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Netherlands Looks To Ban All Non-Electric Cars By 2025 (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Politicians in the Netherlands have proposed a law which could put a ban on sales of diesel and petrol cars by 2025. A majority of the lower house in the Dutch parliament approved a motion where all fossil fuel powered cars -- including hybrids -- would be banned. Yahoo News further reports, 'While it's still unclear whether the proposal will pass and become law, the ambitious plan would involve car manufacturers getting on board to produce enough electric vehicles to meet demand. The latest electric cars have shorter charging times and longer ranges, benefits that emission-free car evangelists hope will help make them appeal to users of traditional petrol and diesel cars." More details on this here.
A well known event that happens every year in Europe is when people from Belgium and the Netherlands pack their stuff in their cars and migrate through Germany to southern Europe. This pisses of the Germans as their autobahns are stock full of cars. .. how will they continue to do this with cars that only move a few hundred km between recharges?
Something like this, I expect.
My uncle has a country place that no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm before the Motor Law
And on Sundays, I elude the eyes, hop the turbine freight
Too far outside the wire, where my white-haired uncle waits
Jump to the ground as the turbo slows to cross the borderline
Then run like the wind as excitement shivers up and down my spine
But down in his barn, my uncle preserved for me an old machine
For fifty odd years, to keep it as new has been his dearest dream
I strip away the old debris that hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta from a better vanished time
Ooh, fired up the willing engine, responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime
Wind in my hair
Shifting and drifting
Mechanical music
Adrenaline surge
Well-weathered leather, hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome, the blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware
Suddenly ahead of me across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air car shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires to run the deadly race
It goes screaming through the valley as another joins the chase
Drive like the wind, straining the limits of machine and man
Laughing out loud with fear and hope, I've got a desperate plan
At the one lane bridge, I leave the giants stranded at the riverside
Race back to the farm to dream with my uncle at the fireside
Written by Peart, of course.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sounds like Dutch people will have to go to Germany just to buy a new car...
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Here, we used this when they slapped 'luxury taxes' and 'gas guzzler taxes' on full sized sedans and station wagons. Everyone jumped in pickup trucks and SUVs. Once Congress recognized the unintended consequences*, they cancelled the taxes. But nobody switched back.
*They briefly tried raising the GVW needed to qualify as a truck. Enter the Lincoln Navigator and H2 Hummer. 'We'll raise it even more'. Manufacturers built vehicles based on the Kodiak chassis and similar. We can move up scale faster than Congress can write laws. Someone Photoshopped the next possible step and cooler heads prevailed.
Have gnu, will travel.
If I lived in a country where the soccer national team needed to carry their passports with them until the EU was founded so they could legally get the balls back that went outside the playing field...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nobody in Holland needs cars.
Unless you are actually employed or work as freelance consultant and happen to live outside the center of Amsterdam or Utrecht... The attitude displayed is an annoying one, mostly entertained by pseudo-intellectual hipsters who are still studying. Anyone who works as a consultant needs a car or has to face hours to commute (try Eindhoven-Utrecht if you don't live in the center, or Utrecht-Rijswijk, or Groningen-The Hague, or Nijmegen-Amsterdam, as several of my colleagues have to do).
I tried using the train when I lived in Eindhoven and worked in Utrecht for a while, when I didn't have my drivers license yet (never needed one when I was in my pseudo-intellectual hipster phase). Two hours for a single trip due was the rule, not the exception. And I had only a single destination then, not three, as is sometimes the case nowadays.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Not fast you say, I think you are looking at it wrong:
http://rameznaam.com/2013/09/2...
New things are always on the horizon
PLEASE!!!! ENOUGH ALREADY with headlines that make factually inaccurate over-dramatized claims.
RTFA.
They're actually NOT banning all non-electric cars in 2025, they're just stopping the sale of any new gas/diesel cars.
And that explains the terrible public transport in US cities how, exactly? "Oh the nearest city is hundreds of miles away, so let's not bother funding our local buses or build tram infrastructure". Stop using that to excuse the pathetic state of public transport in the US. The problems will never be fixed if you just go "but we so biiiig!".