New diesel and petrol vehicles to be banned from 2040 in UK | Hacker News Reader

New diesel and petrol vehicles to be banned from 2040 in UK

bbc.com

58 pointsnoir-york112 comments

2040? The rate things are going they should be considering banning the USE of fossil-fueled cars by 2040, except for some specialized categories.

But in any case outright bans don't seem to me the best idea, they should just give advance notice of swingeing environmental taxes to come.

Exactly. But this is still not too bad, as it sends a clear message that petrol and diesel cars will be banned in the not too distant future, so the car makers need to start getting ready for that right now. I'm also hoping that governments who use 2040 as a deadline are also willing to revise it if by 2025 we already have 20% of the cars on the market as EVs, with over 50% of the sales being EVs.

My guess is the decision was driven from the opposite direction, the government probably asked the car manufacturers when they think they will no longer be making cars with internal combustion engines, then announced that as the cutoff date.

Agreed. Its no surprise that it's the same date France announced for the a similar policy earlier this month.

If you ban the use of these cars then you also need to account for some kind of scrappage scheme for people with now-outlated ICE cars. Otherwise you're disproportionately affecting people who can't afford to get rid of their faithful 150k mile diesel in favour of a £10k+ new car.

this is where public transport needs more funding.

public transport is never going to let you go where and when you need to go unless you live in very dense cities. So no, thats not a solution.

The story is about the UK and there are plenty of rural areas in the UK with good public transport: I live in one such and don't own a car.

You just did the software debugging equivalent of saying "it works for me" :)

Ehh, no, "it works where I am and it could work where you are" isn't "works for me" - it's pointing out that areas with shitty public transport don't have to have shitty public transport, that's just the obvious result of bus deregulation and a lack of relevant subsidies on the part of local Government.

That's a legitimate response when someone says "this doesn't work and could never possibly work".

I live in Devon in the middle of nowhere and the public transportation is excellent. I also don't drive, and I have no trouble getting where I need to be.

Lucky you. We lost one of our major bus providers in Cornwall a few years back and public transport has been shite ever since.

I literally cannot take public transport to and from work, it's that bad.

and even when there is public transport it does not work at night so it becomes a mess quickly if you enjoy going out.

I lived in the UK until I was 28 and never had a car. I lived mostly in small towns and the country, never had a car, wasn't a problem.

The UK has a reasonably good public transport network though it's horribly over-priced since privatisation, especially trains.

try doing the school run with 2+ differently aged kids

try getting stuff back from ikea with kids

what about plumbers and tradespeople

sure you can rent a car but then you are talking £££

just because it worked for you does not mean everyone else could follow suit

As wrote above, it depends on the culture.

I can tell you for certain that kids and ikea can be handled, and are handled, without the need for a car, where the culture supports it.

Plumbers and tradespeople (and who else) are a small part of the population. That is not representative, especially considering that nobody's talking about banning cars completely.

I don't doubt that in a city without good public transport and bike support the activies above are practically impossible.

Ultimately, it depends on the direction a given culture wants to point to.

sure you can rent a car but then you are talking £££

Owning a car costs, and not little. So very general statement like this don't make much sense.

indeed a car costs money so you can be sure that when most people have one it means they really need it and that its not for show.

I live in a town in Germany, with two kids and no car. Zero problems. If I order furniture online (or even in my town), a truck delivers it to the doorstep.

It does seem like many germans live wiThout cars. I lIved in Germany before and everyone I knew aroUnd me, in a small town, had a car and really needed one.

In smaller towns and villages, certainly. I live in the city, and most friends who live in the same city don't have a car. I don't even have a driver's license. If I need a car (to buy furniture or to bring something to the recycling depot), I ask a friend to rent a car for two hours at my expense.

I'm not trying to talk for anyone else, just giving my experience. I now live in Barcelona and have a 4 year old son. Most of the furniture in our flat is from Ikea. So while a car would certainly make things easier at times, it's not essential in many cases. Depends where you live of course. In the country with kids would be a lot less manageable I agree.

It's very much "yes, and" here: much of the UK needs better public transport anyway, especially local buses. Something like half the population lives or works in dense cities or towns - most UK city and town cores are on dense medieval street plans.

This statement is incorrect, if posed in the general form, as a distinction needs to be made between cultures where public transport is core (eg. some parts of Europe), or individual transport is (eg. some parts of USA).

I don't doubt that in the latter it's hard to live without a car, but in the former, you can definitely live without it, and use other means for the exceptional cases.

Before the 1960s and the Beeching Cuts, it was fairly easy to get everywhere in the UK — tiny villages included — by rail. I live in tiny village in Devon with a population of 250 people. It had a train station until the 60s. Today, my village has excellent bus service: two or three buses an hour into the nearest large cities and towns. That's likely because it's a big draw for tourists and hikers, and the roads around here aren't designed for lots of cars (many of them are too narrow for more than one vehicle at a time), but it's certainly possible.

If the government had the will to invest in infrastructure, public transport is a reasonable option in the UK.

20 years from now self owned cars will be a rarity. I live in Singapore where the government has always been very anti car ownership and all its policies including great public transport didn't have as much effect as allowing grab and Uber did to bring down the car population in the last 2 years.

Yeah pal try that in the US.

Public transit is straight up impossible in many, many areas because few places offer transit that’s actually good enough for never using cars... Good luck reliably getting an Uber in Hicksville, SC or anywhere that’s rural.

Singapore was already full of super cheap Taxis well before Uber.

The price was cheap but normal taxi service was not convenient or good enough. Grab and Uber have changed that it is not just about the price but the convenience which was my main point.

Would >20 years advance warning not be sufficient? I assume such a car would already have significant mileage even today.

Many carbon reduction (or insidiously, pro car sales) policies have this effect. Poorer people spend a bigger portion of income on petrol, so petrol/carbon txes hit them harder. registration taxes or other requirements favour newer, more expensive cars (richer owners) which perform better relative to new (more carbon focused) standards.

In terms of political dynamic (in some of europe, in any case) the "side" of politics most concerned with avoiding regressive taxes is also the side most concerned with carbon levels, so we don't tend to have that discussion play out.

> the "side" of politics most concerned with avoiding regressive taxes is also the side most concerned with carbon levels, so we don't tend to have that discussion play out

That's a really interesting point. I'm not sure what the solution is? A scrappage scheme open to everyone (regardless of income) may not be financially viable, so then do you apply means testing or something? Hmm.

Announcing swingeing taxes means not getting elected next time, even if they are the right thing to do.

Which is why you boil the frog slowly. Start with a tiny tax. And automatically raise it a few percent every year. By the time anyone even notices, it's been in place for years and the people who passed it are out of office.

That's basically what they are doing here, announcing a ban that won't take effect for 23 years. A tax is just a soft ban.

This restriction applies to all cars not new only as far as I can tell. This is quite different to banning new car sales only.

Banning something is much more clear cut. The social benefits and costs can be discussed and we can come to an agreement democratically. A tax system just allows people to continue doing something that is damaging. The government effectively sell the right to abuse a shared resource. Like buying a ticket that allows you to drop litter.

I know that petrol and diesel contribute massively to the air quality issues we have in major cities like London (where I live and work), but as a car lover I'm also disappointed by this measure and what it would mean for people like me who love our cars.

What I'd like to see more than anything is the following:

1. Diesel powered vehicles are banned from London's congestion charge zone from 2020. If you want to drive in this zone you must drive a petrol, PHEV or fully electric vehicle. Government provides incentives for taxi drivers to trade in their old diesel taxis for PHEV or electric.

2. All London transport is fully electric by 2020. Their current hybrid buses are a joke. They spend about 5 seconds between stops on battery mode and then almost immediately start up their diesel engines on leaving each stop.

3. All new econobox cars are fully electric within the next 5 years. UK government invests in providing charging stations at existing petrol stations across the UK.

4. Sports cars and performance cars still use petrol engines. We also undo the "engine downsizing" trend that was started to help meet unrealistic emissions regulations tests. When on boost, small turbo-charged petrol engines use more fuel than their larger, naturally aspirated predecessors.

1. This is essentially the same as the T Charge which comes into effect in October this year. Diesel taxis are exempt, which is a shame seeing as they are very high polluters, and also drive around all day long.

2. That would be nice, but 2020 is too soon to be realistic. Unless some of the newer busses have options to operate solely under battery with some modifications.

3. Gov. should absolutely invest in infrastructure.

4. Yes, this. It would be seen as favouring the rich, but there should be an exemption for petrol powered performance cars. Some of the finest examples of human engineering are found in supercars and it would be a shame for them to die out. Tesla is obviously a great example of an electric sports car, but there's something to be said for petrol sports cars. Of course, if all the car companies are working electric mass market cars, they'd probably stop working on petrol high end vehicles anyway.

Yeah, the thing to be said about petrol sports cars is that they have poor acceleration.

BTW there are all-electric busses available in the market. Stanford has a fleet of them from BYD, and there's also an American manufacturer, ProTerra. I've been stuck behind one of the BYD busses and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it accelerated.

I drive a classic Toyota Supra and agree that I don't want to see ICE-powered cars banned completely. Where the government screwed up was with diesels; other than higher CO2 per mile, petrol-powered cars are actually quite clean, and we have ways (at least theoretical) for dealing with CO2. We have no idea how to deal with diesel emissions - NO2 and particulate matter are a big question mark.

Hybrids are also very silly - while on one power source, the other is dead weight, which requires more energy to propel, dragging the efficiency down. They're a stopgap measure, nothing more. I agree that public transport needs to go pure-electric/zero-emission very soon - as soon as a bus pulls away, it spews a visible cloud of black diesel smoke, no matter how old it is or whether it's a hybrid.

A major problem I see is that many young people (myself included) are totally priced out of homeownership and therefore dependent on renting housing, meaning I cannot get access to a charging point at home. Even as a petrolhead, I would be interested in driving an electric car day to day or purely as a mode of transport, keeping my Supra for recreation only.

I checked the Supra's most recent MOT and it almost meets the 2008 (most recent) petrol emissions standards, with CO emissions off by a mere 0.2%. Larger, port-injected engines are clean enough to remain in use. Direct-injection petrols also suffer from higher NO2 emissions just like diesels, due to the higher combustion temperatures, so not only do these small engines use more fuel under boost (where they are most of the time), they produce worse emissions too.

> Hybrids are also very silly - while on one power source, the other is dead weight, which requires more energy to propel, dragging the efficiency down

Overall though the efficiency is higher. I get around 47 US MPG or 5l/100km in the city. Loaded with five people and on the highway I got 40.5 US MPG or 5.8l/100km.

"Hybrids are also very silly - while on one power source, the other is dead weight, which requires more energy to propel, dragging the efficiency down. They're a stopgap measure, nothing more."

Extra batteries are also a heavy load, whether full or empty. So it's not that simple a calculation. Also, the power sources do often work together, in various ways, so it's not always a question of two parallel systems, but rather considering it as a whole system working together, which in many case is better than either alone.

As battery prices fall, and energy densities rise, and fast charge solutions are rolled out widely, then pure EVs will push out hybrids, but they'll be around for a while and have already saved a whole lot of money (it surprises me how little people consider efficiency when thinking about moving civilization forward and making everyone wealthier) as well as toxic emissions and greenhouse gasses.

You're right in that it is indeed more complex, especially since hybrids use electric propulsion almost all the time. My point was that, while operating in pure battery-electric mode, the engine and fuel are nonfunctional and must be dragged around. An engine driving an electric generator is indeed more efficient than a pure ICE drivetrain, but versus the potential efficiency of a pure-electric power source, that's why I said 'dragging the efficiency down'.

I agree completely, hence my comment about them being a stopgap measure. Once pure-EVs are able to offer comparable range and charge time to a tank of fuel, hybrids will be consigned to history.

"Their current hybrid buses are a joke. They spend about 5 seconds between stops on battery mode and then almost immediately start up their diesel engines on leaving each stop."

Getting a heavy vehicle moving from a stop is the hardest work the engine will do. Having the high torque of electric motors to do this (or even just help the engine by working together with it) is probably the highest impact point for reducing emissions. It will probably allow for design changes in the engine to improve efficiency too since it now has a narrower range to aim for. Since busses stop and start a great deal, they get a double-win by using regenerative braking to store the energy of slowing the massive bus for use on start.

So, not as cool as fully electric buses (which are rapidly rolling out in many areas as the make a great deal of economic sense, even without taking into account externalities like air quality and climate change) but an important stepping stone with some thought and engineering behind them.

1) Difficult, but may be necessary; the health cost of particulates pollution is getting harder to ignore.

2) Not great but better than nothing. Buses spend a lot of time idling. Maybe we should bring back the trolleybus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trolleybus_systems_in_...

3) Sadly the market is going to have to be converted from the top down, because at the moment electric cars just have a higher sticker price. That leads into (4): this change will be a lot more popular if the "aspirational" car segment converts voluntarily first. Having a petrol performance car needs to become as socially unpopular as smoking.

In fact, maybe we need more extreme engine downsizing. Cap engine size and horsepower aggressively; large petrol domestic vehicles should be sluggish.

We'll have to address the commercial fleet as well, especially lorries.

The issue here is that, in most cases, while engine downsizing tends to provide some decrease in emissions, fuel consumption isn't all that much better.

If you look at the Fiat 0.9 Twinair 2 cyclinder engine real world consumption is somewhere between 35 and 40MPG despite a manufacturer claimed 68MPG. You cannot have a car with less than 80BHP either, it would be undriveable. In comparison, the VW EA888 2.0 turbo petrol engine (in the Golf GTI, Golf R, etc) has the same real-world consumption (because I drive one), yet can produce up to 300BHP at the top of the rev range if and when you need it. The reason for this is that the engine produces so much power and torque in the low-mid rev range compared to the 0.9 Twinair, the same rate of acceleration is possible without having to work the engine at all. It's not until you put the car into Race mode and use full open throttle that consumption drops below 30MPG to the mid 20s. What's more, in the case of automatic transmissions, gear ratios and software can be made to work the engine at low RPMs 99% of the time to decrease fuel consumption. This isn't possible with the 0.9 Twinair engine because it produces too little power at low revs.

> You cannot have a car with less than 80BHP either, it would be undriveable

Why say things like this, which are so easily contradicted? I used to drive a Peugeot 306 1.4 with a 75BHP engine that was perfectly adequate.

I'm sure that people like big heavy cars that accelerate quickly, but it's worth questioning how much you actually "need" one.

Because I also drive a VW Up! with a 59BHP engine (1.0 N/A) and I think the engine is too weak for the car.

The issue isn't the peak power, but the torque curve. Small, naturally aspirated engines have very poor torque curves, which means that you really have to rev the engine to get the rated power from it. In real driving, where you're between 2,000 and 4,000RPM most of the time, the engine only makes at most 40BHP (peak torque of a meagre 80lb-ft doesn't come in until 3,500RPM). This is fine for driving in built up areas, but it's really bad when you need to accelerate up-hill on an on-ramp to join a motorway or build up speed on dual carriageways where there are roundabouts every mile.

Cars have gotten a fair bit heftier since the days of the 306, largely due to advances in safety (crumple zones, airbags etc). Would you be willing to trade all that for better emissions?

My GF's VW Up! with a beefy 59 BHP is perfectly driveable.

Sure, I do find myself shifting more than on my car and it won't push past 100 mph but it can comfortably do 80 mph on the motorway.

It also gets about 60 mpg on regular use ( best i've measured is 70 mpg, beating VW's figures, IIRC; Mostly A roads and motorway within the speed limit)

4. does not make any sense (especially considering your quite sensible 1-3) beyond: "I like it, therefore it should be so! Let's have the masses take care of the environment so we can have more fun on the expense of it."

I think if wasteful petrol performance cars are banned or at least prohibitively taxed it would open up a lot of innovation to get fun cars (or driving experiences real or virtual) to the market.

Don't get me wrong, I like the thrill of a performance car too, but I can't take this line of reasoning seriously if we are talking about tens of thousands of premature deaths a year of pollution in London alone let alone the much bigger environmental topic.

My concern with electric sports/performance cars is their weight over ICE cars. It ruins the characteristics of the car. You can add power to hide the weight of the car on a straight line, but in the corners the extra weight catches up to you fast. If anyone here has ever driven a Caterham or a Lotus they'll know exactly what I mean by this.

4. should make distinction between the one primarily used for recreation and one also used for e.g. commuting. Majority of cars are used purely for transportation and are expendable. Therefore it is reasonable to introduce a shift to electric because it has a higher impact. Track day cars are driven less miles, though slightly higher emission per mile, with smaller impact in total. It is as wasteful as operating a roller coaster in a Disneyland.

Most people don't care about what car they drive. For them driving a Prius is just fine. For petroheads driving a Prius is NOT fine. It feels as if Mac enthusiasts are forced to live forever with Windows XP, or Emacs/Vim users forced to write code with Notepad, or a mechanical keyboard user forced to live with a cheap membrane keyboard. It brings a huge disappointment to their life. For most people switching to a dull car means nothing, since they have been driving a dull car, which is not the case for them.

By the way, the more serious track day cars, without audio/AC/insurator, are painful and impossible to drive daily, in my personal experience. Especially the summer. One day I was dehydrated and could not shift properly.

> [Hybrid buses] spend about 5 seconds between stops on battery mode and then almost immediately start up their diesel engines on leaving each stop.

The point is that the diesel engines can always run at 1000-2000 rpm, which is the area of maximum fuel efficiency.

1997: Legislation to ban sales of CRT television and computer screens by 2020.

Politicians. Heartfelt sigh.

I don't think any manufacturer will be (or want to be) selling ICE cars in 2020, but it gives those manufacturers a mandate to push ahead with deprecating ICEs without scaring share holders.

That seems extremely optimistic, that is 29 months from now. I don't know how long development cycles are in the car industry, but I am pretty sure there are many engineers working on ICE cars to be released in 2020 right now.

I think they meant 2040, not 2020?

Yes I did, sorry... getting confused with this and Flash ;)

As both a petrolhead and a UK resident, I do think this is moving in the right direction. The internal-combustion engine has had its day. Electric and alternative-fuel vehicles are rising in efficiency and range, and it's becoming much more practical to ditch fossil fuels. The number of scandals that have come to light over increasingly tight emissions regulations shows that there is no future in burning fuel. Hopefully the price of electric cars will continue to fall as battery technology improves, although we do still need to address the problem of emissions from manufacturing the batteries in the first place and emissions from generating electricity to charge them. Also, hopefully 2040 is a hard deadline, and car makers will retire the ICE before that point.

That said, I hope the use of older cars won't be outright banned. Even though electric cars are becoming much better performers with improving technology, you cannot beat the roar and power curve of a combustion engine around a track or twisty road. Hopefully they'll go like horses - electric cars will take over point to point transport, while ICE-powered vehicles will be for recreation.

Elsewhere, while this is a good start, I think we seriously need to rein in the emissions of EVERYTHING that burns fossil fuels. Power plants are already under scrutiny, but shipping is not - it's becoming increasingly clearer that container ships, which burn low-quality heavy oil in international waters, contribute vastly more to air pollution than a large number of cars.

> you cannot beat the roar and power curve of a combustion engine around a track or twisty road. Hopefully they'll go like horses - electric cars will take over point to point transport, while ICE-powered vehicles will be for recreation

This this this. I think electric cars are great and should replace all non-recreational modes of transport. However, they simply do not compare to the joy and involvement you get from ICE cars. The sound and torque curve is critical for the experience, as is the involvement from a manual transmission and three pedals. I hope that petrol cars will live on.

This is 23 years into the future. If autonomous cars take off in that time, the future may be that you won't be able to drive a non-autonomous car on the roads.

If that were to happen, it would be the motorways first. I would guess. But it would mean that deaths would be significantly reduced.

Found this info from 2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

  Road deaths:1,732
  Seriously injured:22,137
  Total: 186,209 casualties of all severities

I predict attitudes are going to change where people driving on the roads especially when talking high speed will be banned.

If people aren't using petrol cars anymore then you won't have petrol stations every few miles, a full tank will become quite expensive as well due to lack of demand.

But hey, it's still a ways away. In my town there's an old sign at the entrance to the square saying that traction engines are forbidden. Today, cars drive through it.

What's normal today will change. Who knows how exactly, so enjoy it whilst it lasts!

I hope driving on the road will not be banned, but instead hope for the more strict law for a driver's license. Too many people pay not enough attention to driving, some may check emails, some may lack ethics, some may roadrage with ridiculous reasons, and so on. We are lucky that those people do not love driving and therefore are likely to welcome the introduction of autonomous cars. There would be an autonomous-only license in the future, bad drivers eliminated first (and shifted to autonomous cars).

I also believe realistically an abrupt change as a total ban on driving would not happen, and instead there will be a more gradual shift to the driverless society, which would only materialize at the time I become too old to drive. I am completely fine with it, by that time I would have enjoyed plenty of driving.

I was in rural France a couple of weeks back.

Idyllic, apart from motorbikes deciding to rev round those twisty bends every now and then. Everyone who lives near those twisty roads hate you. All of them mentioned the motorbikes.

I live in the middle of a city, the noise is high, but the really bad noise? Guys on motorbikes and ferraris and all the other petrol head vehicles. Revving up streets, powering from 0-30 as quick as they can, dangerous and noisy. The noise echos up the buildings and affects everyone in those buildings. Hundreds of people annoyed for one person's little thrill.

Personally I'm all for the complete banning of all these vehicles, right now, they are a horrid detriment to everyone in ear-shot of them, for the pleasure of one.

If you want speed, go to a race track.

I agree. I think recreational use of ICE vehicles is fine from an emission point of view, if not many people do it. But this noise is another matter. Those petrolheads are going to be exactly the ones with deliberately and obnoxiously loud cars and bikes.

don't think they gonna solve the range and recharge time issue by then. as someone that moved countries multiple times, that concerns me.

battery swap has it's set of problems (either accepting a leasing model or dealing with storage issues at home)

Range is increasing steadily, as companies figure out how to cram more lithium into the battery. Teslas can manage a healthy 200 miles per charge. City cars like the Nissan Leaf can stretch 155 miles. Recharge times are actually restricted more by how much power you can pull from the grid at once - lithium batteries allow many kilowatts at a time to be pumped into them, provided they're cooled correctly, but this puts an obvious strain on the local grid. In theory, having a large feed direct from a power station at a petrol station would allow you to charge an electric car in a comparable time to tanking up with petrol.

Battery swap is indeed an issue, but (again, in theory) batteries can be recycled, so the owner could sell the expired pack to a recycler to reclaim the lithium. Most current cars have the battery underneath the chassis, and there are demos of dropping a Tesla's pack in 90 seconds. Some proposals have been made for mechanically switching the pack at a charging station with a full one, then the pack is recharged separately for someone else to use. This fits nicely with the leasing model, but obviously needs a lot of investment.

Leasing is also a good option because replacing the battery at the end of its life is then the duty of the manufacturer, although lithium batteries are pretty good even at five years old - I can get many years of life out of a good-quality laptop battery, so I wouldn't hesitate with an electric car.

If it goes as planned (which I doubt) then this would destroy basically every outdoor hobby I have. I like to ride vintage motorcycles, and have got my eye on a 30 year old camper van. Most of my weekends are spent camping in some field or other making new friends and socialising with like minded people.

Sure, petrol might still be legal, but with no demand from new vehicles, how long will it continue to be available. It certainly won't be affordable - as soon as a decent proportion of voters are no longer affected by petrol prices, duty will skyrocket.

My personal feeling is that if this is the direction we're going in, we might as well just go the whole hog and outlaw human drivers too. At least that way you get the safety and traffic flow benefits that come with every vehicle on the road knowing what every other vehicle is doing.

Whatever they do, they'll take my bike when they prise it from my cold dead fingers.

Well that's going to be interesting. We're already reaching end of life for some of our older nuclear reactors, coal plants are closing as they are unable to comply with EU emissions regulations and we're basically propping the whole thing up with gas and coal. Every new infrastructure project in this space is a walking disaster of cost and chaos. And to add insult to injury we're doing a very stupid thing and bailing out of Europe which means it's going to cost more to import electricity.

So, what are we going to power our cars with? I'm betting I'm on a bicycle again in 2040. Perhaps "peak car ownership" is over.

And what are we going to do with all the petrol and diesel cars then? Bury them? Recycling them is more difficult than it looks.

I manage without a car, I have no intention of getting one again. For the few occasions I need one, I either borrow one from a friend or hire one.

Granted I do live Bristol, a very cycling friendly city.

I am in a similar situation albeit in suburban South-West London. I bought a car in 2006 and it's still hanging on but I have no intention of replacing it. It gets used as a shopping trolley mostly. Literally every use case it had historically is covered by online services now. There's barely even any point going to retail outlets these days as the probability of success is so low compared to online.

Your story is atypical given that you live in an area that's a)difficult to drive in (lots of traffic, little parking), b)incredibly well-connected by about half a dozen public transport options. You shouldn't be making generalisations that no one needs a car anymore just because you don't.

Urban and suburban areas cover about 20m people, a third or so of the population.

so the minority of users, seeing as 2/3rd of the population don't live in a Urban and suburban area.

I live in a Rural area in the UK, i have a 20 mile commute to work, and its 6 miles to the nearest city. There is 2 bus services that run though the "town" I live in both run one an hour and take about about an hour to to get anywhere useful.

I would be unable to work, and get around without a car, I live where i do because it was one of the few places i could afforded to buy a house in the area that I live, that was also close enough to where i work.

If they want to get rid of fossil fuel cars, then by 2040 they need to have far longer range than they do now. To me that seems to be far more important than public transport.

By 2040 you can probably hail autonomous EV taxis whenever you need one. Also note that you choose to increase your carbon footprint (an externalized cost hitting everyone) so you could have a cheaper home. It's not exactly unfair that people who made such a choice might end up with a slight disadvantage.

I made no such generalisation, merely stating my own situation.

It's about banning the sales of new ones, not banning the use. With a ban on new ones in 2040, it's not realistic to see a ban on use until 2060-2070 at the earliest.

If you ban sales I don't think you need to worry about use, within ten to fifteen years the majority will have been scrapped anyway. In fact, it will become quite difficult to run a petrol car as all the supporting infrastructure will disappear.

Unless they start banning petrol stations I dont see how the whole Infrastructure would disappear.

The infrastructure requirements for electric cars are completely different to traditional fuel stations. Instead of a splash-and-dash when the gauge starts touching the red, people will want to add 10-15 minutes whenever they get the chance. So you'll start seeing charge points cropping up in McDonalds, Costa, and anywhere else where people are parking up anyway.

The simplified infrastructure also makes it an industry where anybody can make money selling electricity. As soon as electric vehicles start becoming suitable replacements for current fleet/company cars, companies will snap them up, because now they can fit charge points for all company cars at the office, and make a little extra money from their employees by charging their cars while they work.

When fleet vehicles are all-electric, demand for petrol will drop by 50% or more within 3-5 years. The reasons above will mean it's not viable for smaller fuel stations to add electric charging, so they'll just die out. Just like we had with 4-Star, petrol will only be available at large supermarkets and motorway services, and the pumps will gradually be replaced with electric charge points.

At that point, even the petrolheads will be taking the electric cars for their day-to-day journeys because it's cheaper and easier. The guzzler will be saved for special occasions, and petrol will move to a delivery model, where you can order a 20l jerry can for £5-10 a litre if you're planning a trip. You'd better hope you don't break down though, because the recovery companies will only carry laptops by this point.

> The simplified infrastructure also makes it an industry where anybody can make money selling electricity.

Which ties in nicely with the announcement the other day about letting people store power in batteries and sell it back to the National Grid.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40699986

(Although I doubt this is intentional - our Government is not good at joinedupthinking.)

It will disappear because there will be no market for it.

it will take a very long time until the market needs dissappear. Not everyone replaces their cars as often as their phones.

I know of exactly one petrol station in a miler or two radius around my house, because the land here is too expensive to be able to sustain more. It is co-located with a proper grocery store, and a substantial proportion of its customer base are there just for the groceries.

As use of petrol drops, fewer and fewer stations will be able to run at a profit. So the infrastructure might technically still "be there" but you'll get to the point where the average distance between stations increases substantially to the point where refuelling becomes a nuisance and a reason for people to want to avoid a non-electric car.

Exactly. Hence why any ban would likely be 20-30 years afterwards, and largely about virtue signalling.

Yes I know that but the interest and value in cars will decline and this will result in a lot of scrap vehicles. All the supporting industries like repair and distribution of parts will be bailing out way before then.

Hopefully the purchase rate of EVs will go up in the meantime, and over the intervening 23 years the vast majority of cars in existence today will be scrapped through natural wearing out. The UK scraps something like a million cars a year already.

I don't own a car. Neither does any of my friends. I go to work by bike, and travel by train. I may want to have a car one day for travelling, when train or plane not an option, but not for use in daily life. I think peak car usage is already happening now in some places in western and central Europe[1]

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/21563280

Just curious, do you, or any of your friends who don't own a car, have any children?

I'd like to have a "carless" lifestyle as well, but I find that having two children makes it quite difficult to not own a car.

Exactly. When you start to consider the cost and inconvenience of travelling with several family members the car becomes quickly the best option.

Most of us have kids. It's nice in the train, we can play board games.

thats probably because you live in a large urban center. Not everyone is like you.

Which is why I wrote "in some places".

That doesn't really work for people in rural areas. Rural areas were by far the fastest adopters of cars when they were first invented.

Recycling them is more difficult than it looks.

Recycling automobiles is perfectly straightforward. They are crushed, shredded, and sorted. If there is a problem, it's the fact that scrap steel is down to $50/ton, so the whole exercise seems sort of pointless. "Dumping" by Chinese steel mills is apparently the cause of current low prices, but one could imagine even lower prices around 2040...

Gas and renewables. It pretty much has to be.

Unless the Brexit slump turns into some sort of cascade failure - some of the more alarmist commentators are wondering about security of food imports.

Edit: predictably the Conservative government is against the cheapest source https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/23/drop-in-...

This is slightly meta, but I'm curious about this concept of legislating for the distant-ish future.

My immediate reaction is "cheap" trick, quite literally. It's cheap in the sense that the political/public opposition will be pretty weak on legislation that happens 23 years from now. The authors won't be around to deal with the consequences.

It also feels a little wrong to deciding things They will presumably still have a parliament in 2040, shouldn't that parliament decide on laws? Conversely, if future parliaments will decide anyway by altering, we're back to cheap, empty gestures.

OTOH, maybe this is a way of de-politicizing.. focusing attention away from the short term, horse trading, and vocal interest groups.

Any thoughts on highly delayed legislation like this?

You could use that line of thinking to argue for all laws to be abolished when the next parliament is elected. Laws are almost always designed to be in effect until repealed so that parliament can focus on what needs changing (rather than what needs sustaining). It also makes society more stable and increases legal certainty.

If you want to argue against a law that goes into effect 20 years from today, I'd rather base the argument on our utter inability of predicting things.

planning a ban is stupid, they should just gradually increase the tax on it till cars disappear off the roads and fund public transport with that money.

but motorists are a huge voting block, only someone with a long tenure could ever make those decisions.

it worked for incandescent bulbs.

Weirdly, incandescent bulbs are one of the things that keep coming up on the list of alleged reasons for voting for Brexit. I think it's a bit like the Imperial-metric transition; there are holdouts with strongly felt views.

This smells like a "pass something to make it look like I'm doing something so I get re-elected, but take effect far enough away that it either gets repealed or becomes irrelevant so I keep my donors"

Well, first UK would have to get rid of fossil fuel power plants, make renewable more reliable and green, supported by nuclear, batteries themselves have to get notably more efficient, make manufacturing of the cars and batteries more green, recharging in under 5 minutes, massive recharge station network, EVs need to rapidly drop in price... yeah. It's a nice PR stunt though.

Can a new govt come in and cancel the ban in the future?

Yup.

One of the basic principles of democratic government is that you cannot bind the hands of a future government.

(Although signing treaties has some of that effect. And there will be publicity around changes which can put politicians off.)

As long as I can keep riding one of my early 90s VFR400s and keep putting fuel in my classic mini or BMW E30, I don't mind.

This news made me genuinely happy and hopeful for the future.

Hopefully, future governments won't turn back on this.

I don't think future governments will back down on this. They see the writing on the wall all too clearly.

I think people just won't want to buy ICE cars long before 2040 - they are simply more expensive to run than EVs. I also think if ride hailing, ZipCar alternatives and so on increase in availability, fewer people will actually want to own a car anyway.

Personally, I can't wait to not own a car, it's been one of my life ambitions for a few years now. I am very much looking forward to that day!

LOL.

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