Live data from Hacker News

EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

theregister.com

201–210 of 243 posts

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#201
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expect the 2035 limit to be relaxed or result in fewer car sales because we can't power them up. Good . We need fewer car sales. We need more non-car infrastructure. We don't need an "output equivalent to the energy stored in the fuel used by today's non EV cars". What we need is fewer cars and more people on public transports and bicycles wherever it makes sense. Less car trips. The current price of gas is alrea…

The population is ageing. The idea that everyone will use bicycles is ableist nonsense.

What's ableist about saying we need more people using bicycles? Read carefully what was written above. More. bicycles. Nothing in there mentions that everyone needs to use a bicycle.

Are you saying we can never argue for more bicycle use because that's somehow ableist?

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see if you are being sarcastic or not but this is definitely wrong. Burning gasoline to move a car is much more efficient than burning gasoline to produce electricity transported to a charger to charge a car to move a car.

Gasoline engines in road-legal cars have about 20-35% thermal efficiency. Just making the engine bigger and not caring about engine weight (like in ships or power plants) allows you to bring efficiency up to about 55%. Electric motors (as used in electric cars) are about 90% efficient. Of course you lose some charging and discharging the battery, in the charger itself and in transmission losses. But just eyeballing i…

> Electric motors (as used in electric cars) are about 90% efficient.

But where is efficiency of electricity transmission, transformation, battery charging and battery discharging?

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#203
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>in 2015 it was agreed to let people in There was no common EU agreement to do that though. It was mostly Germany posturing for good PR and to try to save their ageing demographics and supplement their manufacturing sector which is dependent on imported cheap labor to stay competitive, as the cheap labor from the Eastern Block dried up. Denmark and other EU members chose to opt out from the refugee sharing scheme bac…

first you say there was no agreement and then you say there was a sharing agreement, how does this fit together? Also germany needs some cheap labor but manufacturing isn't the main part, manufacturing is actually quiet expensive due to strong unions in germany especially in car manufacturing etc. and yes, brexit happened also because of these things, but as you can see now, letting foreigners in doesn't need to be b…

> manufacturing is actually quiet expensive due to strong unions in germany especially in car manufacturing etc.

Except that not all industries are unionized so workers' exploitation is rampant, especially in low margin, low wage industries like fruit and vegetable picking, meat, hospitality, etc. where most of the migrant workers end up. The exploitation of migrants during Covid was even documented on DW.

Through work, I once had to vist one of the biggest meat plants in Germany, and nearly half the workers were Polish, and the other half Romanian. I asked them if they're unionized, they said 'no'.

Q.E.D.

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see how there are two top-level comments, one saying the date is too far away and the other saying that it's a short period for such a transition. I guess both are true in some way - it's really challenging to decarbonise quickly, but we need even quicker, because we're way past reasonable in terms of the environmental situation.

Electric cars are still ridiculously expensive, don't have the same range and features etc, why would I want one? I live in a cold place, cold isn't good for batteries and engines heat the car inside, with electric cars heating reduces the range drastically

That's exactly why they plan to either ban ICE or tax the hell out of them. Because society needs you to switch to electric, so they need to make you want one.

It's not fast enough to make electrics better, so we need to make ICE worse as well.

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#205
post #87
post #64

If you have a combustion engine and want to change to electric, who will buy it from you? Or how do you get rid of your old car? There will be basically no demand in Europe. Just wondering what will happen to all these existing cars, it’s nice to know new cars will be electric but what are people supposed to do with their current ones? Lot of them won’t be usable in cities due to low-emission zoning policies. Edit: i…

Why wouldn't the used market eat them up? The existing infrastructure of gas station is realistically not going away until enough people have ditched their old vehicles, and cars are thankfully an industry where consumers still expect their cars to last 10+ years. Don't know what everyone else's experience is, but coming from a middle class family, my first car was a 1993 Ford Fiesta (which was ~20 year old at the ti…

ICE cars are going to get banned from city centers at some point.

In Europe, just because of rumors that city centers plan to ban diesel cars their sales have already dropped and manufacturers are phasing down production. When that kind of talk happens to all ICE nobody around a city will want one.

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#206

There's an interesting issue with how expensive ICE cars will become to service and fuel when their number becomes smaller (2023 is meant to be the peak of ICE sales). The tipping point for replacement of horse drawn carriages with cars in large cities around the world came quite quickly - when the infrastructure became more expensive. In 2035/2040 the majority of ICE car owners will be the less well off (plus those…

Well except that people who can afford used ICE today won't be able to afford used BEV tomorrow. It is like banning bread and telling them to eat cake.

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#207

I'm seeing a lot of skepticism in the comments here, but electric cars are already superior to their combustion-driven ancestors in most ways. People want to buy them. (Sales are already limited by how fast car makers can increase manufacturing capacity.) What this will do is mostly limit how long car makers can milk their gas/diesel engine making capability.

People want to buy them, but can they afford them?

The mere amount of parts and assembly required for a gas vehicle versus the simplicity of an electric motor and battery makes me bet on the electric vehicle being cheaper in the long run.

When talking about electric, we tend to think of the expensive cars currently on the road in North America. They're expensive in large part because being electric is used as a premium feature.

Look at the cost of those cheapo chinese electric cars if you want to see how cheap electric cars can get. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/06/the-worlds-cheapest-ev-is...

Nobody's arguing for chinese deathtraps to be used on our roads, but a small car in the vicinity of a Kia Rio's price could exist, but it would have too many caveats at this point.

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not in a planned economy, we don't need a 10-year plan for building national supply chains. We have to make sure our electricity infrastructure can cope, everything else can be left up to the market. After all the investment to build a fast charger is easy if you have a guarantee that the number of customers will increase dramatically.

We don't only have to build fast chargers. We have to build electrical power plants with an output equivalent to the energy stored in the fuel used by today's non EV cars. Find sites, get permissions, build. That's a big race no matter the technology used by those power plants. I expect the 2035 limit to be relaxed or result in fewer car sales because we can't power them up.

> We have to build electrical power plants with an output equivalent to the energy stored in the fuel used by today's non EV cars.

You're mixing up power and energy there

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting guessing game. What country could it be? You must be thinking that automotive will suffer from this, this leaves France and Germany on the table. Arguably, a lot of the sector is spread across the EU, but this spread is facilitated by the common market itself. Since France has basically endless opportunities arising from its "carbon neutral" power generation, are you thinking of Germany?

Romania, and while we certainly benefited economically from entering the EU (even though on a societal level the discussion is a lot more complicated, a lot of small and medium towns are now basically deserted) this type of measures that might make sense for wealthier Germany and France are certainly regressive for countries like mine. To put it more simply, we're too poor for this "eco" green-washing that is imposed…

The economic challenge I understand, but how is this greenwashing? Transportation is one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions.

Re: EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035

#210
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not in a planned economy, we don't need a 10-year plan for building national supply chains. We have to make sure our electricity infrastructure can cope, everything else can be left up to the market. After all the investment to build a fast charger is easy if you have a guarantee that the number of customers will increase dramatically.

I strongly disagree. This is as close to planned economy as possible. Just that this time the planning organ is a weird hybrid mix of the private and public sector, technically very close to the official definition of of the word "fascism". A marriage of the multinational conglomerates and the globalistic supranational state-esque constructs like the EU.

Genuinely curious: What's the official definition of the word facism, and who gets to set it? I did a surface-level search, and couldn't really find that one definition everybody seems to agree on. One commonality seems to be in having some kind of dictator, and I think that even if your view of the EU was correct, it wouldn't have much to do with a dictatorship.
Post reply on HN