Liberals LOL!
California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
181–190 of 218 posts
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#182I generally feel a strong sense of resentment when a government entity legislates for "my own good" or for the "people's own good". Whether it's to outlaw drugs that I don't use or tell me what kind of car I have to buy I don't like this.
However I also most people act in their own self interest most of the time, and corporations are no different. I think things work best when there is a way to align both government and private entities. I think the way she goes about fuel economy standards is not that way. Politicians don't know the science behind electric cars or ICE cars so how can they be in a position to legislate their standards? What would CARB do if they legislated a major manufacturer to pull out of the California market? At some point that could be a viable option.
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Since conventional automakers don't seem to be willing to aggressively pursue EVs on their own, this seems like a reasonable approach. There are EV and plug-in hybrid options across many price ranges and car shapes.
And California policy has had a not-insignificant impact on that range of options.
I never knew that. I thought it was upcoming competition from Tesla and the "writing on the wall" so to speak... I didn't know that legislation was manipulating the product output mix of Big Auto...
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except your electricity has to come from somewhere. If you are in the US, it will most likely be from some kind of hydrocarbon. You are just hiding the pollution, not removing it.
It is much easier to make those centralized power generation sources green than it is to make all of the cars on the road just a small margin greener. If you are in the US then those electricity has rapidly changed from dirty coal to cleaner gas and a growing percentage of renewable over the past decade.
You can make the centrals more efficient (to a point), but you are still burning hydrocarbons. And then you must apply the same electric efficiency as before. There are losses every time you convert the energy.
By the way, "a growing percentage of renewable over the past decade" is disingenuous. From ~9% renewable in 2002 to ~13% in 2013 is "a growing percentage", but not enough to make a difference in the discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...
This is not green (electric) VS pollution (hydrocarbon). It's hydrocarbon -> electric -> car instead of hydrocarbon -> car. It's modifying a whole distribution network in the hope of achieving higher efficiency.
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#185This is yet another indication that people at the highest levels of government simply don't understand or care how free markets work. You don't raise demand for anything by mandating increasing levels of production of a product that people won't buy. You do it by incentivizing or subsidizing the development of a product (and in the case of cars, a nationwide infrastructure) that has advantages over those already in t…
It's unfair to say that these people don't understand the free market. They understand that the free market will not push us out of gasoline cars and into electric cars until oil becomes very expensive. The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out, thus before the free market is willing. Nobody wants to pay more for their transportation, so at some point someone just has to step in…
> The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out
You mean before irreversible ecological disaster? I don't think anyone outside the business of fossil fuel extraction is concerned about us running out of fossil fuels.
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#1861. "Sergio Marchionne had a funny thing to say about the $32,500 battery-powered Fiat 500e that his company markets in California as “eco-chic.” “I hope you don’t buy it,” he told his audience at a think tank in Washington in May 2014. He said he loses $14,000 on every 500e he sells and only produces the cars because state rules require it. Marchionne, who took over the bailed-out Chrysler in 2009 to form Fiat Chrys…
So, I think you are trying to make an argument that opposes these more stringent emissions requirements (correct me if I'm wrong), but I could just as easily read these the other way... 1. Chrysler's fleet is so inefficient that they have to make one-off cars to bring up their average, losing money on each one. This regulation is single-handedly forcing them to improve their fleet or suffer massive hemorrhaging from…
"The electric car is one of the ways carmakers expect to lower their average fuel consumption and get to the 55 mpg average. The problem is, people aren't buying, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid.
General Motors is struggling to sell 10,000 Chevy Volts this year, and Nissan has sold just over 8,000 Leafs. For context, about 13 million cars are expected to be sold in the U.S. in 2011...
The bad news is that the technology is currently at a point where they have to make trade-offs," Giffi says. "So they want that same vehicle — they want it to look and feel the same. They also want it to perform the same."
Nobody is expecting those capabilities anytime soon."[0]
Nobody likes them, and for good reason. Teslas are cool new-ish technology and the best of the lot, and yet the range is still too low, the charge time is too high, the infrastructure will take quite a while to develop, and they're too expensive. They are the playthings of the Silicon Valley rich, but not practical for the everyday person, whose main purpose for driving a car is cheap and reliable transportation. Teslas and other electric cars are uncompetitive because they are too expensive for what you get, and the only way they become "competitive" is by artificially driving up the price of gasoline-powered cars and fossil fuels. They get a subsidy because they are ostensibly "saving the environment". As I pointed out earlier, the mining of the materials to make these cars (especially batteries) is an extremely dirty and energy-intensive process, mostly done in China by diesel-powered machines. Also, the cars are plugged into an electric grid which is run mostly on ancient fossil fuel plants[1] (as is most of CA's infrastructure), as hydro and nuclear have become basically verboten or phased out of existence. If being carbon neutral is the goal, driving your 20-year-old Accord into the ground would result in a fraction of the energy expenditure and emissions of having a brand-new car built.[2] Or, actually, a horse and buggy would be the most carbon-neutral solution.
Californians may marginally start taking less fuel intensive options in terms of transportation, but most people want to live in suburbs where they have a some room to breathe in their backyard, the schools are better, and a car is necessary---higher prices will effectively force them to spend more on fuel (at the expense of other things). The people in Marin County driving their Teslas and Priuses don't really care, but the lower-middle and middle-class gets clobbered by high energy costs (and has been leaving the state in droves, for that reason and others). And it isn't necessarily because transportation is more expensive; energy costs affect the cost of heating and cooling your home, the price of farming and delivering your produce, the cost of your clothing and smartphone, etc.! These sorts of regulations have led to the mass exodus of companies and jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry (which used to be the way many middle-class Californians made a living) to other states and other countries. Let's not forget that the least wealthy people are usually the least mobile as well.
Fossil fuels allow us to have an incredible standard of living. What if food, fuel, clothing, and transportation costs doubled or tripled overnight? This would certainly make the average person's standard of living a lot worse. And this is exactly what these foolish policies have accomplished and will continue to accomplish.
[0]http://www.npr.org/2011/11/21/142464818/can-electric-cars-he... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scrap...
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#187Sadly this sort of mandate leads to a very inefficient application of money to reducing pollution. After that $14,000 "subsidy" the 500e still a $32,500 car, which will appeal primarily to people who are likely replacing an already efficient late model vehicle for a tiny net carbon savings. That same $14,000 applied to the base model 500 Pop would make the price about $3,000(!) and you'd have buyers replacing old clu…
The Federal and State subsidies for EV's drive down the used market value of the cars substantially. I just purchased a 2013 Nissan Leaf and you can get the base models all day long for 10k, or 13k'ish for the high end model. There is probably a little bit of a FUD discount as well since nobody knows how long the batteries will last, or what will happen when you want to change them. Incidentally, my Leaf replaced a N…
I always answer 'have you considered how expensive the batteries will be to replace' with have you ever had to pay to have an automatic transmission replaced? Not cheap! A blown head gasket is also not cheap either.
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
And California policy has had a not-insignificant impact on that range of options.
I never knew that. I thought it was upcoming competition from Tesla and the "writing on the wall" so to speak... I didn't know that legislation was manipulating the product output mix of Big Auto...
Yes it goes way back to California Emissions. California has legislated to drag auto manufacturers kicking and screaming to the contrary position for many years. I think it's unlikely engine efficiency, and battery technology would be as progressed as it is now without that.
There is such a thing as government failure, just as there's such a thing as market failure. The problem with both is that perfect information, and hence perfect markets don't exist. The role of a regulator is to try to get close to a perfect market (like truth in lending laws, anti-fraud laws, compulsory minimum warranty, lemon laws, competition law, etc.) in order to bring about a free market that can actually mostly let people (markets) determine outcome rather than it being a planned economy. Of course it doesn't always work for a litany of reasons, mainly because it's a difficult problem.
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is much easier to make those centralized power generation sources green than it is to make all of the cars on the road just a small margin greener. If you are in the US then those electricity has rapidly changed from dirty coal to cleaner gas and a growing percentage of renewable over the past decade.
You can make the centrals more efficient (to a point), but you are still burning hydrocarbons. And then you must apply the same electric efficiency as before. There are losses every time you convert the energy. By the way, "a growing percentage of renewable over the past decade" is disingenuous. From ~9% renewable in 2002 to ~13% in 2013 is "a growing percentage", but not enough to make a difference in the discussion…
It's all the way up to 1/8 of all our power? That is definitely enough to make a difference, it means we're within quite minor scaling factors of having it take over.
Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Law passes requiring improved mileage or fines. Auto makers followed by increased mileage and avoided fines. It's pretty simple.
Alternative narrative: Customer demand shifted to cars with higher mileage. Auto makers stopped resisting higher CAFE standards because the minor increment was meaningless. See also: The ongoing debate over minimum wage laws and unemployment. Inferring causation from correlation is not "pretty simple", but a lot of poor decisions are made under that assumption.
I can tell you for a fact that at least on large diesel truck forums when gas/diesel hit $4/gallon the number of used trucks being posted for sale was staggering. The number of people who couldn't afford to fill their trucks up and still make a payment was almost comical.