California moves toward banning new cars running only on gas by 2035 | Hacker News Reader

California moves toward banning new cars running only on gas by 2035

washingtonpost.com

20 pointsgamblor95630 comments

I hope they will also somehow ensure people actually charge the cars. Otherwise they’re still 100% gas-powered cars, but with a ballast.

It's going to be a bunch of shitty 48v hybrids. Car companies have already started rolling them out since Europe is requiring the same thing.

Why are they shitty?

48V is "very low voltage" and consequently very high current for a given power output. (Power is the product of voltage and current.)

Loss (waste) of the energy that was stored in the batteries is proportional to the square of the current. Higher currents also require thicker wires so that the wires don't melt, making the vehicle heavier and more expensive.

Non-shitty (bidet-cleaned?) EVs use higher voltages so they can have lower currents and therefore have less waste and light-weight wires. Currently around 480V, with 800V - 960V starting to be rolled out.

Hopefully electricity will remain cheap enough to encourage charging.

Only 20% of new vehicles in 2035 are allowed to be plug-in hybrids, so the vast majority would not even have gas as an option.

Challenges as I understand them:

1. Rare minerals and their amounts needed to support wide-scale adoption of EVs

2. Similarly, massively increased electricity needs to maintain EVs' usability.

I wonder whether they're going to lay out a bulletproof plan to have these, and any other, fundamental issues 100% solved before enacting changes that absolutely require them to be solved.

FTA:

"Whether the state’s goals can be reached, he added, depends on many factors, including “inflation, charging and fuel infrastructure, supply chains, labor, critical mineral availability and pricing, and the ongoing semiconductor shortage.”"

"...Yet California doesn’t want to wait."

So that tells me "probably not." Therefore, the eventual legislation will focus on reducing (or, for average people, potentially eliminating altogether) personal vehicle availability, I'd imagine.

Challenges, yes; insuperable obstacles, no.

1. Electromagnets are well understood and can replace the permanent magnets in motors. Iron and phosphorus are common; lithium iron phosphate chemistries can replace the nickel-cobalt chemistries currently used, more cheaply and more robustly.

2. PV panels now have a capital cost of about $1 per watt and imminent technologies will drive that close to single-digit cents per watt, with corresponding declines in labor requirements and deployment timetables of days rather than weeks. Stationary storage costs are also plummeting.

So we should experience deflation in EV prices and running costs rather than inflation. Roads, on the other hand...

3. The big challenge is deploying chargers in sufficient numbers. If it takes 90 seconds to charge a car with gasoline and an hour to charge an EV, we need 40 times as many chargers as there are gas pumps, modulo any charging done at home and population growth/changes in vehicle usage.

Meeting this last challenge would seem to require sweeping aside NIMBY objections to on-street charging. The implications of neutering NIMBY veto power could be far-reaching.

It's not helpful to view EV charging as a 1:1 equivalent to pumping gas. EVs need different types of chargers depending on circumstances. For road trips people need 300kW DC fast chargers, and these are major infrastructure. OTOH for daily top-ups of commuter cars it's sufficient to have an 11kW AC charger at home or at work. Electrically these chargers are pretty basic, and no more difficult to install than an electric stove or a dryer. Definitely easier to roll out than gas pumps. They're already mandatory for new houses and garages in many countries.

In terms of time for charging, it's better to compare to the time cars spend is parked, because EVs are designed to be left charging unattended.

Agreed. I didn't specify fast chargers, just that they will need to be close to ubiquitous.

It's still an infrastructure installation and maintenance challenge--it's a lot of wire!--and it's still likely to be fought by (possibly astroturf, funded by oil companies) NIMBYs.

Indeed not insurmountable, but a plan is necessary. From the article, it doesn't seem that California are taking it too seriously, though.

3. Not enough copper

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/14/copper-is-key-to-electric-ve...

"The expected embrace of the policy by the state’s Air Resources Board during a meeting scheduled for Thursday comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) set a target in 2020 for cleaning up California’s auto fleet."

Such a momentous decision ought to be voted on by the state legislature, not by appointed regulators.

What's momentous about this? It's an obvious, uncontentious time line.

In 2045, when direct emissions into the atmosphere inside of cities is a thing of the past, people will look back in disbelief that we let things get so bad.

It's momentous when one considers that critical grid infrastructure that failed in CA in 2015 was often built before US entry into WWI. CA doesn't build electrical infrastructure as fast as they plan to expand its use....

If EVs were so great, they wouldn't have to force their use or ban what people really want to buy. This is more coastal elites sticking it to everyone else.

What if consumers don't factor in externalities when they choose what to buy that negatively affect the public interest?

What if politicians aren't super geniuses and don't factor in what people actually need? What if politicians are bought off by corporations, and what the corps are selling isn't really to the benefit of everyone? What if politicians choose the wrong tech?

I mean EVs are the wrong tech. The right tech is walking. And possibly biking. Trains and busses fill in longer trips.

However, GM already screwed us over on the car thing, so I'll take EVs over getting emissions dumped directly into my face by a dodge challenger.

My argument showed why your argument that "capitalism would achieve this outcome if it were good" is not true in the general case without any specifics.

Your argument here suggests "politicians may not make good decisions or even purposefully make bad ones" which is true, but is completely irrelevant to what I said. Your original premise is still wrong. Now you're basically reduced to saying you personally don't like EVs. Which is fine.

If [asbestos-free insulation/unleaded gasoline/flame-retardant bedding] is so great, they wouldn't have to force its use or ban what people really want to buy. This is more coastal elites sticking it to everyone else.

If leaded gas is the only way you can make a high compression engine run, you use it.

If being lined with asbestos is the best way to make something fireproof, you use asbestos.

Combustion engines are still optimal for many use-cases-but CA Central Planning doesn't care about anyone who needs them.

If you had to pay the $200/ton ti remove the roughly 5 tons of CO2 your car produces every year, you’d probably want an electric car pretty quickly.

The average new car is like $40,000. If people had to pay an extra $4-5k (4 year car loan) vs buying an equivalent EV that costs an extra $10-15k people would still choose the gas option.

Most cars last quite a bit longer than 4 years. If the carbon cost was baked into the initial purchase price of the car, the EV would win by miles.

Even if it wasn’t, and you only keep your cars for 4 years, you’d be paying the extra co2 removal fees forever, on every gas car you owned, not just for the first four years, and none of that cost would be capital that you’d get back when you sell the car, whereas you’d recoup quite a bit of the battery cost.

What’s more, more than half the energy usage of a car is during manufacturing, so if you had to pay to remove all of that carbon from the air, both cars would start out 10-15k more expensive, and then the EV wouldn’t seem so bad.

2035 is surprisingly soon! My guess is that it'll get pushed back, but in the interim seems like it could make the the EV landscape more interesting.

Doesn't this mirror the EU? It makes sense to align for car manufacturers sake.

They've played this game before. Which car manufacturer are they trying to bankrupt now I wonder.

Which car companies aren't ready for this yet? The writing has been on the wall for some time now.

Well if they do go bankrupt, I am sure we can bail them out and buy a large stake at a discounted price per share.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-gm-treasury/u-s-gov...

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