Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Not EU resident here) How hard is it to cross an internal EU border, buy a car, and take it back home?
Not hard, but usually not worth it as far as I remember: You have to pay the VAT of your home country when you import it, which is often one of the biggest difference between car prices within the EU.
The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#42Is every part of the electric "sustainable" cars renewable? Is lithium or whatever they make these batteries out of "green"? Are we trading gas for some other limited resource?
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We already have an energy-saving self-driving mechanism - ... (and obeying the speed limit.) Obeying the speed limit is irrelevant; the actual speed is. A given car at a given speed consumes the same amount of fuel per unit distance regardless of what the speed limit is. All the data indicating that "speeding wastes fuel" is basically just proving that fuel economy is a function of engine power output.
Actually it's more to do with air resistance. It increases exponentially at higher speeds. You also don't burn less by driving really slow, since the engine burns some amount of fuel just by running at any speed. 40 mph is the sweet spot, supposedly. Driving at the speed limit will definitely save you more fuel than speeding.
Exponential with regards of the speed? That sounds odd. So I looked it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation
F = (1/2) * \rho * u^2 * C * A
F: drag force
u: flow velocity relative to the object
So, quadratically.Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#44> Electric vehicles – including self-driving cars – are clearly the future Partially off-topic, but it feels very weird when people put electric and self-driving cars into the same basket. Those are 2 different problems. There're electric cars which are not self driving. There're cars aiming to be self-driving, that are not electric.
Electric vehicles are many many times simpler than their gas-powered cousins. This simplicity is passed onto the self-driving computer as fewer variables. Also, the primary downsides to electric vehicles -- longer refuel times, reduced range -- are mostly irrelevant when a computer is doing it by itself. Nobody cares if their self-driving taxi spends 10 minutes recharging itself between every pickup.
From the self-driving computer's perspective they are the same. Running the engine by computer is a solved problem.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#45The Dutch market is far too small for any large company to justify moving towards this. So, unless the rest of Europe moves in lockstep with them, this measure will fail or will necessitate exemptions in order to keep business going.
Either that, or they go back to horses and mules.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self driving cars will almost certainly use much more energy than regular cars. It will reduce the cost of shipping by a lot, increasing the amount of things which are shipped. It will reduce the price of taxis a lot, so people will drive more. And it will make long commutes and road trips much more convenient.
Maybe, but you're still limited by atoms not occupying the same physical space at the same time ("traffic", "congestion", etc). There's limited road to use, so you'll still hit finite limits; if limits are reached, congestion charges will be used to bring demand inline with roadway supply.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#47> Electric vehicles – including self-driving cars – are clearly the future Partially off-topic, but it feels very weird when people put electric and self-driving cars into the same basket. Those are 2 different problems. There're electric cars which are not self driving. There're cars aiming to be self-driving, that are not electric.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electric vehicles are many many times simpler than their gas-powered cousins. This simplicity is passed onto the self-driving computer as fewer variables. Also, the primary downsides to electric vehicles -- longer refuel times, reduced range -- are mostly irrelevant when a computer is doing it by itself. Nobody cares if their self-driving taxi spends 10 minutes recharging itself between every pickup.
> Electric vehicles are many times simpler than their gas-powered cousins What does engine complexity have to do with driving complexity? I imagine that a computer would drive a car using interfaces analogous to those we use; namely gas, brake, steer (and I guess a shifter to put it in drive).
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#49So what are people to do when there's no suitable electric vehicle that fills their need? I'm thinking mostly about businesses that need trucks and vans for shipping and distribution. It's going to be a long time before we have all electric Ranger & Transit lineup. The Dutch market is far too small for any large company to justify moving towards this. So, unless the rest of Europe moves in lockstep with them, this me…
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#50It's noteworthy that 90% of energy used in the Netherlands is fossil fuels[1] (as of 2013, anyway). This means electric cars will emit GHGs comparable to a 40-50mpg gasoline-powered car. Hopefully they do some major work to clean up their grid electricity. Electric cars are a necessary step to reducing GHG emissions, but without a clean grid they are pretty pointless. [1] https://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/netherland…
[1] http://www.nltimes.nl/2016/04/11/dutch-cabinet-to-close-two-...