The fight to ban gas-powered cars in the 1960s | Hacker News Reader

The fight to ban gas-powered cars in the 1960s

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37 pointsrobtherobber54 comments

> Late in the summer of 2022, a California state agency announced a ban on the sale of new cars containing internal combustion engines.

I'm continually amazed at how many journalists just refuse to do basic due diligence on this regulation. To quote the 2nd paragraph of his source for this claim (his own publication btw):

> The new rule will “ensure that consumers can successfully replace their traditional combustion vehicles with new or used [zero-emission vehicles] and plug-in hybrids that meet their transportation needs,” she added.

Top-to-bottom and left-to-right no one seems to care that "California to ban all gas-powered cars" and "California to ban all cars exclusively powered by gas" are wildly different statements with wildly different outcomes.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/cars-and-light-tr...

“Advanced Clean Cars II requirement that 35% of new vehicle sales be zero-emission in 2026”

Is California close to meeting this goal?

Q2 2024 they were at 25.7% which is an increase but a much slower increase than previous years. The EV market is in a slump everywhere in the US so how long that lasts is probably the determining factor.

I'm not sure what they punishment is if automakers miss, trying to figure that out now.

edit: If they are going to miss, they can:

1) sell ZEVs or PHEVs at a 25% discount to "Clean Mobility" grant recipient organizations for a bonus score of 0.5 and 0.4 vehicles respectively.

2) trade in banked ZEV sales from 2020-2022

3) trade sales with other mfgs up to 2030

4) just shift allotment of EVs to California as the restriction only applies to vehicles destined for California (and other states that opt in). Worst case for mfgs is that people who really want an ICE car can buy from them in an adjacent state.

5) lots of other credit math that seemed complicated and niche

The max penalty if none of that is possible is $5000 per noncompliant vehicle sold over the limit.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/barcu/regact/2022...

25.7% zero emissions vehicles in Q2 [1]. Needs about 20% growth each of the next 2 years to meet that target. At least in my corner of the Bay Area, the only people buying new gas-only vehicles are the ones who can’t afford the extra hybrid cost upfront. EVs are popular with the older folks who can use smaller vehicles.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/06/california-just-notched-on....

(Direct fuel injection) Gas powered cars now are emitting more particulates , which arguably are worse for people than the smog of the 60s because they penetrate deep into the lungs and can even enter the bloodstream (I am paraphrasing) .

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32109813/

IMHO gasoline Particulate filters (GPF) for gas vehicles should be mandatory the way they are for diesels (DPF).

> "with significant emissions occurring in the first 3 min of operation"

I'm guessing that's because once the catalytic converter heats up it burns most of the carbon particulates.

> which arguably are worse for people than the smog of the 60s

If the 60s had the number of cars we have today, I seriously doubt carburetors would be healthier than fuel injection.

> Gas powered cars now are emitting more particulates

We mostly solved that for diesels with particulate filters, I assume the same could be done for gas engines?

The picture of the guy holding a “smog free locomotion” sign and a cigarette is priceless.

The fight to ban leaded fuel was much more important, and ultimately successful.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/30/1031429212/the-world-has-fina...

Note that even the bill’s creator only wanted to limit the number of cars per person in the first place, but grew bolder after the initial failure.

“”” … his intention to introduce a bill that would limit each California family to just one gas-powered car beginning in 1975. “[The] internal combustion engine is pouring out poison,” Petris … “””

>Petris altered it to simply ban all cars with internal combustion engines by 1975.

Never heard of him, but too bad Petris did not succeed. We would be in a far different place now.

>the Supreme Court may well be preparing to eliminate California’s authority to set tougher auto emissions standards than the federal government

No surprise here, we all know over half the US Supreme Court only cares how much they can extort from the very rich. Doing this will probably head the world into somekind of mild mad max world.

We would be in a different place, but not necessarily a better one.

> In fact, just a couple decades before his birth, both electric and steam-powered vehicles — which were cleaner and more powerful, respectively, than early gas-powered cars ...

While I agree that electrics are clean steam vehicles still use combustion and were not as efficient as a piston ICE. Plus the driver had to play boiler operator and ensure there was a steady fuel supply and feed water. Kinda stopped reading after that matter-of-fact hyperbole and just skimmed the rest.

There are some neat videos of vintage British coal fired steam trucks which are really neat (they sounds like mini road steam locomotives) but the emissions make a burning tire seem clean.

Here's a photo from 1902 of some people riding on little steam cars to play a polo match:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_polo#/media/File:Dedham_P...

Not sure what point I'm making but they look unexpectedly nimble.

Electricity was cleaner than gasoline, and steam was more powerful than the gasoline at the time. The article did not claim either was both.

Sure, but in the next sentence it asserts that either electric or steam couldve replace ICE in vehicles, which is true only if you ignore air pollution (and fuel efficiency) in the steam scenario.

ICE is a better tech for vehicle motors because IC compresses air by a factor of about 10 before combustion, which is much more efficient than combustion at atmospheric pressure as is done in a steam boiler.

Land yachts and nuclear trains are cleaner and more powerful, respectively, than cars.

I don't know, Jay Leno's Doble looks pretty clean to me: https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo

Ironic you would post that, since Jay Leno was also badly burned by his gasoline-fueled steam car.

As a reasult of a fuel leak, IIRC, nothing particularly specific to the fact that the car uses steam for its engine. The advantage of the Doble design however is that it doesn't have a high-pressure boiler per se, it has a steam generator. This would help address "the occasional propensity of early steam cars to explode" that the article mentions.

Whats the efficiency? No matter how clean it looks it's still burning fuel and releasing pollutants.

Steam turbines can certainly be much more efficient than internal combustion engines, though there’s a scale factor; I’m not sure that a car-sized one would be.

I'm sorry but I reject the premise of this article completely, we're having trouble displacing ICE with electric now the idea that lead acid powered vehicles could have displaced ICE in 1960s is absurd.

The first electric cars date from the 1890s. The reason we're having trouble* now is because ICE cars are so entrenched in society, much more than 60 years ago. Back then it would have been easier than today.

*I take the word "trouble" to mean "progress is slower than some people would like." To that I say, be patient. Societal-scale change takes time.

Is it that ICE cars are entrenched in society or is it that electric cars are still inferior in some pretty obvious ways?

Having thought this before I got my first EV - every fear and assumption I had turned out to be based on trying to think about my EV as an ICE. Everything I need to do in life is honestly easier with the EV.

I have driven an EV for the last 6 years. I find it to be superior to an ICE in almost every way. Range was, occasionally, a minor issue. I've recently bought a new (to me) EV with a larger battery. Range is no longer an issue. So yeah, for the vast majority of use cases, it has more to do with culture than practicality at this point.

We've built our infrastructure around ICE vehicles. Our entire built environment might have looked much different if we had optimized for a different technology.

Did we?

I swear I see more power lines obstructing my view of the sky than gas stations.

It would have been easier then I think. Far less people had cars, Many people remembered life without cars then, and at least my city had a far better transit system in the early 60s than today.

In the 50s my grandfather was living in the country without owning a car, working in town before he attempted farming. He knew someone with a car, and if they were free they gave him a ride home, if not he walked 7 miles home. He would know if they were free by if they showed up at the end of the day or not.

So obviously, a car was a huge improvement in quality of life for him. But also, pretty much any car would do. 50 mile range? Fine. Slow charging? Fine. He had been just walking.

Lead-acid power is what the EV1 came out with, so something similar to that could have existed in the 1960s. Cheaper vehicles would have been closer to golf carts or electric bikes, but it would have been possible.

Because EVs didn't have the range of gasoline vehicles, EV concepts in the old days usually included something like overhead catenary power lines, or in-road induction or other "3rd rail" type charging on freeways, in order to sustain longer trips.

Let's try to keep in-mind that 1960s cars were horrendously unreliable, not starting when you turned the key because they were too hot or too cold, requiring obscene amounts of maintenance, etc., so a trade-off of range in exchange for an immensely reliable vehicle is something many people would have been willing to make, too.

The EV1 switched battery chemistries almost immediately, because the lead-acid version was terrible. GM only used lead acid as a stop gap and knew the result was unacceptable. What made the EV1 appealing was its spaceship-like high tech interior and computer controls, followed shortly by its NiMH battery pack. I strongly disagree with the claim that something like the EV1 could have existed in the 1960's.

In the 1960s not everywhere had completed the shift from automobiles as a nice-to-have to a complete necessity. Perhaps we would have had more investment in public transit and better designed places.

The proponents at the time weren't just promoting lead BEVs, but also things that never stopped being electric or steam they just stopped being used/built in American cities like trolleys/light rail/tram lines because ICE offered more "freedom". They were calling for a return to good old mass transit options, which would have still been strongly in living memory in the 1960s in most American cities.

Agree.

Even more absurd is the assertion in the OP that steam-powered vehicles could have:

>But for a few historical contingencies, either model [lead-acid or steam boiler] could have rendered its gas-powered alternatives obsolete.

Deep cycle lead acid powered vehicles have some significant costs in usability and maintenance, and in a world where the oil price can just jump by a factor of ten as it did in the OPEC crisis, we might have paid them if we weren't insulated by the world's largest domestic oil industry and military hyperpower, and also if we weren't increasingly owned by the auto & energy industries.

More relevant would be everything that isn't a car. Most of the world wasn't built with huge-tract low-density single-use zoning. They walk or take the tram to get most places. We were busy literally paving over our tracks and sidewalks.

We basically postponed the r&d of one for 60 years and funded the other with infinite petro dollars. It really isn't that absurd.

> we're having trouble displacing ICE with electric now

Yeah, now, after 60 years of designing every single aspect of our modern lives around gas and gas cars, how surprising indeed ...

What great innovations would have been made 60 years ago to the lead acid battery powered car that would have put them on par with contemporary ICE, to say nothing of surpassing it?

Without the gasoline car, we would never have built the interstate system. So imagine a world where a similar amount of money would have been dumped into mass transit instead of the interstate system. Imagine a world with high speed trains between major cities and EV's for local transport.

For anybody not within 100 miles of a major city, they'd likely have gotten electricity earlier in a world which depended on that for transport. And stopping to charge for an hour every 100 miles is still a heck of a lot better than the alternative of a horse & buggy.

With the exception of additional money going to mass transit (which doesn't seem like a guarantee at all), that world sounds worse in every way than the one we ended up with.

Remember railroads of the day were all privately owned. There was passenger service between most major cities (at least where there was enough ridership to make it profitable) but that ended as people prefered the convenience of traveling in their own cars on their own schedules as opposed to waiting until tomorrow for the next train.

I’m very possibly missing your point. If so, I apologize. But the interstate highway system was started in 1956, 11 years before Petris’ proposal.

The various players in the ICE and oil industries had a common practice of buying out battery technology developers or their patents to keep advancement off the market. Lithium ion batteries were first developed in the 1970s, and could have come to market much earlier if not for those practices.

You're missing the point. We rebuilt the built environment based around internal combustion cars capabilities. Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done (and has had severe impacts on our society across the board). If we had been limited to early 1900s electric vehicles, we could have stayed with more traditional mixed use city planning. Folks could still use cars to go where they needed, but even more importantly, they could walk! And for longer distances, take a train. Not only would we have been better off pollution wise, we would have been better off physically, mentally, and morally (not had to support middle eastern authoritarians).

> Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done

But let's not pretend that it was forced upon us. Most people liked their single-family suburban home in quiet neighborhoods without a lot of businesses nearby with their crowds, traffic, and noise. Nobody was ever prevented from continuing to live in their inner-city apartments, they just mostly prefered not to, when they had the choice.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm pretty quick to demonize suburbs (and cars), but there were a lot of attractive things about them (and still are). We've had more than 60 years to live with them and it is pretty clear now what their problems are. I'd like it if we could move beyond them and bring back mixed use zoning as the default. My preference would be villages instead of subdivisions (i.e., clusters of housing and places of work with higher densities than suburbs, leaving the countryside intact, more like Europe).

> We basically postponed the r&d of one for 60 years and funded the other with infinite petro dollars.

The R & D would have started much further away from a usable product. Maybe we would have got electric cars earlier, but not as early as the 60s or 70s.

> Yeah, now, after 60 years of designing every single aspect of our modern lives around gas and gas cars, how surprising indeed

Maybe in the US, but not in much of the world. I never owned a car when I lived in London, nor for most of the time I lived in Manchester. Lots of other cities are around the world are better in terms of managing without a car at all.

The need for petrol cars is greatest for people who do long trips. The need for a car depends on distances, what people need to transport (goods, kids...). and the availability of public transport.

Cities are much nicer with fewer cars and when easier to walk around.

> The R & D would have started much further away from a usable product. Maybe we would have got electric cars earlier, but not as early as the 60s or 70s.

Electric cars were a usable product in 1910, superior in most cases to the alternative of a horse and buggy. If they hadn't been outcompeted by gasoline cars they would have gotten better continuously and would never been unusable or inviable.

It's interesting too looking back on the early politics of the electric car versus the gas car. The electric car was the "lady's car" because it was less messy, more reliable, easier to use, quieter, more efficient (higher range in some early cases). The gas car was the "man's car" because it was louder, harder to start, harder to maintain, needed a fuel that was harder to acquire, was overall less reliable.

There's an interesting alternate history tale to be told if the Ford Motor Company had been lead instead of by Henry Ford by his wife Clara Bryant Ford (who was a big proponent for electric cars, in addition to being an interesting suffragette).

My wording was poor, what I meant was not competitive with petrol cars as early as the 60s or 70s.

I'm not sure what your point is, then. We already know what happens when gasoline cars are able to compete freely against electric cars. The speculation is what would have happened if gasoline cars weren't allowed to compete freely, either due to an act of God or an act of legislature.

> Maybe in the US, but not in much of the world. I never owned a car when I lived in London, nor for most of the time I lived in Manchester. L

Without gas you'd starve in a week in any major city...

I also don't own a car, never owned one either btw

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