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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense that road and parking pricing should be proportional to the size and impact of your car. Hopefully this will encourage manufacturers to produce more smaller cars - it's getting somewhat hard to buy a small car these days. I'd love to have a Japanese-style Kei car.

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Agreed -- the popularity of giant vehicles is basically a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, and probably regulation is the only way to fix it at this point.

Some people claim it was regulation that caused SUVs

https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...

Hopefully new regulation will fix it rather than make it worse

Certainly not in Europe, where things like pickup trucks and light trucks were exceedingly rare and there was no such regulation loophole.

In 1990, if you had 3 kids, it could easily fit in a Renault 19.

In 2020… if you have an SUV with kid sits… it barely fits TWO kids. It is totally produced by legislation, although it’s for safety, you have to be extremely rich to carry 3 kids in a car today.

Such a SUV has barely more room than a 308, though, which is lighter, smaller, and more efficient. I agree that there are not that many good family cars and even more reasonably-sized cars are somehow getting too large on the outside and too cramped on the inside at the same time. It makes them very impractical in a lot of situations.

I think some might say it started in the USA and was then brought to Europe after. Many things are introduced in one country and once successful the companies try to expand their market to other countries

They are less rare now than they used to be, sure, but they are still very uncommon. As in, I might see one every week living in a ~10 million people reasonably wealthy metropolitan area. No regulation was tweaked to favour light trucks and Ford is perfectly happy to sell sedans and hatchbacks instead of F-150s. They don’t need to sell the same thing as in the US to develop their market share here.

SUVs seem to increase in popularity following the American fashion, unfortunately.

Regulation that came to be because of the aggressive lobbying.

Yeah once you have kids, you realize this isn't the truth but actually just FUD.

People had kids before the SUV boom?

I don't understand. What does having children have to do with this issue?

SUVs are shit with interior space. Compare an X5 with a VW Sharan and you will see the latter one is a space wonder

You'd think that the country which invented the 2CV and went for full-nuclear electricity generation to save oil imports would have plenty of good small EV options.

There are some of them (like Zoé and the e-208). But even if the option is there, not everyone can afford it, and if everyone would, production would be insufficient, and if production were sufficient, then raw materials imports would not be enough.

There is no magical switch, we have to accept that any transition will be long and messy.

That’s because it makes more sense financially for car makers to make larger cars [1]

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/29/us-car-cost...

In France, small cars are not hard to buy - there is a large range of innovative designs on the market.

It would be nice if the rules for 2 wheeled vehicles could be refined as well.

Here (not France) you can drive an EU moped (45km/h) on a car license, which could (and should!) be a great alternative to a smaller car. The problem is that it's difficult to get to and through the city without touching the highways, which are strictly off limits for the mopeds for obvious reasons.

What's needed is something in between a full sized MC and a moped that can be driven on a car license and that can reach at least 80km/h to keep up with inner city highway speeds.

> Here (not France) you can drive an EU moped (45km/h) on a car license, which could (and should!) be a great alternative to a smaller car. The problem is that it's difficult to get to and through the city without touching the highways, which are strictly off limits for the mopeds for obvious reasons.

In France you can ride a scooter or motorcycle with a displacement < 125 cc with a car license. Certainly not ideal for long trips, but it’s enough for small stretches of motorways in the daily commute. Indeed it’s a good alternative to large cars but it can be dangerous depending on the state of the roads.

Also, surprisingly perhaps, motorcycles pollute more than cars. They don’t have the heavy filters. Some pollutants are higher, even in absolute values.

It would be nice if they didn't intentionally nerf the speed limit to 45 so that's impossible to keep up with the flow of traffic. That makes them a lot less appealing and much more dangerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i-MiEV

Max speed is told to be 130km/h but I'm pretty sure I drove my C-zero faster than that without much issue

Correct. So motorcycle parking tickets should be 1/4 of cars.

tiny EVs are going to be very popular in europe

I'd hardly call a 2 tonnes EV a tiny car, which is the limit in the proposal.

The Tesla model 3 is right on that limit with 1.980 Kg, whereas the model Y weighs 2.4 tonnes.

In Denmark the model Y is by far the most sold car in 2023, with 1 out of every 10 cars being a model Y.

So I think it will be an uphill battle to enact the same law in Denmark.

Where are you getting those numbers from? Tesla's specs pages say 1777/1840kg and 1911/1981kg for the standard/long-range Model 3 and Model Y respectively:

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_cn/GUID-5656213...

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_cn/GUID-E47C4A6...

The Model 3 is undoubtedly still a heavy car, but the bulk of that is the battery pack, so the weight will go down as battery tech improves. Maybe it already has compared to your source?

You are absolutely correct, it was the Model S that I mistook for the Model Y from the source https://insideevs.com/news/527966/electric-cars-from-heavies...

I wonder what made the Parisians choose 2 tonnes, lowering the limit could certainly be justified.

The Model 3 and Y weigh twice that of my current drive, which is quite the difference.

EVs are not really popular in my EU city because they require a dedicated parking space with a charger and most people live in an apartment with none of that.

At least in my city (in NL), there are a bunch of public electric chargers with the street parking around the city. It seems like almost 25% of spots are electric only in my neighborhood

NL is so far ahead of other countries that it's kind of ridiculous. I wish there was a way for average citizens from other places to get a sense of what is possible.

Living in another NL city in the Randstad. Although the infrastructure is getting there and is apparently much better than other countries, it is still hard for me, living in a terraced house without a dedicated car parking space in front of my house. The charging spots in my neighborhood are almost always full - and I will be anxious to leave my car there because what happens when my car is done charging and it is occupying the slot from someone else? Or worse, if others do the same and I don’t have a spot.

The public fast chargers cost pretty close to the equivalent Diesel cost for my ICE car. That is after paying extra to go electric compared to a cheaper ICE car.

We are not there yet to get more folks like me to give up their ICE cars and go electric. I’ll keep my VW Golf kicking until the situation improves and hopefully soon.

I'm not 100% sure where the next public charger is here (quick research says: 1x 1.4km and 1x 1.8km) and one at Aldi closer to my apartment. For me this basically means an EV is completely off the roadmap.

This is in Munich, Germany, so basically an unimportant remote place. :P

Daily at-home charging is needed only for plug-in hybrids. BEVs can easily do a week of city driving without needing to charge.

In my city supermarkets have charging on their parking lots, so my car charges when I'm shopping.

I wonder if the next invention will be a "powerbank" for cars... rather than those dumb e-scooters littering the sidewalks, how about a giant battery on 4 wheels you can leave next to your car to charge it? When it's close to depletion, just like the e-scooters, a van can come around and take them to a hub to be charged. Or I suppose a car driver can put them in the trunk and return to that hub, in case they're driving that direction anyway (plus, they can collect another one to place in their neighborhood).

Sadly it'll probably need protection against people whose denial of the climate crisis involve violence and vandalism.

Charging is so close to being solved, that I don't think we need any new boondoggle. Just build more infrastructure and modern batteries.

For road trips, Nio has 10-minute battery swapping stations, but modern 800V BEVs can be recharged in 20 minutes.

City use is an even easier case, because most cars will spend hours parked somewhere. If not at home, then in a parking garage at work. There are street-side chargers too. In many cases you don't even need a fast charger.

This isn’t inherently true. Take a look at the Silence S04. The batteries are removable and have wheels and a handle like luggage. You could park in any old spot and wheel the battery home to charge.

They’re even cheap to buy because you can buy just the car and lease the batteries on a monthly basis. For small city cars with batteries that aren’t too heavy, this kind of design makes an EV workable for a lot of people who might otherwise not consider one for the reason you’ve stated.

I wouldn't say that bringing batteries home like a wheeled luggage is exactly a convenient option, although it's better than no charging possibility at all... But that can be a showstopper for many people who don't have access to charging spots: putting gas in a tank is way simpler (although clearly not ecological... but that's still secondary for many people, unfortunately).

I feel like charging these batteries in my apartment would be some kind of a safety hazard.

I agree but it's an interesting problem, things like parking spaces and roads will still have to be made to the size of largest vehicle that will use them and I imagine more cars in the same amount of road will lead to even more traffic.

No. There are buses, trucks and vans on the road but not everything is made based on them. In many parking spots you can't park full size vans - and vans are quite popular.

In Europe, if you're driving a huge North American truck (which some people do) your parking options are very very limited. We don't build everything for their sizes only because there's some of them on the road.

This is Paris we're talking about. The roads will remain the size that Hausmann built them. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/31/story-cities-...

You can have different sizes of parking spaces, for different prices maybe.

And the change will probably not increase the amount of cars on the road, because at the same time, bikes and public transport are becoming more attractive in cities all across the continent.

EVs in Europe and the US are on the downward trend at the moment. I’m not entirely sure why, maybe they are still too expensive.

The first derivative is still strongly positive. The second derivative is what’s been reported as falling, which is common in the typical S-shaped adoption curve.

In the EU current short-term trends don't matter that much as long as the scheduled fleet emmision rules will come into force as is the current regulation.

That means from 1.1.2025, for passenger cars 93,6 g CO2/km average (which is impossible with ICE-only cars of current sizes and technology) and the manufacturer pays a fine for anything above that. But that can be relaxed if they sell at least 25% EVs (0 g CO2/km), and higher percentage of those means higher permissible average emmisions. So the manufacturers will be highly motivated to sell more EVs and we can expect all the big manufacturers will hit the 25% quite soon.

Then from 1.1.2030 this goes down to 49,5 g CO2/km and at that point ICEs are goint to be increasingly niche. From 1.1.2035 the limit is 0 g CO2/km.

It's pretty easy to achieve fleet goals with plugin hybrids, since they have ridiculously low emissions on the standard tests (unlike in reality).

Which is why new vehicles (since 2021) have a On-Board Fuel Consumption Meter and this data is then collected by the EU.

Oh I didn’t know that. Does the eu do something with the data? Is it just collected to inform some hypothetical future law? In the latter case that will likely be overtaken by the market favoring BEVs

There is not a lot of info about that, but as far as I could gather the data started to be collected only last year, so probably not a lot right now.

For the downvoters, look it up - this is objectively true and has been well reported.

And I’m not saying don’t buy an electric car, just that EV sales have decreased.

I couldn't find anything substantiating this claim, everyone is reporting record sales. What is decreasing is sales growth [1]. As in: each year more EVs are sold than the last year, but the difference to previous year's sales is shrinking

1: https://www.ev-volumes.com/

Sometimes the difference is still increasing year on year, but due to the higher baseline, the percentage increase has declined.

… Wait, how are you defining ‘downward trend’? The rate of _growth_ has slackened, which you expect as a product category matures, but sales are still very much growing.

I’d be a little more sceptical of the media sources doing this well-reporting, if I were you.

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/electric-vehicle-demand-c...

As I said, the rate of growth is decreasing, but sales are still growing. That article is kinda misleadingly couched, tho (I mean, Murdoch media, what can you expect?), and I can see how people could misread it as saying that sales were actually decreasing.

The legend on that chart says "U.S. electric-vehicle sales, change from a year earlier"

That's a plot of the first derivative (which is still positive [+42% at the last measure, meaning for every 100 EVs sold in Nov 2022, there were 142 sold in Nov 2023]) and the slope of that line is a derivative of the first derivative, or a second derivative.

tl;dr: EV sales are growing. That rate of growth is slower than it was before.

No, the absolute sales and percentage of sales is up, it's just the rate of acceleration that's decreased. https://www.ev-volumes.com/

This literally has sections labeled “Lower European Expectations” and “North American fall”.

Yes. Poor reporting is incredibly common and most journalists seem to have no clue about the difference between a first and a second derivatives. See also, most articles about the economy.

You will need to read the sentences or look at the charts rather than just skim the headings.

But note that the actual data presented shows an increase in sales.

“Look it up” is not a good way to make a point. If you are making the claim, then you need to substantiate it.

I dropped some links into several comments. Should I for every single response? Look it up.

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