The timelines for ICE bans within a decade are ridiculous from a technology and market standpoint and terrible for the environment.
The best car technology is the one you don't use much. And we already have decades of cars in good enough condition to be driven weekly rather than daily.
EVs will barely scratch the surface of environmental issues with transportation. And they will create a new range of supply problems while also not solving traffic congestion issues that plague our cities.
It would be far more preferable to encourage people to use the same car for longer and especially to leave it in the garage when they can use other modes of transportation. Or, use car sharing rather than a personal car.
Btw, that's not me arguing against electric vehicles. They are absolutely fantastic. I think in the next ~10 years everyone who can aford one and has a place to charge one should get one. There will be a massive shift towards them. I just don't see a total ban in 2030 to be necessary -the market will shift towards electric anyway, but if you are in a situation where an electric car just doesn't work for you for whatever reason, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to buy an ICE car. Especially since I imagine they will start being in minority by then, so their impact will be smaller and smaller every year. With a total ban you aren't solving the situation for people who can't work around the limits of an EV - you're just making them pay higher and higer prices on the second hand market for existing ICE cars(as pre-2030 cars are meant to be allowed for as long as they work).
I say this as an EV fanatic and Tesla owner, but I'm with you that outright banning ICE cars is the wrong solution.
It totally fucks anybody that can't charge at home. Do you know how many millions of people live in apartments? Do you think they're really going to shell out the cash to build EV chargers in all their parking spots?
The problem is, increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor who can't afford to buy an EV (and again, are unlikely to live somewhere with a charger), while also having side effects of increasing the cost of all physical goods that need to be shipped. Semitrucks become more expensive to run, and while Tesla is working on a semi, it's only going to be useful for intra-city distribution, since semis used for inter-city travel are almost constantly on the road and will be driven by multiple drivers to keep moving, so they don't have time to charge.
You might as well ban cars entirely at that point. The biggest criticism of EVs is that they are still cars. They are still the most resource and footprint intensive form of transportation out there.
It’s exactly as absurd as the alternative legislation to “phase out” (what a bizarre turn of phrase) ICE vehicles. And I say this as an EV owner.
The concept of banning one tech or another in this way is backwards thinking and stems from ignorance of the power and beauty of market economics.
People (in the aggregate) will buy the products that work best for them at the price they can afford.
Now it’s true those products often have externalities, sometimes even directly harmful to the people that are buying them! (e.g. fast food)
Except in the gravest product safety sense, these products should be left to compete with each other in the great world marketplace.
The aim of government should be to subsidize the innovations that make products with the best externalities safer, cleaner, faster, better, cheaper, etc. to the point where they can stand alone and win in the open market.
In the case of EVs, what we need is not bans on ICE vehicles in some ever closer looming date. What we’ll need is massive infrastructure improvements to support the intrinsic demand for the truly better/cheaper/faster/safer product.
The initial round of subsidies have more than achieved the boost up the learning curve to make these products ultra competitive.
We are rapidly approaching the point where the only reason someone wouldn’t by an EV is because either it’s truly inappropriate for their use case (see: plows in NYC) or they simply don’t have a convenient way to charge it.
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.
Electric cars are still extremely polluting. Tire and break dust is the majority of pm 2.5 particulate pollution in US cities and there is a growing body of research that shows reducing these emissions is a huge impact on our general cognitive ability and happiness (particulate air pollution makes us statistically significantly dumber). As with anything, I’m pretty happy with allowing what the market will support. Accurately pricing parking and making people pay the market rate for parking will drastically reduce car use. This is the plan is Paris (reducing free parking) We don’t need to ban cars, we just need to stop subsidizing them.
2040 is a hilarious timescale. That's 21 years away. The Model S is only 7 years old.
Banning new ICE car sales in 2025 and on the road in 2030 would be about in line with what I'd expect the market to do anyway.
It seems, well, silly to be producing brand new petrol/diesel cars when there are already masses of used ones out there that will do the job.
The article talks about EVs having some small digit percentage difference in cost of ownership or whatever vs. a diesel. If it's that close, then you may as well just ban new diesel sales now.
The main reason not to would be a worry about demand spikes causing shortages.
Efforts like these just confuse me. At first I thought It would be any cars on the road by 2040, in which case this is enough notice, since the warning gives consumers enough time to plan (22 years). But outside of a few strange edge cases like specialised cars, what's the point of banning them by 2040?
Electric cars are going to dominate sales within 10 years. At scale, they are cheaper to fuel, cheaper to maintain, have an acceptably high top speed (anything over 160km/h isn't really needed and Telsas can go 250km/h), a better acceleration curve, they are better for human health (no particulates), they are better for the natural environment (no oil spills), they are better to fight global warming.
The only thing that they are worse at is fuel up time and range. And if either of those problems are solved, both of them effectively are, since fast fuel up gets us a longer effective range and extremely long range (say 2000km) makes fill up time irrelevant.
The writing is on the wall. Fossil fuels are going to be completely replaced very quickly. By taking aggressive steps to ban non-electric vehicles sooner both the environment AND our economy will be better off since we'll gain an advantage in the new industries.
In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness. It's like building a whale blubber processing plant after the early commercialisation of crude oil.
States are mandating no ICE sales by 2035. That is why people are becoming anti-EV. No one would care about EV policy if it wasnt being forced on an insane schedule.
I think most of the damage has been done by politicians who used populist rhetoric to set those inane time limits after which "all non-EVs will be banned". That is just stupid politicking that's easy to pass because none of them will be in office by that date. How about having both EVs and ICE?
In some european countries, the amounts being paid as subsidies for EVs are insane. In some parts of italy you get a Tesla for like $8000 . But this winter europe will have trouble charging them, and this model clearly does not scale. Let's focus on installing solar and expanding remote work instead
The politics now are about banning ice. The electric cars being more expensive makes this discriminatory against low earners. I wonder if it would be far more effective to ban large suv's (uk). Of course e bikes and scooters are the way forward in cities.
Bad idea from an image perspective, from a statistics perspective it wouldn't matter. But if you want to create buy-in from the population the best way to sink that is to give an exemption to the ultra rich.
The easiest way would be to start enforcing the ban today, but percentage wise, and then over the course of the next 14 years enforce a fixed percentage of the cars produced to be fully electric until the last vehicle to roll off the line with an ICE is made in 2035. That way nobody gets an excuse and the likes of Ferrari can make bank by selling their ICE based vehicles at auction for ever higher prices. Problem elegantly solved.
That's too late! Doesn't even make sense. By 2040 they will be banned in nearly all developed world. Volvo doesn't plan to build any of them starting 2020 by the way (while they will still build mild hybrids, which are 80% ICE vehicles). Germany is planning a ban from 2030 and that seems spot on, by this time technology will be definitely up to it.
Doing it by 2040 is same as doing nothing, because gasoline cars will be clearly competed away by that time without any legislative action.
Unless EVs are actually less expensive in 2035, the ban will be removed. However, they will be cheaper so no one will opt for an ICE car at that point anyway.
I think you have it backwards and that late 2034 ICE cars are going to sell like hotcakes and the market for keeping used cars alive will thrive like we’ve never seen.
I really want to believe that local governments are going to have this ban light a fire under their ass and and actuality make EVs usable for the “rest of us” who have street parking and no chargers at work but they won’t and so like everything else in this world this ban will disproportionately affect low income folks.
Also governments will happily exempt themselves and their from their own laws once they realize that you can’t “just” replace busses and mail delivery with EVs and have to actually plan for it.
Assume the ban happened in 1995 when EVs would not have been price competitive at all with ICE cars. A ban here just means shutting down all vehicle production and people have to find a way to keep their old cars going. CO2 emissions likely do not significantly change. People likely wouldn't be happy and would (rightfully) turf any government that did such a thing.
Run the same experiment in 2035. Are EVs still significantly more expensive and lack utility / range? If so, it is some approximation of the 1995 experiment. If EVs are cheap and awesome (which will probably be the case), then no ban is necessary as no one would bother to buy an ICE car anyway.
In short, at best a ban makes no difference and at worst makes everyone's lives suck while having no impact toward the stated goal.
Obviously reducing private car usage is a priority. I don't have a car, never owned one, and I'm absolutely in favour of severe restrictions.
Now, you have to acknowledge the world we live in, a total ban won't be feasible in the time-frame that we have to combat climate change. (And neither will an electric grid sufficiently powerful to power millions of green hydrogen-powered vehicles or 5-ton SUVs for that matter).
Not all EVs weigh 5 tons. Promoting (smaller) EVs for people who need them is a good thing.
Soon enough it won’t even make sense to buy an ICE, once the gas stations all start closing for lack of business.
IMO the bans are silly politics and really just grandstanding. We are barely into the adoption curve of EVs and already a base Model 3 is cheaper to own than an Accord or Camry.
Give EVs 10 more years (a relative eternity) and they will probably be the majority of new vehicles sold just due to market forces. 10 years after that gas stations will have trouble staying in business.
Any fleet will have to switch to EV to be cost competitive on a $/mi basis. Once you can spend $1 to save $1.10 (including interest on the loan) anyone with access to financing will go EV. Which with interest rates only going lower, is almost everyone.
The best way to incentivize the next wave of adoption IMO is dramatically reducing the cost of non-peak electricity. Generation costs are already dropping significantly but retail rates are still averaging over 10 cents for supply and another 10 cents for delivery. In MA for example, many areas do not even offer TOU billing, and where it is offered it only reduces the generation cost slightly, not the supply cost, so it barely even saves 25%, which is asinine. [1]
My impression is we should be able to deliver non-peak energy for under $0.08/kWh total, supply and generation all-in. That would significantly increase EV adoption!
The best car technology is the one you don't use much. And we already have decades of cars in good enough condition to be driven weekly rather than daily.
EVs will barely scratch the surface of environmental issues with transportation. And they will create a new range of supply problems while also not solving traffic congestion issues that plague our cities.
It would be far more preferable to encourage people to use the same car for longer and especially to leave it in the garage when they can use other modes of transportation. Or, use car sharing rather than a personal car.
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