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New Diesel and Petrol Vehicles To Be Banned From 2040 In UK (bbc.com)
New submitter puenktli writes: The UK is joining the list of the countries which are making a commitment towards diesel and petrol free vehicles. Other countries might be more progressive with such a ban (e.g. the Netherlands: by 2025), but at least it's a step in the right direction. However, if new bans are put forward at such a high rate as now, in 2040, the UK might be the only western country where petrol-fuelled cars are still on the road. Tesla at least will be happy about this ban, especially now with their Model 3. But these bans will inspire other car makers as well to invest more in EV. Maybe not such a bad idea after all: oil will run out one day, but the sun will always shine.
oil will run out one day, but the sun will always shine
Maybe another 4 billion years but hardly always.
... assuming the UK is still a first-world nation by 2040.
His movies are not that bad. xXx was fun...
> if new bans are put forward at such a high rate as now, in 2040, the UK might be the only western country where petrol-fuelled cars are still on the road.
they are not banning all petrol fueled cars from being on the road, they are banning the sales of new cars. I drive vehicles over 30 years old (and am looking to move to a different one that's even older)
We'll see what happens to their economies when these bans are ready to take place, I will bet that they end up backing off rather than crippling themselves (or people will end up using a lot more used cars and trucks until they vote the bums out)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
All poverty will be eliminated by 2040. Human lifespans will be 50% longer by 2060. Breast augmentation will be free to all citizens by 2080.
I mean if we're going to promise stupid shit and say it will happen by $FAR_FUTURE_DATE, might as well make them good ones.
"oil will run out one day..."
source?
the UK might be the only western country where petrol-fuelled cars are still on the road
No, the USA will be dead last
Car makers stay profitable by making the same car and selling it around the world (with a few planned modifications, such was flipping the steering wheel, and maybe a renaming). It keeps supply chains simple and amortizes design costs. If major markets in the rest of the world are banning new gas cars by 2025, 2030, or any year before 2040, then the UK won't actually have to do anything. GM isn't going to make an electric cars for other markets, and then have a special gas car for the UK; they'll just stop making gas cars. Legislation or not, by the year 2040 you won't be able to get a new gas car in the UK.
Get 1000 miles a charge no one will want anything else. When its 100,000 a charge in a couple decades there will be nothing else.
Personally I never drive more than 100 miles at a time and that is only because Costco is 45 miles away, so every few months.
We went from 150 to 300 plus miles in 2 years without giga factories and such. Much like a computer CPU this is now technology and antique combustion cars will be like the model A you see now from time to time.
Just like Wright Brothers to NASA.
Time marches on with or without you.
Some analysts are already predicting that the car market will be 50% EV by the mid-2020s, and will "tip" rapidly thereafter. This trend is mostly driven by the cost of Li-ion batteries, which has been falling at about 15%/yr for the last couple of decades. When it becomes possible to buy an entry-level EV for $20k or less, why would you even want an ICE vehicle?
The "fuel" price for EVs is a fraction of that for ICE, as is the maintenance cost. EVs only have a couple-dozen moving parts, compared to thousands in an ICE car. Of course, there will still be "gas car" enthusiasts in 2040, just as there are hobbyists who still maintain antique steam-powered farm equipment. But even by 2030, there will no longer be a need for this law, because the market will already have flipped.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
What if this global warming thing is a big hoax and we make a better world for nothing?! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
>Electric cars suck
tell me more.
Even if you're burning gas and diesel at electrical plants to generate the electricity, there has to be some economies of scale at work here to give better efficiency. More than enough to outweigh transmission losses and battery charging losses.
British Petroleum, what do you think of this idea?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Why are you citing Tesla in this FS? By 2025 (in 8 years that is), not to say 2040, are you sure the "model 3" will be that new? Can't you name a single European car maker that build electric cars? No, you cite it because of your fucking nationalism. And because you have not a fucking clue of what you are talking about.
Look at Norway. Nobody's forcing people to buy more than 20% new cars as electrics. Gas cars cost what they always have, and electrics get incentives. People choose freely to take advantage of the incentives.
limited range, long recharge time, what little infrastructure there is to support it, is typically broken, price, longevity
just off the top of my head
At least for USians, a substantial part of the cost of gas or diesel is the tax earmarked for new roads and maintaining existing roads. That the EV owner currently does not pay these taxes could be regarded as a subsidy to encourage use of electric cars, but when EVs are numerous, this will change the fuel-cost calculation, especially against the coming generation of more fuel efficient IC engines.
In other news, rolling coal is alive and well in the US.
limited range, long recharge time, what little infrastructure there is to support it, is typically broken, price, longevity. just off the top of my head
Depends on what you need.
Almost all of my driving is around town, and it turns out that this is actually very typical-- most people use cars for mostly short trips. Actually, a ten mile range would be fine for me-- we're a two-car family, so it would be practical to have one car used for most of our uses, and when we do need longer range, we could use the other.
I have a perfectly good ten-year-old car, so I don't need a new car now-- but when I replace it, an electric car makes sense.
The take-away lesson is that different people have different needs for which they use their car.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The only things out of those that are true are the long recharge time and price. Everything else is highly debatable.
Ezekiel 23:20
Agreed--it'd be much more effective and efficient to beef up public transport.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Like leaving the Europe or reintroducing diesel engine vehicles! Meh!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
How many new power plants do they estimate they will have to build, to power all of these electric cars? That's a huge amount of power generation moved into central locations. With about 65% of that energy lost in transmission, that number doubles. source: http://insideenergy.org/2015/1... How does more than doubling the amount of energy it takes to run vehicles save the environment? Unless someone is building a solar grid the size of Britain, I don't see this all coming from renewable sources.
We'll see what happens to their economies when these bans are ready to take place, I will bet that they end up backing off rather than crippling themselves (or people will end up using a lot more used cars and trucks until they vote the bums out)
I don't see any reason why not selling petrol cars would "cripple" Britain. You do know that it's a tiny little island by American standards of distance-- all of the U.K. is still a little smaller than Michigan-- and few people drive long distances. As far as I can see, it's a great location for electric cars.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
the UK might be the only western country where petrol-fuelled cars are still on the road
No, the USA will be dead last
You're assuming the USA as a nation will survive the current presidency
I have an electric car. My actual range is 250+ miles. "Recharge" is 5 minutes. 0-60 in 8 seconds or so. Very comfortable. Not perfect, and not an "only car", but hard to argue with.
There are down-sides. Only 27 fueling stations, all in California. Fuel is expensive (for now) but going down (one station dropped their price recently 20%).
The perks to kick-start the infrastructure are literally too good to pass up. After the incentives, it is less expensive to lease than a Honda Civic.
Plus, it loves to pee on drivers following too close. The future is Hydrogen and Fuel Cells.
2040 is far enough off that the current politicians can make all the promises they want and not suffer any repercussions from failing to meet that goal nor any backlash from folks who object.
2040 is also far enough off that we might reasonably make the transition from fossil fuels by then as that is a long time in technological terms.
On the other hand, I have 1968, 1986, 1996 and 2004 delivery vans and there is not a whole lot of difference between them. They all get about the same gas mileage. In fact, they get about the same mileage full or empty. The biggest thing you can do when driving a larger vehicle is make sure you're always carrying at capacity for this reason. It's called backhauling. When we make deliveries we also pickup up spent barley and such for our pastured pig farm to optimize our time and vehicle usage. That makes more difference than doubling the gas mileage.
In Vermont, where we're located, they aren't quite as optimistic as the UK politicians so they set the deadline for this sort of thing to be 2050 to give another decade of slack.
...With about 65% of that energy lost in transmission, that number doubles.
source: http://insideenergy.org/2015/1...
65% loss?!? What do you think they are they using to transmit, wet string?
The link you cite says "Energy lost in transmission and distribution: About 6% – 2% in transmission and 4% in distribution".
But Britain's a small place, and they don't wheel power thousands of miles (they don't have thousands of miles), so I expect a smaller number is appropriate.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
When can I buy my autonomous, AI infused, molecular powered quadrupedal vehicle? We need genetically engineered horses and mules that come with a passenger compartment on the top.
When electric vehicles can be recharged within 5 mins, can reach 180 km/h, and can run for 500 km without recharging then we can talk, not before.
price
Why do electric cars cost the same or more than gasoline cars even though they have fewer parts? Electric car power train = battery -> inverter -> motor -> wheels. That's far fewer than a gas car's hundreds of components.
It's a complete rip-off just like $1,000 smartphones that have low RAM and the performance specs of a Pentium III.
Get over yourself. Half of America thought the same thing about the last president. These hysterics you've worked yourself into aren't helpful.
(And this is coming from someone who doesn't particularly like Trump)
> Because they have limited range, take too long to charge
Mostly this, right, trying to do a 1600km (1000 miles) trip in an ICE vehicle? I can do it with just 2 tanks of gas in 16h. However with an AV?
I don't know how you would do a 1600km (1000 mile) trip within Britain in any kind of car, electric or petrol. Unless it floats.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The problem with hydrogen cars is that the lost opportunity cost heavily favors BEVs. Infrastructure costs are not shared with anything else, electric grid is amortized much more easily - and it *already is* almost everywhere. Synthetic hydrogen is always going to be more expensive than electricity, per driven km, because of better roundtrip efficiency (even if hydrogen infrastructure costs were zero, which they aren't), and NG-derived hydrogen (that avoids electricity input as primary source) is no better than just using CNG vehicles.
Ezekiel 23:20
This may be a very good thing for air quality... but there are some significant logistical challenges to overcome if people are actually going to be able to charge their vehicles. Firstly, the UK simply doesn't have the power generation capacity to support several million electric vehicles. Our current capacity overhead is around 1% in winter. Coal-fired stations have reached end of life and are being closed rapidly, and a lot of the nuclear plant is reaching end of life too. The one new plant at Hinkley Point has taken decades to get off the ground, and it seems highly unlikely that the UK will be able to commission enough generation capacity in time for the 2040 deadline.
Second - a good deal of the housing stock in the UK only has on-street parking, which rules out charging vehicles at home. It simply isn't practical to run extension leads across pavements. Some people end up parking a fair distance from their house too. If you're lucky enough to have a driveway, then that's great... until you realise that the electrical grid in a lot of places is already at capacity. It can't cope with the extra load, and will need to be upgraded. Bear in mind that most of the low-voltage grid is underground, and you realise that you're looking at decades of roadworks.
Third - the government has suggested that the 5,000 or so conventional filling stations will be replaced with 5,000 or so fast chargers. This sounds great... until you realise that it isn't possible to charge a car in the 90 seconds or so that it takes to fill up a car with petrol or diesel. It takes (at best) an hour or longer, so way, way more charging stations will be required. Where are we going to put them? The UK is very short of space in towns and cities.
It's a great announcement in principle, but for me, these points need to be planned for too. It simply isn't possible to ban new petrol and diesel cars without putting the necessary infrastructure in place. And it may not be possible to put it in place at all.
Whatever. Toyota is already backing out of that approach. It was just a hedge.
The only change that hydrogen produces versus gas is that the carbon is removed at the refinery. This is because it is still much cheaper to produce hydrogen from oil than other sources. Splitting water economically is still a fantasy.
So, a hydrogen economy is still petrochemical based. Other flow battery technologies (essentially that is what a fuel cell is) already exist that could achieve the benefits you speak of without stripping hydrogen from oil, but this approach is short-sighted.
One of the benefits of charging a car is that the storage technology doesn't have to be the same for every car. Thus, the charging approach gives us one major infrastructure change with only the details changing (what kinds of hookups are offered) after the initial build out.
This benefit is going to allow "batteries" to aggressively evolve. They will be the main competition point.
Personally, I believe the "batteries" will be capacitors within 30 years. They charge faster, will be vastly lighter (mostly air), built from plentiful substances, and will have lifetimes matching the million mile lifetime potentials of the motors.
And they will be charged, not fueled.
The form of public transportation I'm guessing you see is not happening in America without many trillions of infrastructure investment to rebuild our populated areas to be friendly to it. So not happening.
What WILL happen is a transition away from private vehicle ownership to autonomous fleets. The efficiency gains in doing so will be vast, mostly due to the sudden appearance of million mile vehicles now that the car companies are selling miles instead of vehicles.
A side-effect of that will be new energy competitors. The fleets will find it economical to generate their own power using solar and wind. So, they will move into renewables more aggressively than utilities. The utilities will find themselves left behind and the fleets will buy out their remains.
Why do electric cars cost the same or more than gasoline cars even though they have fewer parts?
Because *one* of those parts is currently *very* expensive (but getting cheaper all the time).
Ezekiel 23:20
When you boil everything down to that level of simplicity, it's not surprising that you become simply ignorant.
But those incentives aren't free. Everyone is paying for them, including those who purchase 'non-government-loved' cars, and their government is deciding who gets the option to partake (quid pro quo, you buy what the government approves of and they grease your palm).
Wrong thinking will be punished (if very indirectly); right thinking will be as quickly rewarded. Hold out your hand! Here's a rebate! Woohoo!
Cancer is what real progress looks like.
Should have been "because of better roundtrip efficiency of BEVs", obviously...
Ezekiel 23:20
Electric cars suck.
I own an electric car, and am quite happy with it. It meets all my needs as a commuter and errand car. The range is limited, but my commute is only about 15 miles per day, so i only charge it once a week or so on standard US house current (120v).
Nobody wants one so the government is forcing you to buy a shit car.
I see scores of electric cars on the road every single day on my way to work. Clearly, your statement is without merit.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Some of your points are "partially true". H2 production from NG is different from CNG internal combustion. CNG internal combustion is less efficient "round trip" than H2 production (but they are close) even counting transport (at least this is what the california hydrogen site says). I was surprised that internal combustion is about 30% efficient while fuel cells are just above 60%.
With current technology, the best solution looks like a plug-in CNG hybrid. Even a plug-in fuel cell hybrid makes a lot of sense. If you can put 10 KWH of battery into a H2 fuel cell car, the added cost should be about $2K. You get 30 miles on a simple overnight 110V plug-in, and the range for longer trips of fuel stations.
This is my problem with "big BEVs" is the amount of energy to charge 100 KWH of battery is monstrous. At 220V and 100A, this is 20KW/hour or 5 hours for a full charge. 220V and 100A is what a lot of houses have service entrances at (most are 150A or 200A). So, while 30 miles may sound anemic, it probably does represent 80%+ of the miles, so the plug-in hybrids look like the right mix. Add that 1KW overnight for 10 hours is a lot nicer to the grid.
Also, 10KWH for "hybrid energy recovery" and "big acceleration needs" makes the hybrid part work a lot better than the current 0.5-1.5 KWH batteries in non-plug in hybrids. I like the idea of recovering all of the energy descending the grape vine instead of just the first 500 feet. (my apologies for lack of translation to metric for international readers)
Doug
Hoorah! Freedom first! We'll get tourists to come here to drive our zoomy gas powered cars instead of their insipid little rolling warts. If their governments mandate electrics, you know after a few years they'll start pressuring on performance and power in the name of saving energy and children...
Half of America thought the same thing about the last president.
Yes, this did. That said, their reasoning was pretty terrible.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
If they were serous about AGW, they'd ban the sale of new IC engines starting in 2018, not 2040. Haven't we been told by every scientist that it's probably already too late to do anything about global warming (er, climate change). Why delay this planet-saving measure for 20+ years? Even the more "progressive" Ntherlands starting in 2025? Why wait?
Isn't slashdot bombarded almost daily with postings telling us the solar & wind have overtaken oil on cost curve? Why wait?
I might be completely wrong, but I haven't heard about any kind of major advances in high capacity capacitors in the last 10 to 15 years.
What makes you think this is suddenly going to change to the extent that they will be competing with batteries?
You make a good point, but:
If electric cars were a better deal than non-electric cars for UKers, you would not have to get the government's guys with guns to force them to buy electric vehicles at gunpoint...
Ah, you must be a libertarian. Pretty much everything that's in the news, you can count on libertarians saying "OMG, it's the government with guns forcing people at gunpoint! "
(I like the way you put "guns" in the sentence twice there. Nice way to hammer the point.)
If you're going a long distance, take a train.
They do still have trains in Britain, you know.
And when I get to my destination, how will I drive around?
Zipcar.
If you live that close to work, WALK IT.
Because your version of hysteria seems to be only from you and fellow AGW and reality deniers.
So why the claim that the UK would be the only "western" country with petrol (gas or diesel) cars?
It is 17 years since they rebranded as an energy company, and changed BP to stand for "Beyond Petroleum".
Yes, more for corporations and less for people. That's great. It's going to be awesome to have to call a car and wait for it when you just need to run out to the store for milk.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I just can't understand buying a car only to be an errand car. I understand that some people don't go on long trips, but you need to consider all uses for a vehicle, not the minimum use case.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And for good reason. As I understand it, Americans tend to drive longer distances on a regular basis. I think we'll settle down to a large majority of hybrids, though.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Look, Tesla sells out their entire production run. They literally can't make enough electric cars. Ford makes many multiples of electric cars that Tesla makes. BMW does too.
And they all pale in comparison to China, which literally makes electric cars for $6000 each. In quantities that dwarf the US and UK output.
Adapt. The market cares nothing for your failed fossil fuel religion.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
By then, they will isolated in their little island, making sure that their population remains pure and flawless. Whatever they do will be of little relevance to the rest of us.
It will be 'You will get my internal combustion engine car when you pry it out of my cold dead hands." You might just as well try to get Muricans to quit playing with guns.
No reason why the USA can't beat Canada then. Warmer climate and similar, if not smaller distances.
But anyways, USians just have to drive less, or smaller cars. Raising taxes on gas would be a good first step instead of giving inefficient subsidies and hoping people will choose small cars and hybrids.
no one wants to travel to a foreign land for bad food, worse weather, and to top it all off, drive on the wrong side of the road.
I'm actually also quite in favor of plug-in CNG hybrids, or at least smaler-range BEVs with CNG range extenders. Regarding comparing efficiencies of ICEs and fuel cells, I think one also ought to consider NG conversion efficiency. I think it's somewhere around 70% or so.
Ezekiel 23:20
They do dribble out periodically. For example:
There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.
So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.
I propose a deal:
You consider your use cases.
And I consider my use cases.
And please leave me alone while I consider my use cases as I will leave you alone when you consider yours!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Your example is totally backwards from the way it is going to happen. Instead of wasting your time going to the store at all, you're going to call the milk. It will arrive in a car-like autonomous vehicle and be placed at your door. And it will often arrive in less than the travel time because vehicles already on delivery runs will be prestocked with common items.
Also vehicles for carrying people will stage themselves in anticipation of need. Your average time to go anywhere will likely go down due to things like more efficient usage of the roads and never having to find parking.
Not in Britain for sure, but in north america it's common.... For instance Québec -> Toronto is 800km
Sure, but the article we are commenting on is "New Diesel and Petrol Vehicles To Be Banned From 2040 In UK"
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's not going to work that way. If I must call the milk, the delivery vehicle is almost certainly going to be somewhere else in my neighborhood; unless you expect me to believe the store will have my own dedicated vehicle ready sitting there waiting to bring me this milk and the delivery will be free, it's much quicker and more efficient for me to drive there with my own vehicle. Often I simply can't wait any longer than that.
But then apparently you expect me to believe there will be an unlimited number of people carrying cars at the end of my street waiting just to serve me as well, so you're fairly delusional. Right now any car sharing service will be out of cars during peak times.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Don't want responses? Don't post.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And public transportation would give less to corporations? Your car doesn't give something to corporations?
Autonomy actually spells the end to the aspect of corporations we hate. Automation breaks the connection between wealth and the farming of human labor which is the purpose of corporations. Money itself represents human labor which is rapidly losing value. The laughable idea that mid and high-level management ever brought anything unique to the table will fall to automation even quicker than the manual labor has. And the need for investors / owners will fall shortly after that.
The endpoint of all of this is either we find new ways to determine the distribution of the products of resources or the rich figure out some other way to remain dominant revealing their true nature so blatantly as to likely end in a class war of the bloody variety.
In the copper industry and train an as electrician.
When everyone buys an EV, there's going to be a lot of work out there re-wiring houses to cope with the charging of these cars.
My house only has a 60A main breaker - the entire house can only supply 14.4kW, including heating, hot water, cooking, lighting, etc.
None of the internal wiring can handle more than 30A, and that run is just for the oven.
I suppose aluminium and steel would be a good investment too, for both the manufacturing of these new cars and the high voltage transmissions lines that are going to need to be upgraded.
Cars are tough enough.
Let's see a single electric semi-truck (lorry) or construction vehicle before we make this categorical switch, shall we?
In any case, I find it amusing that this is being declared 'groundbreaking'....apparently France doesn't exist in their universe: https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
(France declared the SAME policy weeks ago.)
-Styopa
Assuming a complete infrastructure crash, it would probably be easier to produce your own electricity than gasoline. Biodiesel may be an option, but newer cars need a fair amount of work to convert them over or all the emissions controls get clogged.
...than governments (and faceless bureaucrats) making proclamations about what they'll do in 20+ years. They barely know what they're doing before the next news cycle.
Back in 2010 or so Chrysler was starting to promote the ChryslerEV line. Unfortunately it never happened.
I think one of the concepts was a vehicle with an all electric drivetrain but it had a small, very high efficiency diesel engine that could run a generator and keep the batteries charged. The diesel ran at one speed (where it was most efficient) when needed since all it did was run the generator, which fed an inverter.
I would seriously still like this style of not-hybrid bybrid as an option. I doubt the EPA would allow it (because it would work, would solve many shortcomings of current EVs, and would normalize small diesels on American roads, which the EPA seems to be dead set against).
Ah well... I'll think about something with a Cummins in it instead. Because...
Its funny after reading through much of the above. A lot of people wouldn't mind, or might actually like an electric car, given some reasonable specs and capabilities at a comparable price. And perhaps a common American trait that I expect is even now not too uncommon elsewhere: a car that isn't being mandated or shoved down their throat. Some might have principled stands against the taxpayer funded 'incentive credits' and would buy said cars (at a comparable price) without them.
But so many of the posters are all 'ban the gas/diesel cars! Force them to buy electric!" and/or "Raise taxes on gas/diesel to drive them into buying EVs". Wow, authoritarian much? How do so many people think what they want should be imposed on others by government force, and that people who disagree or want markets (people!) to decide instead of governments or bureaucrats...are somehow deficient and need to be told what to do? Where are all these authoritarian controlling wannabe dictators coming from?
Sheesh.
Europeans are very good at taxing people, why the hang up here. Tax fossil fuels at sufficient level to bring down use to desired threshold. Let people keep using it in high value situations where it makes sense. Use the added revenue to cut back on some other taxes like VAT.
Same for United States. Tax gasoline, use the revenue to give people a break on sales taxes. Why is it so difficult and why do we inact paternalistic regulations instead?
While 3+ billion people drive far more polluting cars in developing nations let's get our swipes in on the US, that'll make us look smart and not at all like retarded dicks!
We're converting our Hummers to burn coal. That's some forward thinking there!
I wonder what all the coal miners who voted for Trump are going to think of him when they find out that being a coal miner is a preexisting condition for which there will be no insurance coverage to help ease their suffering from black lung.
Make 'murica great agin!
It typically is.
the occasional long journey for some IS the minimum use case, daily use is not.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Look at the pictures below:
tesla front luggae space: https://static-ssl.businessins...
tesla back luggage space: http://electromotivela.com/wp-...
In which gas car can you have luggage in both the front and the back? The model S has so few components, yet it's priced 2x to 4x a typical gas car.
It's like a smartphone: 1/4th CPU power of a laptop, but the same price as a laptop.
No. Per POTUS, we're switching to coal.
If you drive, or think that ANYONE is capable of competently completing, 16 hours of driving without a significant break, then you are a complete and utter BASTARD ! :)
You are a major danger on the roads, putting other peoples' lives at unacceptable risk.
And you chatter about it as if it were "normal behavior".
I don't know you, I don't know your family or friends, but I hope you die quietly by yourself one day, and don't take out an innocent family in a sedan travelling in the other direction. And that you die BEFORE you next attempt to drive 1600 km in one day.
Professional drivers are legally prevented from doing what you so flippantly extol.
Actually, I shouldn't call you a bastard, that's not fair.
Your're a FUCKWIT, even with your "impressively" low user ID.
Shame on you. You don't deserve a driver's licence.
If Ford could make an electric F150 that had a generator dock in the bed for long trips, 98% of the concerns Americans have with EVs would be moot. Go rent a well maintained generator from your local dealership (could also work with a small trailer attachment for sedans) and be on your way.
Huh. I need to move 20 yards of renovation waste to the dump. Probably 2 tonnes of material.
I guess I should have purchased a dump truck instead of my Honda Civic. You're absolutely right.
Depending on the frequency of the long trips, it may make economic sense to rent or take public transit on those occasions. I'm spending $50/wk on gas for a 60km round-trip commute. If the fuel price drops to $5/wk for an electric vehicle, the fuel savings alone would pay for an ICE rental one day a week. And that's not factoring in the maintenance savings.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
My point is not (should I put "not" in caps?) whether or not taxing liquid fuels is a good way to fund roads.
My point is that the cost of liquid fuels already contains a tax, a fee, a charge to pay for the roads and if you are going to make a comparison between the energy cost of operating an EV vs an IC engine car, you need to take that fee into account.
I don't have any problem that the small number of EV users are effectively exempted from paying this tax. We can argue the merits of subsidy, but for now, that exemption is a subsidy, and such helps push EVs and EV ownership along the cost curve. But when EVs become ubiquitous, EV owners will have to contribute to the cost of the roads by whatever administrative arrangement to pay for roads is enacted, and this will change somewhat the economics of EV vs IC operation.
As to IC engines being at the edge of no further progress, you shall see significant progress with the next generation of small displacement highly turbocharged high compression engines already in the product development pipeline. At least under the Obama Administration, there was a road map (to excuse the pun) of substantial increases in the fuel efficiency standards in the next 10 years, and yes, those regs were informed by scientific and engineering input regarding the momentum of research on improved IC engines.
New Diesel and Petrol Vehicles To Be Banned From 2040 In UK
"Coal" conspicuously absent from ban.
From the author's UK perspective, I'm not sure if the USA are west or east ... they're in the back.
I just can't understand buying a car only to be an errand car.
That's a bit dishonest. I very clearly said commute and errand car. That means I drive it every workday, and then some.
I understand that some people don't go on long trips, but you need to consider all uses for a vehicle, not the minimum use case.
My wife has her own car. If we have to go someplace out of range of the electric, we take hers.
The point I was trying to make is that an electric car meets the needs of many people. Almost every two-car family with a commute under 50 miles per day, for instance, could be very well served by an electric car.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
But you're paying so much for that vehicle and at the same time ruling out ever being able to go for a long drive. To each their own I guess but no matter what the car is less useful and limits you, so don't pay just as much for it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.