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> But where?

The GP already address that "We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles."

On the other hand, yeah, it's time to get started for real to install plugs.

> Add some studies that electric cars are even more expensive to charge than gaspowered ones are to refill, and it's even worse - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-ev...

That studio shows US prices. Keep in mind prices are widely different in Europe. For example, gas is about twice as expensive where I live (about 1.9€/L currently, but it varies by country) than in the US (looking it up, it's a national average of $3.4/gal today, or $0.9/L).

But if we installed plugs and made electric cars cheaper, people would transition to electric cars without force by regulation and mandates. Now we have a hard deadline, no plugs, no powerstations, and again, the poor people will be the ones who get fucked by those mandates (since the rich can charge their cars at home in their garages, and the poor live in large apartment buildings with large parking lots with zero chargers.

That seems like the opposite of what’s going to happen. Surely the hard deadline (assuming not crazy Governments) means that there will be a huge impetus for rolling out this infrastructure? Will it not literally be one of the key drivers of such investment?

But they had many years to start building the infrastructure, and they didn't do anything. People with electric cars here park infront of a Lidl (store) and sit in their cars and read a book while their cars ar charging, because there is not enough charing points. Even some parking lots that have a few charging stations are pretty much useless for most, since Johnny comes home from work, gets a spot near a charger, plugs in, and the car will stay there until the next morning, even if it's charged by 2am (who's going to move their car at 2am?).

If they built the infrastructure, many people would already switch, because it would be probably cheaper... some did in the first wave, because many workplaces installed a charger at a 'premium' spot near the building entrance just to show off how 'green' they are, but with two charing spots, as soon as the third coworker got an electric car, daily phonecalls "your car is full, can you please move it, I need to charge mine" have started and made it a pain in the ass.

I prefer the carrot approach to a stick one... build it, and people will come, instead of forbidding it, and people will be forced to use a worse alternative (for many).

> Surely the hard deadline (assuming not crazy Governments)

That is a terrible assumption to make

> > You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles

> But where?

> https://goo.gl/maps/giAwwS5qRKBuKNDH6

> This is one of the many neighbourhoods in my country and many other european ones, with a large parking lot with a lot of cars. All there cars now need ~5 minutes at a gas station every 600-1000km.

I am not sure I understand your point here. You are showing a residential car park that is a very nice location to install multiple slow chargers for cheap. The only reason this is not done at the moment is that there are not enough EV around, but otherwise you are looking at a small investment for regular revenues on electricity sale (or you can get your building association to buy some and keep the electricity as cheap as possible)

> Add some studies that electric cars are even more expensive to charge than gaspowered ones are to refill, and it's even worse - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-ev...

Be careful about this kind of studies, and even more about news article about them. While this one has a bit more data and is doing less mistakes than the usual rogue journalist study we see once in a while, the electricity cost they used for residential charging is wrong: they use at least very high prices for home electricity, in one of the worst state in the US for electricity pricings without using off-peak prices.

> And 2035 is not some distant future project... if you want to retrofit all those parking yards with chargers, you literally have to start doing it today... also build a bunch of nuclear power plants too, because if we do it the german way, by digging coal, we didn't do much.

Yup, that's the point of this bill. To provide guarantee to the industry that they won't be building these chargers and power plants for nothing. Now they know that the market will shift towards EV with hard deadline in 2035, and you can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of the cars on the road I'll be EV by 2040/2045.

They said the same thing about ice cars in the beginning. I can feed my horse everywhere. I need dedicated fuel stations? Madness! /s This will take time and if demand rises, so will the supply.

But nobody forbid horses, cars just became better and people transitioned to a better option.

Here we're forbidding ICE cars without having the infrastructure for electric ones in place and a relatively short time to do it.

Well - there are also new external factors motivating this increase in urgency.

Like what? CO2? From the industry that is moving from germany to china now, because of cheaper energy sources there (mostly fossil fuel ones)?

Instead of building the infrastructure first, so people would naturally transition to electric, we're forcing people by mandates...

And again, we're doing stuff that affects billions of people and letting the industry pollute as much as ever.

Just an example: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/nw-salmon-sent-to-chin...

These are adjacent but separate problems.

Regulating the supply chain for car and battery manufacturing and electricity generation is not trivial, but can be tackled and is perhaps easier than refreshing the fleet of cars. While making the fleet electric you can work on the energy mix in parallel. With combustion engines, there's a lot fewer options to work with.

There are solid models for comparing the footprints of ICE cars and EVs (including models and studies funded by car OEMs, like my employer). Most of them will show you that there's a higher upfront CO2 footprint to manufacturing an EV and therefore a certain number of miles driven until the EV "breaks-even" compared to an equivalent ICE car. There's a lot of factors that read on it - the manufacturing location of the battery (due to local energy mix and shipping overhead) is a major factor, as is battery size, cell chemistry, etc. Once thing that's immediately noticable if you look at the studies done from 2015+ is that the EV industry has managed to outpace basically every prediction for 2020, 2025, already. The trajectory and velocity is good. I'd back that horse. The market can do a lot once it gets going.

Not just car manufacturing, a lot of industry is moving from europe to china due to energy prices,.. some literally moving production there, and some left unable to compete in price with china made products.

If we're talking energy generation, we can already forget about solar, since most people will be charging their cars at night... unless the bad scenario plays out and people will be forced to wait in their cars after work every few days to recharge them... but during winter, that's tehnically 'at night' too, since there's not much sunlight left.

I believe that there is a time and place for electric vehicles, but forcefully mandating them without the infrastructure to support them in just short 12 years is way too optimistic. Germany is literally demolishing villages to dig coal for electricity production, everybody is way too afraid of nuclear, and two charging points per 100+ car parking lots are not enough. Even if we start building nuclear powerplants now, it will take 10+ years to get them to produce power (which is funnily enough the main excuse to why we are not building them now, even though we know we'll need them then too).

I might be a pessimist, but i prefer an approach where we build the infrastructure first, and people see all the charge points and lower price and buy electric due do that (instead of a mandate).

Can you think of a historic precedent where we ever built infrastructure at scale first without clear incentives or regulation, though? I'll humor you on the preference, but what's the chance of pulling that off? If we had that kind of foresight and predictive planning, we may not even have a climate crisis on our hands. For example, the problems with solar you cite could be mitigated to some extent with grid storage infra too - that we however haven't built in advance. I feel policy making is needed here to advance.

You don't need to build all the infrastructure before you introduce electric cars, but you don't ban ICE cars before you have everything built for electric vehicles.

Otherwise, we've done that with many areas, including ICE cars... we didn't forbid horses, cars were just better, and gas stations, repair shops, etc. followed the needs of the drivers.

We also didn't ban kerosine/whale oil/... lamps, we just built the electric infrastructure and people used electric, because it was better, cleaner, etc.

So, build power plants, to bring electricity prices down, since they're already way above the pre-covid era, build more charging station, fix the grid, so people have incentives to put solar on their roofs, build charing stations and incentivise private sector to build them too (in parking lots where workers park). So, cheap and conventient (car charging while at work, for cheper than gasoline) and people will slowly switch. Once enough people drive electric, the others will follow, since there will be less and less gas stations, less ICE cars available in general, etc.

A few years ago buying an electric car was great... the office building i work in built 2 charging spots right by the entrance, and you could charge your car there for free, and it was right by the entrance and reserved for electic cars. So one guy bought an electric car and we were all jelaous... free energy, premium parking spot. Then another guy did the same, and they both parked there. Then someone else bought one too, and tree cars, to charging stations, and one of them coulndn't charge his car anymore. One of them would literally come way too early just to get a charging spot, while the third one had to wait for one of them to leave, to charge his car for an hour or two atleast. With hundreds and thousands of electric cars, the situation is even worse.

Not to mention the electric grids are getting overloaded, meaning they cannot add charging stations anymore until the grids have been upgraded - which will cost billions and years. This goes on top of a huge surge for renewables and getting rid of the dependency on gas - solar panels, heat pumps, infrared panels, electric stovetops and, indeed, electric cars.

The will is there for sure, but we're running into real capacity issues. We can only go so fast.

And the pessimist in me is saying it's too little, too late and we've passed the point of no return decades ago; no amount of switching to EVs will stop the polar caps melting (removing the ice means less sunlight is reflected), the permafrost melting (exposing sequestered plant material, their now decomposition releasing co2 and methane), and with that the glaciers melting (raising the sea level and lowering the salt content, causing the gulf stream to slow down / stop which will make the north colder and the equator warmer)

Add to this a ban on oil and gas heating (germany 2024, other countries following) - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-22/germany-t...

I don't know the lifetime expectancy of gas and oil central heaters, but i'm guessing that many will fail and be replaced with some kind of electric powered ones between 2024 and 2035, needing even more electricity in the winter... plus reduced battery efficiency for cars in the winter, meaning even more.