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Comment by jblok | Hacker News Reader

The UK government is doing the complete opposite in fact. They’ll give you a grant towards the cost of a new EV, a grant for a wall box to be installed at you home, 0% tax on company car benefits if it’s an EV, 0% road tax, etc. They’ve even just moved The ban on new petrol and diesel sales forward to 2030.

Fuel duties help to offset the negative externalities to society of driving, namely CO2 emissions, pollution and congestion. With EVs tou don’t have emissions and pollutions and the health problems they bring so there’s no negatives to offset (ie fuel duty revenue will go down, but so will spending on health and environmental related issues)

There’s still the congestion any vehicle can cause and I think we’ll move to a much different form of vehicle taxation over the next 20 years, perhaps with more toll roads or even surge pricing style taxation for usage of roads.

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> The UK government is doing the complete opposite in fact. They’ll give you a grant towards the cost of a new EV, a grant for a wall box to be installed at you home, 0% tax on company car benefits if it’s an EV, 0% road tax, etc.

Taxing will have to change and evolve either way.

Today it makes sense to incentivize the move to EVs. But this says nothing about what will happen when everyone is there and people no longer have the option of buying or using an ICE. Some years from now taxing EVs with some form of "road tax" (today included in the price of fuel) will be the low hanging fruit and the technological means may already be there. Your car will likely be able or even required to log and report the distance driven for taxing purposes.

If truly autonomous vehicles do catch on and incentivize moving away from private ownership, it will also have a huge impact on the way cars are taxed or how the taxes are passed on to the user.

The easiest way to replace petrol tax would be to simply charge with the MOT. Road taxes in general raise about 10p per mile driven (including petrol, VAT on petrol, and VED, but excluding VAT on new cars, which is a significant amount - about £10b a year based on 3 million cars a year at £20k a year)

It would work as "You've done 10,000 miles since your last MOT, you have to pay your £1k tax bill". Travel abroad and you could register the mileage when you leave and when you get back easily enough. Final bill on scrapping or on SORN.

That wouldn't allow the differential road pricing that tracking fans want, and wouldn't work in Ireland, but would work in GB right now.

Of course you have! Emissions from tires and brake pads are very significant. CO2 and pollution from driving is just externalized - where do you think all that electricity for charging EVs is coming from? Also, pollution from manufacturing EVs is still there.

The sun and wind? If everyone went to smart charging infrastructure your vehicle could easily stay topped up during excess generation.

> If everyone went to smart charging infrastructure your vehicle could easily stay topped up during excess generation

...and yet from today's headlines:

British coal plants fired up to meet temporary electricity shortfall. Remaining UK coal plants, including Drax, supply 6% of grid’s electricity to cover power supply drop and colder weather

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/26/british-coa...

Also note:

"renewable electricity was in relatively short supply in western Europe too, meaning the UK would need to keep running its coal plants while exporting power to France and to the Netherlands via cable interconnectors"

Even if the energy source would still be purely fossile-based (which it isn't), it would still be a net win, since large power plants are more efficient than ICE vehicles and are better set up to reduce emissions other than CO2.

Yeah you can put good filters and carbon sequestration tech onto those plants much easier than putting it onto all cars.

1). Every year the percentage of renewable electricity is increasing on the grids worldwide so over time electric cars will pollute less. 2). Looking at the parts of an electric car vehicle compared to petrol/diesel cars electric car production has less pollution. 3) Electric cars have regenerative braking so even the brake pads pollution is less in electric cars

Don't forget the UK is FAR ahead of the US when it comes to renewables, which of course is easier when you have a single national grid (and can buy spare French nuclear when you have a dip in capacity)

Correct, the potential CO2 emissions are externalised but the electricity can come from wind, sun, nuclear, or even fossil fuel power stations that run more efficiently and cleanly than an ICE.

Also, I'll take the emissions from tires and brake pads over those from an engine for sure.

Emission from brake pads is way less than ICE cars due to regenerative braking of the EV motors; one pedal driving is awesome.

This is a good article which answers most of your doubts:

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the...

Spoiler alert: EV pollutes less than ICE

I am aware that EVs pollute less. But parent comment claimed that pollution doesn't exist at all which is simply false.

Fair enough, it exists in some regard... let's change that to pollution caused by the powerplant of the vehicle.

I'm not wholly informed here, but just by using common sense, I can only imagine we're talking fractions of a percent for brake pad and tyre pollution, so I wouldn't pick that hill to die on personally.

Emissions from brake pads on EVs are almost non existent (regen braking). This is a vast departure from combustion powered vehicles where PM from braking systems, from exhaust catalytic converters etc. etc. contribute a lot of the grime you see at the edge of a motorway. EVs do make this better.

Tire emissions are NOT a factor we need to be concerned with however :-) Tire manufacture, sure. From waste - most definitely. But emissions from driving are not something to worry about even with the billions of miles driven annually on tires.

Last time I looked at PM2.5 I found the source below[1]. Which lists PM2.5 from tire wear at 0.001 gm per miles. Which is less than brake wear at 0.003. Notable that as you said EV's have much less brake wear.

https://www.bts.gov/content/estimated-national-average-vehic...

[1] Was a lot harder to find it again because someones running an SEO agitprop campaign to blame PM2.5 on tires instead of diesel exhaust. I had wade through GIS pages of trash websites to find it again.

Yeah that looks about right. Brake pad PM2.5 is 3x that of tires but both pale into insignificance next to exhaust PM2.5 at almost 10x that of brake pad and tire emissions added together.

The nice thing about EVs is those exhaust emissions are moved away from the tailpipe in populated areas to power generation facilities.

The efficiency of electric vehicles is almost 3x that of the gasoline cycle of drilling, transporting, distilling, transporting again, combusting then achieving almost 30% motion from the chemical energy of gas.

So because of this efficiency there’s just less emissions overall even though the emissions are away from population centres.

Then lastly, the emissions are consolidated in one place so capture and cleaning becomes viable.

EVs are not perfect but they are so much better than gasoline powered vehicles that if you can at all accomodate the switch, then it would be great to consider it.

>> With EVs tou don’t have emissions and pollutions

You don't have them at the tailpipe, which I guess is really the key thing because it means a reduction in asthma and deaths due to PM in habited areas.

You do still have emissions, they're just emitted away from where humans live. It's a great improvement but not a complete solution.

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