The electric car has dropped out of favor in Denmark

Indeed, it is payed even if you live in Denmark, go buy a car in Germany, drive it back to Denmark yourself, and want to use it there.

Trickle down environmentalism is just like regular trickle down economics.

(The steel/aluminum/plastics of a car's exterior/interior/chassis are shared by cars regardless of drive train and still the overall impact of those materials dwarfs the environmental impact of battery technologies.)

ETA: For what it's worth, I think the downvotes on this comment are fair too. It doesn't need to be reiterated that tired, off-topic comments are tired and off-topic every time somebody makes one. I answered because I feel bad when I see somebody confused, but this is another example of a comment that probably deserves to be downvoted even though it's correct.

Actually: The logic here is: “Tesla batteries use graphite; the world’s biggest source of graphite is in China; China has terrible pollution; therefore, Tesla is partially responsible for China’s pollution.” Except when I did some digging, I learned that Tesla uses synthetic graphite made mostly in Japan and Poland, and that the average Model S uses 100kg of it. That 100kg lasts for ten years, so the amount of graphite used to make a Model S is similar to the amount you’d use if you had a few barbecues a year.

Seems like with compression, x/y offsets, and rotation you could fit just about curve.

In contrast, as of today, the Model 3 doesn't even exist.

Personally speaking, I don't buy the first model of any car anyway. If I were seriously considering the Model 3, I wouldn't plan on buying it till 2019 at the earliest. That would give Tesla enough time to work out the issues that the first batch of cars will inevitably have.

No car company has ever launched a new model line without issues. The issues may be major, or minor (like doors or windows not closing properly... rattles and that sort of thing). Inevitably, the first year or two are basically a public beta-test. For what basically amounts to a dozens-of-thousands of dollars investment, I want to make sure the car manufacturing company gets it right.

https://www.carsales.com.au/car/nissan/leaf/

Not sure about that Focus, but electric cars have vastly fewer moving parts which should help quite a bit.

A 5 year old base 3-series has always been affordable, unless you include maintenance and the price/availability of parts.

Nissan didn't (and still might not) have active cooling in their batteries and was seeing high failure rates in states like Arizona. Because of this, Nissan ended up extending battery warranties to 8 years / 100,000 miles. Basically if there is anything wrong with the battery or it's capacity drops below 9 bars (starts at 12), then Nissan will replace it.

Combined state and federal deductions on EVs were up to 50% of the purchase or lease price of a Leaf and could be deducted over several years. This combined with annual fuel savings when gas was $4 a gallon meant people could drive a new car for little more than the cost of insurance since Nissan was including free charging at qualified stations for 2 years. So a lot of Leafs were bought or leased and being dumped on the market now that all the incentives are drying up.

Right now with our relatively limited driving, it appears E6 is better for me, but I’m sure if you drive enough, the 50% discount at night is worth it.

The problem is that when you turn busses into cars for hire you end up in a situation where you'll get a lot of people pissed all the time.

Ride sharing with even 5 people that are not bound to the same destination is a nightmare.

Think about what happen when you have a bus with 18 people that is diverted because someone called it and then cancels it?

How do you plan stops? Uber can stop nearly anywhere a bus usually needs bus stop not just to not block traffic but because people need to be able to safely get on and off the bus which is much harder to do than with a car as a bus blocks the view much more than a smaller sedan.

Sorry; I'll buy a Tesla that works for Uber while you are at work all day long, I will not buy ridesharing with on-demand hailing and bespoke routes and destinations with 20 people on board.

The best thing you can do get working is a fixed route without fixed stops, and this works today it's called hop-on-hop-off busses and it works in many places including London.

I suspect that eventually you will be able to charge your electric car only from an approved charger that bills you a higher-rate car tariff, just like you can only use fuel sold at a petrol station in your car.

As for the telematics - excuse me saying so, but the UK government can fuck off with suggesting even more surveillance, it's hard to fight off insurers installing telematics boxes as it is already.

Sure, and if you keep yourself warm at night by burning e50 bills, you won't be taxed extra, either. My point is not (or only partially) about the current tax, or how it's justified. My point is that the societal context in which these taxes were instated are a key point to understanding why things are the way they are. And the pertinent part of that context is Calvinistic austerity, which is ingrained in Dutch collective psyche. I know that there is significant cognitive dissonance among a large part of the Dutch population when someone claims that religion has shaped their world view in some way, especially among those that consider themselves 'atheistic liberals', but it's silly to deny it - there are tomes and tomes written about this in social science literature. I mean fuck - my wife gets almost angry when I claim that her world view is shaped in part by the society she grew up in, and therefore by religion, as much of Dutch society is influenced by Christianity one way or another. But objectively speaking, how can this point be denied?

Anyway, when the BPM was reformed a decade ago, the objective was to keep it 'fiscally neutral', meaning that the amount levied in total needed to stay (roughly) the same as it was before. So current rates are a direct consequence of the way it used to be. In Belgian law (where a similar thing happened in 2012 or 2013 I think) it's even more explicit; there a (what I think is a) regression formula is part of the law that determined the new calculation for the 'road tax' as it is called there. Tweaking the parameters in that formula until projected revenue matched historical revenue was essentially how those rates were determined. In such a case, how can one claim that it's really about environmental concerns? Of course the direction (towards 'polluter pays') is there; but again, my main point (but I'll agree that I'm probably burying it between all the tangents...) is that the real answer to the GP is: to understand the why of these taxes, you have to understand the society it operates in.

I think we need to be more radical and apply zones across the whole of the city and apply restrictions 24/7. Discounts for a zone would apply if resident, no off road parking, and city car (no diesel/small).

Commuters would only be allowed permits if city car. Nottingham also brought in Workplace parking permits.

Cities have the infrastructure in place (good public transport combined with park and ride) to encourage people to leave their cars at the edge of cities. Residents within cities should not be driving to work within the city. Neither should parents be dropping kids off by car.

Naturally there are always people that need cars. Even Copenhagen cannot get below 9% car usage despite 62% of people cycling.

Nobody's trying to undervalue the car as costing €1,000 with a €10,000 stereo, that would be fraud.

The point is that by introducing differences in what sort of taxes you have to pay for certain products you trivially open yourself up to legal tax evasion in the form of simply bundling higher cost items as part of products in lower tax categories.

Perhaps a better example: Let's say you have a 200% tax on cylindrical metal tubes, but a 10% tax on bicycles. A lot of people would now legally import bicycle frames, cut them apart, and evade the import fees without the authorities being able to do anything about it. There's nothing illegal about buying a bicycle frame, and there's nothing illegal about cutting apart your bicycle and re-using it for parts.

[1] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/htt...

Sure, I would like my own single family home, as long as I have access to all the other people and activities that make life worthwhile. Even better, I would like to have a castle in the wilderness, permitting no entrance without permission, with a teleporter so I can instantly commute to civilization.

In the real world, we balance the things that we desire with what we need and what we can pay. Would you want to live in a single-family home if you had to pay what it really costs? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/2/a-thousand-hidd...

In California, some of us recognize that castles are sprawl that destroys the wilderness. http://www.sfhac.org

Also, the world isn't my problem, just my neighborhood, and there we're making a lot of progress.