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Germany Calls For a Ban On Combustion Engine Cars By 2030 (engadget.com)
Germany gave the world the internal combustion engine, and now it is prepping to ban the amazing invention in the country. The country's federal council has passed a resolution to ban the ICE starting in 2030. From an Engadget report:The country's Bundesrat (federal council) has passed a resolution calling for a ban on new internal combustion engine cars by 2030. From then on, you'd have to buy a zero-emissions vehicle, whether it's electric or running on a hydrogen fuel cell. This isn't legally binding, but the Bundesrat is asking the European Commission to implement the ban across the European Union... and when German regulations tend to shape EU policy, there's a chance that might happen. The council also wants the European Commission to review its taxation policies and their effect on the "stimulation of emission-free mobility." Just what that means isn't clear. It could involve stronger tax incentives for buying zero-emissions cars, but it could also involve eliminating tax breaks for diesel cars in EU states. Automakers are already worried that tougher emission standards could kill diesels -- remove the low cost of ownership and it'd only hasten their demise.
The Federal Council only represent the single states in Germany and cannot implement such law. This must be a national law or a EU law. While the move would be logical , it will not happen. The transport minister Dobrindt already ridiculed the intervention.
Have they thought of the implications this has on the trucking industry? Have they thought what this might do to low-income or fixed-income individuals who can't afford a car and suddenly left without transportation? Where is the electricity or energy to create hydrogen fuel going to come from now that they've banned nuclear and don't want fossil fuels? What will happen to the jobs of independent gasoline retailers and distributors and other people involved in that part of the economy? And what about the total cost of ownership for a vehicle with comparable range?
I understand that technology has lots of room to improve in this timeframe, but we need substantially better technology all around in order to make it viable to replace current combustion engines and we need to bring the full impact on the economy and on people in particular before we require that absolutely no vehicles are allowed to have combustion engines any more.
For personal transportation the issue is and always will be recharging. Until we get 400kW chargers, it's kind of a step back in personal transportation. That is, basically until we get full-range (300mile / 500km) recharge times down to 15 minutes or less... boo.
Either that, or we lose the idea of personal ownership of transportation capital - which is what all the people talking about "but just Uber (or equivalent) the self-driving car when you need one, or take public transportation" are really espousing even if they don't know it.
As for trucking - that's a different issue, because the constraints are very different. You've got much larger vehicles so mass tolerances for batteries are different, duty cycles are different, and capital ownership is different.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
This isn't banning ICE engines. Only new cars with them. Also, it won't happen this way. But it surely got people talking and the writing is on the wall anyway.
I'm from Germany and the headline is slightly misleading. We have a parliamentary system with two chambers: the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. The former is similar to the US House of Representatives (with the additional duty of electing our chancellor, as we don't directly elect the leader of our executive branch), whereas the second is similar to how the US senate used to be before the passing of the 17th Amendment. In this case, only the Bundesrat called for this (in a non-binding resolution), but there was massive criticism of this from the two largest parties (CDU/CSU and SPD) in the Bundestag that form the coalition of the current federal government. However, in order for the resolution to get a majority in the Bundesrat, some States governed by coalitions consisting of either CDU/CSU or SPD and another party will have had to have voted in favor it.
Also, I don't think EU Commission has the regulatory authority to institute this ban on its own, so if it tries to go forward with the ban, it will have to be in form of an EU directive, which has to be approved by both the EU Parliament and the EU Council. The latter consists of ministers of the governments of all EU countries - including the corresponding minister from the German government, which at least currently opposes this ban.
To me, this reads more like a symbolic gesture from the Bundesrat, so that politicians can pat themselves on the back ("yeah, we've done something about climate change") without actually doing anything, because they well know that this will not actually become law. I might be proven wrong on that, but at the moment I seriously doubt that this ban has a chance of becoming law within the EU - especially because the German government will oppose this. (The German auto industry is still heavily focused on combustion engines, and the infrastructure available for electric cars in Germany is abysmal compared to other places, especially parts of the U.S. such as California. Germany has this reputation of being at the forefront of renewable energies, and that's true if you're talking about power plants and solar panels on homes and the such, but compared to many other first world nations, when it comes to cars Germany is actually severely behind in terms of new forms of fuel; and the traditional auto lobby here is really, really strong.)
Uhhh... You realise that VAG promised last year to have 30 models of fully electric vehicle across their line in only 5 years time. They already have the eGolf, they've announced a fully electric Audi Q6 and A3; Porsche is spending $1bn making a fully electric 911; Skoda has a fully electric SUV under development.
To argue that VW/Audi hasn't realised they need to start to switch is naïve at best, and will fully ignorant at worst.
Have they thought of the implications this has on the trucking industry?
Last I checked, the trucking industry don't use cars, but if you ask Tesla, trucks are ripe for being fully electric and more more cost effective already.
Have they thought what this might do to low-income or fixed-income individuals who can't afford a car and suddenly left without transportation?
Yes - Europe already solved that problem decades ago - it's called public transport.
Where is the electricity or energy to create hydrogen fuel going to come from now that they've banned nuclear and don't want fossil fuels?
It doesn't really matter - even if you assume the worst case scenario (basically, just burn coal out your ears), it's still a way way more efficient scenario than every individual car having a shitty efficiency ICE in it.
Folks, chill. The ban is about emissions not ICEs. If you have an emission neutral ICE, you're good. Also they don't want to ban them entirely, they just want to ban new ones after 2030. Your ICE car from 2029 (if those still exist) is still allowed on the streets after 2030.
I see a good chance for this law to be mostly cosmetic if it passes Bundesrat, Bundestag and perhaps European Parlament.
If the experts are any bit of right, most new cars will be electric by then anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I thought BMW had a few electric models too. Do I have that wrong?
BMW has the i3 and i8. But just having a few token over priced electric cars isn't enough. Car companies have to invest in R&D to make electric cars convenient enough, and cheap enough, that normal people will buy them. Progress is being made, but the crossover point, where electric cars actually make economic sense, is still 5 to 10 years away.
Disclaimer: I have an electric car, but it is not a BMW.
I think you got the wrong idea about transport in Europe. Many regions have excellent public transport, with a dense network of various modes of transport offering frequent service. But even here in the Netherlands with an extremely dense public transport network, there are few people who are happy (or able) to take public transport and not have a car. In the west part of the country, many trains and buses will be jam packed during rush hour, the railway company has trouble adding more cars to the trains and the track is almost at capacity even with state of the art signalling and routing in place. And public transport still doesn't handle a 10th of the number of people commuting by car. It certainly is a lot easier to get around without a car in Europe than it is in the US on average, but the idea that public transport can replace cars is just silly.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
All the vehicles thus far called zero emissions simply shift their emissions elsewhere. Operating an EV emits plenty of pollution, it's just that the power plants which generate the electricity get blamed for emitting it instead of the owners who drive the vehicles. Even if you're getting your electricity 100% from renewables, there's still the emissions during construction, refining of the materials needed to build PV cells and wind turbines, maintenance, etc. Same goes for hydrogen-powered vehicles - their emissions come predominantly from the process of generating the hydrogen needed to power them, which from all the calculations I've seen thus far exceed the emissions from ICEs.
Right now, environmental policy is being driven by popularity and emotion. It needs to be replaced with a rational, mathematical approach. If you choose to drive a car from location x to location y, it will need to use a certain amount of energy. Generating that energy with an ICE creates a certain amount of emitted pollutants. Generating it with renewables creates a different amount and different types of pollutants. Same goes for steam, coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc. You don't get to draw a black box around just the car, blithely ignore what's needed to create what goes into the box, then irrationally proclaim that you've created a zero emissions vehicle.
And no, you cannot claim your EV is zero emissions because you installed solar panels on your house which you then use to recharge your EV. That's a gross misunderstanding of opportunity cost. The correct comparison in that case is how much emissions your activities would generate if you use the solar panels to recharge your EV, vs if you used the solar panels to offset your household electricity use and used a different type of car. The only way the solar panels can show up only on the EV side of the comparison is if you would not have installed solar panels if you didn't get the EV. That is almost never the case.
For the same reason, EVs are being powered almost 100% by coal and gas plants right now. The electrical demand prior to EVs was being supplied by coal, gas, nuclear, and renewables. Nuclear has not increased. We're increasing renewables pretty much as fast as we can, but that increase would've happened even if EVs didn't exist. So the extra demand for electricity caused by EVs is being filled by the most flexible electricity generation sources we have right now - coal and gas.
Stop trying to think of energy in terms of us (eco-car owners) vs them (dirty polluting ICE owners). Start thinking of it in terms of world-wide energy production and use.
For people on low incomes, EVs should be better. Prices on new ones will reach parity with ICE soon, and used ones will be more reliable and cheaper to run. There are fewer things to go wrong, no spark plugs, no exhausts, no emissions to worry about, no lubricants or liquids beyond the windscreen washer fluid. Even the brake pads get less wear.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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It's astonishing to see the success of one little car from a recently tiny American upstart having such an incredible influence on the world. Just that one car being so great has the largest union of nations in the world talking about banning all other cars. It's just very impressive. I suppose the Model S will go down as similar in influence to the Model T. Funny how similar the names are. I wonder if Elon concievably had that in mind.
commuting is not a reason I use car. Dealing with needs of my kids is.
Free markets - you mean like in the 1970s when Nixon's price controls caused a gasoline shortage?
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Because Tesla X is totally the best choice for pulling a trailer, right?
No one was talking about the model X:
https://www.tesla.com/blog/mas...
Maybe if you said emissions efficiency... from what I understand the higher production efficiency gets eaten up by converting combustion (momentum) to electricity, transport, charging losses, parasitic losses when it's not running and so on. The nice thing is that you could have other energy sources like solar, wind and other renewables but if you're just centralizing the fossil fuel consumption it's not much of a win at all.
You understand wrongly. The transport, charging and parasitic losses are extremely small, and in fact, arguably smaller than with petrol vehicles anyway. Remember - oil needs to be distilled into petrol (a very inefficient process), then transported by road to filling stations (once again by petrol/diesel burning vehicles), also very inefficiently, and then pumped out of the ground by yet another petrol burning motor. Paying attention to electricity's distribution inefficiencies, but not paying any attention to petrol's transmission costs is disingenuous at best.
After reading your first two sentences I was wondering if perhaps you had never heard of batteries. Now I suspect you're just over-stating the losses in charging Lithium-Ion batteries.
As for discharging, the energy efficiency of an electric "engine", including the battery and motors is about 95% when thermal and inductive losses are taken into account.
Compare this to a theoretical maximum of 46% of a gasoline engine, dictated by thermodynamics. Of course, this very generous scenario assumes instantaneous burn time (0 seconds), no heat loss through coolant and impossibly perfect exhaust valve timing. In the real world efficiencies of 25% to 30% are typical.
If you're willing to swap out your petrol ICE for a Wartsila 31 diesel engine you could stand a chance of approaching the world record of just over 50%. However you may need to weld some additional support struts to your car, as that engine is typically used in container ships.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
No, they shift a FRACTION as many emissions elsewhere. Even if the entire electric grid burned coal, it would still be cleaner because large power generation is far more efficient than small-scale gasoline engines, and it's more practical to improve emissions on a few large power plants.
And EVs actually get charged late at night, when demand is lower and a larger percentage of grid electricity is supplied by sources that can't be entirely turned off, like large hydro, nuclear, even wind.
And coal is going away, thanks to both increasing pollution regulations, but mostly fracking. Natural gas is much cleaner than coal, and even gasoline, so EVs already provide the best of all worlds, and that only gets better as solar panels drop in price.
Sure you can. It's not very worthwhile to install a small amount of solar panels in a home, and the electric demands of EVs make it more economical. In addition, EV households switch to peak/off-peak billing, where their daily household needs are supplied by their solar panels while rates are high, then charging their EV after midnight when electric rates drop very, very low. That's both economical, and net-zero emissions, because your PVs offsetting peak-demand of yourself and perhaps your neighbors makes the grid more efficient and much less polluting.
Right now, EVERY policy is being driven by popularity and emotion. Economics, immigration, trade, security, etc. Why are you singling out environmental policies?
As you (and your neighbors) only have to BREATHE what's inside the "black box", it's perfectly reasonable to call it zero emissions, and ignore the distant emissions neither you nor almost any humans are forced to breathe.
That's complete and utter bullshit.
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If I really want a roadtrip I can also hire the car for the roadtrip
This stupid argument comes up every time range is mentioned. You *won't* be able to hire a long-range car for your vacation because everyone else is also trying to hire a car for their vacation. If the rental companies keep enough cars for 90% of the population that only gets used twice a year they'll have to raise rates far beyond what you are prepared to pay.
It's a stupid argument, and you should feel silly for using it!
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Tesla offers the use of all of its patents for free. (...) It's mostly a PR move.
And protection against being attacked by others' patents.
The patents are only offered free to those who use them "in good faith". Sue Tesla, and you'll end up paying for each and every Tesla patent you're using. Brilliant move by Musk.
The numbers were a bit off but not that much: cars (driving and riding) account for almost 75% of traffic in the Netherlands by kilometer, public transport is 11%. Biking / walking is another 11%, and 5% "other", whatever the hell that is. Source. Looking at commuters, around 5% of them take the train to work as opposed to 60% going by car (no numbers for other modes of public transport but it's likely not a large amount given the earlier stats)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I can't say I've every hired a car for vacation or dove a long road trip. Your fallacy is that everyone has an identical vacation in an identical area at the same time.
THAT is silly.
According to VW all their cars are already emission neutral *Coughs*
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