some villages in Austria after the war where relatives lived...
> You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy! <- welcome to the new world. All cheap Dacias (cheap European car brand) will be gone. So the mobility for lower income people.
On the bright side, you will get to eat those delicious insects.
This is utterly nonesense.
Do you produce electricity without CO2 emissions? And what about those batteries?!
Last week, the battery for my cordless vaccum cleaner went flat. And to my surprise it costs half the price of the vaccum cleaner. But a bigger surprise was that they stopped making it ... even in China!
So I need to actually "buy" a new vaccum cleaner. But this time I learnt the lesson, and I like cords now !
Back to the point on electric cars, electricity pollutes, battery production (mining the materials) and lifespan (throwing old batteries) pollutes the environment. So I don't see any point in that ...
> Do you produce electricity without CO2 emissions?
I mean, yes, that is clearly the plan. A substantial proportion of EU energy usage is carbon-neutral already, and the current plan is that all coal & oil power plants will be closed entirely before 2040.
You can see current energy sources live on https://app.electricitymaps.com/ - even countries like Germany & Poland (famously fossil fuel keen) currently use 63% / 47% fully renewable energy today, and at the other end of the spectrum there's Iceland (100% renewable), Sweden (100% renewable + nuclear), Norway (98%), France (93%), Spain (86%) etc.
Not 100% yet, but heading in a good direction. There are of course other challenges, but on this specific point: I think it's clearly possible for the EU to get to a 100% renewable/nuclear grid by 2035 if they continue on the current trajectory.
By carbon free, do they actually mean e2e energy production? Do they include mining for the material needed to make the turbins, the batteries and the impact of throwing the batteries afterwards? ...
In short, despite those costs, over the entire lifetime of the wind turbine this adds up to 5 - 26g of CO2 per kWh, as opposed to 437 - 758g (for gas) or 675 - 1689g (for coal).
So yes, it's not literally _zero_ CO2, but it is a 97.4% / 98.7% reduction in CO2 compared to gas/coal respectively. The same applies to most other similar questions: yes, there are lots of small non-zero factors, and it would be great to minimize those, but they're dwarfed by the massive emissions of the current approach.
The end goal here is _net_ zero, not strictly zero emissions output. Although there will still be some emissions there, they will be far far lower than today, and the remaining emissions are intended to be offset through all sorts of measures like increasing greenery, emission improvements in those production steps themselves, direct carbon capture, etc etc etc.
Not all pollution is created equal. Small amounts of nuclear waste stored in concentrated isolated locations doesn't impact anyone, meanwhile CO2 pollution is impacting the whole world extremely negatively.
> Is there a way of producing enough energy without pollution
Can't think of a single energy generation method that doesn't result in at least some pollution from raw material extraction, byproducts or remains after the end of the lifecycle. Maybe geothermal, but I don't know what goes in a geothermal plant.
Producing isn't actually enough, let's talk about the full cycle.
Even if you produce it cleanly, you'll need to store it + production of the turbins ...
And battery production (and mining for materials) pollutes the environment as well.
So let's not compare only parts of the system ... let's be real here
Most of these things are one time investments (plus maintenance), which you need for non-renewable energies just as well (and one might argue that building oil rigs and refineries and transporting the fuel is more CO2 intensive than windmills and power cables).
Yes electric cars produce C02 but its less (arguably 1/6) than petroleum cars. Electric cars are actually driving the research into recycling batteries.
Who said that batteries are the only way of energy storage. Hydrogen is discussed because of that. And yes, energy production also need to switch to reach CO2 emission goals.
It's more efficient to charge a battery and drive with an electric motor than use electricity to create hydrogen and use that to drive a car.
Hydrogen might become useful for things like planes, where electric isn't good enough yet.
If you span some ten-thousand solar panels in e.g. Northern Africa your problem is not the loss of energy because you have far too much green energy. Same is true for nearly all summer months when it comes to photovoltaic on the roofs of houses. There is too much of it.
in theory it extract O2 from the air and produces H2O (otherwise known as water). But the devil is in the details. Also, green energy is mostly photovoltaic/wind ... so panel/wing environment costs and transport costs factor in.
I say this because most Americans have the impression that the US on the cutting edge with technology, but in terms of electric cars, the US is really far behind.