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Comment by marsRoverDev | Hacker News Reader

It'll be more costly for them if the EU ban all combustion consumer vehicles and VW are left unable to sell to the european market.

That is beside the point that the author of this article will be on the wrong side of history.

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Internal Combustion only vehicles are likely to be banned by 2030 and forecourt plug-in hybrids by 2035. Several member countries are aiming to eliminate combustion engine vehicles from the roads by the mid 2040s. These are mostly stated goals at this stage rather than legislation.

I can't see Germany being happy signing off on rules that would kill their own auto industry.

Nor commit to the massive electrical infrastructure improvements such a policy would necessitate. Charging ever car, truck and digger across a country isnt as simple a few charge points in parking lots. The power has to come from something. That something has to be biult by someone somewhere. Nimby means that will take decades.

The majority of charging in Western Europe will happen overnight and at home, combine that with 'smart chargers', which are technologically trivial, appropriate tariffs giving a discount in exchange for flexible demand overnight, and a thirty year period to make the transition (even if all new cars were electric from 2035), and I doubt the impact on the grid will be that dramatic. You will actually likely have improved utilization of existing assets, coupled with a lot of extra revenue going to power companies, away from oil companies. Motorway charging systems, which will be a small minority of total charging, will need ongoing grid upgrades, but spikes in demand can be buffered by trickle charging batteries, and dealing with increased electricity demand can scale gradually and incrementally as the transition occurs over that 30 year period. The infrastructure improvements will likely come under national infrastructure provisions which limit planning objections. I actually think the grid transition will mostly happen without people realizing.

Of cars. But cars are not anywhere near the bulk of IC engine capacity. Between trucks, trains, ships and construction equipment, there is a huge amount of power that will have to come from somewhere. Those devices don't just commute twice a day then sit in a garage charging. They basically run all day, in some cases 24/7 (trucks/trains). They will need a steady supply from some sort of power plant/grid.

Aren’t most European trains already electric?

Commuter trains, yes. "Most european trains" also probably yes as that would include the commuters. But if we are talking about replacing one engine system with another, the real measure is horsepower. Diesel is still a norm for long-haul freight, the real heavy lifting. In total amount of horsepower being used, diesel is still king. There are many reasons for this, the big one being a lack of standardization among European countries re overhead power supplies. A diesel can drive across boarders without worry about voltage or current changes.

And I do laugh a little when they talk about removing the internal combustion trains. Nobody is talking about the external combustion trains, the steam trains. They are carbon nightmares but we keep them for nostalgic rides and movies about wizards. Will we do the same with diesels?

It seems that you’re arguing with a straw man because these bans which are being talked about are for road transport, no government is proposing to ban IC ships, trains, and farm and construction equipment over that time frame, although it will likely be the case that a programme of electrification will be continued and stepped up. Similarly I don’t know why you’re talking about steam engines, they are totally insignificant.

Nobody is talking about external combustion trains because you can count them on your fingers. The amount of coal they use is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. They also don't tend to run through inner cities.

Yes there's work to do, but it's not insurmountable. The National Grid in the UK has already said it would support"a more ambitious target” than the UK Government has set for the end to ICE vehicles.

There's lots of spare capacity in the electrical grid. It's built to handle peak load (late afternoon/early evening). This can be solved with simple economic incentives to charge more for electricity at peak times. The cars are already smart enough to be programmed to charge themselves over night. Plug them in when you get home, and then they start charging once peak is over, with plenty of time to finish topping up by morning (especially considering most people won't drive close to a full battery's worth on the average day).

If all the country's cars are charging overnight, do you think that that might come to be considered "peak" or become otherwise more expensive electricity?

In that case all you need is dynamic time of day pricing and a feedback mechanism to the cars. Or you could give control of the car batteries to the power companies, and let them charge them by X oclock, this has already been suggested as part of a virtual power station type setup.

The point is that you'd charge them off-peak, whenever that might be. The ideal scenario would be no more peaks or troughs at all, yielding a perfectly level baseline at all times, moderated by all the grid-attached batteries in vehicles and buildings that are smartly choosing when to draw (or even feed back) power.

And the majority of the nation's electricity usage will never be for automobile transportation, even if 100% of vehicles were electric. There's simply too many other big consumers of electricity.

Yep. That's the current problem. They have built a ton of wind-farms out in the north sea and have industry in the very south of the country. So they want to build a set of power-lines that connects these places called SuedLink. They started sometime around 2014 and are still only a fraction of the way there.

So charging in the north will be fine, not so much in the middle or south.

Nobody wants a giant power-line around them and they faced stiff protests against the routes. If I recall correctly, they now want to bury the power-lines underground to avoid some of the public opposition.

In the meantime Germany is switching off its nuclear infrastructure (because people hate that too) so that they can buy nuclear power from France (which is perfectly fine?).

Also Germany spent billions on the green energy initiative in the past decade and is still hooked ~35% on lignite, one of the most polluting sorts of coal out there.

Without the power-lines that bring green energy from the sea, the e-car revolution will be difficult (unless we want to burn coal of course).

Established modern society is so dysfunctional when it comes to big projects that aim to change an existing system.

I might suggest doing a little research on vehicle-to-grid and demand side response technology. Millions of EVs plugged into chargers equates to many gigawatthours of instant on-demand storage capacity. EVs are primarily charged overnight when supply outweighs demand, and their charge controllers can dynamically alter the charge rate in response to grid load. The transition to EVs and the transition to renewable energy goes hand-in-hand; relatively modest investments in local power distribution infrastructure combined with intelligent control systems could have a vastly positive impact on the stability of a grid with predominantly renewable generation capacity.

In theory. I haven't seen any actual implementation whereby road vehicles would be discharged onto the grid during peak demand.

The EV drivers I've talked to, every one of them, are simply not open to the idea of discharging their vehicles back onto the grid. It isn't about money. They don't want the hassle of a discharged car, nor the wear on their batteries. The potential money involved (a few dollars at most) is totally irrelevant to them. Dedicated deep-cycle bats, lead acid cells, are the better option for grid tied storage.

Infrastructure isn't a big challenge, and plenty of utilities have some out stating this.

The biggest change will probably time-of-use pricing for the places that don't have it. EVs can be charged overnight very easily, when the grid is underutilized. If you encourage this with pricing, you actually even out grid demand and make it easier to manage.

It seems more likely that the Chinese market will be the important rule setter when it comes to cars. They push electric adoption heavily.

I actually think there will be a dramatic uptake in Western Europe. Petrol taxation is a strong lever, a car rated at 40mpg actually gets 30mpg in real world usage, you drive that car for 100,000 miles and it costs more than £15,000 in petrol, a real world 20mpg costs more than £25,000 over the same distance.

VW is planning to sell its ID hatchback for about the same as the diesel equivalent, the cost savings are far higher, the range is 200 miles plus, it can charge in 30 minutes, which most people will only use on roadtrips, when glad of the break after 3 hours of driving. By launch in 2020, a charging network will be in place across the motorway network.

In Western Europe the barriers to mass adoption are fading.

The main barrier to adoption is the lack of charging infrastructure. In cities, where EVs make most sense, nobody has a garage. IMHO the state should step in and build charging infrastructure instead of lowering taxes for EVs or subsidizing their purchase.

Plenty of people have parking spots even if they don't have garages. Adding a charger to those is easy. Street parking does need many more chargers.

I think it goes beyond cities, in England 200 miles will get you half way across the country, even someone in suburban or rural areas could charge from home and carry on as normal 99 days out of 100. And the motorway network for that one day is being rolled out.

Which makes sense from the production side: electric cars nullifies American, Japanese, and European expertises in internal combustion engines. It levels the playing field for Chinese automakers. This is partly why Germany and Europe have been so reluctant to embrace electric cars. Warren Buffet had this insight about a decade ago when Berkshire Hathaway invested in Chinese electric car makers. Incredible.

You mean 2 decades from now?

It’s a little premature to worry about an EU ban.

Investing in battery R&D is probably important now. Meeting the requirements of China is also important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

2025: Norway

2030 EU: Sweden, Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark

2030 Non-EU: India, Israel

---

If you take a lifetime of 20+ years for new vehicles into account, and you want to be phased out by 2050, you need to ban in 2030. Very simple. Maybe you don't need a full ban, maybe strong incentives suffice (see China). But full bans have been enacted in law in very substantial markets already.

Those deadlines are aspirational, not realistic based on actual vehicle production capacity or energy supplies. In 2030 the majority of new passenger vehicles will still contain internal combustion engines, although those may just be components of plug-in hybrid systems. Governments will end up allowing a lot of extensions and exceptions.

Then Norway has a very different interpretation of the word "aspirational".

From https://electrek.co/2019/01/02/electric-car-sales-norway-201...

> 45% of new cars were all-electric and 60% were plug-in in October 2018. The Nissan Leaf was the most popular all-electric vehicle in the market.

That’s because electric vehicles are heavily subsidized in Norway.

It's not so much that electrics are subsidized. More that fossil-fuel vehicles are heavily taxed.

Well, let’s clarify this:

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jul/02/norway-electri...

https://www.citylab.com/environment/2018/12/norway-electric-...

To be clear, electric vehicles in Norway cost the same or more as they do in (eg) the United States.

The difference is that there are heavy taxes on fossil fuel vehicles that do not apply to electrics, making the relative difference in cost between electrics and fossils much smaller.

(Yes, there are also many fringe benefits like free/discounted road tolls and HOV lane access, but as your article mentions, many of those are already being rolled back)

So it's not aspirational, but real law backed by real money and government investment.

If VW offers a wide range of EVs at reasonable prices the argument that we need extensions and exceptions will be hard to make. VWs move creates a regulatory environment beneficial to VWs move.

TCO of EVs is about the same now and will be considerably better than ICE in the next years.

How many consumers will be willing to pay a premium for outdated technology? This could switch quickly with electric energy and power grids being the bigger bottlenecks.

At least Grid operators are deeply worried about the upcoming transition.

FWIW the Norway one was widely reported as a ban, but it is not. The official government policy is that they "have a goal that all new cars should be zero emission (ZEV) in 2025".

Nobody who's actually crunched the numbers thinks this is realistic (that we reach 100% new cars are ZEV), but maybe we'll reach 60% by 2025. Currently we're at 30% of new cars are ZEV, up from 10% in 2014, and it's highly likely we will see a sigmoid growth curve with a long tail.

One of the issues is that a very large portion of Norwegians like to ski in winter (which typically requires a roof box) and to go e.g. boating or caravaning etc. in summer (which typically requires a tow hitch). Currently there are exactly zero EVs on the market that can do both of those things.

Toyota RAV4 EV: https://www.toyota.com/rav4ev/

Tows 400+ kilos and has a roof box.

With tow ratings you subtract the weight inside the vehicle. At a tow rating of 800lbs you're not going to be pulling much of anything, and with a 41 kW/h battery it is not going to be going far at all either while towing.

I would love to replace our ICE tow vehicle with an electric if any existed, but the electric range would drop by at least half while towing. That's a lot of stopping.

As a comparison a v6 Dodge Durango's tow capacity is 6200lbs/2800kg. A v6 tow vehicle is a part-time tow vechile not intended for large loads. That durango can pull some boats and smaller camper trailers. We have used it to haul rock/gravel/stone as well. Electric would be great because the transmission wouldn't be as much of a concern but it would definitely need a lot of battery and would need a larger cooling system for the batteries and motors just like ICE tow vehicles need larger fuel tanks and larger radiators.

For comparison, a 400 kg tow rating you get on a Fiat 500 with the 0.9 L three-cylinder petrol engine...

I don't believe that a large proportion of Norwegians own boats and need tow hitches with which to move them around. Do you have a source on that?

A roof box can be attached to pretty much any vehicle, and if the market in Norway demands it then EV manufacturers can pretty easily add roof hooks for mounting as an option in-country if they don't already. There's no fundamental incompatibility with EVs here. Google searches reveal that plenty of people are already mounting roof boxes to Teslas, so this is already a solved problem.

I'm talking abut someone who has a boat OR caravan OR does home improvement and needs a trailer, easily 30% of the population. It's important to keep in mind that Norway has low income inequality and high median income. Average middle class person can easily afford a boat.

As a data point, on the Norwegian version of Craigslist (Finn) the number of boats for sale right now is 10% of the number of cars for sale, the number of caravans is 5%, and we're still in winter season.

There certainly will be EVs (or maybe hydrogen powered cars) that meet requirements of this demographic at some point. But they won't be available in volume at a price point people can afford before 2025, especially not when EV subsidies have started phasing out.

A roof box on an electric vehicle - also known as "how to kill your range"...

Huh? The aerodynamic effects are exactly the same as on an ICE car. What's under the hood doesn't matter here. You'll get equally reduced range in a gasoline car, and pay more for the privilege to boot.

As an additional point of data - there is one registered trailer for every two cars in Norway: 1.4 million trailers and 2.7 million cars. For reference, we're almost exactly at one car per household.

https://www.ssb.no/en/transport-og-reiseliv/statistikker/bil...

2025 does seem challenging. But remember that it's new car sales. People will operate their ICE cars for decades after that date.

And in the context of the discussion of VW's investment the difference between 80% of the market being ZEV and 100% is not that big...

By 2021, phased in from 2020, the fleet average to be achieved by all new cars is 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre. This means a fuel consumption of around 4.1 l/100 km of petrol or 3.6 l/100 km of diesel.

To encourage eco-innovation, manufacturers can be granted emission credits equivalent to a maximum emissions saving of 7 g/km per year for their fleet if they equip vehicles with innovative technologies, based on independently verified data. [0]

So this move is more of a combination of short-term gains of less-restrictive emissions, and a long-term move to electric.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/vehicles/cars_...

Just as a reference, that's 57mpg for petrol and 65mpg for diesel, and that's average, not peak, for all cars. A good diesel estate might average 50mpg if driven carefully, but in towns a lot less. So there's a long way to go. Companies will need to build/sell/operate a lot of tiny cars, or definitely have significant electric and hybrid parts of the fleet.

> A good diesel estate might average 50mpg if driven carefully, but in towns a lot less.

Going to fuelly.com, newer Golf TDIs seem to average out at 40 mpg, with the tails trailing out by +/- 5mpg:

* http://www.fuelly.com/car/volkswagen/golf?engineconfig_id=10...

The older 1.9L engines are slightly better.

Ah yes, i forgot Americans gallons are 4/5 size. Adjust data accordingly, so i did mean 40mpg US! (Most modern diesel estates(station wagons) do up to and sometimes over that, such as mazda 6, Ford Mondeo)

> By 2021, phased in from 2020, the fleet average to be achieved by all new cars is 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre. This means a fuel consumption of around 4.1 l/100 km of petrol or 3.6 l/100 km of diesel.

Whew, that's going to be interesting. Toyota can hit that with the Prius Eco... if that was the only car in their fleet.

Well, they can easily achieve this with plug-in hybrids (and obviously battery-electric cars) just by tightening up the average distance a car is driven per day. My PHEV is averaging a solid 300+ MPG, because I fill the tank every 2000 miles, because I only drive it 20 miles on most days. Tolls and sensible development patterns can lead to shorter trips.

I love that page, I haven't seen a comprehensive policy document that was so readable.

> the fleet average to be achieved by all new cars is 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre. This means a fuel consumption of around 4.1 l/100 km of petrol or 3.6 l/100 km of diesel.

This means nothing due to the idiotic way fuel consumption is calculated for PHEV. A 2+ ton hybrid SUV like the Volvo XC90 is rated as 2,1 liters/100 Km while it easily burns 10+ liters when the battery is empty or the electric engine can't keep up (i.e. on the highway).

Things move slowly in the world of Big Automotive. A new model can easily get worked on for 5 years. If they are planning on having an electric version of each of there models, they need to be making this investment ASAP.

It’s not premature because savvy buyers are going to soon start realizing that ICE car resale value will plummet fast and hard as good electrics roll out with good infrastructure.

As someone buying today, I have to factor in that (say) five years from now when I sell, the buyers at that time will be thinking about their resale prospects (say) five years from that date. And for ICE cars, it’s not going to be pretty.

I would suggest, if you have an ICE car, trade it in now while you can still get more money for it.

The average car is over 11 years old and many of us drive a car for 15 or so years until it basically has no value. Resale value doesn’t enter into the buying calculus of a lot of people.

In the UK most new cars are bought on personal lease plans, fairly short and the cost is dependent on the resale value of the car at the end of the lease.

Yes ymmv but it’s something that some people will consider.

That only means it will get less expensive to buy and operate an ICE vehicle, especially as the demand for fuel decreases and the price for it goes down as well. For those using an ICE vehicle for transportation and not as investment that is only a good thing

The fact that you will be subsidizing other people's transportation costs in the future is little consolation for the loss. Particularly when you're subsidizing pollution.

I imagine there will be taxes and fees coming along to make the cost of ownership quite different from what you think.

It could go the other way, if there are enough electric cars on the road the infrastructure for ICE cars will shrink and get more expensive.

> I would suggest, if you have an ICE car, trade it in now while you can still get more money for it.

Just as soon as I can get a low-cost, 300 mile range 4wd vehicle, that I can put on 30+ inch tires and a 3-6 inch lift.

Until the battery tech gets a helluva lot better, that ain't happening.

Furthermore - even if it does happen (which it probably will at some point - I'm optimistic) - it still doesn't fix the next problem:

How do I tote along an extra "10 gallons" of electric fuel with me?

You see, when you are off-roading, you typically will take extra fuel with you. An extra 5 or 10 gallons of gasoline can mean the difference between hiking out or getting back to pavement with your vehicle, depending on what happened to get you stuck to need the fuel. It can also mean extending a trip, or seeing side trails you normally wouldn't be able to. Or being able to do a much longer trail and having the fuel to take you to a nearby gas station at the end.

But I can't see with current battery technology - nor even future technology - being able to do anything like that. You'd probably need a trailer or something to haul around the extra batteries, or you'd have to haul a generator (which would also require fuel...). Forget solar panels, because you wouldn't be able to carry enough panels to be able to charge up the batteries in the same amount of time you could pour a tank of gasoline - no where close to it. Heck, even if you had 1000 watts of panels with you, it would still take at least a day or two to recharge the pack, most likely.

I'm not sure what the solution is for that situation. Maybe a battery that got you double the miles (4-600 miles per charge?), or what I suspect a lot of people would say (don't go off roading...)

For now, I'm sticking with my ICE vehicles until that problem is solved; there may come a time when I'd have an electric just to get to work and back, but that'd be about it for now.

If you think about what you’re doing to the land you rip up while off-roading, the don’t-go-off-roading solution merits a look. As a hiker, if you could see yourself from my eyes, you would not like what you see. [Edit: ok there are better and worse practices of off-roading and maybe I shouldn’t assume you are not responsible... so disregard that if it doesn’t apply]. But yeah it would mean giving up some kinds of pleasure you’re indulging in now. That’s for you to decide.

As for the dream vehicle you describe, yeah electric won’t deliver that because for example the Tesla pickup and the Rivian won’t be cheap (one of your requirements). But there are costs you aren’t accounting for and probably never will if you’re this deep into it.

BTW Tesla AWD is insane and a step beyond normal AWD you are used to. So (when the truck comes out) the extra money is getting you something. The AWD is not the only thing of course but it is holy shit crazy good in their sedans, I can only imagine how it will be in the pickup.

You've already touched on it a bit, but yes there are responsible off-roaders out there that work to minimize the amount of impact that they have on the lands that they traverse through. A lot of these folks will avoid areas that hikers and horse riders frequent. Of course, there are also asshole off-roaders too but the same can be said for everyone.

Agreed. And I should have taken more care to say that I don’t look at all off-roaders the same way.

I doubt that decisions of this magnitude are taken in spite of the big players or without their participation.

Calling it a ban is a bit over the top but it is going in that direction. Many cities in the EU are banning cars that pollute a lot. I've no doubt the definition of how bad they have to pollute will be tightened over time. If you are a carmaker with no electric cars it will be the same as a ban in the end. Most (all?) countries in the EU are also either lowering/removing registration taxes on electric cars or raising it on everything else.

So the decision has already been made. We are basically just in a grace period.

The big players in this case are Global Warming and air quality in cities, not the car manufacturers.

A shame, that. A company with a large investment in a technology that causes immense harm is probably not one you want to consult on ongoing policy.

Dieselgate killed people. If they'd dumped poison in the water supply and lied about it the reaction would've been far harsher, but apparently it's ok to poison people via the air.

VW also causes immense employment and brings an immense amount of money into Germany. It's not that simple. Germany isn't a dictatorship. They can't take unilateral action that harms its populace and say "just deal, it's good for you in the long run"

But.... volkswagen can?

The state of North Rhine/Westphalia owns like 21% of VW group. I would expect they might deprecate the statistically-implied deaths resulting from selling noncompliant cars vs. the very concrete loss of jobs and revenue should that might result from regulation.

Not to mention China which is literally doing that, just gradually.

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