France to end sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040

Where to read more about this law?

The price has a large intractable stone in it - the battery cost. It won't go down very fast until new technologies are adopted. And it take a giga-factory to adopt a new technology. Rule of thumb: battery tech has to double the charge and halve the weight or nobody is interested in building the factory.

The center of gravity argument depends upon the current heavier batteries - but e-cars can't take off until something like metal-air batteries are working. And they weigh just about as much as a gas tank does.

As for complexity, sure compared to the mechanical engine it's simpler - 100's of parts vs a dozen. But the software has just exploded by orders of magnitude. Millions of lines of code instead of thousands. We mustn't underestimate this.

Then, there's a core of car buyers that have to grow old and die, and be replaced by e-car enthusiasts before the market moves significantly. Beta-Max was better than VHS (for the old videotape guys out there) but it died simply by being too late.

No, we won't see a $15,000 focus for decades.

It seems like there are still too few EVs to fully understand their lifespan and long-term maintenance costs (including battery replacement).

I also want to see how fast "fast charging" will be and what kind of adverse impact it has on the battery. Is it acceptable to the usability and lifespan of the vehicle to routinely charge on fast chargers? I don't want to sit at the charging station for 45 minutes when a gas car can be fully fueled in 5 or less.

At home, my expectation is that a vehicle does not need a garage, so charging at home may present a logistical challenge (OR, weather-proof outside charging stations might also be deployed). Likewise for apartments and condos with shared parking.

I think all these issues can be overcome, but they will need some thoughtful approaches to ensure that EVs are reasonable for as many people as possible to own and use, not just the wealthy.

Here is a entertaining live map of electricity trade across Europe : https://www.electricitymap.org/

Let me know if you can spot any time when France is a net importer with any of its neighbours.

Not only does it constantly export to Germany, the CO2 intensity of its production is also 5 times less per kWh, and of course that is thanks to nuclear power.

Going nuclear-free is a noble mid-long term goal, nobody can disagree with that. But the German decision of doing so a couple of decades before renewables were ready to take over was completely demagoguery. It is one of the most bonkers environmental stances in the face of the actual immediate threat that is global warming.

Germany actually had to replace 80% of its nuclear power with... coal ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...

Good job, Die Grüne.

[0] http://www.cae-eco.fr/IMG/pdf/cae-note043.pdf

Terrestrial wind turbines can be sited in otherwise usable land. Or offshore.

>Windmills and solar kill birds at a much larger rate than activists would seem to care about.

A rate which is many orders of magnitude lower than killed by buildings, cats, coal plants, etc. This becomes a complex discussion when localized, sensitive populations are relevant, but on the whole it isn't a big issue.

Wind turbines and solar don't kill a significant number of birds; this is an old myth recently revived by Trump. In the US, wind turbines kill about 300k birds per year, power lines kill 30 million (mostly through collision), cars kill 200 million, and collision with buildings kills _600 million_.

While there's certainly room to improve on bird-wind turbine interactions, it's just not a major problem, and any resources used would be better spent improving the safety of buildings for birds.

> Please stop perpetuating this myth- started by Eric Raymond and happily encouraged by SV "thought leaders"- that hackers must, by definition, be laissez-faire capitalists who love Ayn Rand and treat breaking laws as a noble goal in and of itself. I do none of those things, because I recognize that many times regulations are vital for ensuring human health and happiness, and think that free-for-all capitalism leads mostly to misery for all but a few in the plutocracy. "We can do beter" implies not settling for a world like that.

> Other people don't have to agree with my politics, but if they want to say I'm "not a hacker" because of that, they can take their very-politically-motivated prescriptivism and... well, I got told by dang the other day and I'm trying to cut down on the angry HN posts because of it, but you get the idea.

So yeah, I'd say that historically, many (albeit not all) hackers have felt like we can do better than a system built on force/violence.

The problem is, too many people assume that seeking such a model rules out any kind of collective / communal action or coordination. That's just a strawman though. People can, and do, collaborate on a voluntary basis all the time. What is needed is to encourage and facilitate more of that, not seek more application of Ultimate State powers.

And I would think that somebody who considers themselves a hacker would look at a problem like that and think "Yeah, let's get too it and find a way to do this", not think "meh, let's just put up some huge State apparatus and call it good".

Upon which the regulations will be adjusted accordingly.

> My point is, these things are unknowable and uncertain and the state should stop issuing these authoritarian decrees and let the technology catch up and work itself out and then maybe we can collectively as a democratic society vote on and decide what we want the laws to be in 2040.

You mean like by the election they just had?

How is this any different? The government is not blind, they can make projections and at this point the must have concluded that alternatives are likely to be ready in time.

Plus cities are moving to ban ICE cars anyway due to particulate pollution instead of CO2.

If the goal looks more and more impossible as time goes on it can be adjusted, the more important aspect is making it a national goal in the first place. It's not much different than the US and CAFE standards, there's something quite powerful about a far off mandate that can make the impossible gradually doable.

If in 20 years battery-powered cars are still not feasible for most people, do you think the French government will forget that they have power to modify or repeal the law?

That clearing price has absolutely nothing to do with the cost to produce a good - especially if that cost is borne by someone not involved in the transaction.

The only people who think otherwise are Marxists - who believe that, on an equal playing field, the cost of a good is solely determined by the costs to produce it.

In general, an externality is something which happens to an unrelated third party due to some activity. An example of a positive externality is if someone waters their grass using a sprinkler, and there's enough excess spray from that sprinkler to keep your flowers sufficiently watered as well. A negative externality is, well, pollution: A truck drives by, belching toxic gasses, and you get to breathe them.

The problem with externalities is that they're not priced into the activity, because the cost is not borne by the person doing the thing which causes the externality. The owner of the truck which belched fumes near you isn't going to pay for your next asthma attack. Therefore, there's no incentive to stop doing those externality-causing activities, so they continue to happen.

The other half of the market failure at the heart of pollution is game theory, in this case a Prisoners' Dilemma: Say a company wants to stop polluting, but it can't be the only one, because not polluting is more expensive than polluting, so if it's the only one to stop, it gets out-competed. Thus we have the cooperate-defect choice: Cooperation means agreeing to not pollute as much, and then taking the steps to reduce pollution, and defection means agreeing with your fingers crossed, and then not reducing pollution at all. The best strategy for any individual actor in this system is to defect while everyone else cooperates, so you get to be the big economic winner in a cleaner environment because all the other suckers cooperated and reduced their pollution.

So. What's the solution? We need an entity which can make the polluters internalize the costs of pollution, so they're more likely to want to stop polluting for real, and can punish defectors who say they want to stop polluting and then don't. That entity, something which can levy and enforce punishments to pursue a policy, is a government, no matter what else it's called, and it can do those things because it's not bound to the same incentive structures which caused the market failure.

This is a peculiarity of Washington state. In much of the US, and the world, once your garbage is on the curb, there is zero expectation of privacy.

(And yes, I agree that we want to punish the real externality, which can be done by taxing, or banning coal, petroleum...)

However, forcing a switch to electric, without banning fossil fuels would still be a net gain - an electric vehicle powered by fossil fuels produces fewer GHGs per mile driven then a gasoline one.

I'd go as far as to say that "left" and "right" don't even really mean anything anymore. Those terms now are just pejoratives that refer to a perceived group that "doesn't agree with me". I mean, who in this day and age has a strong stake in the preservation of the French monarchy?

Nobody is saying that all "old-skool hackers" were libertarians, or that the "hacker ethic" is composed of nothing but those three things. But as long as I've been involved in what you could call "the hacker community" - a period of time that dates back more than 20 years now - I've observed that many self-described "hackers" did, indeed, adopt somewhat (albeit not exclusively) libertarian attitudes, and did adhere to principles like the ones mentioned above.

Whether the mind-set of self-described "hackers" has changed over the years, or whether this site is simply made up of a lower percentage of "hackers" now is a question I can't really answer. Or maybe it's a combination of both. But in either case, it seems clear to me that there has been a shift in the overall tone of the community here, towards more acceptance of authoritarian approaches.

And frankly I find that disturbing, but what can ya do?

If auto firm A makes the deadline and is able to sell awesome EV vehicles and auto firm B and C have only so-so, because they didn't take the law seriously, A is going to sell a lot more vehicles. So autofirms have to start considering these sorts of government regulations in their R&D budgets today. The investments made today will help determine their outcomes in 2040.