EU approves effective ban on new combustion engine cars from 2035 | Hacker News Reader

EU approves effective ban on new combustion engine cars from 2035

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38 pointsstonks40 comments

Wonderful news. I live in a European city, so i dont have a need to own a car, but i use my bicyle to get around town (all year). The city i live in has great air quality, and i generally avoid big car streets, but as soon as i get close to a larger road, or i get passed by a car (often hurrying to get to a red light further down the road) you really start to feel the exhaust. Inhaling and tasting car exhausts is terrible, and i think many car drivers dont think about this, as they are protected in their air conditioned box.

If your city and place of living has a good public transport system that’s feasible. The reality in countries like Spain is that once you live somewhere outside of the center the public transportation essentially sucks.

That said this will only speed up electric vehicles but with these prices I don’t see how many people are gonna afford them.

EU is only creating a golden decade for far right. Just watch.

So everyone who disagrees with current EU policies is far right? For me the divide is more "far left" vs normal :)

Yes you are right. I got infected by media and started thinking that everything right from far left is now far right.

That is all that the far right have, unsubtle threats of violence to try to get people to obey by fear.

No. People are going to vote for populist parties which will promise easy solutions, which are usually also right from the center. No violence necessary.

I can see these kinds of bans working in the EU where car ownership isn't a necessity. However, in the US where cars are often the ONLY means of transportation, I imagine they will go down like a lead filled balloon. How many barely running gas cars are the only thing letting poorer Americans make it to work and school? I really wish the US would work much harder on making car ownership unnecessary.

In the end though, I won't miss the stupid cars that go up and down my street farting at 120db for no freaking reason because the owner "Want car go vroom!"

This is 12 years from now. There will be plenty of used combustion vehicles for the less well off to acquire and use until EVs further decline in cost. These folks don’t have $40k-$50k (median sales price) to spend on a new car anyway.

They'll push that target into the future once the power networks won't handle the load and the industry won't be able to obtain enough lithium and copper and sell the cars at a competitive price. The industy will reconvert the internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen and/or manufacture EVs with a small battery and a hydrogen power cell range extender. Renault already annonced fuel cell powered Kangoo and Master vans.

https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/news-on-air/news/kangoo-z-e-...

If you would like to make a LongBet [1], I'm willing to take the other side and wager $1000 (to a charity of the winner's choice) that EVs move full speed ahead, hydrogen dies except possibly for trucks and niche use cases, and that range extenders are never deployed in material quantities.

The Tesla Model Y is currently the best selling vehicle in Europe, and fully electric cars made up 16 percent of total registrations during the first nine months of the year. [2]. Fast DC charger networks are robust and continue to grow rapidly [3]. The costs to make these vehicles will only come down, and used vehicles will filter down to the less well off and replaced by new vehicle sales. Fast charges can already be performed in 10-25 minutes. A decade is a long time for progress.

Tangentially, hydrogen is just an expensive, low density battery. Toyota is learning this the hard way [4] [5].

[1] https://longbets.org/

[2] https://europe.autonews.com/sales-market/tesla-model-y-tops-... ("Tesla Model Y tops Europe's new car sales for the first time")

[3] https://chargemap.com/map (Map of Europe's Fast DC chargers)

[4] https://electrek.co/2022/10/24/toyota-struggles-ev-shift-cha... ("Toyota struggles with EV shift, considers changing plans due to Tesla")

[5] https://electrek.co/2021/06/16/toyota-delusionally-claims-hy... ("Toyota delusionally claims hybrids and fuel cells will stay competitive with electric cars for next 30 years")

> The Tesla Model Y is currently the best selling vehicle in Europe

This is like saying that Mercedes E class is the best selling vehicle.

The majority of new bought cars are people's cars. When you have the majority of new cars replaced by luxury cars (model Y) this shows something different. (i.e only the rich can buy a car,).

The go forward economic mobility proposition for your average and lower income class consumer requiring an auto is either buying a more expensive EV (versus a historically priced combustion vehicle) or paying exorbitant petrol prices as various stakeholders make O&G production and refining painful (by design of course). The future is going to be harder than the past; way more people while we're trying to move away from a cheap source of energy that is detrimental to the species' survival.

The days of cheap and plenty are behind us in the near term, at least until all of the flywheels around clean energy and mobility (and their associated supply chains) spin up to speed. Let's be real, we're shifting a global energy system to a new paradigm and attempting to do so in decades instead of centuries. Not easy nor cheap!

Rich poseurs fueled by subsidies. You could then make Lamborghini Urus best selling car in EU if you would set the subsidies right. In the end you need to target peoples cars (VW Jetta 20k EUR, VW Polo 16k EUR) and we are not there at all with BEVs.

> Tangentially, hydrogen is just an expensive, low density battery. Toyota is learning this the hard way [4] [5].

That's not even hydrogen's worst problem.

Hydrogen's worst problem is that it would need a distribution network set up. EV charging works because the electrical grid already existed, chargers just need to be plugged into it.

Meanwhile, for hydrogen, you would need to transport liquid hydrogen all over the place constantly. It's a whole new set of logistics.

To put it bluntly, Toyota fucked up and have been very slow to admit their mistake.

> EV charging works because the electrical grid already existed, chargers just need to be plugged into it.

Electric grid may exist, but it's capacity is not enough to handle the additional load of the car charging. Sure, it can take car here or there, but replacement for current ICEs? No way.

> Hydrogen's worst problem is that it would need a distribution network set up.

Yes, slowly supplement and convert the gasoline and diesel distribution network to H2. We already have a LPG distribution network. Currently the only company offering H2 in the EU is Linde Gas. But that will change. The EU MPs want H2 stations every 100 km and charging stations every 60 km. Without this infrastructure EVs and H2 powered vehicles will not get enough traction to replace the current vehicle fleet.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20221014IP...

My hope is that the shift to EV causes side effects like increased number of communal hubs and better public transit so people don’t have to use cars as much anyway

Those changes won't just happen as a result of EV adoption, but they can if we push for them. Call your (especially local) elected officials.

Yes they won’t be just because of it, but I think it’ll be a very influential factor

I think that's unlikely. EVs aren't much different from ICE cars in operation, and they have the same large space requirements.

Unless you include e-bikes of course, in which case sure. But electric cars have most of the same problems with regards to encouraging sprawl, danger to pedestrians/cyclists, etc.

If we want changes it's gonna have to be a conscious effort to reshape our built environment.

> In the end though, I won't miss the stupid cars that go up and down my street farting at 120db for no freaking reason because the owner "Want car go vroom!"

I consider myself somewhat of a car enthusiast and I absolutely hate the mentality of "Loud = Good". They just remove their muffler and then rave about how good their car sounds and then later rant about getting a ticket for their car being louder than legally allowed.

I love the sound of flooring it in my Model 3 Performance. From the outside, all you hear is tires on pavement. From the inside, I hear a slight "whoop" that quickly goes up in pitch as a few hundred kilowatts get shoved through the motors. It's quiet and sounds futuristic.

In my experience, those loud bangs are usually caused by motorbikes. Some car drivers however loves their audio to be on 110% and I can hear that tuc-tuc-tuc 100 meters away as it will approach me and then the tuc-tuc-tuc disappears into distance.

Its the same in more rural countries like Ireland, for a lot of people public transport and bikes aren't an option

Germany currently has the highest energy prices in the world. It seems seriously insane to suggest banning IC cars before you have a concrete plan to have any kind of sufficient energy supply. How do you cope with tens of millions of EVs charging every night?

Also, if there is no enormous breakthrough in the next decade in battery technology, car ownership will become a luxury for the rich.

(I use public transport daily, by the way. And it is absolutely disgusting, overfilled and obnoxious. Absolutely hate it.)

or fix the cities? wfh, better public transport, incentivize local business, e-bikes, etc

individual cars are not going to solve anything, ev or ic or whatever

The eventual plan as was announced was that power consumption would reduce once a majority of vehicles were EVs, since the EVs could charge at night during minimal demand and discharge to the grid during the day at peak demand. There's a lot of ignoring possible (and likely) catastrophes with that plan, and Germany found out how flimsy it really is when Russia invaded Ukraine and made economically viable low sulfur coal and natural gas much scarcer.

All major car manufacturers already set earlier dates to phase out their ICE production. This announcement has basically no impact.

I also don't buy the argument that this is going to be a problem energy- or grid-wise. It's 12 years out and the grid has to change anyway. If it doesn't until then, then it will be the least of our problems.

The regulatory target date and the goals of the industry are not unrelated. It is unsurprising the laws are set to change after the dates the major players in the industry claim they can achieve the new regulatory standards.

And i don't think it has no impact, my trust that any car manufacturer would even consider this, leave alone see it to the end, without such regulation, is very limited.

A large reason that manufacturers have jumped onto EVs with such enthusiasm has nothing to do with regulations or wanting to get ahead of them. It's entirely because EVs sans batteries are extremely cheap to manufacture at scale and are vastly more modular than even the very prevalent front wheel drive layout and platform sharing combination. The number of components is much smaller by half or even more, the cost of servicing the vehicles is much lower during the warranty period, and the permutations that can be made with the same basic parts are limited only by crash and class size regulations.

The question I haven't seen answered is how electric cars ever attain reasonable resale values.

The car I have owned and driven for years now cost me less than $1000, minimal maintenance, it's done 30,000 miles.

I don't think that a usable 100kWh lithium battery, alone, with no car attached, is ever going to depreciate to $1000 ($10 per kWh). As far as I know, the wholesale price of the metal itself is more than that.

The idea seems to be that loads of people just get priced out of driving entirely. So what happens to them? Are they all supposed to move out of all of the suburbs into urban housing that doesn't even exist yet?

It's not a matter of charging infrastructure, the viable replacement cars are going to cost 5x what they currently do as far as I can tell.

We've been a decade away from doing something for 40 years now...

> There is also a non-binding proposal in the agreement to allow the manufacture of vehicles “running exclusively on CO2-neutral fuels” (also known as “e-fuels”) beyond 2035 if these vehicles fall “outside the scope of the fleet standards.” [...] “outside the scope of the fleet standards” suggests that only speciality vehicles, like ambulances and fire engines, will be able to take advantage of this carve-out.

10 years after Norway: https://electrek.co/2021/09/23/norway-bans-gas-cars-in-2025-...

And still at least 10 years to early.

I have a feeling that this won't happen. It feels like instead of doing the hard work of modelling how this can possibly work and what the effects will be, we've got virtue signalling from eu politicians.

Why not trucks?

(Well, we know the answer....)

As someone who was initially very excited about the switch to EVs, a lot of the incentives to push towards EV ownership were seen as good in my eyes. However, as a car enthusiast, the full swing towards banning anything but EVs is an overreaction and something I am very upset about. I know Europe is still wary after the diesel fallout, and they're reticent to try anything else. But this is repeating the same mistake of the diesel regulations in that they're putting all of their eggs in one basket.

The manufacturing of batteries is going to be a problem if all vehicles are EV. That includes small personal transportation like motorcycles, large personal transportation like cars, and public transportation like buses. There are charging concerns as well. Currently Europe is struggling to generate enough power using non-fossil fuel sources to even keep running. If the electrical demands go up by 1.5x due to mass EV adoption as has been predicted, then Europe's going to have to turn to power rationing until they can build out the necessary infrastructure. And I don't think that's going to go over well with the population.

There's also the research that indicates that internal combustion motive engines in personal transport like cars, boats, and motorcycles have a comparatively negligible impact on greenhouse gases and airborne toxins in the modern age. The numbers dropped dramatically throughout the 1980s and then again in the 2010s, driven by CAFE (Corporate Average Fleet Emissions) standards in the U.S. and Euro 1 through 6 in Europe. I used the word comparatively earlier, because industry is the main contributor. Industries such as steel manufacturing, power generation, air transport, and farming are the biggest contributors to greenhouse gasses, while industries such as plastics manufacturing, ocean transport, and underground resource extraction are the biggest contributors to airborne toxins. There's been a lot of regulatory movement to restrict motor vehicles, but very little for industrial level problems. Bunker fuel, which is almost entirely sulfurous tar fuel oil, has been the standard for large container ships since the 1940s. Only in 2020 was there a global agreement to reduce the sulfur content in bunker fuel used by ships. Meanwhile there has been absolutely no substantial progress on the four major types of aviation fuel that are used. High octane kerosene jet fuel, low octane kerosene jet fuel, unleaded aviation gasoline, and leaded aviation gasoline. Aviation fuel is the only type in the U.S. that's still allowed to contain tetraethyl lead. Airliners continue using high octane kerosene jet fuel, while the military, farmers, and even wildfire firefighting teams continue using leaded aviation gasoline. Regulators continue squeezing the collar ever tighter on cars while airplanes get away with poisoning their maintenance crews and the people they fly over.

My personal conclusion has been that diversification and control of industrial emissions seems to be the solution, not concentration in EVs. Certain engines such as the Wankel and diesel will certainly have to die as the power/emissions ratio for them is atrocious. But Atkins cycle engines for example can work on hydrogen. For other engines pure E100 ethanol, while having about the same carbon dioxide output as and lower energy density than gasoline, is viable via compression ratio increases. Compression ratio increases also tend to create more drivetrain power output, so it's not really a mechanical loss. Ethanol's also renewable. The issues are that hydrogen is expensive to create and contain in pure enough form to be used as fuel, and ethanol requires large amounts of industrial farming that contribute to greenhouse gasses.

does this affect motorcycles?

This will get reversed because in 10 years we are still going to struggle with expensive BEVs with minimal market share and no usable aftermarket for them, which will cause raise in right wing populism and reverting all green policies years or decades back.

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