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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.
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
It will then be replenished by the same processes that produce the oil we use today
Actually, it won't. Because we have oxygen in our atmosphere now.
Oil was produced by vast piles of organic matter being covered by sediments and baked for hundreds of millions of years. Once our atmosphere got a significant concentration of oxygen, those vast piles of organic matter no longer formed in the same way. The organic matter oxidizes too much before it can be buried. Instead much smaller molecules (aka natural gas) are created instead.
And before the post above asks, the problem with just relying on natural gas is it tends to not stay in the ground on its own. You need particular geology to hold it in place. So there's way less natural gas forming than the way oil formed 250M years ago.
The Green River Formation contains the largest oil shale deposit in the world. It has been estimated that the oil shale reserves could be equal up to 3 trillion barrels (480 billion cubic metres) of shale oil, up to half of which may be recoverable by shale oil extraction technologies (pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution of kerogen in oil shale). However, the estimates of recoverable oil has been questioned by geophysicist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, who argues that the technology for recovering oil from the Green River oil shale deposit has not been developed and has not been profitably implemented at any significant scale.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Fuel cost alone is EV=0.03 cents per mile and ICE = 0.20 cents per mile. (YMMV)
Also, EVs have low maintenance cost. Tires are about the only cost. Brakes last forever; no oil changes; drive train has a few thousand fewer parts to wear and break.
The more you drive, the more you save.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I'm buying a new car, and just ran the numbers for a volt versus a normal gas engine. In my commute? I save an amazing $321 a year. That's less than $1 a day. in a car which is $3K MORE than the gas car, even after $9K in gov't /state bonuses.
You wannna push electric vehicles? Lower the cost of Electricity.
Don't forget to factor in maintenance costs. EVs are much simpler with fewer moving parts. No oil changes, no muffler replacements, etc.
But yeah, I'm not surprised the math doesn't pencil out yet. Modern EVs are still relatively new in the grand scheme of things, and there's a lot of optimizing still to be done. But the math will work out sooner or later. In the meantime the people buying them are doing so for reasons other than hard dollars and cents (i.e. the same reason anyone buys a $30k car in a world where $15k cars exist).