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That is pretty American focused. In developing countries, low end wages aren't enough to buy cars anyways, and the rich people clogging the roads can afford EVs. Even in the rest of the developed world, cars are much more of a luxury item, and ICE vehicles and/or gas to power them are already ladened with lots of taxes (so buying an EV in Norway can be cheaper than buying an ICE).

I'm not sure where you got the idea that the rich people clogged the road in developing countries, but we heavily depend on cars/motorcycles for our transportation. Poor people use them all the times (especially motorcycles). And people with low wages do take loans just to buy a cheap car/motorcycle, even way before buying a house since they provide immediate benefits with manageable monthly installments.

EDIT: It makes me think why there is not much push for electric motorcycles. Whenever EV is mentioned, it's always been a car.

Cheap Chinese electric bikes and trikes aren’t a thing in your country?

> It makes me think why there is not much push for electric motorcycles. Whenever EV is mentioned, it's always been a car.

That simply isn’t accurate. Chinese electric scooters were common even back in 2008, they are pretty ubiquitous by now. Electric motorcycles aren’t common, but neither are gas powered motorcycles in that country. These aren’t the fancy “for play” motorcycles replacements or electric bikes that the west want, but are definitely work horses in developing countries.

A lot of places don't have electricity or paved roads...

They don’t have paved roads, but they still have electricity. I stayed in a place in China off the grid on a trip (it was on a mountain in the Tibetan part of Sichuan), they still had electricity via a water wheel. When the water wheel was knocked out of alignment, the electricity went off.

A lot of off the grid solutions for electricity, getting regular gasoline shipments to those locations is much more of a challenge.

Vehicle ownership, including gas powered motorcycles, is extremely common in many countries. I’m not sure why you think it’s an American thing, because it’s definitely not.

“Developing countries” is a broad category, but it’s certainly not the case that they’re free of vehicles except for rich people driving around in expensive cars.

Gas powered motor scooters are being replaced by electric bicycles even before ICE cars are being replaced by EVs. In China, that transition is largely complete, and is happening in SEA and South Asia at a reasonable clip. See for example https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/paving-way-elect...

Here is another article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-04-20/hyperd..., quote:

> The second reason is that two-wheelers are going electric faster than any other segment of road transport. BNEF’s latest estimates put 2020 electric two-wheeler sales at over 25 million. That’s about 35% of sales globally, far ahead of passenger cars where EVs are still only around 5% of sales.

Although the issue with that statistic is probably because China has banned gas powered scooters (other developing countries are still catching up).

I predict that Electric scooters will long replace gas powered ones in developing countries before EV cars replace ICE cars. It’s kind of an economic no brainer given how cheap they are.

> Vehicle ownership, including gas powered motorcycles, is extremely common in many countries.

And I bet that the countries with cheap, polluting vehicles are those with lower life expectancy.

A large part of that will be correlation. Thailand has bad pollution from agriculture burning and some reallyy nasty car pollution. It looks like their life expectancy is very close to the US while other countries like the Phillipines with less pollution have significantly worse life expectancy. So you can't just chalk it up to one factor and think these countries would be better off if you suddenly took away all their gas powered vehicles - they wouldn't.

EVs are going to transform the developing world, in conjunction with solar/wind/storage solutions.

The EVs will be small motorcycles, e-bikes, scooters, etc. You get the EV with a 100 mile range, you already have a (used) panel. The small EVs can be quickly recharged because they are small (or battery swaps, which are far more feasible on e-bike/e-scooters).

Starlink or cell towers provide the internet.

As stated in the article, air quality will increase substantially.

Unfortunately global warming will disrupt everyone's fundamentals: water and food.

Why do you need to buy a car to go to work?

I see this thinking as a main problem. Cities are being built around cars, workplaces are being built around cars and etc. Banning ICE vehicles could be a step into transforming cities to be more people friendly, more kid friendly, more community friendly.

There are places in the world were cities were not built around cars. You take a train (or any other kind of public transport) to go to work, or you take a bike. Or you walk.

Buying a new car is even a big deal to many professionals in six-figure jobs. And not every vehicle category has a realistic EV or electric bike equivalent yet.

I'm all for aggressive policies to encourage the change, but like you, I don't think outright bans are going to be doable in the short term.

Whenever I see these pictures, I am happy not to live in a city.

The "Smog over Los Angeles" photo is from the 1970's or 1980's. Most younger folks in the US don't realize this, but pollution here is WAY down from a few decades ago. Our air is cleaner, out rivers and lakes are cleaner. Hell, even the sides of roads are cleaner.

More to the point, people in rural areas pollute far more per person than people living in cities. We need to end rural subsidies to stop encouraging people to live in rural areas.

When I read a comment like that, I am happy I don't live in a city.

I live in rural Washington and there's a ton of trash on the side of the road. There are also a ton of huge polluting trucks, many of which are intentionally modified to blow extra thick smoke ("roll coal").

Amen.

In most countries you could take public transport to work.

A lot of pollution has to do with local ICE vehicles lack cat converters or usage substandard cat converters. Same with fossil power plants, most will not use scrubbers.

You’d probably have much faster results mandating them and retrofitting cars.

Changeover to EV will take decades.

> Outright banning ICE transportation is a no-go unless we have a plan to alleviate the financial burden a sudden change puts on the lower class vehicle owners. It can be done, but it would be expensive.

Public transport, dedicated cycling infrastructure, and planning policies aiming for the "15 minute neighbourhood" are what you're looking for.

A full rollout of those ideas would take decades. I'd love to see all of them happen, but you can't just force someone to get rid of their ICE car and promise they'll have good public transit and a walkable neighborhood come 2035.

In many parts of the world good public transport already exists, and had existed for decades. An inability to build good public transport in cities seems to be a uniquely American problem.

I could certainly see cities like London banning ICE cars within their centres within 5 years, without much impact on poorer individuals. It’s already financially prohibitive to drive into the centre due to the congestion charge, and most people would consider it insane to drive due to traffic, and the fact that public transport is about twice a quick.

> just force someone to get rid of their ICE car and promise they'll have good public transit

In the US, we are so far away from "forcing" people to get rid of ICE cars that the very concept is ludicrous. What we instead force is ownership of ICE cars, and it's nearly impossible to live without one because we have banned, via law, the land use that would allow a person even the option of living without a car.

As somebody who advocates for the mere legalization of car-free land use, I am frequently accused of forcing others to get rid of their car, or of being exclusionary, for merely proposing the possibility.

People in the US are somewhat sick in the head when it comes to cars, and need to at least let the huge population of people who don't want to be subjected to the violence and pollution from cars to live that way. The contrast between Paris, which great expanded non-car options during the pandemic, and a car-addicted city like San Francisco which can't even convert a lightly used beach highway into a bike and walkway, is massive.

The US must change drastically, but the drastic change is to allow people to ditch their cars, not force them.

You'd also need solutions for deliveries, in-person shopping, timely commutes, and other things that transit and cycling don't solve.

Even many neighborhoods designed to be 100% walkable and pedestrian-first make affordances for delivery vehicles and similar. Those vehicles can and should be electric, but cycling and transit still aren't at all complete substitutes.

> timely commutes

Billions of people seem to have worked out how to do this on bicycles and public transport.

One of the big differences I’ve observed between the USA and Europe is the way cities are zoned: I didn’t realise until I actually went to America that SimCity 2000 is somewhat realistic with regard to Californian city design.

By comparison, my residential building here in Berlin has a restaurant and a café on the ground floor, a business office on the first floor, and the rest is residential, and even the parts of the city with houses rather than apartment blocks do similar things horizontally rather than vertically: house, house, kebabs, five houses, small supermarket, three houses, office.

Similarly in the UK, you’ll have domestic resistances above or next to shops and pubs and offices. Or next to (I’ve never seen them above) industrial buildings: workshops, factories, etc.

In person shopping for groceries is solved by walking in many large European cities. If you rely on street parking, the shop is likely not much further than your car anyways.

Commutes can also be faster by public transit than by car, especially if start and destination are in the same city.

Delivery vehicles and trucks are probably the most difficult, but they're also major contributors to the noise and stink.

So not only are you taking their transport away you’re forcing them to move home/buy a new house and forcing them to find a new job. Bloody hell, that’s a massive change.

yes, you can't solve these problems with tiny band-aids, it requires significant structural changes. People have to live and act differently. My observation of the US from the outside is that this kind of adaption is next to impossible and would be unpopular. The timescales needed compared to the election cycles means politically it's near impossible without very widespread support. It seems it will require actual disaster scenarios to instigate change, even then, the US seems really slow to adapt. So I'm expecting that we will see slow piecemeal measures that are more palatable to the populace.