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Comment by sharpercoder | Hacker News Reader

Fun story. I bought a very fuel efficient diesel car (build: 2001) 3 years ago. It does 94 mpg or 1L per 30KM. Since then, many cities in my country decided to introduce "pollution zones", banning diesels of 2000 and older. My old home city decided to go one step further and ban diesels of 2004 and older. When I visit family and friends, I actually have to actively route around it. Which is ironic, since my car is more fuel efficient then most cars currently produced. But I guess the NOx exhaust also matters (which is much higher with diesels).

To be frank, it surprises me that I can go around in my car still at all. Burning diesel to move people should be banned by now, especially with the market flooding with EVs.

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And diesel cars like yours are THE reason why these type of legislation is being put into place. Your 2001 diesel is most likely a euro 3 emission type and that put on average 3x more NOx and 10x as much diesel particulate matter in the air per km driven than a 2010 euro 5 diesel (1).

Of course you can do a calculation on how it is economically better to drive a car for a longer period of time compared to factories using resources to make new cars. But at this moment all the focus is to get NOx and particulate matter emissions down, preferably in cities.

So noone, except you, cares about how fuel efficient your old car is because even the biggest modern Mercedes, BMW or Audi luxury barge is more environmentally friendly than yours. Buy any modern (less than 5 years old) normal everyday car and immediately you lower the amount the amount you pollute in your everyday driving.

1: http://ecoscore.be/nl/legislation/european

Yeah, low-emissions diesel branding is a criminal oxymoron.

It’s 100% the particulate and NoX emissions that are the major problems for those of us living in urban populations.

This is one of the reasons why I was surprised Tesla revealed a semi before a city bus. Getting the air and noise pollution out of city centers alone is a big win.

City busses also dont have as much energy-density issues (can swap busses or batteries) and regenerative braking would also be a big win, especially with the way bus drivers drive.

Electric buses is a competitive business; semis less so, from what I can tell. Tesla probably has a better head start there.

Semis outside the city avoid stop-and-go, which drastically affects mileage. City buses are almost strictly stop-and-go, if for nothing more than alighting of passengers.

Unfortunately optimizing combustion for fuel economy can increase emissions dramatically. Two primary examples- 1) efficiency rises with combustion temperature; however over a certain threshold temperature NOx starts to spontaneously form much more rapidly 2) efficiency rises with combustion pressure; however a high compression engine tends to have a combustion chamber shaped like a pancake instead of a sphere or cylinder, which tends to cause incomplete combustion raising particle emissions.

Edit: I forgot another, a leaner mixture (more air less fuel) helps get the most complete combustion for maximum efficiency and low particulate, but the more air in the chamber, the more free oxygen and nitrogen there is to form more NOx

Every engine strikes a balance between fuel economy, particulate, and NOx emissions. They are like the three corners of a project management triangle.

If you're in europe(UK by chance?) then your car is built to a standard that allows 87.5% more NOx emissions, so in this regard you're polluting as much as a diesel burning over 5.6l/100km[0].

[0] Comparing to a car produced in 2006. This standard has been updated since.

>To be frank, it surprises me that I can go around in my car still at all. Burning diesel to move people should be banned by now, especially with the market flooding with EVs.

Do you think everybody can afford to buy a new car, especially an EV?

The reason these bans are in place is because they are necessary, and they are necessary because most cars are old because most people can't afford to switch. It's effectively a tax on the poor.

Everything that increases the cost of doing _anything_ is a "tax on the poor"; that's just a particularly emotional way of describing exactly what it is that poor people don't have (money/power).

In a city like London there is actually no reason to drive around a diesel car in the centre. It's done for convenience only. Non-diesel vehicles exist, electric vehicles exist, very soon there'll be enough to fill the roads (Central London is really quite small), done.

I don't think it should be banned - I think a tax is far more appropriate (that's actually what we're doing) - but ultimately, yes, poor people will be hit harder.

We don't allow burning rubbish to heat homes either. That's a "poor tax" too.

As a possible counterpoint, consider the following image:

https://goo.gl/maps/R9aBPPb59yC2

I used to drive past this block fairly often and I'd shudder every time. I can't imagine living there. (It's worse in person than in the photo, really, the building is black).

Poor people are overwhelmingly more likely to live in those sorts of conditions in London - more likely to live near traffic lights, close to busy polluted roads, on major arterial routes, and generally just in the pollution hotspots.

By contrast, the wealthy are more likely to live in luxury apartments with proper AC, or leafy suburbs, or just on side streets that aren't front-line pollution (compare Euston/Marylebone Road to side streets).

(I say more likely, because it's true on a statistical level, but it's also just obviously true. I can afford to not live there so I don't. It's obviously horrible, look at it, there's a massive road on one side and a railway line on the other. You'd better have some bloody good sound insulation if nothing else).

So actually reducing emissions is in some ways an inverse tax on the poor - because poor people inhale more of the shit anyway.

> It's effectively a tax on the poor

I live in a European city with comparatively bad public transport, and I still don't own a car. Sure, going somewhere by public transport often takes twice as long as going by car, but it's cheaper and I am free to do stuff in that time. In the rare case I need one I could always rent one or use a car pool and still be much cheaper than owning and operating one.

In rural areas it's a different matter, but the poor in the city rarely need cars in Europe. Many want it for the convinience, but taxing luxury goods is accepted practice.

Allowing people to pollute is effectively a subsidy for them, paid for with a tax on everyone’s health. Wealthy people are more able to take advantage of this subsidy and more able to avoid some of the tax, so the old way is also a tax on the poor. Except instead of just taking their money, they’re being slowly killed.

I am not the person you replied, taxes on pollution affect the poor, it is true but I seen people buying a 20 years BMW rather then a new or newer less cool model car, so the pollution taxes and measures should affect this purchases and push people into buying petrol, smaller engine cars.

Yes but these people had a choice. Poor people don't.

Europe is different from the US, we don't need cars here. I'm from Romania and I don't even have a licence. The only reason to have a car here is for work or comfort. I've travelled around the EU quite a lot and could always get around with public transport or taxis.

So no, in the context of the EU, banning cars is not a tax on the poor, it is a comfort tax at best and one which increases the comfort of every other citizen while punishing "poor" people who want cheap comfort at the expense of everyone else around them.

It depends. For city-dwellers, that's true (I'm one myself, 29, living in Germany, no driver's license either). But someone living in a village will find it pretty impossible to run their errands or bring their children to school without a car.

>But someone living in a village will find it pretty impossible to run their errands or bring their children to school without a car.

It is not impossible, I know people that live in villages in Romania and use public transport to go to the city where they work. Usually this people don't own a car because they don't have a driver license, there are enough such people since the common transport is profitable for the companies that offer it.

Is not that true, there are cheaper cars, they may be missing some comfort features, the engine will be smaller (very cool how for example Ford has now peformmant 3 cylinder engines), the regulation will push people on cheap newer and cleaner cars instead of cool cars but 10-20 years old.

I know what I am talking about since my family is not rich, in my extended family (in Romania) nobody bought a new car. I think is OK to sacrifice electric windows, parking camera, other non essential comfort features and getting a cleaner car.

Do you have a better idea on how we push things in the right direction , except the vague "free market and deregulation solves everything bullshit"

A 20 year old BMW is a beater car that can be bought easily for less than 5000 EUR. Banning old cars is the way to drive those cars out of the market.

If a poor person needs to replace a broken car, the new laws will limit the valid options to 2006 or newer cars. You can buy a 2006 car for cheap nowadays.

I own car but also take advantage of the transport networks.

What I really dislike with this kind of bans is the complete disregard how people can afford to reach their usual destinations with a fragile transport network, if at all.

One of the customer sites I used to travel to, takes 30m with the car and almost 2h with public transports.

I would not call Madrid's public transportation network fragile. Not at all. For most practical cases, public transport won't take longer than if you need to park a car.

Not if one is lucky enough to live close enough to the city center.

From my experience in Lisbon, it took me 1h to do 30 km during rush hour and 2h outside rush hour.

As the trains/bus/boat connections get drastically reduced outside rush hour.

Ah, and good luck returning back home after mid-night.

Talking with Spanish friends, their view of Madrid network isn't much different from my experience.

In any case I was talking in general, because outside the major European cities, the transports are even worse, like 1 bus connection every two hours until 8pm and such.

I don't know Lisboa, but I can tell you this is not the case in Madrid. Neither it is in Barcelona, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, ...

There can be very particular routes for which 30km can take very long (although I do not see how a 30km trip is relevant when we're talking about the centre of the cities), but this is not common. And 8pm is not late at all, it is quite easy to move at that time. Again, I do not know Lisboa, but your generalization does not fit with my experience at all.

Nice, I talk about the general case, and you list capitals and people living on the city center.

A 30km trip is relevant, because there is a large set of population that works on the city center, yet it can only afford to buy a house 30-100km away from it, and commutes every day.

I lived in middle size cities where after 8pm there are no more buses, only taxis.

You were talking, and I quote you, about "major European cities". You can easily reach most major European cities from 30km away in less than 1 hour using public transport, also after 8pm. Most middle size cities are also quite well covered, depending what you mean by middle size, but 30km away may easily be in the middle of nowhere. If this is the case you are describing, it does not apply to the case of Madrid we are discussing. It is not a generalization, it is a totally different problem.

I guess we have a complete different view what a "major European cities" city is all about.

For me major doesn't necessary mean country/region capital.

Example Coimbra and Porto are major European cities, and good luck getting in less than 1h if you happen to live outside of the happy path of bus/subway lines.

But "these kinds of bans" are also more likely to be impose on the centers of capitals.

In what middle sized cities can people only afford to buy a house 30-100km from it?

Plenty of German cities, for example.

http://m.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/wohnen/haus/immobilienma...

The sensible way to go about this would be making new cars with ICE progressively more expensive, starting some time twenty years ago or so, so that people naturally switch over to clean alternatives. What we get instead of incessant lobbying by car manufactures until perfectly fine, new, cars need to be banned from city centers because the air quality is too bad. Now it is too late for a painless switch to less polluting transportation and the poorest suffer most.

By thinking about the fuel efficiency of your diesel as somehow being relevant to the pollution zones shows you have made an error that is pretty commonplace.

One shouldn’t confuse fuel efficiency with fewer emissions. Motorcycles for example are very fuel efficient for getting a person or two around without a lot of stuff as compared to a car, but they cause way more pollution per mile (which makes it even worse than measuring by per gallon, exactly because they are so fuel efficient, making it strikingly bad because to achieve worse emissions per mile, their emissions have to be truly extraordinarily bad).

(Yes, other commenter who wants to retort that the type of motorcycle matters, it’s true that it does. This is a general point about internal combustion engines where some motorcycles are being used as an example.)

Have you ever had the DPF replaced? On most diesels they get so clogged up after around 150,000km so that the engine can't work efficiently anymore (and it can actually break the engine if it gets clogged enough).

You can pay to have it replaced (a few thousand Euro) or in a lot of countries it's quite popular to just remove the guts of it, so the there is no filter, meaning your polluting car pollutes even more. It's usually illegal, but as particulate emissions are not part of periodic inspection most European vehicles undergo, it's usually not found out.

(They weren't required until Euro 5 came into affect, so maybe your car doesn't even have one.)

What car did you buy? I'm curious what car can do 1L per 30km!

3.3L/100km doesn't seem that hard. I get 4.7 in a mid-size sedan so this is probably a small Volkswagen with a 3 cylinder engine.

The best I ever really hear about are ~4L/100km, from small VW sedans as you say.

I'm curious what can get better!

It's probably one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Lupo#Lupo_3L

It also explains where the 94mpg number comes from.

Not sure how you're doing the conversion but 3.3l/100km is only 71mpg according to Google. 94mpg would be 2.5l/100km or 1l per 40km.

US gallon vs Imperial gallon? It's a ~20% difference.

That would be 85mpg, not 94 from what I can see online

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