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Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

reuters.com

291–300 of 352 posts

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#291

Many, many houses do not have anything other than on-street parking here. Since 2012 I've lived in 5 houses, and three of them had no driveway. I'm currently buying a house which has no drive way, with no way of fitting one. Apparently 1/3 houses have only on street parking. Unless they also provide huge, huge grants to rapidly implement dense onstreet charging, and fast, this is a pipedream and will end up getting p…

I live in urban Japan and outside my window there are zero cars parked on the street because every car is required to have a registered parking space within 2km of its owners’ residence.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#292
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Edinburgh, one of the more car-unfriendly cities in the UK and recently bought a Model 3. I park on the street, the city has gone nowhere with its plans to provide on street chargers. Yet it isn't a problem, despite a relative lack of public chargers compared to elsewhere in the country it is still perfectly feasible. I've tweaked my habits to go to the supermarket that has a charger in the car park, when p…

Is this strategy still going to work if everyone is doing the same thing? My local supermarket has a couple of electric car charging points, amongst perhaps 200+ car parking spaces. On a busy saturday most of those spaces are full. Certainly it's possible to install a charging point at every parking space, but it requires both a large scale building project to lay all those wires (the existing charge points are right…

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Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#293

I'm so surprised to read so many people complaining on HN. I live in Oslo where electric cars are normal and everything is fine. It changes a few habits and these cars are not cheap brand new yet but I really don't see a problem. If it's going to be a challenge in 10 years, because they are still too expensive or it's too complex to install power plugs for example, it will simply be delayed. UK is very good at delayi…

No, everything is not fine in Norway.

Norway invested a lot on Tesla and to help their investment, they removed taxes and tolls on EVs.

Most of Norway's electricity comes from hydropower and they have been building wind farms lately.

Meanwhile, Norway's entire economy basically relies on selling crude oil. So, it has been "donating" a lot to anti-oil interests in the U.S. so that the oil prices remain high enough for them to justify more oil exploration. As a counter response, the U.S. has been supporting Greenpeace Norway to try to stop oil exploration in Norway.

The whole thing is a clown show.

The only one who is benefiting from this is China. It produces most of the rare earth minerals required for EVs, makes all of EV parts and makes all the wind turbines.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#294
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should stop letting individuals appropriate public space for storage of their private property, and charge market rate for the land used by parking, thereby encouraging people who are not car dependent to buy houses such as yours instead of demanding a public handout for vehicle storage? (The High Cost Of Free Parking explores this issue in depth)

> Perhaps we should stop letting individuals appropriate public space for storage of their private property Are you arguing for getting rid of apartments?

They are proposing to charge for parking spaces, like installing meters.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#295
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, with new teslas, their range is similar enough to gas cars that you only need to charge them about once a week, if that. And they charge fast enough that it's not terribly dissimilar from hitting the gas station, which currently is perhaps a 10 minute affair for gas. Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker. It's feasible, if a little bit annoying, to have a refueling story for them that's similar to that o…

How much is a Tesla? Many tens of thousands of pounds. They have to be a lot cheaper or I am just going to buy another second hand car and just use it as a donour car for my existing vehicle.

As of this year you can get an a lease on an electric company car with a benefit in kind tax rate of 0%. i.e You don't have to pay income tax on the lease[0].

That can make an enormous difference to their affordability, and should also inject a large pool of electric cars into the second hand market over the next few years.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/support/incentives

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hilariously impractical. Have you seen curbside chargers? There's some up the road from me and by no means does it look simple to install them, not to mention that you'd have to do it along _every_ single residential street _everywhere_ and we don't have the electrical capacity to do it anyway! If it really is so simple, why when I live in London do I not see entire streets filled with chargers? Surely you'd…

You don't see streets filled with chargers because almost nobody has an EV yet. Just like you didn't see many gas stations providing unleaded fuel two years before catalytic converters became mandatory.

It's funny because I actually remember the unleaded/leaded transition and petrol stations were stocking it very early on. The equivalent simile here would be if unleaded was going to be made mandatory in a year and basically 3 petrol stations in the UK stocked it.

The govt are going to make these cars mandatory soon. London is the ideal place to do this due to infra + rich people with EVs (more than you might think, far from 'almost nobody'), yet I don't see any street that has charges along it.

My point is that it's not easy. Having to upgrade the grid and dig up tons of roads is simply not easy no matter how much people want it to be.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#297
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a lot easier than the alternatives: unmitigated climate change or building the infrastructure for e-fuels.

Of course, unmitigated climate change will be catastrophic. No argument there. I do however think that we would be better off funding and building massive amounts of solar that gives us enough energy surplus to do large-scale carbon capture, instead of forcing everyone to move to electric vehicles. If you think about it, we right now have an open loop transportation system - dig stuff up from the ground, burn it and…

Electric vehicles solve several problems at once though. They don't emit any of the other unpleasant gases, particularly NO2. And they massively reduce other particulates (no clutch, regenerative brakes).

Plus, having that much battery capacity plugged into the grid should be exploitable to help manage the vagaries of solar and wind power.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#298

I hope that with these bans, actually the government will take action on the high prices of electric vehicles and on the charging infrastructure. A middle-size car can't cost € 40.000 (without batteries!), a lot of people can't afford them.

I know that decent electric cars will drop in price over time, but I don't know if they'll become in reach. I also am not convinced the secondhand market will be any good in the next decade, batteries have a limited lifespan and will need to be replaced eventually. You can buy a beater for <1000 pounds which can still work just fine for a few years, I don't see that happening with electric cars.

I don't see a huge price drop before 2027-2028 at least.

EV feel like "luxury" ones because they are new. A VW ID.3 costs like a Mercedes Class E, which can be considered a high standard.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#299
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard to build curbside chargers. You don't need high current chargers when most parking spots have a charger. A kilowatt or two will be plenty. Cars spend 23h a day parked. EVs use 15-25kWh/100km. Most people drive less than 50km a day. Sprinkle some fast charging along highways for longer road trips and charging is no longer an issue.

This is hilariously impractical. Have you seen curbside chargers? There's some up the road from me and by no means does it look simple to install them, not to mention that you'd have to do it along _every_ single residential street _everywhere_ and we don't have the electrical capacity to do it anyway! If it really is so simple, why when I live in London do I not see entire streets filled with chargers? Surely you'd…

There are several thousand in london already, embedded in lampposts so you might have missed them.

Here's one within 100 meters of my very run of the mill flat https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4689844,-0.1013741,3a,30.1y,...

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