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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Better than nothing, but the date is a bit far away if we want carbon neutrality before (or even around) 2050. Cars have fairly long service times. Hopefully the market will phase out ICEs earlier than that except for niche uses.

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There may be a faster fall-off than you'd think, because of feedback effects. Same way film cameras stopped being popular and then you couldn't get the films, or get them developed, so they got more unpopular, repeat until extinct. If fuel stations start closing down and you can't get the parts, it won't matter if fuel cars have decades of good service life ahead.

Yes, that's what I'm thinking too. It's a vicious circle (or maybe a virtuous one?) but once fuel stations start closing in droves it will become very impractical to own a petrol car.

That cycle will undoubtedly be slower for vehicles than cameras. Much larger, much more expensive population, covering a broader range of niche cases. I think very highly of my EV, but I'm not under the illusion that all fossil fueled vehicles will evaporate quickly. Certainly I expect another 10-15 years out of my 22-year-old truck.

A 22 year old van is already too old to be driven in many European cities.

For example, vans must be manufactured on 1 January 2007 or later to be used in Copenhagen. In July the date will become 1 January 2012 [1].

That doesn't yet apply to cars, and I think the truck counts as a car. It does apply in some cities in Germany, where the limit depends on the fuel -- petrol cars are often limited to 30 years (1992), diesel to 2007.

I expect these regulations to tighten as electric cars become widespread, and the various exemptions to become more stringent.

[1] https://miljoezoner.dk/en/regulations-and-vehicles/regulatio...

And https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/

Probably, but I still expect it to be slower than the film camera sunset. If memory serves, it took about a decade for film to evaporate once film camera sales were dominated by digital cameras. I think it'll take 2-3 decades for transportation electricity to do the same to petrol. It's unfortunate, then, that cessation of ICE car sales is so far away.

A petrol stations running costs are very low. They break even with 2% margins. Even if they go away, a 2m^3 tank at home will last you for a year or more. And if your typical full tank range of 500-600km is not enough, you can toss a few fuel cans in the trunk and travel across the continent without refueling.

The only way ICEs will go away is by hostile legislation, being regulated and taxed to death purely for ideological reasons, as is happening.

> a 2m^3 tank at home

Err, what? I'm in Paris, I can't drill that kind of hole anywhere near my home. The article is about the EU; but I doubt most people can do that even in the US, except when you have a house in the middle of nowhere with lots of land around it.

Not to mention: huge underground tanks of gasoline are a fire and explosion hazard. They are an environmental hazard if they leak or spill. They require building to safety codes. They require trained and skilled operation. They need to be to insured.

Global warming is not an ideological reason. Neither is air pollution in densely populated areas.

Purely ideological? What do you mean?

That is likely true for rich countries, but typically old cars get shipped to poorer countries where they continue to run for another decade or so. The infrastructure there will see good use for a while longer.

> where they continue to run for another decade or so

Or another 50 years. The modern western disposable culture isn’t global, although is certainly envied by many who don’t have it.

Of course some cars live essentially forever somewhere, but I think the fraction that passes the thirty year mark is rather small.

It's the oil infrastructure that will affect them, because it's global. If that goes away...

It won't go away, but there's good chances fuel gets a lot more expensive as production scales back.

Which is another feedback loop, high cost, shrinking demand, shrinking supply, rising cost.

Also oil has high fixed costs. Stations, tanker trucks, refineries. Fewer customers carrying them means they rise as a percentage of purchase price.

Assuming you can easily get parts.

It's interesting to see how there are two top-level comments, one saying the date is too far away and the other saying that it's a short period for such a transition.

I guess both are true in some way - it's really challenging to decarbonise quickly, but we need even quicker, because we're way past reasonable in terms of the environmental situation.

Electric cars are still ridiculously expensive, don't have the same range and features etc, why would I want one? I live in a cold place, cold isn't good for batteries and engines heat the car inside, with electric cars heating reduces the range drastically

We need to tell that to people in Norway where 85% of new cars are plugin vehicles.

Electric cars can run on average 100 km/h over 10 hours if you plan your trip well (and have a bit of luck with free spots on plugin stations). Apart from charging time I don't see where plugin vehicle is worse than ICE one when it comes to features.

> Electric cars can run on average 100 km/h over 10 hours

That's below highway speed here, and everything is at least twice the distance in America than you think it is. The nearest major city from me is 240km away, the second is 435km and it gets -34C here (the average in winter being about -10C).

It just isn't feasible if you aren't in a dense metro area and only ever use your vehicle to commute (which is by far not the case).

Average trip lengths in America are not that much longer than in Europe. On the rather rare occasions when you do several hundred kilometers in a single day, stopping for fifteen minutes to recharge every two hours or so doesn't increase travel time all that much. You have to take breaks anyway.

> Electric cars are still ridiculously expensive, don't have the same range and features etc, why would I want one?

Are you under the age of 65? Do you have children? Do you expect that you will ever have children?

If so, you want either an electric car or no car at all, in preference to a fossil-fuel-powered car, because you want the planet to remain hospitable for humans.

That's exactly why they plan to either ban ICE or tax the hell out of them. Because society needs you to switch to electric, so they need to make you want one.

It's not fast enough to make electrics better, so we need to make ICE worse as well.

As someone in the American Midwest: LMAO. ICE cars are definitely not going anywhere anytime soon here.

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