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Comment by loremipsium | Hacker News Reader

first scrapping old but reliable cars with cash incentives to buy "clean" diesel. Then dieselgate pushing for gasoline powered cars and getting pennies on the dollar back. Now killing ICE alltogether. Not going to buy VW Group cars anytime soon.

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> Now killing ICE all together.

The writing is on the wall. In Europe several big cities as well as countries have announced that they'll ban diesel engines in about 10 years, max. Some have announced that they'll ban all ICE cars in about 15-20 years.

Even bigger than the city by city ban is the huge, and ever more demanding EU commission fines on car makers, measured by grams of CO2 averaged across the fleet.

So what's happening is VW is trying to get ahead of the enormous fines which will make it impossible to keep selling larger sized ICE cars in the EU (e.g. SUVs which are becoming ever more popular in Europe).

> According to the EU, fleet emissions in 2018 were 120g/km, which means automakers need a 21 percent reduction overall to avoid fines that could total as much as 33 billion euros this year, according to some estimates. Each gram over the limit, per vehicle, will cost automakers 95 euros.

> Each automaker has a different target, based on the average mass of the vehicles they sell, and only 95 percent of sales are measured in 2020, meaning that some high-polluting cars won't count. Even so, analyst ISI Evercore has warned that the "2020-21 CO2 regulation poses the biggest risk to the auto industry in recent memory."

Source: https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/how-automakers-plan-a...

EDIT: Some countries, e.g. Ireland[1] and the UK[2], have decided to ban all new ICE cars completely from 2030.

[1] https://www.newstalk.com/news/electric-vehicle-ownership-sho...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/the-uk-plans-to-ban-sales-of...

They can ban ICE cars as much as they want. More than half Europe won't buy electric because they are too expensive.

And not only that, you can't plan to travel in a lower end electric with their ranges. Recharge is very slow.

You can buy a dirt cheap second hand ICE, and it will give you that, you'll recharge in a minute, and most proven models are easy and cheap to repair.

Electric cars turns out they do fail, and when they do it is super expensive.

I really really want to have one, but currently comparing an electric to, say, a Fiat Panda, it just doesn't make sense for most Europeans.

What's the alternative? The status quo isn't an option, so something has to replace it.

IDK, but I won't spend 30K in a car that only allows me to city travel. If I'm forced to live without an ICE I just won't have a car, and that's it.

That's fine for many people, not so good for the car industry and their direct and indirect jobs.

Buying a 6K second-hand car is not only much more ecological than buying a brand new electric car, but I have more range, I can get it cheaply fixed if I go to something like a Renault Clio, a Peugeot 206, Fiat Panda and the like.

Since I live in a flat and I don't have garage, I can park it in my street without worrying about recharging (it's just going to get me a few minutes to get to the gas station, a two minutes to get gas).

With the salaries in my area, spending 30K in a car it's just too much money. It's more than my current yearly salary. And there's plenty of people with lower income than mine.

Also, turns out electric cars come with a lot of bloat that breaks, so the most immediate upside of such car goes away.

As far as I can see, too much has to change for mass adoption. With the current trend they'll remind cars for rich countries and rich people for a lot longer.

> Buying a 6K second-hand car is not only much more ecological than buying a brand new electric car,

I'm not sure how true this is: 80% of ICE CO2 emissions are from driving/servicing I believe.

Probably, but you still have to compare it to an electric car.

Not having a car wins in both scenarios.

> I won't spend 30K in a car that only allows me to city travel.

Right? It's like a $30K license to be a four-wheeled member of the working class.

I can understand the Fuzz in high-income countries. 30k seems doable when your income is in the range of 60-200k. For me 30K is a lot of money.

And honestly I don't really feel that moving around a massive battery in a newly produced car is better than buying a Fiat Panda and taking care of it. My brothers Panda is nearing 500.000 Km and it's fine.

Synthetic fuel. Works in current cars and it's cleaner than current fuel:

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry-news/porsche-beg...

Synthetic fuel and biofuels will probably be required for several decades until legacy equipment like farming machinery (not to mention military veichles) has been replaced/modernized. Regular cars, on the other hand, will probably be mostly electric within 15-20 years.

The main issues are power-grid development and EV range. I suspect those problems will be handled within 10 years.

No one talks about the biggest disadvantage of EVs which is extraction of lithium which is a threat to environment and people who are involved in it. Plus a major disadvantage is where these dead batteries end up! land fills which again is biggest threat to environment. Even batteries are recyclable but up to what extent one day they will end up in landfills [https://www.res-ev.co.uk/problems-with-ev/#:~:text=One%20of%....] . There are some other options like hydrogen powered cars which do not harm environment any way, i think more research should be done to promote them or any other absolutely cleaner biofuel powered cars

Yeah, that's another hurdle that needs to be tackled. Going electric is going to take decades, and we'll probably never be completely rid of combustion engines.

Since synthetic fuels are zero emissions, why would they ever need to be replaced by EVs? A better question is why we need to bother with electrification at all if there are alternative paths to zero emissions?

They still pollute, even if they're carbon neutral. Particle emissions won't go away.

Particulate emissions can come from the tires. EVs aren't magic on this form of pollution. Plus, you can have particulate filters on the engine exhaust, reducing this greatly.

I wouldn't be surprised if ICE's powered by biofuel/synthetic fuel could be competitive with electic veichles given enough time to improve the technology. Most likely we are going to see some of that development as EV's simply cannot fill all the niches yet.

The most ironic result would be ICE powered vehicles outlasting EVs. They could be the vinyl records of transportation.

There is the option of fuel cell cars in addition to synthetic fuels. Electric cars is only 1 of several possible directions we can go.

With synfuels the status quo is an option. Nothing fundamentally has to change.

Forcing Europeans to move to electric cars hardly changes the status quo re: global warming.

It changes things. Europe is developed. If Europe and other developed groups don't switch to clean energy, transportation, heating, etc, the future industrializing countries with probably 2-3-4 billion people will fry us all.

It's not a moral imperative, it's simple survival.

Ok, now try to sell an electric car to someone who makes 10K/y or less.

People just won't have cars.

Hey, I'm not from a developed country. Poor people will just buy second hand cars from developed countries, give it 5-10 years.

They'll just need beat up Opels with 300k km on them :-D

That's pretty difficult, unless fixing batteries for dirt cheap (and with enough range to inter-city travel at least) becomes doable.

I can't see someone making any useful of a VW ID3 in, say, Morocco.

CO2 wise the shift to EVs alone will change almost nothing, you just centralize emissions at power plants. It does enable a potential shift to renewable energy sources, though.

Source: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

It's even sooner than that in places. The UK has announced a ban on new ICE vehicles from 2030. To be seen how closely that's followed through on, we have a long way to go on charging infrastructure.

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