German push to ban combustion-engine cars by 2030 wins support | Hacker News Reader

German push to ban combustion-engine cars by 2030 wins support

uk.reuters.com

72 pointsjseliger42 comments

> A switch to sales of only zero-emission cars puts thousands of German auto industry jobs at risk since the powertrain of an electric car requires only a tenth of the staff to be assembled when compared with a combustion-engined equivalent, which needs more workers to assemble cylinders, spark plugs, and gearboxes.

The stupidity with wich we argue for retaining useless jobs is baffling.

To quote Volker Pispers. "If you tell the minister of the internal that all those anti terror actions treated jobs in the TNT rod industry. Then you'll really put him in a dilemma."

> The stupidity with wich we argue for retaining useless jobs is baffling.

You are calling it an argument in defence of the status quo yet from the article it is merely a statement of fact. And it is a vital fact that could in couple of ways have ramifications on the local economy.

> The stupidity with wich we argue for retaining useless jobs is baffling.

What do you mean by 'retaining useless jobs'? We aren't talking about subsidizing carriage makers or wheelwrights here. We're talking about jobs that will be lost as a direct result of legislation, not market obsolescence.

> We're talking about jobs that will be lost as a direct result of legislation, not market obsolescence

Of course. It's legislation that will make the world a better place for everyone to live.

Just like all the jobs that were lost when asbestos was legislated to be illegal, or a thousand other examples.

Not here in germany. Legislated but very happy. Dont have to shiver in fear of trumpzilla because the holy st. market didnt bring those outsourced jobs back.

Yes, this is stupid. But many voters will be attracted by simplistic statements.

And as a factory worker you are likely much more scared of having to leave your job and learn something completely new… compared to, e.g. the random HN reading IT freelancer.

So the stupid sentence, I'm sure, will resonate well with many citizens (unfortunately).

Of course, there better approach would be to show the potential benefits and job opportunities. But why put in the effort of simple fear-mongering will do?

Agree, I think it's the opposite: the car industry needs to be pushed by the politicians, otherwise they are complacent and don't innovate.

I still think the strict environmental regulations pushed by the green party a few years back gave the German car makers an edge over the US competition. And they complained a lot back then.

I still think the strict environmental regulations pushed by the green party a few years back gave the German car makers an edge over the US competition. And they complained a lot back then.

Huh? Automotive environmental regulations are much stricter in the US compared to Europe.

German, and other European, carmakers have an appalling environmental record, and have for years been getting away with pretty much ignoring the (already weak) EU environmental regulations. Just look at Volkswagen.

Or, just try to breathe the air in London, Paris or other big European cities where the stink of Diesel fumes has become more and more pervasive in recent years.

That's only a part of the picture. Fuels are heavily taxed in Europe, partly due to the environmental impact that cars have. As a result, you really don't see those >4L engines in cars, in fact anything above 2L is rare. While I agree that diesel cars have nothing to do in cities, they are still superior on highways and for longer drives.

It's a mistake to assume there's a direct relationship between fuel efficiency and environmental performance.

Diesel cars are more efficient than conventional petrol vehicles, but at the cost of significantly worse air pollution.

With "a while back" I meant from '98 until 2005 (after that it was Merkel only).

Yes, VW is atrocious, but trust me, it was worse in the 90s.

These jobs are already gone. Most Europeans lines that assemble powertrains, transmissions, etc. are already robotized.

[Edited]

> The stupidity with wich we argue for retaining useless jobs is baffling.

I couldn't agree more. It's basically occupational therapy.

> the powertrain of an electric car requires only a tenth of the staff to be assembled when compared with a combustion-engined equivalent, which needs more workers to assemble cylinders, spark plugs, and gearboxes.

This is why an EV-dominated future is inevitable, even without the environmental considerations. Fossil vehicles simply won't be able to compete on cost.

That is a claim I saw, Electric cars are reasonably competitive now even though production numbers are a tiny fraction of the market. Every time the number of cars sold doubles the cost drops by 15-20% (learning rate). Doesn't take a leap of genius to realize gasoline cars won't be competitive in 15 years.

Then we'll just build steam engines again. Maybe nuclear instead of coal-fired? The Germans haven't banned those, they just got quickly replaced by ICEs. Why ban? Why not just let the market handle things?

Because there's a good chance that the economy couldn't handle it on their own, or that they would take very long.

There's the chicken-egg-problem of no one driving electric cars, therefore no one building charging stations, therefore no one buying electric cars.

This problem isn't going to solve itself without someone investing a lot of money into building charging stations. And so far, such an investment was an extreme risk. There was no guarantee that you'd make a dime off of your money.

With this ban upcoming, you're essentially guaranteed to make money in at most 15 years.

Maybe electric cars are not that great then? If an electric car would cost somethilng like a regular car and offer 600 km range on a "tank" full of electricity or hydrogen, everyone would buy one without the need of banning regular cars. This is exactly how railway steam engines lost ground to diesel and then to electric. Electric cars already have other advantages such as the lack of needong a gearbox, very good torque/seed characteristic which enables fast acceleration.

I'm all for electric cars, but outright banning regular cars at EU level just feels plain wrong. What about forcing this upon other less wealthy EU member states, just like they did with migrant quotas? Selectively banning them at city level by the local authorities due to pollution and noise is a much better idea.

>What about forcing this upon other less wealthy EU member states, just like they did with migrant quotas

This. If you can handle the economic fallout from doubling down on teslas, volts and leafs and legislating away everything else then good for you but don't make everyone else do it.

>Why not just let the market handle things?

Unpriced externalities represent a huge market failure. Respiratory illness, floods and droughts due to climate change, resource wars in the middle east. Fossil fuels impose a cost on other people that is not priced in.

Gasoline is cheap like dumping toxic waste in a river is cheap. You pass the real costs on to some schmuck downstream.

You could put a tax on dumping toxic waste in rivers. You could establish some kind of toxic waste credits scheme, where dumpers of toxic waste buy credits from people who clean it up. Most of us would agree that the more sensible option is simply to ban the dumping of toxic waste.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/our-energy-choices/coal-a...

because the German government is in a different situation compared to the american parliament. one of their founding principles is to literally lead the population in controversial topics after taking counsel from experts and forcing sane actions on the population.

i'd actually be glad if this would be passed, not that it has any kind of chance of ever passing. it would decrease the car noise significantly inside cities, and i neither need nor own a car anyway.

Penalizing emissions directly through gasoline and emissions-based road taxes would be a vastly cheaper and simpler way of reaching the same objective. What can be done to make this more politically palatable?

No it won't it would harm consumers and businesses because these do not offer alternatives directly.

A global gasoline tax would hugely inflate the prices of good and services without doing anything to reduce emissions.

A gasoline tax that only affects private car ownership would have even a smaller environmental effect while negatively affecting non-urban residents pushing even more people into densely populated cities.

Ban on combustion engines (in new cars sold) isn't as bad as long as there an industry wide cooperation to provide an alternative, it doesn't not affect existing cars and services dependant on gasoline while providing a constant reduction in emissions as more and more zero emission vehicles are put on the road.

Carbon emissions, smog and noise pollution are externalities and not reflected in the market. This creates the huge inefficiencies we see in the economy today with combustion cars still being produced. As Bobblebobble said the most efficient way to correct this is with a tax.

Other European countries are moving in the same direction.

The Netherlands is the one in which such a law seems likelier to be passed, also because of significantly less lobbying from the car industry (no major manufacturers, as opposed to Germany with Volkswagen, the second largest in the world).

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/neth...

In Europe they went after the large engines with a heavy tax cudgel.

The result was turbo-diesels and direct injection, which produce deadly particulates, not to mention ever fiddlier motors.

You know, sometimes it would be better to just let market forces do their thing. The downstream effects will be interesting and far reaching.

Not sure if that is a good or bad thing.

If you let the markets do their thing, you'll get a combination of actors focused on all timescales: some trying to get returns this year, some over the next 5 years, some over the next 50 years.

However, sometimes the actions taken by those seeking 1- or 5-year returns actually decrease the total amount of returns available over the 50 year horizon. This is a tragedy of the commons situation, and it may behoove a government to step in and remove the incentives for the short-term investors so that society can reap an overall larger profit.

Whether this is one of those cases I do not know.

It's not like markets just decide to do things. Simplistically the market responds to supply/demand. If the Germans guarantee a few million cars' worth of demand to those who develop non-ICE cars, people will respond and create the supply. It's a bit of a cludge but progress isn't guaranteed, it must be chased and earned.

Collectively, computers consume far more energy than transport and so contribute more to emissions. Perhaps they should be banned.

Source for this claim?

By 2040, computers will need more electricity than the world can generate. So says the semiconductor industry's last ever communal roadmap

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/25/semiconductor_indust...

That's not a source for the claim "computers consume far more energy than transport and so contribute more to emissions".

Computers use about 13% of the world's electricity.

Electricity production is about 25% of the world's greenhouse emissions, transportation is about 14%, so currently this isn't correct but within 10-15 years it potentially could be, of course it is dependant on the energy sources for both electricity production and transportation or to be more exact their share relative share of greenhouse emissions remaining proportionally similar.

Ha, yes, because, you know, burning coal for energy is better for the environment than burning gasoline.

Actually Germany produces 30% of its electricity demand via renewable energy sources[1]. The share of sources that vary in intensity during the day (wind, solar) would even be higher for electric cars, as they can be charged overnight, when the demand is lower than the supply.

Anyways, even for the part that comes from coal, there's still an advantage for big cities. The fossil fuel isn't burnt where people live and breathe, but outside of the city, increasing health considerably.

[1] https://www.bmwi.de/DE/Themen/Energie/Erneuerbare-Energien/e...

A big coal plant is more efficient than the lightweight ICE that moves around with a car.

Also note that many countries in the world don't exclusively get power from coal, and that amount is certain to go down in the coming years, dramatically so in the coming decades.

No, it's approximately the same. If you get your electricity from 100% coal your emissions will be about the same as a gas burning car.

Most places don't use strictly coal for electricity generation though.

According to Marc Tarpenning (Tesla founder), EVs produce less carbon than combustion vehicles, even if 100% of the power is generated by coal:

https://youtu.be/hf15nMnayXk?list=FL68WumAcUAWIBaxczXoR-1Q&t...

The reason is that combustion engines - even modern ones - are very inefficient and lose most of the energy they produce to heat. Large coal plants are efficient by comparison, and EVs themselves are extremely energy-efficient even when considering grid losses etc.

Yes, maybe you even burn more fossil fuel because of transmission loss. But one might still gain on better filtering of dust/particulates in the exhaust which is a major problem in German inner cities.

(I'm not advocating the use of coal energy to power electric cars, just mentioning that there are more aspects.)

Coal plants can run more efficiently though.

My take, correct me if I'm wrong but switching to electric transport means electric power consumption goes up by 25%. Nothing says we need to build more coal fired plants to provide it.

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