Tesla pushes U.S. to boost fuel economy penalties | Hacker News Reader

Tesla pushes U.S. to boost fuel economy penalties

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189 pointsourmandave239 comments

Tesla are no angels, but it is nice to see an example where a large company has an inherent financial incentive to behave in an a broadly pro-society manner.

Would be nice to see more companies lobbying against pollution and other negative externalities.

I wonder if a carbon tax which subsidizes low emission alternatives could get across this way?

You've just described Tesla's entire business model. They sell carbon credits to enable polluters to keep polluting.

For anyone else who'd never heard of carbon credits:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkobayashisolomon/2020/03/13...

So, if these carbon credits exist, is it possible to coinify them and boost their value? Because it would seem the more valuable they are, the more financial incentive there would be to reduce carbon emissions.

I don't know if you meant it this way, but your statement comes across very negatively. Just a reminder that the carbon credits are doing exactly what they're supposed to do: give a leg up to green companies.

My mind is spinning with these carbon credit things right now.

You can trade them! Like a stock market!

If /wallstreetbets started buying all these up (not sure of the supply right now), they could fleece dirty industries.

There's a cap on valuation. You can buy them from producers or pay the ceiling cost per credit from the state (e.g. California).

Now, if the WallStreetBets folks want to go into clean mobility, I'll pop the popcorn and watch that show for a few days.

I couldn't find anything about a "cap on valuation" on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit) or (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=carbon%20credit%20valu...)

Would you mind pointing me in the way? Even if there is a cap, as long as the current price is below it, there's a market.

That's quite a disingenuous way to describe the situation. Without ZEV credits, the polluters would keep on polluting.

With ZEV credits, the polluters, for now, keep on polluting, but they have to subsidize the development of clean automotive tech, and fund their own competition. This is definitely a good thing, and give them a big incentive to stop polluting (as much) so they can stop paying for those ZEVs.

> but they have to subsidize the development of clean automotive tech

More like they subsidize bitcoin-created pollution.

It absolutely would, and they've been pushing for that for ages. New taxes just aren't tenable in government right now, even if it means avoiding the worst of Climate Change which impacts everyone

If I had to bet I would say we're >50% chance we get somewhere around $1T in Dem spending which will be close to 100% paid for with new taxes.

BUT it doesn't look like there will be much in the way of hitting emitters. In fact it looks like we'll be giving the incumbents money to 'green' which I don't trust at all.

Albeit with some penalties attached for accountability which is kind of a potential tax.

I find the utility industry weird in that it's so regulated yet they are allowed to make profits sanctioned by govt agencies. Just nationalize it or regionalize it.

> carbon tax?

No you want an emissions trading scheme instead of a carbon tax. Only this way the government can actually enforce strict upper limits on CO2 emissions („cap“) and allow economic subjects to sell their emission rights for profit („trade“). Compared to a carbon tax „cap and trade“ makes the regulation of carbon emissions more efficient both for all market participants and the government.

In theory. Then the government gives free carbon credits to industries that are supposed to reduce their emissions.

Taxation does seem to be the best way to let the market do what it thinks is the best way to achieve the goal you set.

Someone once retorted to me, "well won't some businesses go bust?" - to which I do not reply glibly since job losses are overreported but still important, but simply "That is the whole point".

Only if it considers the total emissions required for making and using a particular vehicle. If I buy a 10 year old civic to drive for the next 5 years, I will be producing MUCH less emissions than what's released when building and using a brand new tesla. This will never happen though, because the virtue-signalling 'green' politicians and companies still have a bottom line which is MUCH more important for them than any real improvement.

Engineering Explained youtube channel tackled this question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k

The verdict appears to be that the answer to this question is a bit more complicated then a blanket "Its better to buy a new car for the environment" but its highly dependent on gas milage and time of ownership, as well as new gas car vs new hybrid car vs new electric car. He does take into account carbon needed to build the cars too. It seems that in most cases a new EV will be better for the environment then your 10 year old honda in roughly 4 years. Skip to 6 minutes in the video for when he starts showing compiled data of when its better to buy a new car vs keep old.

The CO2 emissions of 10400 kg for producing new tesla is taken directly from tesla's own marketing materials ('impact report') and arguably highly inaccurate as admitted by the author. I'm willing to accept his revised figure of 20800kg however.

Next, moving on to the pollution and externalises (besides emissions) required to produce a tesla - he correctly points out that acquiring several of the metals involves human trafficking, pollution, release of toxic chemicals, etc (he gives no useful numbers). He then moves on to state that's not a big deal because the relative weight of these metals in one car is much smaller than the total weight of the car? What a bizarre argument.

> It seems that in most cases a new EV will be better for the environment then your 10 year old honda in roughly 4 years.

2011, manual, 10 year old civic, gets 29mpg not 25mpg, which even based on the bullshit numbers from tesla's marketing pamphlet means it's better for the environment to buy a 10 year old civic and drive it for 5 years. If we use more realistic numbers you can probably buy 90% of 5-10 year old car models to drive to 5 years and emit less CO2 than a new tesla.

Also, people buying 10 year old civics generally already have economy and frugality in mind and aren't loaded with cash, they often don't have the option of buying a tesla. Trying to economically punish them for this is just counterproductive.

It would be also nice if they made a repairable car, and not fill the landfills...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-tVM9lz4h4

Yeah, that video was primed for clickbait. The picture of the repair bill they showed was from 2019 for a completely different car. Both Rossman and Rich Rebuild’s channel are complicit.

There’s always more to the story.

https://twitter.com/petteri_bergius/status/14384521225263104...

There has been a follow up video by RichRebuilds where explains (and regrets) what he did. It doesn't change anything about Tesla's stance against 3rd party repairs and their reluctance to do anything other than a complete battery swap in that case.

I mean, if a part isn't supposed to be opened up to be serviced, then them doing so would increase liability in case they botch the repair or it later catches on fire. If the part was on a smaller scale, say replacing a mosfet on the ADAS unit when the service techs are only allowed to replace the full ADAS unit, would it be the same story?

It may not change the individual fact, but it quite clearly doesn't support the ridiculous hyperbolic generalizations about a "non-repairable" car upthread either.

Look, cars are complicated. Manufacturers write repair manuals and stock parts based on expected failures. Not every conceivable failure is going to be in those manuals. In this case there was a valve that was part of "The Battery Pack" as far as the manual was concerned, but that had a localized failure more that could have been repaired with a targetted replacement of a single part.

And it wasn't in the manual. And yeah, that's sort of an engineering failure. They should have anticipated this low-hanging-fruit kind of repair (just as they do for other very common stuff like brake calipers or shocks or whatnot). And they didn't. Shame on them.

But that's not a systemic failure. They just didn't write it up.

What are you really asking for here? That Tesla empower its local service centers to do their own engineering work on a 400V electrical system and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements? Does that sound like a good idea? Seems like we'd be right back here with entirely different (and IMHO more justified) anti-Tesla safety flame wars.

[1] So far as anyone can tell, this is in fact the only such valve that has failed on a wild Tesla. It's not like these things are dropping everywhere.

>What are you really asking for here? That Tesla empower its local service centers to do their own engineering work on a 400V electrical system ...

Yes. This is what certifications are for.

> and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements?

No. See above.

The Tesla fleet is aging every day. This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse is going to start to decimate the used car value. If Telsa's long game is to sell trips and not cars it might not be a terrible plan.

> Yes. This is what certifications are for.

No... no, it's not. Manufacturer certifications are designed to provide liability protection for repairs done by people given training on how to make specific repairs to specific systems. What you're asking for here is for someone to independently determine that this valve can be replaced in isolation from the battery it's attached to. That's not the same problem at all, and good luck getting an insurer to cover that kind of nonsense under a "certification" contract.

> This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse

Again, that's just simply wrong. Small part repairs are routine and common in the Tesla world just as they are everywhere else. The overwhelming majority of repairs don't involve replacing the battery pack! This controversy was about a very specific small part that happens not to have an individual part number nor disassembly spec.

And maybe it should! But your generalization is just silly. Tesla doesn't treat repairs any differently from any other manufacturer, period. You got sold a line that matched your priors.

The model 3 price is $13,500 just for parts which still fits with the theme of the story. Arguing over invoices is just a diversion from the real issue of repairability. Everyone agrees replacing the battery is crazy expensive - especially when a simple fix is possible.

That narrative is really not true. Tesla provides the resources for repairs and parts just like other U.S. auto manufacturers.

Anything that deals with the high-voltage (HV) systems need to be certified for obvious safety and liability reasons.

Tesla Parts Catalog https://epc.tesla.com/en

Service and Diagnostic website https://service.tesla.com/

You can access "Service and Repair Information" and even "Diagnostic Software" and pay by the hour, day, month or year...

Some manufacturers won't even provide some of these to individuals and only makes them available to dealerships.

My friend and I just performed maintenance on our Model 3s. We changed the A/C filter and cleaned the condenser and serviced the brakes. I just ordered the parts from the Tesla app and did everything in my garage.

The provide some parts and some documentation but nowhere near the extent of legacy manufacturers.

Do you have some legitimate examples? Please share them. HV parts excluded as I stated above.

Here is an example of an owner ordering a 2021 center console from Tesla so he can upgrade his older model year car.

https://youtu.be/6TOnzrrkxDc

I’ve done many other retrofit upgrades and repairs to my Teslas.

They are no true sustainability advocate at this point, and this is an element of opportunism in this as well.

Yes, but the green angle still sells and government subsidies are still being paid.

Without a huge reduction in their use, it's really hard to square car use with human health. For example, most damaging air pollution, and the most microplastics in ocean near SF, comes from tires. EVs don't fix that. And then there are all the health problems that come from requiring people to use a car to visit friends, or get a loaf of bread, or really do anything. Cars are killing us in many ways.

80-90 years of mobility or 85-95 years trapped in one place is not a hard choice to make, especially when 60+ of those years are still in the future.

Yes, the pollution from cars is terrible. I lived by a major freeway for three years. No, the solution is not to give up all their benefits. For one thing, SF could actually enforce air quality standards inside apartment buildings, especially those near the freeways. Also future storm drain systems could be designed to settle out microplastics (many storm systems do have settling/collection ponds anyway).

The choice isn't cars or no cars, that's a completely false dichotomy.

The choice is to legalize other forms of mobility beyond a car.

People in the US are so car-addled that when I suggest something like this, they can't even imagine a life where they can buy groceries without using a car. It's quite shocking!

The choice isn't cars or no cars, that's a completely false dichotomy.

Apologies for reading too much into your comment, then. Many in SF seemed to espouse just such a dichotomy.

People in the US are so car-addled that when I suggest something like this, they can't even imagine a life where they can buy groceries without using a car. It's quite shocking!

I lived in downtown SF, walked to the grocery store, etc. I do miss being able to take BART and not having to have a DD, but otherwise I prefer the unscheduled nature of car life for all the quotidian practical needs. Even in SF, transit wouldn't get me to the beach or to hiking, etc. unless maybe I wanted to wait for an hour and have to walk way too far at both ends.

> I prefer the unscheduled nature of car life

See what he means. There is no reason transport needs to force a schedule life on you. Good transit is frequent enough that when you decide to go you just walk out the front door to the station and wait for the ride to show up - it will be soon enough.

But you have never seen that so it hasn't occurred to you that it is possible.

But you have never seen that so it hasn't occurred to you that it is possible.

I don't believe it is possible, no. Even in places with frequent trains during the day, they typically stop at night. Say I need to take someone to a doctor and fill a prescription at 3AM. The usual pharmacy and urgent care are closed. Is there a city on earth that has trains to exactly where I need to go, every five minutes, at 3AM? Will the train get me there as fast as, or faster than, a car?

IMO transit is incredibly useful for situations where everyone is doing the same things at the same times. But it forces you onto a schedule and a destination, with little flexibility.

that is rare enough - for most people - that a taxi would save you money.

But it's not about the money, of course :)

Privacy, for one thing -- I don't think I'd ever want an unknown third party in the vehicle with me when I'm taking someone or myself to or from an unscheduled medical visit.

The reasons I own and drive a car would be impossible to meet by anything except self-driving personal transit pods that can link up with other pods to form dynamic trains. That's the sci-fi future I'd like to live in, where I have a private pod, but if I want I can connect to a train for a long distance ride, use the dining car, meet other people along the way, etc. Kind of like how ferries work now, except you could stay in your car if you want, and faster.

I guess if there was a way to force drivers to pay for the externalities of pollution, that would be a reasonable fair middle ground. Then it simply becomes a question of to what degree that privacy is valued.

I suspect it would push the cost of driving out of the reach of your average person though.

But this is only true if you live in major cities and quite often only the capital.

You often see this (in the UK) where people living in London assume that everyone else has 24 hour bus services.

Like what?

There are problems sharing the road with vehicles that can't keep up with the flow of traffic. Apart from those, what isn't legal?

Building mixed use neighborhoods where you can walk to a corner store is illegal in most of the US.

that is not really different from Ferrari or McLaren or any other of the fastest cars on the planet.

EDIT: i'm being downvoted but these manufacturers build machines capable of extreme performance, and have interest in maintaining their reputation. If you think i'm exaggerating, there are repairs where you are required to ship your car to the McLaren or Ferrari factory. The Ferrari FXX is not allowed to leave the track ever.

I think you are being downvoted because it is not a completely apt comparison. While Tesla does make luxury/performance cars, they are also used as people's primary means of transportation, not just track cars like the FXX (or the Enzo which I believe is the road-legal equivalent). So they are less like Ferrari and McLaren where I can't any new car for less than six figures and more on par with Audi/Lexus/etc.

I'm not sure why it isn't apt? a performance part has to perform under certain constraints regardless of the MSRP of the vehicle.

Daily Driver ferraris and mclarens are also laughably expensive to maintain as /the norm/ Unlike this defective battery which is /an exception/

also the "going to landfills" bit is really FUD. Tesla repairs your vehicle by installing a new battery, and tesla recycles the old battery themselves. The loop is as small as possible and there is no landfill in it.

Ferrari makes about 8,400 cars a year, almost entirely assembled by hand. McLaren produces just shy of 5,000 per year. Tesla is currently producing about the combined number per week.

Ferrari and McLaren cars are a very exclusive club. Ferrari, to my understanding, explicitly limits production capacity to maintain that exclusivity. The practices of these two companies are in no way comparable to the practices of a large-volume automaker.

Alright then for your sake i'll compare it to something I am intimately familiar with: Battery replacement on the 2012 nissan leaf, my first EV and my current Daily Driver.

After almost a complete decade I'm down to 78-84% of the original battery capacity. Before buying a tesla, i investigated the cost of replacing the battery out of warranty though Nissan. The cost estimate i got on the phone was over $14k.

That's for a battery about 1/3 the capacity of a tesla battery.

Tesla has a reputation for their batteries catching fire less than their competitors... not letting people hack up their batteries has a large part of that. Allowing 0.5% or however many people ruin their battery risk their own safety for cash would impact the perception of tesla battery safety far more than 0.5% so it is obviously a smart move to preserve their reputation, in a manner consistent with mclaren insisting on applying their own special glue in Woking to preserve the reputation of mclaren roofs not coming off.

But neither of those cars are comparable to tesla... those are showoff sport cars... tesla is comparable to standard BMWs, audis and mercedes'. All three companies have a huge number of authorised and 3rd party repair shops, doing everything, from "just swap it out" to a lot of manual work to save cost on parts.

Not to defend Tesla, and I don't know the details. But very likely that old replaced battery would remain with Tesla and they would scrap it for parts or otherwise recycle it into a "refurbished" part to be sold again. Might be they would ask more than $16000 for the repair if you decide to keep the old battery yourself.

Other companies apply this as well, it's an economics of scale thing. It's not worthwhile (ie: profitable) for them to have every technician in every service location educated to a high enough level to do low level troubleshooting on every model and every part, it's much cheaper to hire people that can swap out modules and ship those back to a central facility. There you have people that do nothing all day then troubleshoot all parts they have been specifically trained for, repair them and sell them as refurbished. A lot would probably still end up on the landfill. And whether the customer sees any discount in repairs due to this "optimisation" is debatable. But right now you hardly have a choice, I hope that will be changing.

My father had this complaint about just about all cars manufactured post 1985(ish). Up until then, he, himself, could repair his own car for most issues with a basic set of tools that most people already had in their houses. Then they started putting computers and proprietary parts in, making it so that he had to take it to a dealership or repair shop who had the specialized multi-thousand dollar equipment to read the chips. Define "repairable." It was still repairable, just not by him.

Cars made back then were easy to fix in a sense, but broke often, got terrible gas mileage, and were largely death traps in any crash over ~45mph. There are certainly parts of modern cars that should be easier to fix yourself, but in a lot of ways they're less difficult to repair.

The engine compartments are smaller, and the engines have more parts which means it takes longer. However if you can hook up and read the OBD2 system codes you get a lot of diagnostic info that was never previously available. This can mean you send a lot less time redoing work. The real limiting factor is space. If you're not averse to Quora, there's a nice discussion here https://www.quora.com/Why-are-modern-vehicles-so-difficult-t....

From the 70s to 80s cars were a complete shit show as they had smog control systems tacked on. Your father's sentiments are more applicable to pre-70s vehicles, before smog control laws arrived.

By the mid 90s things settled down and were much simplified, thanks to the computers and electrification of most actuators. You just treat the engine control module as a black box, with a small handful of easily tested sensors.

I'd take any 90s car over most post-smog ~pre-obd era vehicles, your father's complaint strikes me as more an irrational fear of computers. There's a definite sweet spot in the 90s where computerized cars still have throttle cables but extremely simple and minimalist computerized engine control systems vs. years prior.

I've heard this a lot, that cars stopped being repairable by the Average Joe (and Jolene) once they started putting computers in them. After having worked on my own cars' weird problems and watching a lot more car repair YouTube videos than I'd like to admit, I have to say a lot of that is just bunk. Not all of it, just most of it.

Yes, cars got a lot more complicated. Yes, there are a few parts on them that the shadetree mechanic has no chance of fixing on their own, such as an automatic transmission or the car's security system. (Those parts, you either replace the whole modular unit, or pay a specialist/dealership to repair.)

But for the most part, they are still _systems_ and they are still _understandable_ and repairable. The key is that you have to have the willingness to learn how these newfangled systems work. To make it a computer analogy, it's like an old COBOL programmer complaining that you can't fix modern computer programmers because everything is Javascript now.

It's my observation that over the decades, the mechanical components of cars (the engine and transmission) have gotten extremely reliable while the electrical and computer systems are where most problems occur. That means you have to understand the basics of electronics and electricity in order to troubleshoot these kinds of issues. I know a few motorcycle guys who can rebuild a whole engine for fun on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but the moment there's a slight electrical problem with the bike, they throw their hands up and trailer it into a shop.

On the diagnostic front, the good news is that auto makers have standardized on a lot of things that actually make it _easier_ for independent shops and home-gamers to work on modern cars. For instance, all cars have an ODBII port and CAN bus through which you can (at a minimum) read diagnostic codes and read live data through with a dirt-cheap reader. More advanced scan tools can graph live data from every sensor on the car, communicate with the car's various modules, perform diagnostics, and other fun things. These cost more of course (hundreds of dollars) but can still cost under one trip to the repair shop depending on the issue if you're willing to put in the effort and time.

What a total scam that kind of clickbait video is.

There was that lemon law lawyer as well trying to go after tesla - also a scam.

I think one difference - Tesla doesn't seem to rollover for these scams as much as others do. Ie, they went after that lawyer, who'd pulled the same stunt on LOTS of other car companies. And won.

And the whole Rich Rebuilds stuff - I used to follow him, but it just devolved into a Tesla gripe fest. Ironically, while folks like Rich says Tesla is not opening stuff up enough they are going to have regulators breathing down their neck for every fire they have (most are things like household not car electrical wiring when clueless homeowner runs a high resistance socket onto their house wiring).

With 500K vehicles, the last thing they need to be focusing on is making these type of clickbait folks happy (Rich Rebuilds etc).

In terms of making frankenstein battery packs the way Rich says they should be made.

1) The BMS for these things has pretty tight tolerance.

2) The swap certain cells out is a disaster waiting to happen.

"No, the "remove a cell" thing is not a "fix" either. The result is the same, it just takes longer. Removing a cell is literally creating an SoC imbalance on purpose and it's idiotic that people who don't understand the Tesla BMS push this."

https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1437607772959428608

"I can't believe this is being touted as a fix. You can't replace individual modules in an S/X pack. There's no way to match them well enough for a long term fix. Might last a few months, but will invariably die again. Have tried it a half-dozen times. Best run was about a year. "

So we have folks pushing straight scam repairs here on HN as a way to tarnish Tesla.

Some of my favorite aspects of capitalism are when incentives align people toward things that are also in the public interest in addition to the private interest of the company.

Another historical example that comes to mind were some train companies lobbying to end segregation because they didn't want to run separate cars/routes for different groups.

Another thing that isn't really an example of this are the bodegas in DC (often run by immigrants) selling both trump and hillary hats (or whatever current political battle is going on) to the public - arguably that could incentivize divisiveness, but for some reason seeing those stands meeting demand without caring about tribalism makes me smile.

Tesla is kind of an outlier here though, in that Musk's motives were in the public interest more than the private interest at the start (accelerating adoption of alternative fuels) - so in this case the private interest is in service to the public one and not incidental.

[Edit]: I know it's poor form to complain about downvotes, but what I assume must be politically motivated downvotes on this are lame.

Yep. For all its evils and potential evils capitalism eventually trends towards net positive. We don’t have to like the way works but at least its something… and way better than the historical alternatives at scale.

I would say it broadly trends that way as long as you keep some checks and balances around to keep it in track and from descending into a perverse local maxima (or minima, depending on how you want to phrase it). Labor unions and anti-trust legislation are around for a reason.

There's not much reason to expect this to happen systematically in the realm of regulation. As George Stigler put it, regulation is purchased by the industry for the benefit of the industry. This data fits that story.

Yeah - it's one of those cases where effective coordination is hard.

We need effective coordination (regulation) to get outcomes that are best for both individuals and the group, but that doesn't make it easy. Risks of regulatory capture, bad regulations, and such are still there and a problem.

Policy and good incentives are hard to get right. That's why I'm happy to see them when they happen. At least in the common case capitalism allows for markets to get this right a lot of the time through company success and failure. Even with negatives there's still massive wealth creation that has risen all boats on net.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I think that's an excellent question to ask oneself when starting a company:

"Will the financial interests of this business align with or oppose the public's?"

Generally I agree. I don't know why we expect companies to be angels either. Personally I'm okay with "fiduciary responsibility" and the role of government is to align incentives. Of course, morality and culture are still important (e.g., managers should still see themselves as providing good employment for their communities, etc), but without aligned incentives the former are swimming upstream.

> NHTSA issued a notice saying it could impose higher penalties for prior model years for automakers failing to meet fuel efficiency requirements.

Pretty sure buying an average used ICE car will net MUCH less emissions than what's required for building and using a brand new tesla.

ICE cars emit roughly their weight in CO2 every year. Within a few years the new Tesla is net negative. Compare your options.

How does a car become 'net negative'?

>> it is nice to see an example where a large company has an inherent financial incentive to behave in an a broadly pro-society manner

I don't see how Tesla is "pro-society". Tesla batteries are very costly to the environment. For every x amount of batteries they need to blow up y amounts of mountain tops. We don't have infinite amount of those.

I think the goal with the Gigafactory and iterations on battery tech is to keep increasing energy density/efficiency so that the pros outweigh the cons.

The same could be said for solar as well. AFAIK panels are a net negative until their efficiency outweighs the cost of making them.

It's all a means to a noble end. Rather this than continuing to burn and release carbon?

>> The same could be said for solar as well.

Yes but we're talking about Tesla now, not solar.

>> iterations on battery tech

So at one point in time, Tesla _will_ be "good for society"? They are not there yet. But they pinky-swear that they _will_ be?

Tesla has an entire energy (solar) division via the SolarCity acquisition.

Right, right, of course, thx for pointing that out.

Now, how does that make Tesla "good for society"?

I'm not saying they aren't. I'm simply asking, how is mining rare earth minerals (by blowing up one mountain top after the other) to produce solar panels or batteries "good for society"?

How about better for society. Maybe our qualifiers are off. The ceiling for making solar and battery tech green is much higher imo than burning fossil fuels.

Any conversation we have in this realm is relative and we're basing that relative qualification against fossil fuels.

>> better for society.

According to what model?

For the sake of what's best for humanity, according to what model is what Tesla is doing "better"?

Do you know what will happen once we run out of rare earth minerals? Will we launch a space ship and mine Mars? Do you know that Mars contains those minerals that we need in order for Tesla to truly pursue their goal?

Is there science behind this belief, or simply a yearning for your stock to become the next GameStop?

https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...

I wonder if Tesla would be as into the government imposing penalties for exaggerating the range of their vehicles. Tesla seems to under-perform their range estimates pretty consistently across models while every other vehicle exceeds the estimate except for the Polestar. Sometimes Tesla is only under-performing the estimate by a small amount, but they're claiming 15.7% more range for their "Model 3 Long Range" than a "Mustang Mach-E CA Route 1" while only achieving 1 mile more in tested range.

Tesla has often also pushed its own estimates over EPA cycle estimates claiming that their estimates (which are more generous to their cars) are better. Should a car company be able to make public claims about range based on their own models?

As you noted, this is simply Tesla having a financial incentive. If competing manufacturers need to pay large penalties for prior years, it gives them less money to compete against Tesla.

In some ways, this doesn't provide a pro-society incentive. Penalizing past bad acts doesn't alter a car company's incentives for the future beyond proving that you're serious about enforcing rules. A better incentive could be to announce that you will penalize companies for past failures, but allow them to get that penalty rebated back to them if they exceed requirements going forward. In the first case, you're penalizing them and getting a small amount of money while taking from the companies resources that they could use to invest in electric vehicles (or lobby against fuel economy standards). In the second case, you're proving that you're serious by imposing the penalty, but also providing a very strong incentive to exceed targets going forward.

I think that many automakers like Hyundai/Kia, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, GM, VW, and Renault/Nissan are looking to make major investments in electric vehicles. I would rather incentivize them about the future (and punish them about the past if they don't reform). Maybe set a standard like getting 50% of the penalty back if X% of their cars sold in 2025 are electric with an MPGe of 100+ and getting back the other half of the penalty if Y% of their cars sold in 2028 are electric (with MPGe over 100). That would give them a concrete incentive to create efficient and popular models.

It would also likely be palatable to them. GM has announced ambitious plans for its conversion to electric. If they're able to convert the majority of their car sales to electric in a short period of time, it seems less important to apply a retroactive penalty. If their plans are a green-washing campaign to keep getting sales for their ICE vehicles, they can say so-long to that cash. In the meantime, they can take out a loan to cover what they need for R&D if they're confident they'll meet their targets.

A company wants to use regulation to harm their competitors?! How shocking.

Sarcasm aside the only surprising part about this misuse of regulation is how blatantly obvious the motivations are.

For what it’s worth I am not opposed to fuel efficiency standards, but it seems to make a lot more sense to just use the existing lever and raise gas taxes, instead of trying to circumvent them by applying pressure to the market directly.

> it seems to make a lot more sense to just use the existing lever and raise gas taxes, instead of trying to circumvent them by applying pressure to the market directly.

Note that the "fuel economy penalties" and regulations that Tesla is pushing for were an existing lever. The penalties were law from 2016, the Trump administration revoked the increase in early January of this year. [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-emissions-idUSK...

yeah, reading the article was a TIL for me too, Tesla is selling credits so other auto makers can meet emission standards. They're suing because the increased standards (and fines) that were delayed by the former administration made those less valuable.

Their competitors want to use regulation to harm Tesla, not the other way around. Their competitors are the ones who are unfairly making money by stealing from the public.

Yes, I assumed that is was a push to drive consumers to more electric cars by increasing the fuel economy penalties, not that they were making money directly from it. I did not realize that Tesla could sell credits to other companies to offset those penalties.

> raise gas taxes

yet another way to drive income inequality

All depends on how the revenues of the tax is distributed. Redistributed equally, the tax would help to reduce them:

See: https://clcouncil.org/our-plan/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada

I dont understand why people get so defensive when it comes EV vs Fuel vehicles. My friend who is an asian immigrant working in Idaho, experienced quite a bit of friction when he announced that he bought a Tesla.

Their major argument constituted how the tax benefits paid by US citizens were going for a Tesla owner (in this case being an immigrant.)

A lot of people get their opinions from a chain of misinformation that starts from groups who are incentivized to keep the status quo.

Even so, there are a lot more high leverage ways to spend tax money on reducing carbon than car rebates. Car rebates are a way to buy votes. I think it's pretty obvious that $7500 could be spent in way that reduces much more CO2 and doesn't benefit people that are already pretty well off.

The rebates are more directly intended to spur an EV auto industry, preferably dominated globally by US auto makers though? And I think you could argue that they did a pretty good job of this- at the very least they seem to have fast forwarded EV market share by 5-10 years, allowing at least Tesla to bootstrap itself and spurring the big auto makers into the EV game in a real way. The way things were going until 2005ish, GM would create a lot of headlines by putting a battery into some golf cart that could barely handle a trip to the mall and back and then put up its hands and say "See this just isn't practical and this is the best our MIT engineers can do vaguely waves at its ICE car lineup"

And through that lens, when it certainly felt that EVs were really going nowhere aside from a few prototypes that were completely uncompetitive, or a niche for really rich people, these subsidies have essentially launched a legit EV industry that can stand on its own, and the amount of carbon reduction that will lead to seems astoundingly cheap for the price paid. I guess you can always second guess what would have happened in the absence of these incentives, but to me they seem to have legitimately pushed forward the EV market quite a bit. Without these incentives and Tesla, I personally feel that the big automakers would have continued to pay lip service for another decade or two, maybe even three, until peripheral advances in battery technology made EVs too competitive to ignore.

That's sad. Immigrants do pay taxes, for instance car registration directly I assume.

The politics on immigrants of color right now is so gross. The Biden administration has to be severely inhumane and the other side cheers on literal whipping of black Haitians who clearly need our support.

I also don't understand why businesses don't use their power more to try and open up & increase 'correct immigration' that politicians claim they support.

We keep hearing about not having enough employees right? Social Security is going bankrupt because there aren't enough workers paying in. There are studies that show undocumented migrants are net contributors in terms of public resources they consume vs. what they pay back. I genuenly believe the color of the skin of most of the migrants plays a large roll in this, including right now Asians who are experiencing a lot of hate, kind of like Arabs post 9-11.

Adding a couple hundred thousand a year won't cut it. Why not a million a year?

> literal whipping

They were "literal" reins, not whips, and nothing yet indicates any "whipping" was happening. The reins are standard horseback riding tools and were used for that purpose. The Whitehouse just spoke with press after their evaluation of the details. They say CBP won't be using horses anymore. That's it, because it was bad optics.

Probably because it seems there's an air of superiority of being better than others for choosing an EV. There are studies that prove owners of hybrids/EV's want their card badges to flaunt they're driving them.

If it were just hey I got this cool EV and I really like it I think people would be less stand-offish. Instead it feels more like "Hey I bought an EV and you're a bad person who wants to kill our planet if you don't get one. I don't care that you do things like bike to work and walk places. If you have a ICE car you're bad, conform now!"

I don't want one, they don't currently meet my needs and I don't live in an urban area that has charging stations everywhere. When I say that I typically get shit on by a bunch of EV enthusiasts in online forums. So, my default response has been tainted by these encounters and I assume most EV owners are this way. I realize I'm not being fair though. I have the same problem with Vegans as well.

When are they going to push for taxes/penalties on power generated by coal?

Environmental laws have to punish individuals directly so that people feel that something is being done.

For example, banning plastic grocery bags instead of plastic food packaging, even though food packaging is a significantly higher proportion of litter.

The issue with plastic bags is overblown and banning them doesn't solve the actual issue it just makes as all feel like we are doing something. Waste management is the problem. Sure excessive use of plastic should be prevented but what is more important is what happens after it has been used. Landfills are a horrible solution as trash is in the open and can migrate to water ways etc. Ideally all trash should be incinerated and the waste gases cleaned and captured. The heat can be used to generate power. The plastic should also be manufactured in such a way that it burns as clean as possible.

Can't always trust what Elon says, but allegedly he has lobbied Trump and Biden to institute a carbon tax https://electrek.co/2021/02/11/elon-musk-asked-biden-adminis...

When Joe Manchin can no longer hold the Senate hostage and Dems have larger majorities ;)

But to be less flippant it does look like we are pushing with our European counterparts to build a framework with provisions to punish trade with countries that do not reduce coal power.

That pressure + China's public marketing to become the new hegemonic power seems to have moved the needle. China just announced they won't fund new coal development which is a positive step forward, just not the giant marathon miles forward we need immediately.

I'm sure this includes minimums for miles/kwh for electrics, right?

That's really a separate issue, which has to do with a combination of enough zero carbon electricity generation, distribution, and storage.

Though, I do wonder: Are there egregiously ineffecient electric vehicles currently on the market?

To lazy to find it, but there are some youtube videos of a car reviewer doing cross country trips in tesla's to review the difficulty. They are generally favirable, while pointing out some of the possible issues (broken chargers!) that might cause problems. A year or so after the first one, he did the exact same road trip along the northern US to compare how well it worked in cold weather to determine how much effect it would have. (answer enough to be inconvenient but he also changed to a more optimal charging method to compensate). All that is to say, in the end he published how much it cost him for this road trip, per mile in charging fees and it ended up being something like 15% cheaper than driving a similar family sedan (30MPG IIRC) and buying gas.

Two which, I would like to point out that gas taxes to pay for the roads he was driving on where likely more than 15% in most of the states he drove through. It might have been slightly more carbon friendly, but i'm a little tired of people with electric cars being given quantity discounts (if you will) buying from power generation mixes that are >50% carbon while those of us cooling our inefficient houses and powering our piggy computers are on tiered pricing models that rape us for excess consumption.

>being given quantity discounts

It's way more than that. Imagine trying to open a gas station without being required to provide restrooms, handicapped spaces, environmental permitting, and all the other headaches that come with opening any other business location, let alone the requirements that are gas station specific.

Especially since time to charge basically guarantees the occupants will be getting out of the car, which isn't the case for 5 min fill-ups at gas stations.

I believe that there's often a yearly fee for electric vehicles meant to counteract that - there is a >$200 one in Georgia, where I live, and I believe that's far over the equivalent one would pay through a gas tax if one had an ICE vehicle. In addition, I believe the vehicles hardest on the road are commercial trucks, not standard sedans. Put together, I believe the electric vehicle owners here end up subsidizing the roads for commercial truck ICEs, which seems very backwards.

Electrics like Tesla and others blow far past the most stringent fuel economy minimums. The Model 3 sedan gets close to 140 MPG equivalent! You might expect the heavy, larger Model S to perform more poorly, and you'd be right...it only gets 93 mpg.

It's a simple matter of economics; even a big battery pack contains fewer kWh than a gas tank so electric cars essentially must be streamlined. Even the Cybertruck with its huge battery and utilitarian aesthetic is aerodynamic: It looks more like a crossover SUV than a conventional pickup truck, with its streamlined windshield, sail pillars, and automatic tonneau cover. This isn't for aesthetic reasons, it's because these changes are required to reach the desired range numbers. Low-rolling-resistance tires are standard on electrics not because they're cheap for electric vehicle manufacturers, but because they're cheaper than installing larger batteries. Meanwhile, before it even hits the torque converter or transmission, a gasoline engine only turns 25-30% of that chemical energy into useful work. Conversely, an electric motor turns 90-95% of the energy in the battery into useful work.

An electric vehicle that couldn't make the 27.5 mpg CAFE minimum would be pathetic and would not be a viable product.

MPG equivalent externalizes fuel production, which when charging your car at night - is primarily done by burning coal.

If you burned gasoline to make magic wizard juice and then powered your car off of that, it does not make the car any better for the environment.

This is a lie. My Tesla is nuclear powered. Nuclear provides baseload power which can't be easily spun or or down, so overnight power is almost entirely nuclear and carbon free.

Are you directly connected to this nuclear plant, or to the grid?

Even as a baseline energy source nuclear accounts for a maximum of 19% of generation. 60% comes from burning dinosaurs in various forms.

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/CA-ON

If you zoom out, you'll see that is the cherry picked exception, not the rule.

The entire generation capacity of Ontario is 17 GW. You are correct, it isn't hard to go all nuclear and hydro for 3/4 the population of New York. That isn't the case in the rest of North America.

Depends on the area. In my state, over 60% of production at night is from wind. I have solar at home and so I charge my car during the day.

Besides, the average emissions per kWh of a large power plant is significantly lesser than several thousand smaller ICEs due to basic thermodynamics.

>far past the most stringent fuel economy minimums.

Only because the efficiency of generating and transmitting electricity isn't included.

Electricity generation is generally only ~30% efficient. Transmission and grid for on-demand power slightly reduces efficiency further, while non-on-demand sources like solar and wind result in higher than apparent grid inefficiencies, since the grid investment tied to it is also only as efficient as the power source.

Solar efficiency is 20%, and lower when you factor in grid inefficiencies due to its variability.

Yes, the cost of solar already reflects these inefficiencies (land use, etc), but so does the costs of other fuels.

And most batteries aren't getting anywhere near the efficiency on the label either. All that heat coming off the battery when charging (especially using a supercharger) isn't free energy either.

Just raise taxes on fuel. It has the added benefit of actually saving lives too. The higher the cost of fuel, the less people are killed by cars.

This is, for better or for worse, a directly regressive tax in a way that is politically toxic.

There is a really easy solution to that - tax carbon, and put 100% of the revenue into a single bucket, divide that by the number of citizens, and give each citizen that amount.

This means that it is a net positive for anyone who uses less than the average amount of carbon, and incentivizes everyone to use less. Poor people use way less than the average amount of carbon, so it will be a net positive for them.

"Poor people use way less than the average amount of carbon..."

Do you have a citation for that?

There are quite a few:

https://apnews.com/article/science-be099434a414a0cb647640ce4...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/21/worlds-r...

https://www.oxfam.ca/news/carbon-emissions-of-richest-1-per-...

> Poor people use way less than the average amount of carbon

This is not true in a world where most white-collar workers have been working from home for two years (or, increasingly, can afford Teslas), and service employees have to drive to work every day.

Look, I want a carbon tax. It's good on net. But it's regressive and the people will never vote to support it. I live in deep-blue WA and even here the public rejected it.

The gap is large enough that I doubt the shift in work habits was enough to change it. Cars are not the only major source of carbon emissions, and wealthier people have bigger houses:

https://apnews.com/article/science-be099434a414a0cb647640ce4...

I think you are misunderstanding the reasons why carbon taxes don't get passed. One, the ones you mention failing were NOT of the type that I am talking about (revenue neutral ones, where all of the money taken in is given right back to the citizens). If you told citizens they would be getting a check every year, I bet you a lot more would support it.

In fact, I don't have to be hypothetical: They implemented a revenue neutral carbon tax in British Columbia, and after nearly a decade of being in effect, 70% of residents supported it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/04/how-to-make-a-...

I think you will find that like most policy decisions, it is not the average citizen who is keeping a revenue neutral carbon tax from being implemented, but large carbon polluters who lobby against it and convince citizens not to support it.

This is hard to enforce. How about family that doesn't have kids vs one with 4? Each child contributes a lot to carbon emission until adulthood and after that. To be really honest families without children then should have more carbon credits.

> To be really honest families without children then should have more carbon credits.

What about dead people? They are carbon negative since they are sequestering it in the grave. To be really honest murderers should have more carbon credits.

Edit, in case it wasn't totally obvious, this is reductio ad absurdum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

It wouldn't be given per family, it would be per person, so those kids would each get a share. I am not sure why that would be hard to enforce.

I am not sure why you think it should be divided by family... that "family without children" was created by a family that had children... why would an adult be more worthy of their share than a kid? A kid probably uses less carbon than an adult.

The whole point is that we don't have to figure out who uses more carbon or who deserves what... we tax the carbon at its source, and let the market figure out how to pass that cost along, and then pay the money directly to people. If you use less carbon than average you get more money than you pay... doesn't matter who you are or how old you are.

You seem to be talking about incentivizing population control... I am very against that, but even if you are for it, I don't think carbon taxes are the way to go for that.

That seems like it would be an extremely regressive tax and disproportionately affect lower income Americans, no?

Yes it would and also inflation. Goods would cost more which would be another whammy. We should boost the tax credits for new EV purchases. And maybe extend to your first used EV purchase too.

offset it with more tax credits for lower income

That's just creating a poverty trap. Sure you can use math and do a phased in/out credit based on income but that just replaces a welfare cliff with a welfare "steep grade". Unless the credit is so generously applied as to defeat the point of the price hike you're still making the metaphorical gravity well of poverty deeper.

Edit: Did I say something mathematically incorrect or is it just inconvenient?

You don’t even need a phase-out, a flat redistribution would work well enough, maybe accompanied by funding for public transportation.

Take more money from poor people and then give it back at the end of the year - after paying the salary of all the new bureaucrats you had to hire. Great idea.

With the key added piece that you're trying to disincentivize carbon emissions in the process. I'm much more worried about the risks of the climate crisis than I am whether a few extra bureaucrats are hired.

Gas tax already exists, as does the earned income tax credit. Doesn’t take any new bureaucrats to change the numbers, although it will perhaps force some of them to get off their ass and modify some forms.

so? I say this to point out that if they're doing something that is to be deprecated there's nothing wrong with disincentivizing it, so long as we keep helping them get their needs met or towards self sufficiency.

For example nothing wrong with doubling tax on gas if we also improve public transit.

My main point is that regressive, nor disincentivizing the poor are wrong things to do if they're causing issues for society.

> That seems like it would be an extremely regressive tax and disproportionately affect lower income Americans, no?

> so?

This is a standard economically liberal position, at least stated openly.

EU has a min excise tax on gasoline of 0.359 euro per 1L, before VAT ($1.6 per gallon). Most countries have it way higher (Germany : 0.6545€, or ~ 0.78€ after VAT). Higher fuel taxes should incentivize public transport, smaller/more efficient engines, etc.

In the US that needs to come with policy though. We have woefully inadequate public transit here, save for outlier metroplexes like New York. I would get laughed out of the room if I suggested taking the bus to the grocery store here.

> We have woefully inadequate public transit here, save for outlier metroplexes like New York.

Yep, and the only areas that have good public transit within the USA also happen to be very expensive... Something the working class poor and lower middle class simply cannot afford to even live near.

There's a catch though: fuel taxes in Europe are important part of government's tax income. In my country it is like 10% of all taxes collected. Now, if everyone switches to electric vehicles this income source will dry out. Governments will have to replace it with something, so my guess is, they will at some point impose similar taxes on electricity.

or transition everyone to a road usage charge.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

The cost of not doing it would be much, much greater though, and disproportionately affect lower income folks

That's the point. It exempts the poors who live in a shoebox apartment and take the bus and crushes the ones who are living far from their job and slogging out a crazy commute.

I doubt a decently sized gas tax (a few cents a gallon) would "crush" those who are commuting from afar.

Compared to the inflation already present for years in healthcare, housing/rent and college - all things with double digits for over a decade - the cost of gas rising a dime or two a gallon wouldn't even be noticed with the fluctuation of gas prices as is.

It won't be a few cents because few cents/gal isn't going to get the behavior change that is the point of the tax.

The fundamental issue here is that you need to take what a lot of people currently see as their best option (driving an ICE car) and make that sufficiently worse so that the next best option is the one tons of people choose.

Anything that gets the behavior change will necessarily screw a lot of people.

> Anything that gets the behavior change will necessarily screw a lot of people.

I disagree. Just look elsewhere around the world. It's doable, we just don't do it.

We had similar discussions in Germany on taxes on any CO2 emissions. There were proposals of redistributing some of the earnings to people with very low emissions, a bit similar to negative income tax rates in concept. Sadly never really went anywhere.

Climate change also disproportionately affects lower income humans.

Perhaps we can subsidize the poor Americans with something other than a percentage of oil consumption.

The fundamental issue is incentive structures, not austerity.

Sin taxes (those on alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, etc) also hit low income people harder. Yet, we still raise them because the positive effects on society outweigh the consequences.

We want people to find ways to reduce their fuel consumption, just as we want them to stop smoking. It's painful, but necessary, because the consequences of inaction are so high.

I think that is a major false equivalence.

Assuming that you don’t have a problem, you can always curb your drinking.

You still have to get to work. Many jobs, especially low income ones, will always have to remain in-person. In many places, infrastructure is already too far built out as sparse for public transport to be feasible for a very long time.

It’s easy to say “just take the hit” if you’re not walking in their shoes.

Implemented in the same spirit as this: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2307...

It would actually reduce inequalities because the revenues of the tax is redistributed directly to every individual. Since rich household polluting more than the poors, the 7 lowest deciles should actually be better off.

Actually, maybe not.

https://web.stanford.edu/~goulder/Papers/Published%20Papers/...

"We find that a carbon tax is inherently progressive, narrowing the income gap between rich and poor households. Beyond that, we find that it can potentially raise real incomes of low-income households."

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/550691-econom...

carbon tax != fuel tax you pay at the pump

true, less people able to afford a Tesla on the roads, maybe we can build a nice walking lane with the proceeds so the good folks doing the gardening at the presidio can make it to work.

You could do the same thing about cigarettes and cheeseburgers too. The problem is that it’s inherently a regressive approach where the brunt is borne by the lowest income classes.

Cigarettes is a great example where there are highly taxed in some countries, so the US has a population of foreign experiments that the US can study to see the effects on the poor.

In New Zealand a pack of 20 costs about NZD36. Minimum wage is NZD20 per hour here.

Or adjusting to match median per capita incomes, that is about USD40 for a pack.

Also see this list of world cigarette prices: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

Edit: Disclaimer: when you are old enough to have close friends with smoking related cancers and emphysema etcetera, using dollars to represent the future cost to yourself seems more reasonable. It also breaks the social dynamic of handing cigarettes around and getting others addicted - when a single cigarette is expensive to you, you don’t just offer them to others.

Step 1. Send a $50 check to everyone who earned less than 30k last year or who is unemployed now at the beginning of every month

Step 2. Raise gas/burger/cigarette taxes

The easiest approach is to remove the billions (nearing trillions) in annual fossil fuel subsidies. People fight against subsidies to clean energy, forgetting how much more flows into an industry that is killing us.

>forgetting how much more flows into an industry that is killing us.

It's not very much. People who write white papers for their think tank or who want to push a particular agenda like to say that not taxing something or someone is the same as subsidizing them. Which is definitely not true in reality. It should be simple enough to see that not taxing has a floor at $0.00, while subsidizing something has no limiting bound at all.

Absorbing the negative externalities of a process is the same as subsidizing it. The subsidy value here is bounded above by the net present value of the negative externalities in question.

What are the externalities of extracting fossil fuels? Or are you attributing the consumption of fossil fuels to the extraction companies? How many degrees removed does one continue to be responsible?

The externality is in removing the carbon from the geosphere and introducing it into the biosphere, since it'll end up in the atmosphere eventually. So yes, the responsibility for the externality is attributable to the extracting companies.

This is a weak talking point. There are no direct subsidies to US oil and gas companies. None.

The subsidies people frequently talk about are “externalities.”

> The higher the cost of fuel, the less people are killed by cars.

Not if your goal is to move from ICE to EV. Just because it's an EV, doesn't mean fewer people are "killed by cars".

EV are still susceptible to accidents (the way they're driven 'round here, I might even say more susceptible), but pollution from ICE also reduces lifetimes of people who have to breathe it in.

(e.g. this is probably a bit alarmist but: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/cars-k...)

Agreed but only if we subsidize low income earners.

In Europe, fuel taxes are high. In Turkey, taxes are high but also the income is much lower.

As a result, in EU the cars tend to be much more smaller and economical than those in the USA. In Turkey, the cars are like the cars in EU but the engines are much less powerful and fuel economy is everything. In Turkey, the car that the average Joe would buy will have 1.0 to 1.6 engine. Anything larger is reserved for the rich.

However I would like to note that, not only the fuel taxes are high but also the car taxes are high. In fact, the taxes in Turkey are so high on the powerful and expensive cars that it started catching World Wide attention[0].

But I would be careful on overtaxing. In Turkey's case, cars are so expensive that it's like buying a house. People take very long term loans to buy these things, which greatly reduces the disposable income and the life quality. On the flip side, cars value don't depreciate as quickly as in the USA or EU. Cars in Turkey tend to be well maintained and very few clunkers would be on the road(unlike Eastern Europe) and once you get a car, you can actually upgrade it after few years much easily since the old one will hold it's value pretty well.

As a result, from environmental and safety perspective taxing high works but it comes at a great cost of life quality. I would prefer the EU approach. Taxes are still high but not excessive and goals of reducing emissions are achieved through regulation instead of tax pressure.

[0]"Why This $150,000 Porsche Costs $600,000 In Turkey?" https://jalopnik.com/why-this-150-000-porsche-costs-600-000-...

I knew Denmark had high taxes on cars but this is probably even higher!

It's horrible for cars, electronics and Alcohol. The base model iPhone 13 Pro is 1850$ in Turkey(the min. salary is 330$).

There's this thing called ÖTV, or "excise tax" which is applied to everything that is not basic biological need, essentially. It's not just very high(%50 for the cheapest and least powerful cars and goes to a few hundred percent for the luxury ones) but also it is applied before VAT, so you pay VAT on the tax too.

Oh, maybe you can just buy stuff from abroad, right? Nope, very hard to import cars. Phones are required to be registered to you passport or the carriers would block the IMEI after few months and you guessed it right the registration fee is high(300$) and you can do it once veery 2 years. Maybe you can bring alcohol at least? Nope, max 2 litres per passenger allowed and it is again match to you passport.

Also, public transport. Lived all my life without a driver license, at 30 I got one because I moved to the US

I agree with this policy entirely, singapore has similar high taxes on cars. It is possible to build cities, and countries, in such a way that cars are mostly unnecessary. In a pedestrian first design, with bikes and public transportation, you do not need a car. Cars are dangerous (to pedestrians, and drivers and other drivers), environmentally harmful, wasteful, noisy things. Outside of some rural areas, and businesses, cars are not necessary, and should not be necessary day to day for 95%+ of people. Even with Buses a bus moves many more people more efficiently than a car. Autonomous trolleys, trains, buses are an easier problem than cars since you can have set routes. Electtric buses exist. Its really unfortunate so many societies are set up around the rich and cars.

This will hit poor, and low middle class, the hardest.

We are barely getting by as it is.

The poor don't have the luxury of buying new fuel efficient, or electric cars. Our roads are not safe for motorcycles 365 days out of the year. They buy what will get them to work and back hopefully, at a price that won't put them further into debt.

My biggest fear with Global Warming is they make the poor pay for it in sneaky ways.

When smog checks were required in CA, they made it sound like the low income wouldn't be hit hard financially. It didn't turn out that way though. If your vechicle doesn't pass increasing harder smog tests every two years; you end up paying a lot. (I can work on my own vechicles, but thinking about buying a smoke machine because they are now failing for tiny holes where hydrocarbons might escape.)

The assumption is that the tax money would be redistributed to low earners on a monthly basis, much like the child tax credit works now. That way the poor aren't affected and rich bear much of the burden, which makes sense since they also do most of the polluting.

Do the rich do most of the polluting by buying gas though? I am middle class and work from home. I pollute by having a lot of things delivered. Consumption tax shifts the burden to the person delivering things to me, who is probably poorer than I am.

Isn't this the standard argument against consumption taxes?

The person delivering to you will either raise their price, affecting you indirectly, or be subsidized directly by the tax rebate.

The person delivering to me has no power to set prices. That is decided by the management at the delivering company.

Sure they do. Your pizza delivery driver won't take that job if they lose money on the gas. Then the pizza place has to either raise their rate or cover their gas, which they would then pass on to you as an increased delivery fee.

Pushing the consumption tax to the bottom squeezes the delivery driver’s margin more than the business’.

Shifting the cost onto the delivery service is actually good. Pretty much all delivery is done by a few large companies. The only exception are things like Grubhub/Doordash which put the fuel costs on the individual worker. A fuel tax across the board would no doubt just result in a price increase that would compensate the drivers since it would be a uniform tax.

Outside of specific areas where gig services are regulated - using things like Grubhub/Uber. does cause harm to the poorer, worker because after accounting for costs and vehicle depreciation the profit is less than minimum wage. I would not be surprised if the profit is negative part of the time. The way to not cause this harm is to not use these services e.g. make your own food at home.

Deliveries would just get more expensive if fuel got more expensive.

And I consider delivery to be basic infrastructure that’s the backbone of everything from small Etsy shops to Amazon to B2B shipping, so I wouldn’t want delivery prices to go up.

A Carbon Dividend fueled by a carbon VAT tax...

Is this a safe assumption? The majority of our federal budget is spent on social security, health care (more than half on 65 and over), and defense. According to this research, only 8% was spent on safety net programs in 2019: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-fe...

I'm saying the assumption when someone says, "increase the gas tax" is that such a system is only viable if a subsidy for the poor is part of it.

I think one could make the case that social security, Medicare and Medicaid are safety net programs. That said, I don’t think that means these taxes would necessarily go to help the poor.

Edit - bad spellcheck edit

The rich do most of the polluting? How can that possibly be true given the rich are a tiny minority of the population.

They outsource the polluting. Their capital funds operations that generate pollution.

I don’t think so, public transport will flourish to meet the new demand.

A carbon tax would be the most efficient ways to reducing CO2 emissions. It's a far simpler system than trying to work out average average emissions for different fleets of vehicles, never mind trying to balance competing CO2 production coming from various industries, agriculture and transportation. Complicated laws make for loopholes and massive inefficiencies as technology and the economy changes. We should tax precisely the thing we want to reduce.

This is assuming you're actually on board with mainstream science and the problems associated with anthropogenic climate change. If you think climate change is a hoax or harmless, then yeah any carbon tax is a drain on the economy with no upside.

We are barely getting by as it is.

Okay, that's the problem. People need more equitable access to opportunity and a stronger safety net. Better public or charter schools, or more earned income tax credits or a higher minimum wage or maybe even straight up UBI. All of these are things that might address poverty more effectively than repealing smog laws.

> The poor don't have the luxury of buying new fuel efficient

You don't have to buy more fuel efficient car of the same size. You can just buy a smaller car.

No, let's not do that. Taxes should exist purely to cover government costs, not to finance causes.

The people of a country have an incentive to shape collective behavior that affects the collective, now and in the future. Straight taxes on the item causing problems is the least corruptible way to do it. Such as taxing fossil fuel.

The market will then allocate to which needs the remaining fossil fuel usage should go towards. Presumably, not to using pickup trucks and SUVs to take kids to soccer games and shop for groceries.

When Macron tried doing that in France pre-covid, people went on streets ("yellow vests"). 50€ more on fuel each month is a lot of money for many people who have to commute to work many kms from small towns.

The tax was implemented in an extremely unfair way. The bright side is that it has made it clear that the ecology transition should work hand in hand with an effort to reduce inequalities.

Here's a different implementation https://clcouncil.org/our-plan/

Regarding people living in isolated areas and forced to drive, Canada throws an additional 10% on top of the tax cut you get.

(Nitpick: Hollande and the Ayrault government implemented the tax. The yellow vests happened because Macron tried to raise that toothless tax)

Perhaps instead we could levy a 0.05% or $300 income tax, whichever is less, and have a tax credit if you do not own a ICE vehicle to negate that.

That's how we got the yellow vest protests. You cannot do that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

They need to just stop classifying cars as trucks.

They don't push for stricter marketing regulations or more oversight regarding fsd.

I have seen mentions of repairs here, just read a report from insurance companies recently. Tesla's or electric vehicles do not burn more often than other cars. The repairs are 10 percent more expensive and some of the repairs require electricians(not necessarily from Tesla). Conclusion was, if something breaks, it's really expensive, like some high voltage cables can easy cost 7k. I think Tesla gets too much negative press on this matter.

Great initiative... but if you really want Biden and his administration to listen to you, you probably shouldn't make fun of him on your twitter account with 60 million+ followers. [0]

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2021/09/20/elon-mus...

It appears that the underlying question is over whether fuel economy fines should be inflation-adjusted. From https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-emissions-idUSK...:

  The decision - announced eight days before President-elect Joe Biden takes office - follows a U.S. appeals court ruling in August that overturned the Trump administration’s 2019 decision to suspend a regulation that more than doubled penalties for automakers failing to meet fuel efficiency requirements.

  Congress in 2015 ordered federal agencies to adjust civil penalties to account for inflation. In response, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued rules to raise fines to $14 from $5.50 for every 0.1 mile per gallon new cars and trucks consume in excess of required standards.

  Automakers protested that 2016 hike, saying it could increase industry compliance costs by $1 billion annually.

That's $1B out of Tesla's pocket, since they are a major recipient of fuel economy credits (the other side of the fuel economy penalties).

You can see the status of all current penalties and credits here: https://one.nhtsa.gov/cafe_pic/cafe_pic_home.htm

The way the US implements fuel economy rules are stupid. For example, a diesel motorcycle that gets 100 miles per gallon wouldn't meet standards.

Our fuel economy laws are the primary reason people have been moved from fuel efficient cars to much less efficient SUVs. It's very, very stupid.

So I just assumed the lease on a Chevy Bolt so I could cheaply try an electric out for a year. So far so good. The biggest issue, and not a big one since I can charge at home, is that 80% of the chargers around are Tesla Superchargers.

If Tesla wants to help the environment and boost EV adoption overall, they'll make their supercharger network available to other brands. I hear it is coming, but as far as I know I can't do it yet, even with an adapter.

I totally understand Tesla prioritizing its customers with a better/faster charging experience, but building a private charging network makes me think they really don't give a shit about anything but Tesla.

> but building a private charging network makes me think they really don't give a shit about anything but Tesla.

duh? They're not a company for public good. They're a company to make money.

We live in a capitalist society. How is that a surprise?

They offered it to other OEMs before in exchange for support for upkeep/expansion and none of them took them up on it.

I'm a Bolt driver with the opposite experience- every charger around me is a ChargePoint, EVGo, or Electrify America. This isn't generally true across the country of course, but I generally drive in the Denver/Boulder, Colorado area which is somewhere I would expect considerable EV infrastructure. Some do have a single Tesla connector among a set of several J1772 connectors, although most commonly I see several J1772 connectors and one for Nissan Leafs.

Ahhh the old crony capitalist "regulate the competition" mantra. Et tu Elon?

> Tesla, which produces only electric vehicles, sells credits to other automakers to help them meet government vehicle emissions requirements, and says those credits are less valuable due to changes in rules made by former President Donald Trump's administration.

Funny that Elon Musk is strongly critical of big government and regulatory bodies right up to the moment where it is better for his profits.

FAA is bad for enforcing safety standards for rocket launches.

NTSB and state transportation departments are bad for wanting to ensure safety in self driving testing and rollout.

State health departments are bad for enforcing workplace covid mandates.

Democrats are bad for incentivizing union labor in auto production.

EPA is good for increasing the value of Tesla's emission credits. In fact they should be more strict!

Although I guess there's nothing more American than wanting socialism for yourself, rugged individualism for everyone else. Considering his pro-environment stance I wonder how he would feel about removing massive subsidies on the coal sector, which produces 40% of the electricity needed to power his cars.

Judge people by their actions rather than their words. Talk is cheap etc.

Also - the whole credits scheme is a way for the US government to legitimize continued massive environmental pollution and resource waste.

Elon also called Biden "Sleepy Joe" over the weekend now his company that he is a big spokes man for and is actively involved in its running is making an appeal to the government.

Elon will be Elon...

Isn't it a bit of, "Don't hate the player, hate the game"?

The regulatory incentives are what they are. Democracy necessarily creates an incentive for lobbyists. Politicians and bureaucrats have similarly aligned incentives. Given these incentives, the outcome is almost entirely predetermined.

Too much focus is put on the sales pitch and the bill of goods while the deliverables are ignored. Narratives and elite promotions take on lives of their own in the minds of the public. Observe the incentives and watch who gets paid. There's a strong chance that everything else is just marketing fluff.

Being critical of certain regulatory bodies is not the same as "wanting socialism for yourself, rugged individualism for everyone else". Elon is a proponent of UBI, and every year for the past 20 years has worked on projects are intended to help all of humanity (green energy/transport, space travel, safe AI/human symbiosis). Not sure how that's wanting individualism for everyone else.

Trying to increase profits by having the government outlaw your competitors is unethical.

Not moving as fast as you can to greenify your cars as an automaker is unethical.

I think that's not their complaint; I think they started selling EV credits that Tesla earns from the government to internal combustion engine companies (GM, Ford, etc.).

Then the government changed the story by instituting a delay, which devalued what they had earned under the original rules.

I believe they are proposing that changing the rules on them, because they did the work to be in compliance, is effectively punishing them financially for that work, indirectly.

That is like wanting the government to step in because you bought a bunch of beanie babies and they went down in value.

maybe if the government is the one manufacturing the beanie babies...

It's because without government subsidies in one form or another Tesla isn't profitable (not SolarCity, nor SpaceX)

how can you tell (i ask because I don't know how to read the published earnings report) ?

How about we push penalties misleading advertising and deceptive marketing that Tesla is know for?

> How about we push penalties misleading advertising and deceptive marketing that Tesla is know for?

Why are these issues in competition with one another?

> misleading advertising

They notoriously don't advertise. Are you referring to the after-savings price calculator on the sales pages?

Probably the lies of “autopilot” and “full self driving.”

You didn't read the fine print, by self driving they mean it drives itself directly into the nearest emergency vehicle with pinpoint accuracy.

And the full is for the full body cast you’ll have if you’re lucky. Lol.

Just for posterity, this was posted an hour after these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633640

LOL. Butthurt Tesla fanboys in this thread.

Tesla...doesn’t advertise?

I have never once seen an ad for Tesla.

What do you think a product/brand website is?

Per dictionary.com, the first definition of "advertisement" is "a paid announcement, as of goods for sale, in newspapers or magazines, on radio or television, or on the internet". So, their own website is not an advertisement by that definition.

Their second definition: "a public notice, especially in print". So, yes, by that definition.

The second definition is second for a reason, though: The first usage is more common. When people say "Tesla doesn't advertise", they mean the first definition. Trying to conflate it with the second definition does not take the discussion anywhere useful.

> Per dictionary.com, the first definition of "advertisement" is

Not at all a compelling argument.

Per the Oxford dictionary (https://www.lexico.com/definition/advertisement), the first definition of "advertisement" is "a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing a job vacancy."

Per Mirriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertisement), the first definition of "advertisement" is "a public notice".

Per Collins (https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/adverti...), the first definition of "advertisement" is "an announcement online, or in a newspaper, on television, or on a poster about something such as a product, event, or job."

Per Cambridge (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/advertis...), the first definition of "advertisement" is "a picture, short film, song, etc. that tries to persuade people to buy a product or service, or a piece of text that tells people about a job, etc."

I don't think any dictionary is going to capture the nuances of marketing vs advertising. Consider ads vs posts on social media

There is no nuance and there is no distinction. It's all advertising.

All that's happened here is that they've been advertised at and they have swallowed the advertising hook, line, and sinker.

And because they'd prefer to think of themselves as sophisticated rather than gullible, they then make these dishonest semantic arguments in order to find some desperate difference between marketing and advertising that their ego can live with.

I am pretty sure they pay for their website.

Marketing is not advertising.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing marketing includes advertising.

It's true that Tesla pays nobody to put their name somewhere. Not TV, Google Ads, Twitter, etc. They do have marketing since they need to have a website that, when someone visits it (driven by an outside source), they are encouraged to purchase the product.

I think it's comparable to a marketing brochure.

marketing

You’re allowed to have a storefront and have that not fall under what most reasonable people call “doing advertising”

Marketing; not advertising. An avenue for interested parties to find out more information about your product - not a way of informing people who may not know about your product of it’s existence, or to promote the product to people who already know about it.

Have you seen that advertisements that traditional OEMs and dealers run? Have you visited a dealer?

Let's read how two different automakers introduce their driver assistance features:

> https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-...

> Super Cruise is the first true hands-free driving-assistance feature for compatible roads

> https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

> Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities

Both are SAE J3016 level 2 systems. This engineering standard calls this literally "driver support features" and says they are not "automated driving features". Tesla is really stretching per the SAE spec.

https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre...

Tesla is literally the only automaker that does business in the US that advertises their assistance system this way.

Tesla shouldn't get a say. They don't produce cars that use fuel so this is purely and obviously self serving.

> Tesla shouldn't get a say.

You make a fair point. But then again Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Obviously they get a say. Everyone gets a say. Even (hell, especially) for things that are "self serving". The government serves us all. We regulate for the benefit of society, not the industry being regulated!

Of course it's self serving. Why would any company lobby for anything that doesn't benefit itself?

Isn't Tesla's "angle" that they sell clean-air ev credits to ICE vendors, which are being devalued by the delay?

Only companies being fined should get a say in what the fine is? That is the opposite of how you address self-serving behavior.

Another instance of Musk not believing in the free market.

The other instances is when the companies take government money and contracts.

It appears he only wants to keep governments out when it suits him, like exploiting employees.

I disagree. Fuel emissions are an externality [1]. And for the free market to function, externalities should be appropriately (dis)incentivised.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/externality.asp

"free market" isn't a binary thing. There's a spectrum between free market and regulation. Many spectrums.

I'm not aware of Elon ever saying he's 100% free-market

> "A carbon tax is needed to correct the unpriced externality & market will do the rest. The consequences of slow action are serious. In my opinion, we need to convert >80% of the global road, sea & air fleet to renewables by 2050." - Elon Musk, June 25, 2020. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1276221517932552192

> [regarding supporting government breakup of monopolies/oligopolies]: ". . . I’m definitely against any monopolies/oligopolies where there is a low forcing function for improving customer happiness or an unpriced externality that consumes a common good (eg emissions)." - Elon Musk, May 15, 2020. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1261155900569640962

I think its just fighting fire with fire, The big automakers were pushing to get all kinds of subsidies from the U.S. government for unionized labor....which excludes Tesla.... this just seems like Musk fighting fire with fire.

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