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UK to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030: FT

125 points by hhs 6y ago

potiuper 6y ago
Cool. So, funds have been appropriated to complete a national grid upgrade to support the switch along with a charging station network compatible will all manufacturers too?
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  You know how these projects go: Rich people: meh, this won’t change our lives much Poor people: SOL
  - maccard 6y ago
    Poor people aren't going to be affected by this. They're not buying new cars. This ban us on the sale of new vehicles, a second hand market will exist after the fact.
    - lumberjack 6y ago
      Used ICE cars will very quickly go up in price making them less affordable for the poorer classes.
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        I would guess most people will not buy an used ICE car in 10 years when they can also buy an used electric car. The people into ICE engine sure, but they are not that many and rarely buying economical ICE cars.
        Hamuko 6y ago
        I doubt the range issues with EVs are fixed in 10 years.
        speedgoose 6y ago
        In UK? It's a small island. It's already fixed unless you buy a city car.
        Hamuko 6y ago
        It's not that small.
        speedgoose 6y ago
        True. I checked a better route planner, a great app to plan electric vehicles trips, and driving from Brighton to Glasgow today in 2020 is 7h10m of driving and 36m of charging with a tesla model 3. Let's round up to 1h of charging. I don't think it is a problem today, and even less in 10 years with better cars and a bigger charging network. Sure you may lose some time because you will have slightly longer breaks, but it's fine in my opinion and don't forget that electricity is cheaper than gaz (unless you charge to 100% on Ionity without using a car from a Ionity constructor).
        Hamuko 6y ago
        >driving from Brighton to Glasgow today in 2020 is 7h10m of driving and 36m of charging with a tesla model 3 Is that under the assumption that it's a warm day?
        speedgoose 6y ago
        It was with 10°C. I put -10°C and it takes 8 minutes longer according to the app.
        maccard 6y ago
        > Sure you may lose some time because you will have slightly longer breaks, Unless you've got two drivers, a 7 hour trip likely requires more than a 35 minute stop to eat, and rest anyway.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        My Nissan LEAF (pure EV) is almost 6 years old. It's going to be near-valueless (selling for parts) within another 6 years due to battery degradation [and not starting with that much range in the first place]. That's after one major battery-out warranty repair by Nissan already. The last two ICE cars I had, I bought them when they were 12 and 9 years old, rather than planning how to get them parted out at that age. I've very much enjoyed having an EV (especially as the guy who turns the wrenches), but they don't last anywhere near as long as ICE cars without major infusions of cash for the battery. My next car is very likely to be another 6-10 year-old ICE car where I'd probably never consider buying a 6-10 year-old pure EV.
        brianwawok 6y ago
        LEAF went the cheap route of battery with bad thermal management. I think current generation of other BEV should get you at least 10 years. Not going to yet match my 16 year old Honda I have in my driveway as my backup car, but getting closer!!
        sokoloff 6y ago
        All of that's true, but largely not helpful to the working poor who today can buy pretty reliable 15-20 year old Corollas, Civics, CR-Vs, etc for $1500-3000 and expect to drive them for 5 years or more and have them be every bit as useful at 25 years old as they were when they were 25 months old. "other BEV should get you at least 10 years" isn't nearly the same as "will get you 25 years if it doesn't rust out or get crashed".
        brianwawok 6y ago
        Sure, but do realize those 25 year old cars are likely polluting 2-10x more than modern cars. The sooner we can get the oldest cars off the road, the best chance our planet has.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        Order of magnitude, making a car creates about as much emissions as driving it over its lifetime. [0] If we typically average even just 20 years from an ICE and 10 from a BEV, the BEV starts out way behind in the green race and might never catch up. Stopping making new inefficient cars is good. Scrapping working perfectly good cars is an alloy of good and bad. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
    - mattr47 6y ago
      And the demand for second hand cars will explode, prices will increase and the poor will be most affected.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        Yeah, and banning CFCs affected the ability of poor people to have AC. The price we pay for a functioning environment.
      - maccard 6y ago
        The demand for second hand cars is already there. In 2030 people aren't going to turn around and say "wow hmm I all of a sudden want a second hand combustion engine car" and find themselves priced out. The first people to be priced out will be the price who buy cars 2-3 years old and drive them until they need a major repair. Realistically, there's 20 years before the full impact of this policy will be felt at the bottom of the used car market, and the "poor" (who are a large group) will be hit by this law. That means there is 20 years to come up with an incentive or a solve. It's easy to dismiss progress with a one line snarky quip on the internet, and this is a hugely positive move.
      - olivermarks 6y ago
        Petrol prices will make running ICE vehicles impractical, seems likely a lot of filling stations will be removed as the forced transition to centrally controlled and permissioned hybrid/EV transportation is gradually increased.
        olivermarks 6y ago
        https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/charges-for-using-roads-to-fill-40bn-black-hole-t2bz9k6br https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/charges-for-using-ro...
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Carless household # has been increasing in the uk. Helping the poor by enabling them to buy new fossil cars after 2030 won't have very good bang for the buck.
  - hannob 6y ago
    Poor people have much lower car ownership to begin with. It's irrelevant for most of them. If you want to do traffic policy for the poor the best you can do is making walking safer.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      I’m pretty sure the %age of income spent on auto related expenses goes up as you go down the income curve. All comes down to how you define poor (is it homeless? « Lower class »? Whatever Boris Johnson would think of as a bad living situation?)
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  The UK is small, it's smaller than California alone, and most people will be able to charge their cars at home. Far more important than a charging station network is investment in on-street charging for people who don't have access to a garage. Charging at home is far more important than charging on the road. In any case, a grid upgrade will not be required. The "grid overload" story is fossil fuel industry propaganda. You can find the details here: https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-will-overload-the-power-grid https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-... ...but the salient point is that if 80% of all passenger cars become electric, this would lead to a total increase of 10-15% in electricity consumption. (Far, far from the "order of magnitude" claim.) And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    It’s not just the building of distribution points, which can be at home. It’s the sheer overall volume of electricity consumption going up per household, sometimes even an order of magnitude. Most electrical grids will need to be upgraded to accommodate this. This is doable, but costs money and takes time.
    - LeoPanthera 6y ago
      The "grid overload" story is fossil fuel industry propaganda, I'm afraid. You can find the details here: https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-will-overload-the-power-grid https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-... ...but the salient point is that if 80% of all passenger cars become electric, this would lead to a total increase of 10-15% in electricity consumption. (Far, far from the "order of magnitude" claim.) And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        > And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand. I expect this is the part which will require more investment than anything else, as it will mean electrifying office car parks — the UK is further north than every American state except Alaska, so winter sunsets happen before the work day ends. It certainly shouldn’t be impossible, but the current UK government is prone to acting as if they can make things happen just by saying so rather than spending money or doing any planning.
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  These are just details. Next government will have to worry. We just need to collect grease from EC companies...
- dangus 6y ago
  Were funds appropriated to build gas stations? And also: considering the progress that’s been made with EVs in just the last 5 years, project that out and it’s going to be a situation where you’d have to be mad to buy a gas car over electric in 2030. That’s a full 10 years from now. New gas cars won’t be price competitive by then. If you don’t believe me just take a look at what Volkswagen is doing with their upcoming EVs. So, sure, they’re being “banned,” but I really do wonder who in their right mind will be wanting to choose a gas car for a brand new vehicle in 2030.
  - dnh44 6y ago
    Lots of people only have access to street parking and won’t be able to charge their cars overnight.
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      Chargers can installed at the sides of those streets. For overnight charging, 16A is ample. Alternatively: charge the cars wherever they drive to. So at workplaces, shops etc.
      - dnh44 6y ago
        Yeah those are solutions, I'm just struggling to imagine that infrastructure being built in time to not be a major inconvenience. Unless it is built I could see the attraction of not wanting an electric car in 2030.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    Improving the grid is not the same as building gas stations. Petrol can be moved in advance and stored. A gas station is essentially a big hole underground filled with inflammable liquid, plus filling a tank is fast enough (compared to even 15min for a partial supercharger "refill") that you can build them away from densely populated regions. A parking lot downtown, with 500 car capacity, might need several hundred kW of power at peak every day (50 km * 0.15 kWh/km * 500 / 8 hours = 475 kW). Anything above 100 kW requires MV distribution and a local transformer. At least they could allow people to book their charging slot and stagger the charging of all those cars, though. There are worse cases. Ski resorts will have people visiting for a day on the slopes, possibly after a 100 miles drive or so, and needing their cars charged by the time they leave, maybe 6-7 hours later. But at least these are in sparsely populated regions, and often close to hydroelectric dams too, so it's not impossible to bring more electric power. By the time those people go back home they will have to charge as well to get ready for next day's commute the though. In fact, every night people will come home and charge their cars. In this case (unlike the parking lot) there is no centralized distributor that could try to stagger the charging of all these cars. And perhaps it will only be a couple days a year on long weekends or bank holidays, but there will be cases when a condo with 100 flats will also need a sustained power of hundreds of kW for several hours... and all other boxes of flats will have the same need on exactly the same day. This means building lots of HV and MV transformation stations (which are not exactly cheap) in densely populated regions. Where are the plans to estimate this need and to build this infrastructure?
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I'd heard somewhere that the idea that the national grid would need upgraded is vastly overstated but doing some back of the envelope maths does seem like it could potentially be a problem. My workings were 32 million licenced cars, 40kwh each (obviously bigger batteries are already available but you'd hope not every car would need charged from scratch). Works out as over 1000gwh, you'd have say 10 hours to charge them so you could bring that down to 100gw. Average electrical consumption in the UK is about 30gw. I appreciate it's a gross over estimate as most cars won't do nearly that many miles every day. Average mileage in the UK is typically around 10k miles. A 40kw battery nets somewhere around 200 miles, so needs to be fully charged perhaps once per week on average. That cuts the above significantly but it's still of the order of the UK's current average consumption.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    I think average consumption is wrong figure to be looking at here. You can charge EVs overnight when consumption is typically lower.
    - VBprogrammer 6y ago
      I accept that but for the moment there is no centrally organised way to do this, car charges have timers and the like built in for sure, but that is asking a lot to expect everyone to set it. The majority of people will come home and plug in. This should be easy to fix but it is another thing which needs to be rolled out and working in the next 10 years.
      - fulafel 6y ago
        Flat rate electricity prices over the day aren't sustainable anyway with the transition to renewables, price signaling is coming.
      - _ph_ 6y ago
        In Germany, if you have a heat pump you can get special discounted rates if you let the utilities company switch off the pump for some time during peak demand. The same scheme could immediately be used for electric car charging. Actually I expect the utilities to be a big pusher for charging infrastructure, which is then controlled to even stabilize the grid.
- anomie 6y ago
  The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points. There’s also a big rollout of charging points built into existing lampposts - by tapping existing power lines these are very cheap to install. The chargers are run by a few different networks but you pay for usage so it’s quite possible to just sign up to them all and carry 2 or 3 cables.
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    London getting that lavish investment once again. The only place near me is a supermarket 15 minutes away.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points. How many people live within a circle of "a few hundred metres" in London? It averages 4700/km^2 across all of Greater London according to Wikipedia, it will be denser in the middle. How many cars is that? TFL says average of 0.3 cars/person. So that would be 1410 cars or 235 per charging point.
- _visgean 6y ago
  According to [0] the UK actually does not need to upgrade the network. I would also check [1] - the government task force that coordinates this. This is also interesting article: [2]. The company I work for is also engaged in a project that would allow using fleet of EVs as a power storage. (e.g. buying energy when it is cheap - during wind peaks and selling when it is expensive, but I dont know much about that project.) [0] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-myths-about-electric-vehicles-busted https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-m... [1] https://www.lowcvp.org.uk/projects/electric-vehicle-energy-taskforce.htm https://www.lowcvp.org.uk/projects/electric-vehicle-energy-t... [2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/electric-vehicle-car-infrastructure-charging-point https://www.wired.co.uk/article/electric-vehicle-car-infrast...
Proven 6y ago
It's not enough to make them artificially expensive - the rich still aren't suffering. They have no choice but to completely ban them! The serfs are already down to just one choice (public transportation) so that' been taken care of.
akmarinov 6y ago
10 years are plenty of time to get ready for that, hope they manage.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Not to "hate" on the government, but 10 years to anybody in the government is like 1 year in the private sector. A lot of places run in government institutions with lifers still work on paper. PAPER! I interviewed at a government job in my area a several years ago before I got into tech and the guy I was talking to told me when he took over, he spent his first few months just converting everything to digital formats. All because the guy in it previously didn't want to learn how to use a computer. Since the position was an agency arm of something in the penal system, there was no oversight besides the people that essentially paid him to make certain reports for higher ups to then make available to the public.
LeoPanthera 6y ago
Important point: This isn't an "EV only" law, hybrids will still be allowed. The government does still plan to eventually go EV-only, but not in 2030.
- hhs 6y ago
  Indeed, the Reuters piece notes, “The FT said the new timetable was not expected to apply to some hybrid cars which use a mixture of electric and fossil fuel propulsion and could still be sold until 2035.”
  - ant6n 6y ago
    Odd. Hybrids _are_ diesel or petrol cars.
    - dheera 6y ago
      Yep. Smells like "I am the good guy" political agenda. Environmental bills that accomplish very little. Go all-in on electric for real change.
      - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > Smells like "I am the good guy" political agenda Looks like the only realistic plan. All the “fully electric by 2035” plans that hardcore environmentalists love to pass have zero chance of going into effect.
        jes5199 6y ago
        2035 is fifteen years from now, and good EVs are competative with ICE vehicles right now. I don’t see how that’s unrealistic
        tomp 6y ago
        Which EV is competitive? Even the best have lower driving range, longer charging times, much more expensive and cold in the winter. I’d love to buy an EV but I can get a decent petrol/diesel car for 30k EUR and no comparable EV.
swebs 6y ago
>Citing unidentified industry and government figures, the FT said Johnson now intended to move the date forward again to 2030 in a speech on environmental policy he is expected to give next week. >The BBC reported a similar plan earlier on Saturday, without giving any sources. So it didn't happen yet, but they think it might. Why not just wait a few days to report it when we have something more concrete than anonymous sources?
- mola 6y ago
  Because competition.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Because anonymous leaks are the way the UK government announce policy decisions...
  - jen20 6y ago
    Indeed, it’s been known for a long time that when the BBC say “sources close to the Prime Minister” they mean “Dominic Cummings, who is too slippery to put anything on the record”.
    - tobylane 6y ago
      The Times, and BBC’s Kuenssberg have had recent success over these tidbits longer than Cummings has been with the PM. He was with Gove for a while.
      - toyg 6y ago
        Yeah, it's a tradition that stretches way back, to the Blair years at the very least - when "King SPAD" was Alastair Campbell, also known as the main inspiration for the character of Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick Of It".
- toyg 6y ago
  This is how policy is proposed these days. “Anonymous sources” brief friendly reporters, who float it in the mainstream. If it gets shot down, the big speech is replaced with a neutral one; if obvious gotchas are pointed out, the speech is tweaked to pre-empt them; otherwise, the speech happens, friendly reporters are happy, and the policy basically is set out to get on the books as a non-event - which is a big win for a government.
quotemstr 6y ago
The market, not the government, should decide the transition time. If gasoline and diesel fuels have such strong negative externalities, the state should tax these fuels until hybrid and electric become compelling alternatives. These top-down, non-market edicts damage the ability to the market to find appropriate resource allocation via the price mechanism and thereby make everyone worse off.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  The problem with just raising the fuel taxes sky high is that the poorest part of the population is struck the hardest, they can't just buy a new electric car and have no way to avoid the fuel costs.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    Well the "ban cheap cars" method doesn't help the poor either.
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      Electric cars will be cheaper than gasoline cars long before 2030, probably before 2025.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  >The market, not the government, should decide the transition time. No, the market will continue to completely screw the environment unless the government steps in. >If gasoline and diesel fuels have such strong negative externalities, the state should tax these fuels Petrol and diesel are already heavily taxed, at £0.58/L (at current GBP/USD exchange prices that works out at $0.76/L USD, whereas the equivalent tax in the US is $0.05/L). >These top-down, non-market edicts damage the ability to the market to find appropriate resource allocation via the price mechanism and thereby make everyone worse off. Oh the holy market! Can't disrupt the holy market, even when it's destroying the planet.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
crmrc114 6y ago
So they want to restrict everyone's movement? No longer can you just travel around Europe by car. There are some good Top gear episodes showing the issues with recharging. In before all the Tesla/EV apologist team downvotes this truth into oblivion.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  You know that we have electricity outside UK?
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Tesla managed to create a good coverage of western Europe in 3 years. If there were a complete ban of non-electric cars in 10 years, that should be enough time to make sure there is good coverage of charging stations. Besides, hybrid cars (unfortunately) still can be sold.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    It's good coverage along highways. The peak usage of energy might change completely in residential areas if everybody has to charge their car every night for several hours (230 V * 16 A means you will not even refill 20 km/h). Edit: not sure about the downvotes, anybody care to explain? Did Tesla build superchargers in random 10-20000-inhabitant towns far from highways?
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      A car in Germany on average only travels 40km/day. Only a fraction of the night is needed to recharge that. Individual cars might have quite different travel distances, but for the grid, the average distance matters.
      - bonzini 6y ago
        It's peak usage that is a problem, the average doesn't matter much if everybody charges from 6 PM to 8 PM, does it? Is the grid sized for 50% of the households sucking 3 kW at the same time? Peak usage also means that uncommon cases are going to be a problem. For long trips I am not sure that the supercharger networks can scale. When travelling for vacation, for example, planning multiple 30-60 minutes stops at the supercharger station might not be feasible (and the fastest charging only fills the battery by about half of the capacity, so that means more stops) and there's also going to be a problem with waiting times without massive infrastructure improvements. Right now a typical highway gas station has at least 5 pumps and it serves one customer in 3-5 minutes. That is roughly 60000 km-vehicle per hour. To reach a similar capacity, a supercharger station would need (at 30 minutes per 300 km and 150 kW per station) about 15 MW of power and its own high-voltage transformer. Yet this capacity would be needed only when everybody moves for spring break or summer vacation, and it would be vastly more expensive than a gas station. Is it feasible to have such a thing every 50 km of highway or so?
intricatedetail 6y ago
What kind of unintended consequences we could expect? People setting up transportation companies and buying old diesel lorries?
haskaalo 6y ago
Awesome! In Canada they just announced the ban of new petrol cars from 2035
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > In Canada Just the province of Quebec. * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/gas-vehicles-ban-electric-quebec-1.5802374 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/gas-vehicles-ban-ele... Proviso: > And according to La Presse, which first reported details of the plan, vehicles used for commercial and industrial purposes will be exempt.
  - grecy 6y ago
    And 2040 for BC [1] Hopefully they bring that in a bit. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18646486/british-columbia-zero-emissions-vehicles-act-ban-gas-powered-cars-climate-change https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18646486/british-columbia...
jayp1418 6y ago
Why not just now?
LeoPanthera 6y ago
This may be a bit off-topic, but these comments are really eye-opening. I had no idea that anti-EV sentiment was so strongly held. Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology. What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together. It's seems crazy that in the 21st century the best option we have for the storage and transfer of energy is "let's burn stuff". We can do better than that.
- maallooc 6y ago
  But the best option is to burn stuff. The best batteries avalible has a density of 0.4 MJ/L while gasoline has 34 MJ/L.
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  I would like to start by banning all diesel...this is something that can be done immediately. All city buses can run an regular gas or propane, same with large transport trucks. I'd like my city to become a bicycling paradise. It's the best way of getting around for under 30km.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    Uh, could you say why you want to ban diesel in particular?
    - brianwawok 6y ago
      It releases a fair bit more gunk into the air. Bunker oil is even far worse.
    - sjg007 6y ago
      Diesel has higher particulates and pm2,5s.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  Letting people choose petrol and diesel vehicles is not "anti EV". I believe sales of electric cars will automatically eclipse petrochemical ones gradually, government coercion and suppression of individual liberty is not required.
mnd999 6y ago
Sounds like a greenwashing stunt to distract from their other epic fuckups.
rienbdj 6y ago
We should be encouraging people to keep their car for longer and to use it less. Even electric cars have most of the negative externalities of regular cars (with the emphasis moved around a little). The UK government should make life without car ownership viable and the default option for most people. What does this mean in practice? It means reallocating road space from cars to pedestrians and cyclists; legalising and properly integrating electric scooters; creating a functioning rail network, potentially with new lines and (least sexy of all) affordable and frequent bus services, including in rural communities.
tigerBL00D 6y ago
These are good news. However, one of the biggest unsolved problems of the EV industry is utilization and recycling of degraded battery pack cells. You can't simply take an old EV to a junkyard due to fammable and polluting chemicals in battery cells. Extracting and disassembling different types of battery packs is not something that can be done on industrial scale right now (unlike manufacturing). Only on the order of something like 5% of batteries get recycled [1]. Today each manufacturer is focused on achieving highest production efficiency with no coordination which leads to many divergent designs none of which are easy to recycle. Are there are some new developments on the horizon before the world goes all-in and creates a new environmental problem? [1] https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-recycling-lithium/97/i28 https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Yes, there are. Tesla just announced building a recycling facility. In Germany, there are also active recycling companies. Old batteries have valuable resources, so there is a large incentive of recycling - as soon as large scale supply of dead batteries is available, large scale recycling will be done. But most batteries in current electric cars will live for quite some time before they need recycling.
dkdk8283 6y ago
Who is going to pay for all this infrastructure?
- skummetmaelk 6y ago
  Who's going to pay for the inevitable cleanup and disaster management if fossil fuel consumption continues at current rates?
jmpman 6y ago
Is the learning curve going to progress that quickly? The Tesla Model S came out in 2012? How much has it improved by 2020? 100kW instead of 75kW? At the same price? Yes, I know soothsayers claim battery packs are $100/kwh, but even at those prices, we are seeing $100k pickups with roughly equivalent capabilities to a $45k ICE version. Factor in 200k mile lifetime with 20mpg and $3/gallon fuel, and an electric pickup is still a hard sale. I’m skeptical the industry will make a 2030 deadline.
- kungito 6y ago
  Pickups in Europe? Practically don't exist
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    They definitely do on the countryside.
gandalfian 6y ago
If batteries plummet in price everyone will buy EVs anyway. If not whoever is in government the will quietly let it slide. They mandated all new houses to be energy efficient a decade ago, but somehow it never quite happened.
null0pointer 6y ago
This should not be a blanket ban. Actually I don’t think they would even need to implement any policy at all. By 2030 I would expect electric cars to be so economical that it’s the only viable choice for the majority of people. Not to mention that there will still be plenty of valid use cases for ICE cars in 2030. Need to go anywhere without the charging infrastructure? Need to travel a long distance? Need to travel in an emergency like a blackout? The other part which is just kind of sad is that this is another nail in the coffin for the hobby of building and modding cars. Parts supplies will dry up and working on older cars will just become more and more prohibitively expensive. It’s already happening. To be honest when a car is just another computer it ceases to be interesting.
- vosper 6y ago
  > this is another nail in the coffin for the hobby of building and modding cars. I confess ignorance about this hobby, but I had imagined it might be easier for a hobbyist to build an electric car than an ICE one (once the parts become more available). I thought there were fewer moving parts in electric cars, and maybe fewer fluids (gasoline obviously being the big one)?
  - bradlys 6y ago
    The electronics are a big hurdle. Also, electric cars tend to be pretty locked down. I doubt it’s easy to upgrade a battery pack in an EV. Or switch motors. Turbo cars are usually pretty easy to get extra power out of. Want a different sound? Get an exhaust. Slap a bigger turbo on. Etc. I haven’t looked much but most “modded” EVs I’ve seen required a whole team.
  - Laarlf 6y ago
    Many hobbyists don’t enjoy electric cars. I really liked the idea of a Tesla model 3 before I drove one. The fact that electric cars are being politically “shoved” up our throats doesn’t help there. That just creates more hatred. Also let us not forget how hard it is to charge them for many people. Many newer cars already have a lot of engine choices canceled because of questionable emission laws. It all just increases the dissatisfaction with politics from car enthusiasts. It is theoretically easier to make an electric car faster, but in practice that needs hacking of software etc and is a far cry from what tuning cars was/is. Also tuning electric cars is very expensive and there is less diy. There surely are people who enjoy tinkering with electric cars but those are probably more IT nerds than car nerds. Choice is cool. Ever heard of hydrogen internal combustion engines?
antman 6y ago
Within city limits the car could be expelled in 10-20 years in favor of public transport. The car should be used as means to more distant travel. Fuel can be stored in far away placess and gas stations refueled intermittently and dynamically per season. Expanding the electricity grid capacity to far away places or countries seems impossible considering current world grid status. So for a few years after the compulsory usage of EVs socioeconomically non urban centers will probably have a hard time.
aurizon 6y ago
This is a good idea. This will give time to create the needed charging points and to implement price regulation to eliminate the rampant price gouging at many places. They will also need to implement a progressive ramping up annual licence for gas/diesel cars that will prevent the emergence of an enduring repair and maintain the gas/diesel cars - without which repairs could keep them going for another 20-30 years - which will gut the process. That said, there should be a path for converting a ~5 year old otherwise good car, via the e-skate conversion process so someone can convert their great gas/diesel Mercedes into a reasonable e-car. It can and should be done.
enigma20 6y ago
I bought a car recently. 100% petrol. Didn't even think of EV. Why should I. It costs more. It weighs more. There is no infrastructure. It has a short range. Also bought and new apartment recently (Germany, in a big city). There is no chargers in the underground garage, no infrastructure whatsoever. How should I visit my family/friends, leaving far away? Plan additional 2 hours each way to charge a battery. In this case I didn't even look at the Plugin Hybrid. Why? Above points apply. Trunk is smaller!!! Horsepower? I'm not against it. I could consider Plugin Hybrid, if I would have charger dedicated for my parking spot. But IMHO, governments are approaching this from the wrong angle. Instead of fining manufacturers , and increase taxes, focus on the infrastructure, and the rest will follow.

125 points by hhs 6y ago

Cool. So, funds have been appropriated to complete a national grid upgrade to support the switch along with a charging station network compatible will all manufacturers too?

Scoundreller 6y ago
You know how these projects go: Rich people: meh, this won’t change our lives much Poor people: SOL
- maccard 6y ago
  Poor people aren't going to be affected by this. They're not buying new cars. This ban us on the sale of new vehicles, a second hand market will exist after the fact.
  - lumberjack 6y ago
    Used ICE cars will very quickly go up in price making them less affordable for the poorer classes.
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      I would guess most people will not buy an used ICE car in 10 years when they can also buy an used electric car. The people into ICE engine sure, but they are not that many and rarely buying economical ICE cars.
      - Hamuko 6y ago
        I doubt the range issues with EVs are fixed in 10 years.
        speedgoose 6y ago
        In UK? It's a small island. It's already fixed unless you buy a city car.
        Hamuko 6y ago
        It's not that small.
        speedgoose 6y ago
        True. I checked a better route planner, a great app to plan electric vehicles trips, and driving from Brighton to Glasgow today in 2020 is 7h10m of driving and 36m of charging with a tesla model 3. Let's round up to 1h of charging. I don't think it is a problem today, and even less in 10 years with better cars and a bigger charging network. Sure you may lose some time because you will have slightly longer breaks, but it's fine in my opinion and don't forget that electricity is cheaper than gaz (unless you charge to 100% on Ionity without using a car from a Ionity constructor).
        Hamuko 6y ago
        >driving from Brighton to Glasgow today in 2020 is 7h10m of driving and 36m of charging with a tesla model 3 Is that under the assumption that it's a warm day?
        speedgoose 6y ago
        It was with 10°C. I put -10°C and it takes 8 minutes longer according to the app.
        maccard 6y ago
        > Sure you may lose some time because you will have slightly longer breaks, Unless you've got two drivers, a 7 hour trip likely requires more than a 35 minute stop to eat, and rest anyway.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        My Nissan LEAF (pure EV) is almost 6 years old. It's going to be near-valueless (selling for parts) within another 6 years due to battery degradation [and not starting with that much range in the first place]. That's after one major battery-out warranty repair by Nissan already. The last two ICE cars I had, I bought them when they were 12 and 9 years old, rather than planning how to get them parted out at that age. I've very much enjoyed having an EV (especially as the guy who turns the wrenches), but they don't last anywhere near as long as ICE cars without major infusions of cash for the battery. My next car is very likely to be another 6-10 year-old ICE car where I'd probably never consider buying a 6-10 year-old pure EV.
        brianwawok 6y ago
        LEAF went the cheap route of battery with bad thermal management. I think current generation of other BEV should get you at least 10 years. Not going to yet match my 16 year old Honda I have in my driveway as my backup car, but getting closer!!
        sokoloff 6y ago
        All of that's true, but largely not helpful to the working poor who today can buy pretty reliable 15-20 year old Corollas, Civics, CR-Vs, etc for $1500-3000 and expect to drive them for 5 years or more and have them be every bit as useful at 25 years old as they were when they were 25 months old. "other BEV should get you at least 10 years" isn't nearly the same as "will get you 25 years if it doesn't rust out or get crashed".
        brianwawok 6y ago
        Sure, but do realize those 25 year old cars are likely polluting 2-10x more than modern cars. The sooner we can get the oldest cars off the road, the best chance our planet has.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        Order of magnitude, making a car creates about as much emissions as driving it over its lifetime. [0] If we typically average even just 20 years from an ICE and 10 from a BEV, the BEV starts out way behind in the green race and might never catch up. Stopping making new inefficient cars is good. Scrapping working perfectly good cars is an alloy of good and bad. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
  - mattr47 6y ago
    And the demand for second hand cars will explode, prices will increase and the poor will be most affected.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Yeah, and banning CFCs affected the ability of poor people to have AC. The price we pay for a functioning environment.
    - maccard 6y ago
      The demand for second hand cars is already there. In 2030 people aren't going to turn around and say "wow hmm I all of a sudden want a second hand combustion engine car" and find themselves priced out. The first people to be priced out will be the price who buy cars 2-3 years old and drive them until they need a major repair. Realistically, there's 20 years before the full impact of this policy will be felt at the bottom of the used car market, and the "poor" (who are a large group) will be hit by this law. That means there is 20 years to come up with an incentive or a solve. It's easy to dismiss progress with a one line snarky quip on the internet, and this is a hugely positive move.
    - olivermarks 6y ago
      Petrol prices will make running ICE vehicles impractical, seems likely a lot of filling stations will be removed as the forced transition to centrally controlled and permissioned hybrid/EV transportation is gradually increased.
      - olivermarks 6y ago
        https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/charges-for-using-roads-to-fill-40bn-black-hole-t2bz9k6br https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/charges-for-using-ro...
- fulafel 6y ago
  Carless household # has been increasing in the uk. Helping the poor by enabling them to buy new fossil cars after 2030 won't have very good bang for the buck.
- hannob 6y ago
  Poor people have much lower car ownership to begin with. It's irrelevant for most of them. If you want to do traffic policy for the poor the best you can do is making walking safer.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I’m pretty sure the %age of income spent on auto related expenses goes up as you go down the income curve. All comes down to how you define poor (is it homeless? « Lower class »? Whatever Boris Johnson would think of as a bad living situation?)
LeoPanthera 6y ago
The UK is small, it's smaller than California alone, and most people will be able to charge their cars at home. Far more important than a charging station network is investment in on-street charging for people who don't have access to a garage. Charging at home is far more important than charging on the road. In any case, a grid upgrade will not be required. The "grid overload" story is fossil fuel industry propaganda. You can find the details here: https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-will-overload-the-power-grid https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-... ...but the salient point is that if 80% of all passenger cars become electric, this would lead to a total increase of 10-15% in electricity consumption. (Far, far from the "order of magnitude" claim.) And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  It’s not just the building of distribution points, which can be at home. It’s the sheer overall volume of electricity consumption going up per household, sometimes even an order of magnitude. Most electrical grids will need to be upgraded to accommodate this. This is doable, but costs money and takes time.
  - LeoPanthera 6y ago
    The "grid overload" story is fossil fuel industry propaganda, I'm afraid. You can find the details here: https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-will-overload-the-power-grid https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-... ...but the salient point is that if 80% of all passenger cars become electric, this would lead to a total increase of 10-15% in electricity consumption. (Far, far from the "order of magnitude" claim.) And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      > And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand. I expect this is the part which will require more investment than anything else, as it will mean electrifying office car parks — the UK is further north than every American state except Alaska, so winter sunsets happen before the work day ends. It certainly shouldn’t be impossible, but the current UK government is prone to acting as if they can make things happen just by saying so rather than spending money or doing any planning.
intricatedetail 6y ago
These are just details. Next government will have to worry. We just need to collect grease from EC companies...
dangus 6y ago
Were funds appropriated to build gas stations? And also: considering the progress that’s been made with EVs in just the last 5 years, project that out and it’s going to be a situation where you’d have to be mad to buy a gas car over electric in 2030. That’s a full 10 years from now. New gas cars won’t be price competitive by then. If you don’t believe me just take a look at what Volkswagen is doing with their upcoming EVs. So, sure, they’re being “banned,” but I really do wonder who in their right mind will be wanting to choose a gas car for a brand new vehicle in 2030.
- dnh44 6y ago
  Lots of people only have access to street parking and won’t be able to charge their cars overnight.
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    Chargers can installed at the sides of those streets. For overnight charging, 16A is ample. Alternatively: charge the cars wherever they drive to. So at workplaces, shops etc.
    - dnh44 6y ago
      Yeah those are solutions, I'm just struggling to imagine that infrastructure being built in time to not be a major inconvenience. Unless it is built I could see the attraction of not wanting an electric car in 2030.
- bonzini 6y ago
  Improving the grid is not the same as building gas stations. Petrol can be moved in advance and stored. A gas station is essentially a big hole underground filled with inflammable liquid, plus filling a tank is fast enough (compared to even 15min for a partial supercharger "refill") that you can build them away from densely populated regions. A parking lot downtown, with 500 car capacity, might need several hundred kW of power at peak every day (50 km * 0.15 kWh/km * 500 / 8 hours = 475 kW). Anything above 100 kW requires MV distribution and a local transformer. At least they could allow people to book their charging slot and stagger the charging of all those cars, though. There are worse cases. Ski resorts will have people visiting for a day on the slopes, possibly after a 100 miles drive or so, and needing their cars charged by the time they leave, maybe 6-7 hours later. But at least these are in sparsely populated regions, and often close to hydroelectric dams too, so it's not impossible to bring more electric power. By the time those people go back home they will have to charge as well to get ready for next day's commute the though. In fact, every night people will come home and charge their cars. In this case (unlike the parking lot) there is no centralized distributor that could try to stagger the charging of all these cars. And perhaps it will only be a couple days a year on long weekends or bank holidays, but there will be cases when a condo with 100 flats will also need a sustained power of hundreds of kW for several hours... and all other boxes of flats will have the same need on exactly the same day. This means building lots of HV and MV transformation stations (which are not exactly cheap) in densely populated regions. Where are the plans to estimate this need and to build this infrastructure?
VBprogrammer 6y ago
I'd heard somewhere that the idea that the national grid would need upgraded is vastly overstated but doing some back of the envelope maths does seem like it could potentially be a problem. My workings were 32 million licenced cars, 40kwh each (obviously bigger batteries are already available but you'd hope not every car would need charged from scratch). Works out as over 1000gwh, you'd have say 10 hours to charge them so you could bring that down to 100gw. Average electrical consumption in the UK is about 30gw. I appreciate it's a gross over estimate as most cars won't do nearly that many miles every day. Average mileage in the UK is typically around 10k miles. A 40kw battery nets somewhere around 200 miles, so needs to be fully charged perhaps once per week on average. That cuts the above significantly but it's still of the order of the UK's current average consumption.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  I think average consumption is wrong figure to be looking at here. You can charge EVs overnight when consumption is typically lower.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    I accept that but for the moment there is no centrally organised way to do this, car charges have timers and the like built in for sure, but that is asking a lot to expect everyone to set it. The majority of people will come home and plug in. This should be easy to fix but it is another thing which needs to be rolled out and working in the next 10 years.
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Flat rate electricity prices over the day aren't sustainable anyway with the transition to renewables, price signaling is coming.
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      In Germany, if you have a heat pump you can get special discounted rates if you let the utilities company switch off the pump for some time during peak demand. The same scheme could immediately be used for electric car charging. Actually I expect the utilities to be a big pusher for charging infrastructure, which is then controlled to even stabilize the grid.
anomie 6y ago
The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points. There’s also a big rollout of charging points built into existing lampposts - by tapping existing power lines these are very cheap to install. The chargers are run by a few different networks but you pay for usage so it’s quite possible to just sign up to them all and carry 2 or 3 cables.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  London getting that lavish investment once again. The only place near me is a supermarket 15 minutes away.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points. How many people live within a circle of "a few hundred metres" in London? It averages 4700/km^2 across all of Greater London according to Wikipedia, it will be denser in the middle. How many cars is that? TFL says average of 0.3 cars/person. So that would be 1410 cars or 235 per charging point.
_visgean 6y ago
According to [0] the UK actually does not need to upgrade the network. I would also check [1] - the government task force that coordinates this. This is also interesting article: [2]. The company I work for is also engaged in a project that would allow using fleet of EVs as a power storage. (e.g. buying energy when it is cheap - during wind peaks and selling when it is expensive, but I dont know much about that project.) [0] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-myths-about-electric-vehicles-busted https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-m... [1] https://www.lowcvp.org.uk/projects/electric-vehicle-energy-taskforce.htm https://www.lowcvp.org.uk/projects/electric-vehicle-energy-t... [2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/electric-vehicle-car-infrastructure-charging-point https://www.wired.co.uk/article/electric-vehicle-car-infrast...

Proven 6y ago

It's not enough to make them artificially expensive - the rich still aren't suffering. They have no choice but to completely ban them! The serfs are already down to just one choice (public transportation) so that' been taken care of.

akmarinov 6y ago

10 years are plenty of time to get ready for that, hope they manage.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
Not to "hate" on the government, but 10 years to anybody in the government is like 1 year in the private sector. A lot of places run in government institutions with lifers still work on paper. PAPER! I interviewed at a government job in my area a several years ago before I got into tech and the guy I was talking to told me when he took over, he spent his first few months just converting everything to digital formats. All because the guy in it previously didn't want to learn how to use a computer. Since the position was an agency arm of something in the penal system, there was no oversight besides the people that essentially paid him to make certain reports for higher ups to then make available to the public.

LeoPanthera 6y ago

Important point: This isn't an "EV only" law, hybrids will still be allowed. The government does still plan to eventually go EV-only, but not in 2030.

hhs 6y ago
Indeed, the Reuters piece notes, “The FT said the new timetable was not expected to apply to some hybrid cars which use a mixture of electric and fossil fuel propulsion and could still be sold until 2035.”
- ant6n 6y ago
  Odd. Hybrids _are_ diesel or petrol cars.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Yep. Smells like "I am the good guy" political agenda. Environmental bills that accomplish very little. Go all-in on electric for real change.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Smells like "I am the good guy" political agenda Looks like the only realistic plan. All the “fully electric by 2035” plans that hardcore environmentalists love to pass have zero chance of going into effect.
      - jes5199 6y ago
        2035 is fifteen years from now, and good EVs are competative with ICE vehicles right now. I don’t see how that’s unrealistic
        tomp 6y ago
        Which EV is competitive? Even the best have lower driving range, longer charging times, much more expensive and cold in the winter. I’d love to buy an EV but I can get a decent petrol/diesel car for 30k EUR and no comparable EV.

swebs 6y ago

>Citing unidentified industry and government figures, the FT said Johnson now intended to move the date forward again to 2030 in a speech on environmental policy he is expected to give next week. >The BBC reported a similar plan earlier on Saturday, without giving any sources. So it didn't happen yet, but they think it might. Why not just wait a few days to report it when we have something more concrete than anonymous sources?

mola 6y ago
Because competition.
andy_ppp 6y ago
Because anonymous leaks are the way the UK government announce policy decisions...
- jen20 6y ago
  Indeed, it’s been known for a long time that when the BBC say “sources close to the Prime Minister” they mean “Dominic Cummings, who is too slippery to put anything on the record”.
  - tobylane 6y ago
    The Times, and BBC’s Kuenssberg have had recent success over these tidbits longer than Cummings has been with the PM. He was with Gove for a while.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Yeah, it's a tradition that stretches way back, to the Blair years at the very least - when "King SPAD" was Alastair Campbell, also known as the main inspiration for the character of Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick Of It".
toyg 6y ago
This is how policy is proposed these days. “Anonymous sources” brief friendly reporters, who float it in the mainstream. If it gets shot down, the big speech is replaced with a neutral one; if obvious gotchas are pointed out, the speech is tweaked to pre-empt them; otherwise, the speech happens, friendly reporters are happy, and the policy basically is set out to get on the books as a non-event - which is a big win for a government.

quotemstr 6y ago

The market, not the government, should decide the transition time. If gasoline and diesel fuels have such strong negative externalities, the state should tax these fuels until hybrid and electric become compelling alternatives. These top-down, non-market edicts damage the ability to the market to find appropriate resource allocation via the price mechanism and thereby make everyone worse off.

_ph_ 6y ago
The problem with just raising the fuel taxes sky high is that the poorest part of the population is struck the hardest, they can't just buy a new electric car and have no way to avoid the fuel costs.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Well the "ban cheap cars" method doesn't help the poor either.
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    Electric cars will be cheaper than gasoline cars long before 2030, probably before 2025.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
>The market, not the government, should decide the transition time. No, the market will continue to completely screw the environment unless the government steps in. >If gasoline and diesel fuels have such strong negative externalities, the state should tax these fuels Petrol and diesel are already heavily taxed, at £0.58/L (at current GBP/USD exchange prices that works out at $0.76/L USD, whereas the equivalent tax in the US is $0.05/L). >These top-down, non-market edicts damage the ability to the market to find appropriate resource allocation via the price mechanism and thereby make everyone worse off. Oh the holy market! Can't disrupt the holy market, even when it's destroying the planet.
- quotemstr 6y ago

crmrc114 6y ago

So they want to restrict everyone's movement? No longer can you just travel around Europe by car. There are some good Top gear episodes showing the issues with recharging. In before all the Tesla/EV apologist team downvotes this truth into oblivion.

speedgoose 6y ago
You know that we have electricity outside UK?
_ph_ 6y ago
Tesla managed to create a good coverage of western Europe in 3 years. If there were a complete ban of non-electric cars in 10 years, that should be enough time to make sure there is good coverage of charging stations. Besides, hybrid cars (unfortunately) still can be sold.
- bonzini 6y ago
  It's good coverage along highways. The peak usage of energy might change completely in residential areas if everybody has to charge their car every night for several hours (230 V * 16 A means you will not even refill 20 km/h). Edit: not sure about the downvotes, anybody care to explain? Did Tesla build superchargers in random 10-20000-inhabitant towns far from highways?
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    A car in Germany on average only travels 40km/day. Only a fraction of the night is needed to recharge that. Individual cars might have quite different travel distances, but for the grid, the average distance matters.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      It's peak usage that is a problem, the average doesn't matter much if everybody charges from 6 PM to 8 PM, does it? Is the grid sized for 50% of the households sucking 3 kW at the same time? Peak usage also means that uncommon cases are going to be a problem. For long trips I am not sure that the supercharger networks can scale. When travelling for vacation, for example, planning multiple 30-60 minutes stops at the supercharger station might not be feasible (and the fastest charging only fills the battery by about half of the capacity, so that means more stops) and there's also going to be a problem with waiting times without massive infrastructure improvements. Right now a typical highway gas station has at least 5 pumps and it serves one customer in 3-5 minutes. That is roughly 60000 km-vehicle per hour. To reach a similar capacity, a supercharger station would need (at 30 minutes per 300 km and 150 kW per station) about 15 MW of power and its own high-voltage transformer. Yet this capacity would be needed only when everybody moves for spring break or summer vacation, and it would be vastly more expensive than a gas station. Is it feasible to have such a thing every 50 km of highway or so?

intricatedetail 6y ago

What kind of unintended consequences we could expect? People setting up transportation companies and buying old diesel lorries?

haskaalo 6y ago

Awesome! In Canada they just announced the ban of new petrol cars from 2035

throw0101a 6y ago
> In Canada Just the province of Quebec. * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/gas-vehicles-ban-electric-quebec-1.5802374 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/gas-vehicles-ban-ele... Proviso: > And according to La Presse, which first reported details of the plan, vehicles used for commercial and industrial purposes will be exempt.
- grecy 6y ago
  And 2040 for BC [1] Hopefully they bring that in a bit. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18646486/british-columbia-zero-emissions-vehicles-act-ban-gas-powered-cars-climate-change https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18646486/british-columbia...

jayp1418 6y ago

Why not just now?

LeoPanthera 6y ago

This may be a bit off-topic, but these comments are really eye-opening. I had no idea that anti-EV sentiment was so strongly held. Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology. What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together. It's seems crazy that in the 21st century the best option we have for the storage and transfer of energy is "let's burn stuff". We can do better than that.

maallooc 6y ago
But the best option is to burn stuff. The best batteries avalible has a density of 0.4 MJ/L while gasoline has 34 MJ/L.
mymythisisthis 6y ago
I would like to start by banning all diesel...this is something that can be done immediately. All city buses can run an regular gas or propane, same with large transport trucks. I'd like my city to become a bicycling paradise. It's the best way of getting around for under 30km.
- jefftk 6y ago
  Uh, could you say why you want to ban diesel in particular?
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    It releases a fair bit more gunk into the air. Bunker oil is even far worse.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Diesel has higher particulates and pm2,5s.
perryizgr8 6y ago
Letting people choose petrol and diesel vehicles is not "anti EV". I believe sales of electric cars will automatically eclipse petrochemical ones gradually, government coercion and suppression of individual liberty is not required.

mnd999 6y ago

Sounds like a greenwashing stunt to distract from their other epic fuckups.

rienbdj 6y ago

We should be encouraging people to keep their car for longer and to use it less. Even electric cars have most of the negative externalities of regular cars (with the emphasis moved around a little). The UK government should make life without car ownership viable and the default option for most people. What does this mean in practice? It means reallocating road space from cars to pedestrians and cyclists; legalising and properly integrating electric scooters; creating a functioning rail network, potentially with new lines and (least sexy of all) affordable and frequent bus services, including in rural communities.

tigerBL00D 6y ago

These are good news. However, one of the biggest unsolved problems of the EV industry is utilization and recycling of degraded battery pack cells. You can't simply take an old EV to a junkyard due to fammable and polluting chemicals in battery cells. Extracting and disassembling different types of battery packs is not something that can be done on industrial scale right now (unlike manufacturing). Only on the order of something like 5% of batteries get recycled [1]. Today each manufacturer is focused on achieving highest production efficiency with no coordination which leads to many divergent designs none of which are easy to recycle. Are there are some new developments on the horizon before the world goes all-in and creates a new environmental problem? [1] https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-recycling-lithium/97/i28 https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

_ph_ 6y ago
Yes, there are. Tesla just announced building a recycling facility. In Germany, there are also active recycling companies. Old batteries have valuable resources, so there is a large incentive of recycling - as soon as large scale supply of dead batteries is available, large scale recycling will be done. But most batteries in current electric cars will live for quite some time before they need recycling.

dkdk8283 6y ago

Who is going to pay for all this infrastructure?

skummetmaelk 6y ago
Who's going to pay for the inevitable cleanup and disaster management if fossil fuel consumption continues at current rates?

jmpman 6y ago

Is the learning curve going to progress that quickly? The Tesla Model S came out in 2012? How much has it improved by 2020? 100kW instead of 75kW? At the same price? Yes, I know soothsayers claim battery packs are $100/kwh, but even at those prices, we are seeing $100k pickups with roughly equivalent capabilities to a $45k ICE version. Factor in 200k mile lifetime with 20mpg and $3/gallon fuel, and an electric pickup is still a hard sale. I’m skeptical the industry will make a 2030 deadline.

kungito 6y ago
Pickups in Europe? Practically don't exist
- fogihujy 6y ago
  They definitely do on the countryside.

gandalfian 6y ago

If batteries plummet in price everyone will buy EVs anyway. If not whoever is in government the will quietly let it slide. They mandated all new houses to be energy efficient a decade ago, but somehow it never quite happened.

null0pointer 6y ago

This should not be a blanket ban. Actually I don’t think they would even need to implement any policy at all. By 2030 I would expect electric cars to be so economical that it’s the only viable choice for the majority of people. Not to mention that there will still be plenty of valid use cases for ICE cars in 2030. Need to go anywhere without the charging infrastructure? Need to travel a long distance? Need to travel in an emergency like a blackout? The other part which is just kind of sad is that this is another nail in the coffin for the hobby of building and modding cars. Parts supplies will dry up and working on older cars will just become more and more prohibitively expensive. It’s already happening. To be honest when a car is just another computer it ceases to be interesting.

vosper 6y ago
> this is another nail in the coffin for the hobby of building and modding cars. I confess ignorance about this hobby, but I had imagined it might be easier for a hobbyist to build an electric car than an ICE one (once the parts become more available). I thought there were fewer moving parts in electric cars, and maybe fewer fluids (gasoline obviously being the big one)?
- bradlys 6y ago
  The electronics are a big hurdle. Also, electric cars tend to be pretty locked down. I doubt it’s easy to upgrade a battery pack in an EV. Or switch motors. Turbo cars are usually pretty easy to get extra power out of. Want a different sound? Get an exhaust. Slap a bigger turbo on. Etc. I haven’t looked much but most “modded” EVs I’ve seen required a whole team.
- Laarlf 6y ago
  Many hobbyists don’t enjoy electric cars. I really liked the idea of a Tesla model 3 before I drove one. The fact that electric cars are being politically “shoved” up our throats doesn’t help there. That just creates more hatred. Also let us not forget how hard it is to charge them for many people. Many newer cars already have a lot of engine choices canceled because of questionable emission laws. It all just increases the dissatisfaction with politics from car enthusiasts. It is theoretically easier to make an electric car faster, but in practice that needs hacking of software etc and is a far cry from what tuning cars was/is. Also tuning electric cars is very expensive and there is less diy. There surely are people who enjoy tinkering with electric cars but those are probably more IT nerds than car nerds. Choice is cool. Ever heard of hydrogen internal combustion engines?

antman 6y ago

Within city limits the car could be expelled in 10-20 years in favor of public transport. The car should be used as means to more distant travel. Fuel can be stored in far away placess and gas stations refueled intermittently and dynamically per season. Expanding the electricity grid capacity to far away places or countries seems impossible considering current world grid status. So for a few years after the compulsory usage of EVs socioeconomically non urban centers will probably have a hard time.

aurizon 6y ago

This is a good idea. This will give time to create the needed charging points and to implement price regulation to eliminate the rampant price gouging at many places. They will also need to implement a progressive ramping up annual licence for gas/diesel cars that will prevent the emergence of an enduring repair and maintain the gas/diesel cars - without which repairs could keep them going for another 20-30 years - which will gut the process. That said, there should be a path for converting a ~5 year old otherwise good car, via the e-skate conversion process so someone can convert their great gas/diesel Mercedes into a reasonable e-car. It can and should be done.

enigma20 6y ago

I bought a car recently. 100% petrol. Didn't even think of EV. Why should I. It costs more. It weighs more. There is no infrastructure. It has a short range. Also bought and new apartment recently (Germany, in a big city). There is no chargers in the underground garage, no infrastructure whatsoever. How should I visit my family/friends, leaving far away? Plan additional 2 hours each way to charge a battery. In this case I didn't even look at the Plugin Hybrid. Why? Above points apply. Trunk is smaller!!! Horsepower? I'm not against it. I could consider Plugin Hybrid, if I would have charger dedicated for my parking spot. But IMHO, governments are approaching this from the wrong angle. Instead of fining manufacturers , and increase taxes, focus on the infrastructure, and the rest will follow.