California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It | Hacker News Reader

California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

bloomberg.com

136 pointsmactitan204 comments

I don't get it. Mandating that auto manufacturers sell a certain percentage of electric vehicles seems a bit like legislating the weather. If CA really wants to push people into electric vehicles, why not manipulate the demand for electric vehicles? Perhaps add another dollar or two to the gasoline tax?

It makes sense to me: they're forcing the automakers to subsidize the R&D of electric vehicles from their profits on ICE vehicles, which seems like a normal thing for a business to do when it benefits the business.

Since conventional automakers don't seem to be willing to aggressively pursue EVs on their own, this seems like a reasonable approach.

Or, put another way, the consumers who continue to buy ICE cars, and in doing so create pollution, are helping to pay for the EVs that other people are buying.

> Since conventional automakers don't seem to be willing to aggressively pursue EVs on their own, this seems like a reasonable approach.

There are EV and plug-in hybrid options across many price ranges and car shapes.

And California policy has had a not-insignificant impact on that range of options.

I never knew that. I thought it was upcoming competition from Tesla and the "writing on the wall" so to speak... I didn't know that legislation was manipulating the product output mix of Big Auto...

Yes it goes way back to California Emissions. California has legislated to drag auto manufacturers kicking and screaming to the contrary position for many years. I think it's unlikely engine efficiency, and battery technology would be as progressed as it is now without that.

There is such a thing as government failure, just as there's such a thing as market failure. The problem with both is that perfect information, and hence perfect markets don't exist. The role of a regulator is to try to get close to a perfect market (like truth in lending laws, anti-fraud laws, compulsory minimum warranty, lemon laws, competition law, etc.) in order to bring about a free market that can actually mostly let people (markets) determine outcome rather than it being a planned economy. Of course it doesn't always work for a litany of reasons, mainly because it's a difficult problem.

People were buying Hondas, Toyotas and Datsuns in the '70s. Part of that was mileage, some of it was price, part of it was ... a sort of rebellion. There was interest.

The US automakers were just downright bellicose. No real surprise; they're huge organizations and turning a thing that large takes forever. This was so profound that Roger Smith of all people started the recently defunct Saturn marque. GM remains cast in the same shape today.

Outside of electronic engine control and the stupefyingly dumb leaded gasoline, most EPA style "improvements" made cars less efficient and would have been unnecessary for properly tuned vehicles. I suppose it's lost for all time now, but Robert Pease had a great story about his Beetle not registering any emissions and his trouble with that ( an aircooled Beetle has a high enough exhaust gas temperature to theoretically emit no carbon monoxide ).

Regulation is extremely difficult - I think of it in terms of Brian Kernighan's "debugging is twice as hard" maxim but with a higher multiplier.

I think if you want clean air, $10 a gallon gasoline is a good start. This will be very disruptive. I have never seen proof, but I have heard many times one reason Reagan was popular was because gas prices dropped during his tenure.

The sad part is that we mostly use cars to subsidize land use patterns that could be taxed. Commuting is the least efficient thing ever devised.

Recent story inre GM’s poor quality and high prices relative to Japanese automakers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9946385

I agree that high priced gasoline, fees for parking and road use, and changes to zoning and land use policy would be great, but perhaps we still also want some regulation of car emissions?

Do you have a link explaining how EPA improvements made cars less efficient?

This glances at it a bit.

http://jalopnik.com/5551040/why-old-cars-suck

Spark control was much more primitive, carbureted engines just were not good candidates for all the complexity of hoses and such, gas of varying quality would clog catalytic converters... the technologies were just in an intermediate state. There were all "add parts" improvements.

Japanese cars could be better but frequently were even much more complex.

They might meet EPA off the lot, new, but after five years... I had a 1979 Buick Regal (normally aspirated, 3.8 L V6 ) that was getting like 8 MPG when I sold it in 1993 or so. No mechanic in three states could find anything wrong.

I guess I’m not understanding your original point... it seems like cars have gotten much better than they used to be. Are you saying in a counterfactual world without the EPA, they would be even better still? Or are you saying that those improvements were inevitable and cars would be equally good but cheaper without the EPA regulations? Or are you saying that regulations are better now than they were in the 80s? Or ...

It seems to me that an alternate explanation could be that it took auto makers 10–20 years to figure out how to build good compliant cars, with their first tries sucking, but once the regulatory regime had been stable for a while they figured out how to make big improvements. In a counterfactual world without those requirements they might be much more polluting today. [I dunno, I’m not at all an expert in this subject, I’m just speculating.]

At any rate, as someone who grew up in the 90s in southern CA, I’m very thankful that emissions of cars made in the 80s/90s were much better than cars 20 years prior; cleaner cars were a big part of the radical drop in air pollution throughout the area.

It's the "it took 10-20 years" thing. Really, the advance of digital technology made it all work out in the end - trying to do all that stuff in the mechanical domain was charming but it took more talent than was readily available and raised the price of cars. Digital just means a different class of engineer could address the problem and the replicability of digital helped. A generation had to exit the workforce and be replaced for it to actually work.

My more central point is that they didn't have to be polluting at all, using older technology. Properly tuned engines didn't pollute much.

Most if not all issues addressed were really down to proper maintenance. The "people who aren't there" in the modern software that runs cars do that for you now. As hard as it may be to believe, people were more or less expected to do their own maintenance on cars. Of course they didn't. But that is just how I was raised.

Again, we use cars to rejigger location in real estate. It's the use of a technology to solve something that is ultimately a governance problem. I suspect land rent taxes would be more efficient.

> I think if you want clean air, $10 a gallon gasoline is a good start. This will be very disruptive.

It's interesting to think about how, due to the price inelasticity of gasoline, every penny in price increase results in a certain number of bankruptcies. My pet economic theory is that the gas price spike in the summer of 2008 is what tipped over the first domino in the global financial crisis. That was just a $2-3 per gallon spike. You're seriously advocating a $7+ dollar spike? If by disruptive, you mean collapse of society, sure. That would be very disruptive.

It is beyond interesting.

I don't think $10 gasoline would cause a ..."zombie apocalypse" level perturbation, but it would doubtless be bad.

I, perhaps surprisingly, agree wholeheartedly with your pet theory.

I have also read more than one (monetarist) economist who holds your pet theory, with a few modifications - the oil price spike was interpreted by the Fed as inflation so they did nothing to ease the money supply, worsening ( or some say starting) the whole shebang.

Political expedience. Mandating that an unloved industry do X makes it the industry's problem. Trying to do Y yourself exposes you to criticism about choice of Y, ability to implement it and consequences of the outcome.

Your comment reminds me of the ev2. Back then, the first electric vehicles were being piloted on the road, and then California tried to create some sort of mandate to force all vehicles to eventually become electric. The mandate backfired because car manufacturers were now trying persuade the state that no one wanted electric cars, eventually causing all electric cars to forcibly be taken off the roads.

>Perhaps add another dollar or two to the gasoline tax?

If only, the gas tax is waaaaaaaaaay too low.

Thats kind of what happens when you don't ever adjust it in 50 years and it's a fixed dollar amount.

The federal gas tax was last increased in 1993, 22 years ago.

Which is also why the federal highway trust fund is broke. Not just figuratively; it is literally out of funds.

Increasing the price of gas would incentivize more efficient vehicles for sure, but it is also incredibly regressive, impacting lower-income individuals disproportionately.

The rich keep driving their Escalades since it makes little difference to them what the gas costs, but the poor can't afford to get to work... To the extent possible, it's best to try to avoid externalities like this, making a gas tax less appealing than it would otherwise be, free market or no.

Use the proceeds to further subsidize and increase the coverage of public transit to make getting to work cheaper. A gas, or carbon (if you want to get closest to the raw input as possible) tax would probably be the best price signal to what you want to reduce demand for.

Forcing automakers to sell more EV's also makes cars more expensive. So then people don't buy new cars and continue to use old ones, the worst emission offenders?

Public transit is cheaper for low income earners than driving and disproportionately used by them. Improving public transit is a much better solution.

http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge proponent of well-funded, and extensive public transit options... If you are advocating an expansion of public transit to counter the gas tax, I fear it may be more complicated than tit for tat...

In Seattle, where I live, for example, it is logistically and financially expensive to expand public transit. While the city is building out light rail, adding trolleys, and encouraging density, the city is growing too quickly for public investment to keep up. Moreover, the success of Amazon, Microsoft, etc. in adding great, high-paying jobs has the side effect of making the downtown core (where all the transit is) prohibitively expensive to live in.

More externalities... Thus, it comes to be that the poorer working class live further away, have to drive into the city for work, and would still be the hardest hit by a gas tax. Meanwhie, Microsoft provides a private bus/shuttle network to get its employees around from homes to its various campuses - the very people who could afford the extra cost of fuel.

None of this is bad, per se... It's great that there are all these good jobs available and that so many people are flocking to the city! The knock-on effects are to the detriment of the 50% living below the mean...

If we had some kind of basic income, gas taxes, road use fees, parking fees, and many other prices attached to negative externalities (e.g. general carbon taxes) would be much more palatable at a societal level.

> Perhaps add another dollar or two to the gasoline tax?

Political suicide.

I'm guessing here, but since fleet fuel efficiency standards have been around for awhile, making cars like hybrids attractive to sell, extending that concept is natural.

I would love to buy an EV right now, but charging it really wouldn't be practical for me given where I live, so it isn't really a practical option, but I believe that could change in the future. As bad as gas prices could get, it still takes some incentive to get that kind of practical infrastructure change made, in terms of businesses to sell them and for parking lots to have them. If you have auto manufactures on the hook the sell them, they need to figure out those practicalities that go beyond R&D. Plenty of electric alternatives (e.g. hydrogen) have died out, despite R&D from a number of groups, in part because the lack of fueling stations make them incredibly impractical.

CAFE is a farce, as it it forces manufacturers to design and build cars that no one buys. It's the wrong metric.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy

> The CAFE achieved by a given fleet of vehicles in a given model year is the production-weighted harmonic mean fuel economy, expressed in miles per U.S. gallon (mpg), of a manufacturer's fleet of current model year passenger cars or light trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of 8,500 pounds (3,856 kg) or less (but also including medium-duty passenger vehicles—such as large sport-utility vehicles and passenger vans—with GVWR up to 10,000 pounds), produced for sale in the United States. "

(Bonus points for the stupidity of using "harmonic mean of mpg" instead of a simple "gpm")

Also, CA has to work around Federal pre-emption

> Through EPCA and EISA, U.S. law (49 U.S. Code § 32919) also requires that "a State ... may not adopt or enforce a law or regulation related to fuel economy standards or average fuel economy standards".

... And yet CAFE has had an enormous positive effect on fleet milage in the US.

Do you have evidence for this? I seem to recall that low-mpg light trucks and SUVs were wildly popular in the US until the price of gasoline went to $4.

http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

Since 1980 we've gotten about 50% better mileage over all. Considering the number of cars is greater today the real effect of gas saved is even more.

Is that due to CAFE or due to consumer preference for fuel-efficient cars within a class? Since MPGS are heavily touted in advertising, it seems to be related to consumer preference

I was hoping for evidence of causation, not correlation :-/

Law passes requiring improved mileage or fines. Auto makers followed by increased mileage and avoided fines. It's pretty simple.

Alternative narrative: Customer demand shifted to cars with higher mileage. Auto makers stopped resisting higher CAFE standards because the minor increment was meaningless. See also: The ongoing debate over minimum wage laws and unemployment.

Inferring causation from correlation is not "pretty simple", but a lot of poor decisions are made under that assumption.

I can tell you for a fact that at least on large diesel truck forums when gas/diesel hit $4/gallon the number of used trucks being posted for sale was staggering. The number of people who couldn't afford to fill their trucks up and still make a payment was almost comical.

I'd credit most of that improvement on electronic engine control, and that really kind of had to evolve somewhat after 1980. You could see good improvement in cars from that time frame just by replacing the coil system with an SCR based ignition.

It's also difficult to explain how brittle a 1980 car's fuel handling system was. Now, having both controlled by the same computer leads to much improvement.

It does seem a bit backward. On the other hand, the auto manufacturers are perfectly capable of achieving this end result by themselves: Just subsidize the sale of electric vehicles by raising the price on non-electric vehicles.

Taxing gas will hurt a lot of people and wouldn't stimulate the economy since people will just stay home instead of travel.

And I don't recall that many people that can afford electric car such as Tesla. Nissan Leaf might be cheaper but it still a 100 miles range IIRC. You're basically asking poor people to buy two car. One for daily travel and one to travel say from LA to LV just to play some casino games.

edit:

I think what she and California is doing now is a much better way, mandate it.

> One for daily travel and one to travel say from LA to LV just to play some casino games.

There are other ways to get a vehicle for a road trip, besides buying one.

There are also many plugin-hybrids now: 0 gaws for local driving, and a gas tank for long dries.

If only there were businesses that specialized in letting you use a car for a predefined period of time if you agree to pay a daily fee for the privilege...

Rental cars have their own weird tax structure. Lots of areas tax rental cars and hotels because out-of-towners bear the burden. Rental cars in the UK were startlingly cheap when I was there, like 1/3 the price I would expect in the US. And you could rent one with a stick.

Tax increase requires supermajority in CA.

You can encourage demand as much as you want, but if manufacturers are keen on selling the more profitable gas powered cars that demand will just go unfulfilled. By mandating that auto makers have to sell a quota of electric cars they have no choice but to fulfil the demand (and to create more demand if there isn't enough).

Don't you understand? When government mandates something, things happen. We've won Bush's war on terrorism, we've won Reagan's war on drugs, and we've won Nixon's war on cancer. Victory is at hand in Obama's war on gasoline powered cars, and you're going to feel pretty foolish when you miss the celebration.

You forgot LBJ's war on poverty and Clinton's war on pants.

If the war on drugs was to sell a certain amount of legal pills, or the war on terrorism was to kill a certain amount of terrorists, or the war on cancer was to cure a certain number of cancers, those would all be 'won'.

Your analogy is terrible, and with enough money and willpower the government could easily get rid of gasoline cars.

The poor, nor the California economy couldn't take on another tax on gasoline?

A lot of guys(including politicians, and the people who fund them) like their collector's cars/trucks. They want to drive that 455 Oldsmobile convertible on the weekends without gouging the wallet? (Collector car enthusiast are a big group of people, across all income levels. "Just try to pry my '65 Corvette from my cold, dead hands?"

California provides a big demand for the sales of automobiles; the legislature knows they can tell carmaker's what to do? I couldn't imagine being the guy who lost the sales rights to California? Not fair, but in this case I not crying over the car companies.(Car companies will get my sympathy when they start manufacturing cars that owners/independent shops can easily work on, or at least have access to the proprietary programs? I don't think I will buy a new car until I can have complete access to your programming? I buy your car. I buy your programming too--because I need to clean it up in so many cases? Seal off Emmissions--fine. Give me access to everything else?

(This is a note to CARB: right now you only require Emmission shops to have one reference on hand to verify smog requirements. Most shops take the cheep route and buy Motor Emmission publications.(The publication is filled with errors. Technicians and customers know this. Many smog customers are sent home with failed visual component tests, but smog compliant automobiles. There are mistakes in Volvo's, BMW's and Toyota(88 toyota's, air aspirated, do Not have an MIL light). These are just the mistakes I ran across. It took at least three emails to Emission Publications Ltd. for them to respond to my complaints about errors in their publications. They literally argued with me? They didn't know the difference between natural aspirated(carburetor), and FI(Fuel injection)? I was floored!

Require the smog shops to have access to two Emmission references? Ondemand5(Mitchell manuals) is a good alternative, and I have yet to found an error in it.)

> Mandating that auto manufacturers sell a certain percentage of electric vehicles seems a bit like legislating the weather.

nope. We have levers for the market that we don't have for the weather. In this situation the manufacturer's are forced by the state either to sell cheap EVs or develop more capable EVs - attracting buyers either way through pure market devices. As conservatives like to point, developing a more capable and cheaper car is not the business of government, it is the business of the car businesses. Government in this case does exactly what it does best - applies force.

They hit the manufacturers because they're a large target.

An awful lot of people in or close to poverty still can't do without a car, and this will hit them the hardest. Even for people who make a modest living, an inordinate number of them drive something for their job.

55 MPG is an arbitrary and modestly ridiculous target that soon. A Prius stickers @ 51 MPG. And or course, SUVs and pickups are exempt.

At a loss of $15k per car, I'd have to seriously consider abandoning the California market were I Marchionne.

CARB are not ... nice people.

What is the comparison between using energy to generate liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 (which would be carbon neutral) and trying to electrify the entire transportation sector?

Those Los Alamos guys [1] said in 2007 they could get it down to $3.40 a gallon. Okay, maybe they were wrong and/or optimistic. But, still, there is some price point at which it is break-even. What is it? Five dollars? Ten?

The advantages of this over electrifying everything are that we already have built up the infrastructure for liquid fossil fuels. There is no extra engineering to be done for storage and/or transport, and no environmental impact from building new facilities like battery factories or erecting more transmission towers.

In both technologies, you start with an energy source, and then distribute it to consumers who use the product up. Both are carbon-neutral once you get past the "have the centralized energy source" step.

[1] http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/greenfreedom...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html?_r=0

Where's the electricity coming from? If your answer is natural gas, or oil powered generators, then no, there isn't a price point where it will break even.

Now if you can answer that question with nuclear reactors or renewables of any kind, then your logic probably applies. Yet, I doubt it will ever be the main fuel powering our transportation.

Why doesn't natural gas count? It's increased usage is one of the key reasons the US's carbon output is down over 10% since 2005.

> "There are two basic factors that have contributed to lower carbon intensity (CO2/kilowatthour [kWh]) in the electric power sector: 1) substitution of the less-carbon-intensive natural gas for coal and petroleum, and 2) growth in non-carbon generation, especially renewables such as wind and solar."

http://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/

It's impossible to win with converting a fossil fuel X into something and then to convert back to fossil fuel X, because of basic thermodynamics. If you want to convert fossil fuel X to something to convert to fossil fuel Y, you may be able to "win" over the current situation but you will very likely never get to get zero emissions in the system as a whole, because of the first step. It isn't necessarily impossible to burn X tons of CO2 and pull X+delta tons of CO2 out of the air, depending on the exact binding energies of the chemicals involved (which given that both are fuels, probably don't have an advantageous difference you can exploit), but you'll certainly be paying somewhere else to do it. And given that pulling CO2 out of the air at scale is quite challenging even on its own merits, it probably can't win in a practical manner.

If you're going to pull CO2 out of the air you pretty much have to be using a non-CO2-generating power source to do it if you want to net CO2 withdrawal.

But doesn't this equally apply to fully-electric vehicles as well?

No. Electric cars that charge on fossil fuels face the Carnot cycle loses exactly once, just like internal combustion ones. They are competing on what are details when compared to another cycle.

From the linked pdf:

"We have limited our studies to nuclear power because its capital costs are lower than wind and solar-electric power, and it has significant environmental advantages over fossil energy sources, which are not carbon-neutral."

If that (huge) assumption is allowed for this technology, why not EVs?

You can paint a very rosy picture of any transport technology if you assume away fossil fuels.

If I already own a perfectly good ICE car, as most people do, it's much less wasteful to start feeding it synthetic gasoline than replacing the whole car with an EV. And the benefits are immediate.

Edit: Also, the energy density of hydrocarbons is unmatched. Synthetic kerosene could be used to run 747's; battery technology can't do that.

>If I already own a perfectly good ICE car, as most people do, it's much less wasteful to start feeding it synthetic gasoline than replacing the whole car with an EV

Actually this is incorrect. 75% of the energy used by a gasoline car is in the fuel it takes to drive it, and only 25% in manufacturing and disposal.

It's the same situation with incandescent lights. It's mathematically more efficient to throw out a perfectly good one and replace it with something more efficient.

>Synthetic kerosene could be used to run 747's; battery technology can't do that.

http://www.aviation.com/general-aviation/elon-musk-toying-de...

The entire point of the question I asked was: given energy source, what is the comparison between 1) sending out electricity to batteries, or 2) creating liquid carbon-neutral fuels.

Probably because the existing inventory of ICE based rolling stock has something like a half life of 20 years.

It'd also be nice to have some time in on good carbon sequester techniques in large scale.

But if you could guarantee that huge energy demand for nuclear reactors, then it would (economically) justify the scale-up that would allow nuclear to power a bigger share of transportation: they could just run at high loads all the time and simply use any excess to produce liquid fuel.

The back story for electricity is peer grid and arbitrage techniques. Power grid should be just like the internet - every endpoint can produce as well as consume services. Would this allow for grid defection? Don't know, but it will radically change the model for energy economics for sure.

The Green Freedom link was interesting, thanks for sharing.

It looks like the $3.40 number is contingent on some advances in material science enabling more efficient electrolysis. I also think they under estimate the cost of a new PWR nuclear reactor.

An interesting idea related to this: Would high income people pay extra to buy gas from a carbon-neutral gas station? It could be designed and marketed as an environmental/elite gas station (something much better than the usual mini-mart).

Electric cars have an efficiency of about 70-80%, if you count the losses of electrical transmission, charging and the engine. A car engine < 40%, in mixed use about 20%. So even if you could generate fuel from electricity at close to 100% - which you probably can't - the electrical car is way more efficient. And of course, even with synthetic fuel, you have some level of pollution, as no combustion engine is perfect.

Except your electricity has to come from somewhere. If you are in the US, it will most likely be from some kind of hydrocarbon. You are just hiding the pollution, not removing it.

It is much easier to make those centralized power generation sources green than it is to make all of the cars on the road just a small margin greener. If you are in the US then those electricity has rapidly changed from dirty coal to cleaner gas and a growing percentage of renewable over the past decade.

You can make the centrals more efficient (to a point), but you are still burning hydrocarbons. And then you must apply the same electric efficiency as before. There are losses every time you convert the energy.

By the way, "a growing percentage of renewable over the past decade" is disingenuous. From ~9% renewable in 2002 to ~13% in 2013 is "a growing percentage", but not enough to make a difference in the discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...

This is not green (electric) VS pollution (hydrocarbon). It's hydrocarbon -> electric -> car instead of hydrocarbon -> car. It's modifying a whole distribution network in the hope of achieving higher efficiency.

It's all the way up to 1/8 of all our power? That is definitely enough to make a difference, it means we're within quite minor scaling factors of having it take over.

The California Air Resources Board and the EPA have achieved quite a lot. Los Angeles air was barely breathable in the 1970s. Now, there's very little smog. Look at 1960s pictures of Los Angeles, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York. That was once considered impossible. Now, it's mostly done.

The only thing keeping electric cars from taking over is battery cost. Performance and range have already been fixed. Once battery cost is solved, and it looks like it's going to be, electric cars will start to take over. At some point, there will be a tipping point, as gas stations start to close.

And the fact that millions of people live in flats, condos, terraced houses with no private parking spots and they can't charge their cars overnight. Here in UK the vast majority of people I know live in places where it would be impossible to take out a charging cable at night, so the only option is...charging at work? But who will foot the bill for installing chargers at literally every single parking spot everywhere?

Seems like battery swaps are the solution to this. Essentially the battery pack is designed to be easily removable and you just "lease" it in one way or another.

You go to a fuel station and swap your battery packs with some that are already charged. Here's Tesla's pilot program http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/battery-swap-pilot-program

There's a lot of big challenges to this (weight of batteries, standardization, convenient swap stations, etc.) but I haven't heard of any better ideas at this point.

Battery swaps help with long-range trips, but are in no way a convenience improvement over filling up a tank of gas.

I have an expensive American electric car and use it in Europe.

Before buying it I was worried about all the things you mention.

Now that I have been using it for some time normal cars look crazy outdated to me. Going to some place(gas stations) just to fill the tank. Why? It should be in my home, like with my electric car.

Lots of European houses have natural gas installations on homes, so why can't we just plug our vehicles to that, like we do with electric.

In any western country there are electric cables everywhere since 100 years ago or so, and most are not used at night, so it is not a big deal.

Impossible to take a charging cable at night? In the UK?.

I routinely use my car in Spain and Portugal, with no significant problems.

The only problem is that we attract significant attention everywhere we go.

>>Impossible to take a charging cable at night? In the UK?.

I used to live in a terraced house, and sometime I would park right in front of my door and sometime I would have to park 100m away. In any case, if I ran a cable from my door to my car I'm sure it would get cut sooner or later, just like wing mirrors get broken every now and then. If you live in the 4th floor of a condo, how do you connect then? And I don't understand what you mean by natural gas. Cars that can run on gas use LPG, so you would need to liquify the gas coming for your cooker somehow.

And the bill for updating the grid and local distribution network to cope with the higher loads.

"Parking is not Free"

Those parking spots already cost a lot of money. Setting up chargers is not unreasonable.

Heck, bundle it into the price of the car for home use. A thousand dollar bump, paid over time, not a big deal.

Say you live on a street like this: http://i.imgur.com/uAAhXUc.jpg

Houses there can cost half a million pounds and more. They are not cheap by any means. Yet the only parking is on the street - and sometimes you park in front of your door, sometimes down the street, you can't possibly run a cable down from your door. So what do you do? Does the city council install 50x chargers along the curb for everyone? Why would the residents agree for a bump in their council tax to do that? They are already driving cars, there's nothing wrong with them, why pay for this?

I'm not saying I'm against the idea of electric cars. I love them. But it's going to be super hard to do properly, because most people don't live in places with their own driveways and can't run cables from their homes.

> The California Air Resources Board and the EPA have achieved quite a lot. Los Angeles air was barely breathable in the 1970s. Now, there's very little smog. Look at 1960s pictures of Los Angeles, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York. That was once considered impossible. Now, it's mostly done.

I've never understood how Los Angelenos can be satisfied with their air quality. So many people are like you, and say that it is a solved problem.

But the air is still horrible in LA [1,2]. It is extremely smoggy most days. Even on the coast, say in Santa Monica, the air is at best about the same as in San Jose.

[1] http://www.stateoftheair.org/2015/states/california/los-ange... [2] http://www.stateoftheair.org/2015/city-rankings/most-pollute...

We're not satisfied yet. That's why the CARB exists, to keep working the problem.

> I've never understood how Los Angelenos can be satisfied with their air quality. So many people are like you, and say that it is a solved problem.

As a non-resident of the California republic, I don't know that I'd called the problem "solved", but I'd say it's a hell of a lot better than it was, and the contrast is stark enough for me to give the EPA and CARB every budget dollar they ask for. Parent does not exaggerate when stating that the LA air of the 70s was "barely breathable". So maybe it's a matter of perspective, as I go there now and think "wow, it sure ain't like it used to be". "Extremely smoggy"? Perhaps I just go on the good days, but I'd describe it as "hazy, knowing full well it's pollutants" rather than "extremely smoggy". That's on the bad days when I'm there. A lot of the times I'm pretty impressed with the clarity of the air given it's a city in a hot valley.

Disclaimer: I have no allergies or respiratory problems of any kind, so maybe I don't notice the air quality of modern LA as much.

+1. It's not "solved". Therefore the mandate to sell ZEVs.

I can't speak for LA or NYC but I would suspect in Cleveland and Pittsburgh this has much more to do with decline of the steel and coal industries than it does with automobile emissions.

Serious question: unless all the electricity for these vehicles comes from completely renewable and environmentally friendly sources, won't banning fossil fuel emissions from motor vehicles just externalize this pollution onto electric power plants? Is there data to show that the environmental impact will be somehow lessened?

It is easier to monitor and maintain a few large sources of pollution than many many smaller sources.

Plus the large sources of pollution are typically further away from major population centers (i.e. fewer people directly breathing in the output from the smoke stacks), while the small sources of pollution are in the major population centers (i.e. more people directly breathing in the exhaust fumes).

Since charging of electric vehicles can be done intermittently and can also be time shifted, it could match with renewable energy sources relatively well, acting as virtual storage.

Generally, it's much easier to make a larger engine more efficient and pollute less than one that has to be small, light, mobile, and safe in an impact.

Exactly. And we are talking about millions of ICEs in cars vs orders of magnitude fewer "engines" at power plants.

The keyword for the problem you're talking about is the "long tailpipe theory." [1] I was just reading Wait But Why's article [2], which concluded that the overall greenhouse impact will still be lessened by using electric cars over internal combustion.

I didn't dig into the sources enough to conclude that it's truly a better option, but those articles are a good place to start.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe

[2] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...

Do those analyses also account for the energy needed to build the batteries? From the wikipedia link, it looks like they don't.

How big is that fixed cost in proportion to the fuel energy? Also, how much energy does it take to make a combustion engine?

It's not really a fixed cost. Batteries aren't good for forever. They have a limited lifespan.

An electric car could be thought of as a gas car with a very, very large, magical fuel tank. If a battery costs $20k (like a Tesla) and I spend $200/mo on gasoline then that's 100 months (simple interest) or about 8 years, before we even talk about the cost of the car or the cost of the electricity.

I know that this doesn't feel good to talk about, but economics is more about numbers than feelings.

That economic analysis is flawed because you're ignoring the externalities of burning gasoline (health costs, climate change). Only if there were high enough taxes on gasoline to mitigate those effects, then you could accurately do that sort of dollar-cost analysis.

Sure but then every analysis is flawed because everything has some kind of externality that's hard to measure and account for.

How much fuel is burned to make the cells? How much pollution happens to mine the rare earths for the cells and the motors? It's super easy to poke holes in both sides of the argument because building a car is so damn complicated whether it's an ICE or electric.

I didn't downvote you but I really don't think it's hard to measure and account for the externalities in fossil fuels.

1. Calculate the dollar amount per pound of CO2 released that pays for enough tree planting or subsidizes enough renewables to offset the emissions.

2. Apply it as a tax to all fossil fuels and imports from countries without a comparable tax scheme.

Right but that's incredibly naive and uncreative. It presumes that fossil fuels are the ONLY way to do certain things, unless you can spend millions of dollars proving otherwise.

For example, right now most steel is made in electric furnaces which can be powered by coal, nuclear, gas, oil, solar, hydro, etc. What's the right tax for imported steel then?

Let me now make a list of a bunch of other things that are in a similar category: aluminum, most other metals, rubber, plastics, glass, etc.

Machines that are used to process raw materials may themselves be made of raw materials which are sourced in various ways. And those machines may be powered by dirty fossil fuels or clean renewables. Which means that components -- as opposed to raw materials -- are also going to be very difficult to properly classify and tax.

The same for subsystems and full assemblies and entire products.

It's a lot more complicated than "do some math and then apply a tax"

> If a battery costs $20k (like a Tesla)

That's not nearly the asymptotic price, though. Tech is still developing.

Well, let's say you've got millions of classes that all perform the same operation. Now you refactor those millions of classes to rely on a handful of classes to perform those common operations. Now you've just made it easier to eventually refactor those few remaining classes into something nicer, cleaner, more efficient.

Sure, you're just shifting the source of pollution in the interim, but once cars are no longer polluting, changing the source they charge from is the last roadblock to removing those emissions from the system.

A quick googling produced:

The impact of coal-burning power plants and gasoline can be quantified. The EPA estimates that the average passenger vehicle emits 5.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year. Coal-burning power plants, on the other hand, produce more than 4 million metric tons per power plant, per year. The overall carbon dioxide output of coal-fired electric power plants exceeded gasoline by more than 30 percent in 2010.

California doesn't burn coal. It's mostly natural gas and some oil. Natural gas is a very efficient fuel in terms of CO2 output.

California doesn't burn coal in-state, but it still gets around 5%-7% [1] of its energy from coal via imports from five coal plants. [2]

I can't seem to find any more recent data showing how that coal energy use has declined in the last two years, the most current seems to be 2013.

They appear to have projected to be getting 20gwh of energy from coal in 2015. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/07/ca...

[3] http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/tracking_progress/docume...

These numbers need a bit more data and some unit conversion before they can be compared. Tons/powerplant and tons/car are not comparable units. We need something like tons/mile_electric and tons/mile_gasoline.

If only coal is considered, it doesn't look good.

My math may be way off, but:

coal: 1,933,130,000,000 kwh/yr plants: 518 kwh/plant: 373,191,120 tons/plant: 4,000,000 ton/kwh : 0.01 37.4% of electricity in US

nat. gas: .0005675 ton/kwh 30.3% of electricity in US

tesla S: .3kwh/mi

Coal only: .003 ton/mi Gas only: .00017 ton/mi Coal + Gas + Renewables: 0.0012 ton/mi

avg ICE: 12,000 mi/yr 5.1 ton/yr 0.000425 ton / mi

As we move away from coal and towards renewables, it's obvious that electric cars become the winners. In areas with mostly coal power production, though, ICEs are more environmentally friendly.

It's really telling how freaking dirty coal is.

The pollution gets shifted to the power plants, but the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants are often better than those from cars. IIRC, in California the fraction from hydro and other renewables is ~ 25 %. Nuclear is another 15 % or so. Natural gas is a big portion of the rest.

People living in an areas that get all of their electrical power from coal need to be more careful about choosing the better option, though. In those cases, something like a high-efficiency hybrid may currently win.

Yes it externalizes it. But it centralises it too, making it easier to keep it clean. It also removes the pollution from town centres making them much pleasanter places to be. The total efficiency of burning oil in a large power station to power electric cars is generally is slightly better than burning the oil (which must be much more highly refined) in an internal combustion engine even if it is a hybrid.

There's also that you have to burn fuel in the tank trucks to get the fuel to the consumer.

Centralized generation is vaguely like dependency injection, or loosely coupled modularity in general, you can put what you want into it.

My only concern with electric vehicles is battery end of life. What do I the consumer do? Will I be able to sell my 25 year old EV? Have we gotten far enough to see what that end looks like?

You use/lose some of the energy in transport, either way. I forget exactly, but high voltage power lines lose something like 1% of their energy every...100 miles?

Another way to look at it would be: How much electricity would it take an electric truck to deliver that gasoline?

By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation. In both cases (electricity and gasoline) loss is marginal and can be mitigated by striking a balance between centralization and transport/power line distance.

I wouldn't call it marginal (it's about 7% for the eletrical grid). See https://www.nema.org/Products/Documents/TDEnergyEff.pdf

Merely refining oil into gasoline already has an efficiency of less than 90%.

Marginal doesn't necessarily mean small, but that it's proportional to the overall cost. In economics your fixed costs (eg the cost of building and equipping a factory or an oil field or whatever) go down as a percentage of unit price as you produce more goods, whereas your marginal costs are a function of production (eg transmission losses, taxes, raw materials, labor-per-piece).

> By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation.

Please show me where gasoline is being shipped in open vessels for that argument to hold water. Oil tankers? Sealed. Tanker trucks? Sealed. Your car's gas tank? Sealed.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/high-tech-fuel-tanks

Even if it does, relocating motor vehicle pollution away from major population centres will still have a massive public health impact.

Yes, battery electricity is cleaner even if it comes from coal, compared to the energy given by gas in gas-powered cars. I've read an article about this recently but I don't remember which. The point it it's much more "efficient" to create that energy in a power plant than it is to do it within a small car engine.

Now, add to that the fact that in the US, the electricity is not 100% produced by coal and natural gas (I think 70% in total, but that number will also shrink when more companies adopt solar panels and batteries for power generation/storage).

Also, it's much better to keep the pollution away from the cities and people.

An electric car generates less than 25% of CO2 as an equivalent gasoline car in California [0]. In every US state, an electric car produces less CO2 than an equivalent gas car.

[0] https://youtu.be/mURbzh9t0_0?t=5m40s

Beyond what's been said about efficiency, you have to look forward a bit. Solar is really cheap and getting cheaper. This is anticipating for a future where a much larger fraction of the power on the grid comes from less polluting sources.

A huge amount of energy in gasoline is wasted as heat. About 70%. Electric plants lose much less energy due to reusing the heat fairly efficiently. There are some losses due to power transmission there of course. Keep in mind some electricity that ends up in cars would/should come from renewable sources...

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml

FYI the losses of different power plants vary greatly but are higher than I thought. http://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/72369-compa...

All is left for you is to learn why resistive losses on the order of about 30% are necessary for the (unbuffered) electric grid to function at all.

Stationary power plants can be optimized much more than a car. A car engine has to give optimal power at a range of torque and horsepower outputs, from starting out at a stop light, to passing people on the freeway, and maybe pulling a loaded trailer. A stationary plant can be optimized to be much more efficient at single rate of torque and horsepower.

- Electric vehicles are more energy efficient.

- Gasoline requires lots of transport. (Shipped across the ocean, trains, refinery, delivered to a gas station, travels with the car until burned.)

- Electric vehicles last longer.

- Electric vehicles can be charged with a personal solar array.

- Less smog which means better health and cleaner cities. Making density more attractive is always green.

- ICE cars have 152,300 automobile fires per year in the US.

- Even creating electricity using bad methods keeps the pollution somewhat concentrated. Does this matter with regards to climate change? Probably not, but I don't know.

> Electric vehicles last longer.

Do they? Because ICE vehicles last decades and they don't have expensive battery packs that need replacing.

I'm willing to bet all of the ICE-related maintenance will cost more than a battery pack replacement.

I drove a $500 dollar car another 100,000 miles and only had to do oil changes for the engine. I'm guessing shocks, struts, etc that I did have to fix would be the same on an electric. This was on a 90s car, I'm assuming the current generation of ICE cars will only last longer if properly taken care of.

This is yet another indication that people at the highest levels of government simply don't understand or care how free markets work. You don't raise demand for anything by mandating increasing levels of production of a product that people won't buy. You do it by incentivizing or subsidizing the development of a product (and in the case of cars, a nationwide infrastructure) that has advantages over those already in the market.

The major hurdles with electric cars are cost and range. Cost will come down on its own as battery technology improves. But imagine if these politicians were intelligent and instead used their power to mandate that the industry agree on a standard for interchangeable batteries, that all electric cars sold must conform to the standard, and that all sellers of the gasoline that they hate so much must install equipment to do automated swaps of charged for uncharged batteries. If recharging the car (battery swaps) were faster, cheaper, and more convenient than pumping gas, that would remove an enormous roadblock in the minds of many consumers. Consumer demand for electric cars would skyrocket, gas stations would have a massive new profit center, and as a side effect, politicians would get the environmental benefits they desire far faster than they would under their current plan.

It's unfair to say that these people don't understand the free market. They understand that the free market will not push us out of gasoline cars and into electric cars until oil becomes very expensive.

The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out, thus before the free market is willing.

Nobody wants to pay more for their transportation, so at some point someone just has to step in and force the issue.

California's laws don't dictate exactly how producers and consumers find their way off gasoline, they simply state that they must, and so leave it to the free market to find that path.

Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea, since batteries are likely to change rather quickly in the near future, and this is a time when we want as much competition and innovation (both in technical methods and business methods) as we can muster.

> Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea

But it would be great to standardize something. Imagine a world where my car could only burn Honda Gasoline (TM), whereas your car could only burn Toyota Gasoline (TM).

There are cars that run on diesel fuel, cars that run on ethanol, cars that run on gasoline, and cars that run on hydrogen fuel cells.

Your suggestion of cars that only burn HondaGas seems fairly implausible, as Honda would need to build a large network of special HondaGas filling stations, and no one would be willing to buy a HondaGas car until the network was complete. It would be massively risky for the company, and they would be pretty unlikely to try it absent some kind of external force.

(By contrast, an electric car can charge from widespread, non-proprietary electricity sources, not only specific branded superchargers.)

But in any event, I don’t think your world would be so bad in a nascent industry, where formulating a special type of fuel might conceivably lead to a dramatic improvement in efficiency or a dramatic cost reduction, or some other advantage.

Sometimes forcing standards helps build a common platform on which people can innovate in other areas, but sometimes forcing standards (or even just having de facto common standards win in the market) holds a whole industry back by precluding better alternative infrastructure.

In computing, we have many examples of this: the dominance of the x86 architecture, the C programming languages, UNIX, the mouse and keyboard as basic input devices, HTTP as the main network protocol, the Mac/Windows GUI, MS Office, Photoshop, etc... these behemoths all won over their respective markets then stagnated, in most cases allowing flourishing innovation on top but preventing some amount of innovation at the same level unless and until radically different conditions unseated them.

> The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out

You mean before irreversible ecological disaster? I don't think anyone outside the business of fossil fuel extraction is concerned about us running out of fossil fuels.

Mandating production of something people don't want does not make people buy it, that's true.

But mandating production does make research happen, which drives prices down on the thing you want, and makes it closer to marketable.

And mandating sales means that the company has to discount it until demand gets high enough. As long as it's still worth it to them overall to do business in the state, that works just fine in the market.

This is subsidizing, it's just making the car companies pay for it more directly than a tax.

But it works about the same as a tax on non-electric cars that pays for electric car incentives.

Emergency situations and natural disasters, where are the discussions? Real life has the two and yet there is no real life discussion of what one should do with a pure electric car. Snow storm his the Midwest and nocks out the power. You need to get someone to the hospital or you work at a hospital how does one get the electricity to ready their vehicle? Electrical core for cars yes but pure electric cars for real world scenarios does not fit.

This is where I start liking the Volt. Pure electric? No way. Not in Michigan winters.

>California emits only 2 percent of global greenhouse gases

What? That's huge! California does not have 2% of the world's population, not even close!

Looking at it another way, all the more effect the regulations there will have.

> California does not have 2% of the world's population

Consider all the power required to support a Californian's life style, including his direct use and all the services and products that converge on him. That Red Bull can on his desk is probably not negligible, not when you factor in all the infrastructure required for it.

What does the number of people have to do with this? Industries contribute much more to emissions.

(also not relevant, but California's current GDP is ~2.2T, which is around 3% of the total world GDP (75T)).

A lot of California pollution is indirect, as in produced from factories outside of the state. Which makes GDP a terrible measure of pollution.

I agree with you that's a strange statement. But also consider California's GDP is about 2-3% of the world GDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

World GDP is about $87.25 trillion and California GDP is about $2 trillion, so California has more than 2% of world GDP. You could make the case that that's a more important metric than population.

If you look at GDP per person in the population, California is only 14th in the US ($58K per person -- Delaware at #1 is $112.K per person GDP), so they have room to more efficiently make that GDP per person than they do. Delaware does have a higher CO2 emission rate per capita, tho (nearly 50% more than California)

> Delaware at #1 is $112.K per person GDP

Is that real, or a side effect of the number of companies which are basically ghost-chartered in Delaware?

> Delaware does have a higher CO2 emission rate per capita, tho (nearly 50% more than California)

I wonder how much of that is due to increased heating necessary during winter...

Is some of that CO2 imaginary, traded corporation pollution-points?

Not sure what percentage are "ghost-chartered", but according to this article I read earlier [1] corporate fees cover over 25% of Deleware's budget.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/dole-and-other-companies-sour-on...

Might need to Google that URL and click through to skip the paywall.

I've been wondering whether population is the right statistic to correlate greenhouse gas emissions with. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare it with a measure of productivity? Producing 2% of the world's greenhouse gases is not bad at all if California performs 2+% of the world's greenhouse gas-producing activities.

Sadly this sort of mandate leads to a very inefficient application of money to reducing pollution. After that $14,000 "subsidy" the 500e still a $32,500 car, which will appeal primarily to people who are likely replacing an already efficient late model vehicle for a tiny net carbon savings. That same $14,000 applied to the base model 500 Pop would make the price about $3,000(!) and you'd have buyers replacing old clunkers with something that gets 40 mpg and a huge net savings.

Maybe, but you're making a bunch of assumptions here - people might well replace an old clunker with a small compact for only $3000, but you can't take that for granted. People who don't own a car already might enter the market at this price (adding to pollution and congestion) or those who have efficient cars might replace them with an equally efficient but much cheaper car and and simply pocket the savings, for no marginal gain.

I agree the existing system isn't very economically efficient but ISTM that you're assuming rather than demonstrating the efficiencies that would result from your alternative scheme.

My example was really meant as a thought experiment rather than a credible program, but obviously governments and institutions can formulate such plans with requirements for the replaced vehicle, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System

The Federal and State subsidies for EV's drive down the used market value of the cars substantially. I just purchased a 2013 Nissan Leaf and you can get the base models all day long for 10k, or 13k'ish for the high end model. There is probably a little bit of a FUD discount as well since nobody knows how long the batteries will last, or what will happen when you want to change them. Incidentally, my Leaf replaced a Nissan XTerra :)

I always answer 'have you considered how expensive the batteries will be to replace' with have you ever had to pay to have an automatic transmission replaced? Not cheap! A blown head gasket is also not cheap either.

I generally feel a strong sense of resentment when a government entity legislates for "my own good" or for the "people's own good". Whether it's to outlaw drugs that I don't use or tell me what kind of car I have to buy I don't like this.

However I also most people act in their own self interest most of the time, and corporations are no different. I think things work best when there is a way to align both government and private entities. I think the way she goes about fuel economy standards is not that way. Politicians don't know the science behind electric cars or ICE cars so how can they be in a position to legislate their standards? What would CARB do if they legislated a major manufacturer to pull out of the California market? At some point that could be a viable option.

California also has the worst electrical infrastructure in the nation, and is not doing something like "requiring the EV people who will stress it" to pay a tax for improvements, or if they wanted to be punitive, a tax on gas cars to pay for it, or anything other than saying what a great idea this would be and pushing for it on the environmental side.

Given that converting all cars in CA to electric would seriously stress the infrastructure[1], yet they are not doing anything to improve that infrastructure, I can't say i'm impressed with california's long term thinking here ...

[1] Some back of the envelope math: there are 20,665,415 registered autos in CA. I'm going to exclude light trucks and trailers which make up another 12 million, and essentially double our numbers because they need more power/etc. <10% of autos are electric, but i'll just remove 10% to round nicely, and say "18 million non-electric vehicles. If they move to 85KWH cars, depleted and charged once a week, now we have an additional 85KWH x 18 million cars of electric power being used once a week. That's 1,530,000,000 KWH or 1530 GWH extra that needs to be generated and distributed every week. That's 79,560 (52x1530) GWH a year.

California produces 200,000 GWH a year, mostly from natural gas: http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electric_generation_...

So they need to produce and distribute 40-50% more electricity than they do now to make this happen. Note that generation ability has not really moved from 2000. In fact, it's gone down! If they also want to meet their goal of moving generation to 33% renewable energy by 2020 (and eventually all of it), and thus provide this capacity without staying on gas, they'd basically have to double all available renewable energy output.

That's just the generation side. Then they have to make sure they can distribute it.

Don't worry though. I'm sure all the right people talk and plan this stuff together, and it's not just one part of the government doing something without thinking about the long term consequences that need to be planned for elsewhere - that never happens in government :)

Of course, the numbers above are just spitballing to show there is thinking that appears to not be happening (as to whether it's a good idea or not, i actually don't care whether my car is electric or not :P). The average car is driven 15 miles a day, so maybe it takes 2 weeks to deplete your 85kwh battery. But generally, no matter what sane thing you do to these numbers, halve them, double them (maybe cheaper cars use crappier batteries/engines, maybe they mean light trucks too, etc), it's still "a lot of extra to plan for". Even a 1-2% change in electrical capacity is serious business.

Until they actually have a serious plan for solving these issues, i'm just going to look forward to the lawn signs saying "80 volts is the new 120".

I think this is why Tesla's home battery is going to be such a big deal in the near future. You could buy your own solar panel system and use it to charge your home battery, which would in turn power your electric car. You wouldn't be adding additional stress to the grid and it would probably be less expensive in the long-run. Not to mention that you'd be running on 100% renewable energy.

Anyone ever do the math on charging your car using a solar panel? I'm guessing that unless you have a massive solar panel setup, it would be tough to charge an electric car and get more than 50 miles out of it.

Nissan leaf has 24 KWhr pack, so a 5 KW solar system getting 5 hours of sun could charge it.

However, the cost of having 2 full batteries (ie panel - powerwall - car battery) would be massive in today's world, where batteries are already a huge cost.

It's odd that you think private companies who own and operate the Grid need public support to expand it. If demand increases they make more money which can pay for upgrades directly or in the case of large shifts pay down loans.

PS: A 2% change per year is actually well within normal variations.

I'm not 100% sure how California public utilities commission works, but in most states, the company would in fact need government permission to do upgrades. Otherwise they can't charge more money to do it.

Power companies are heavily regulated and so are power rates. Their business model is dictated to them.

There is no need to change rates if demand increases, if anything things get cheaper per KWH as electric cars increase night time demand. As to permission, that’s not a cost which would need to be paid for.

The man hours (and there would be many) required to document the need, apply for permission, potentially attend hearings of some sort, argue for, and comply with the conditions of permission most certainly have non-zero cost to the utility company.

California decouples utility profits from demand/quantity supplied, and has done so since about 1980. If they didn't, then as you point out, the utilities would be trying to get people to consume more.

Here is a two page CPUC brochure (PDF) about it: http://www.fishnick.com/pge/Decoupling_Explained.pdf

Thanks, that's just odd.

Cars charge overnight, which is a trough in electric demand. power plants prefer even loads. So car charging loads would be much less stressful than, say, growing population 10% and increasing peak demand.

"which is a trough in electric demand"

Except, with some of the suggested solutions, like rooftop solar/etc, we know that over time it causes the normal power usage to invert (see germany, which no longer has a mid-day peak).

That is, the trough is no longer at night, but in the middle of the day.

Ever barring this: think of this another way: If you suddenly increase nighttime usage by several thousand percent, it's unlikely to be a trough anymore, and pretty far into a spike.

THe carport amperage/voltage is usually around 240v/30 amp. This is a lot, and definitely a ton more than the average power usage of a home at rest or even with the AC on.

At that voltage/amperage, it would take 10+ hours to charge an 85kwh battery

If you go to 240/50 amp, it's about 7 hours, but again, even more of a factor than the average hours residential usage.

This is like having 4-5 high end electric oven on full blast for 7 hours.

(or in maker terms: i have a really nice 3hp table saw, really nice 3hp jointer, planer, cyclone dust collector, cnc machine, vacuum clamp, etc. Having them *all running at once takes less power than the carport :P)

I would bet, in fact, that it would shift peak residential to nighttime by a significant factor (to put some perspective on this: average residential usage is like 25-30kwh a day, so 85 at night would definitely be "huge")

(Again, it's not that i don't think there are solutions, but in grand california tradition, they chase some magically happy utopia without actually ever planning for the long term consequences, then act shocked when they happen)

The long-term trends look favorable for rooftop solar and community solar.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2011/08/08/chevy-volt...

http://www.sandc.com/products/energy-storage/ces.asp

The grid of the future might be decentralized and autonomous.

You may in fact be right, but nowhere, in any of this planning for the electrical car phenomenon of the future, do you find anyone thinking about this, and making sure that happens for the reason of supporting this plan.

Instead, you find all the talk is about the magical environmental benefits of this plan (which i expect are actually pretty slim in and by itself), without any implementation details of how california will prepare for it to happen. They talk instead of how they are going to force automakers to do the "right thing", with no self-introspection that "holy shit we may need to do some work too".

That she pushes hydrogen so much is disturbing to me. The source we need will either be water or polluting processes. Water is something we should be protecting and conserving with battles going on for it all over. Definitely don't need to be putting Niagara Falls worth of it into cars. The alternative is commercial production which is anything but ecofriendly. That it contains less energy than gasoline for same volume will impact efficiency, logistics, and safety in some setups. Overall, hydrogen fuel is a very bad idea. That she pushes that undermines her credibility to me.

The reason I like electric, on other hand, is that makes the power-source neutral and could spur investment into our strained grid + battery tech. Yet, it has its own environmental consequences that should be carefully considered by anyone claiming the moral high ground. The environmental impact of manufacturing has a nice summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Environmental_asp...

Or, we can just look at a picture of Nichols' "green" and "clean" vision...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-C...

...then guess what a 2000+% increase of that would entail.

I'm baffled by your inclusion of a link to a four year old anti-wind turbine rant in the Daily Mail at the end of an otherwise sane and sensible comment.

I glanced at the photo in search results before heading to work thinking it was the right article. It wasn't. Good catch. Here's the intended article that covers the damage of rare-earth mining and why most countries don't do it:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rar...

The point of including the topic was that these people talk all kinds of green while doing it using stuff made in most eco-damaging and unhealthy way. A little hypocritical. Further, they should bring up the reality of expanded mining of rare earth elements in these discussions [among other issues] and attempt to make a cost-benefit analysis of various approaches. Current approach is to pretend it doesn't exist or sweep it under the rug.

Does water-powered hydrogren power consume freshwater? If you can get it the input from ocean, there is no scarcity problem.

There's still the issue of using our most precious resource up the way we do everything else. It could be done with desalination plants like they already use in California. There's also research into doing it more efficiently:

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-sea-ocean-hydrogen-fuel.html

So, dealing with the fuel source using ocean is a possibility. (light bulb) Might even be a solution to rising oceans as arctic caps melt. Now there's some original thinking on the topic haha. Probably wouldn't work in reality but might make a good movie scenario.

We use so much water that the amount to make fuel out of would have next to no difference. And it would cost barely any more to use desalinated water.

Not that I think hydrogen is better than batteries.

Good point. Good and bad depending on how one looks at it.

I am really glad there are higher mileage requirements. I feel it is this impetus that has pushed the industry forward technologically.

You can get a VW Golf with a 1.8T that gets over 40MPG while delivering 170hp for the cost of around $20k. Volvo's new SUV is going to get mileage in the mid to high thirties with a turbocharged and supercharged four cylinder that puts out 400hp.

I don't see ICE engines going away like the article implies, especially if they can hit mileage and emissions targets like we are starting to see.

Well battery tech will be a roadblock for some time but deadlines as far out as these make it look like something is being accomplished but provide enough time to not actually be a deadline. Converting off peak electrical power into hydrogen is getting more and more viable and frankly, I don't mind storing and transporting hydrogen versus stuffing the planet with li-ion batteries replete with their hazards.

GM should be first out of the gate with an affordable 200 mile range EV by late 16 or early 17. It will be interesting if other manufacturers follow quickly or wait too see what the uptake is. Fuel cells will likely be the filler application to directly replace fossil fuel engines.

that twenty year gap should be sufficient to get all used cars off the road as the one issue not addressed by current rebates is that the poor rarely can take advantage of them. Currently they seem to only serve the well off who could buy into new tech without them. California is already taking steps to fix this, income limits and such, but the federal government needs to do similar. Direct it to average consumer priced cars and likely there would be wider acceptance

I don't mind storing and transporting hydrogen

Spoken like someone who has never tried to store or transport hydrogen. It's much less convenient than li-ion and has its own hazards.

Isn't that the truth. Unless there's been a breakthrough in the last few years, I remember storing hydrogen being an absolute nightmare: and not because it can combust, but simply because it's so small. Minimising leaks and achieving high storage densities, especially over longer periods of time, is super hard and not least because the hydrogen diffusion can cause embrittlement of metals too.

Think of all the people that light up smokes, etc at the gas station. Then, think about this with a fuel that's invisible when it's leaking. Guy that worked at a hydrogen plant made that point to me when talking about the safety precautions they took.

> the poor rarely can take advantage of them

I'm pretty sure the solution to that is clean public transportation, no?

Cheap public transportation sounds like it'd be more applicable to the poor than clean transportation.

Don't even mind storing that hydrogen. You certainly haven't actually tried to use those hydrogen fuel cells for anything real, not even in a lab.

I wonder if the Chrysler CEO is trolling us: "Don't buy the 500e, you get a $45k car for $32k!"

The car may cost $45K to make, but that doesn't mean it's worth $45K. Maybe it's worse than the cheaper gas version.

I wonder how much of it is due to scale. If they were to make and sell, say 10% of what their other car models sell, then what is the cost per car?

I'd like to see the data points at certain % to see if it's a limited quantity problem or something specific to electric cars where he'll always lose money.

He is definitely not serious - the reason they sell the car at 32k is that is the best price to get the required sales. If people don't buy at that price, they'll have to go even lower, and lose more money.

I wonder about the infrastructure change required for electric vehicles. The bay area relies extremely heavily on on-street parking. If everything is to go electric, will there be charging stations every 15 feet along every sidewalk?

In the not very distant future cars will drive themselves to a charging center and parking needs will be greatly reduced.

That's where things get interesting.

I read that some cities are converting their streetlights into charging posts. It seems like a very clever solution to this problem to me.

1. "Sergio Marchionne had a funny thing to say about the $32,500 battery-powered Fiat 500e that his company markets in California as “eco-chic.” “I hope you don’t buy it,” he told his audience at a think tank in Washington in May 2014. He said he loses $14,000 on every 500e he sells and only produces the cars because state rules require it. Marchionne, who took over the bailed-out Chrysler in 2009 to form Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, warned that if all he could sell were electric vehicles, he would be right back looking for another government rescue."

In order to meet the fuel economy standards, car companies have been building cars that nobody actually buys to bring up their averages. Unfortunately, this means that the cost of all their other cars must also go up.

2. Thanks to the slew of environmental mandates, Californians are now paying $1.11 more for gas on average than the national average.

Also, "Over the past three years, electric rates in California rose by 2.18 cents per kilowatt-hour—about four times the rate nationally—as more solar and wind power has come online. Meanwhile, nuclear plants, which generate cheaper electricity, have been decommissioned, and hydropower has flagged because of the drought."[0]

So, the environmentalists and leadership in CA oppose fossil fuels, oppose nuclear, and actively work with their vast legal resources to sue hydroelectric dams out of existence to preserve the habitats of bait fish.[1] For the time being, they are ok with solar and wind power, but what happens when they realize that it takes actual mining and lots of high-torque, powerful diesel trucks to extract the stuff from Mother Earth?[2] Not to mention the processing/manufacturing.

3. Fossil fuels have been a boon to human life and have raised our standard of living and life expectantly immensely, and should not be dismissed so lightly. You can burn a bunch of stuff for energy (peanuts, wood, animal dung, whale oil) but there's a reason that fossil fuels have had such longevity in their usage---they have high potential energy, good portability, are ubiquitous, and they're cheap! The positive effects far outweigh the adverse effects, especially when you can start using things like catalytic converters to make their emissions less harmful.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/sky-high-california-gas-prices-h... [1] http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-2-march-april/green-li... [2] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rar...

So, I think you are trying to make an argument that opposes these more stringent emissions requirements (correct me if I'm wrong), but I could just as easily read these the other way...

1. Chrysler's fleet is so inefficient that they have to make one-off cars to bring up their average, losing money on each one. This regulation is single-handedly forcing them to improve their fleet or suffer massive hemorrhaging from the electric car mandates. Seems like it's working...

2. Gas costs more in California, making people buy more efficient cars, drive less, and seek mass-transit options, reducing traffic and encouraging increased density. Maybe they'll buy a Fiat 500e?

3. Fossil fuels have helped us get where we are, and now energy is so ubiquitous that we have the luxury of looking for more efficient/less-emissive options...

Looks like things are shaping up pretty well to me!

"The electric car is one of the ways carmakers expect to lower their average fuel consumption and get to the 55 mpg average. The problem is, people aren't buying, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid.
General Motors is struggling to sell 10,000 Chevy Volts this year, and Nissan has sold just over 8,000 Leafs. For context, about 13 million cars are expected to be sold in the U.S. in 2011...
The bad news is that the technology is currently at a point where they have to make trade-offs," Giffi says. "So they want that same vehicle — they want it to look and feel the same. They also want it to perform the same."

Nobody is expecting those capabilities anytime soon."[0]

Nobody likes them, and for good reason. Teslas are cool new-ish technology and the best of the lot, and yet the range is still too low, the charge time is too high, the infrastructure will take quite a while to develop, and they're too expensive. They are the playthings of the Silicon Valley rich, but not practical for the everyday person, whose main purpose for driving a car is cheap and reliable transportation. Teslas and other electric cars are uncompetitive because they are too expensive for what you get, and the only way they become "competitive" is by artificially driving up the price of gasoline-powered cars and fossil fuels. They get a subsidy because they are ostensibly "saving the environment". As I pointed out earlier, the mining of the materials to make these cars (especially batteries) is an extremely dirty and energy-intensive process, mostly done in China by diesel-powered machines. Also, the cars are plugged into an electric grid which is run mostly on ancient fossil fuel plants[1] (as is most of CA's infrastructure), as hydro and nuclear have become basically verboten or phased out of existence. If being carbon neutral is the goal, driving your 20-year-old Accord into the ground would result in a fraction of the energy expenditure and emissions of having a brand-new car built.[2] Or, actually, a horse and buggy would be the most carbon-neutral solution.

Californians may marginally start taking less fuel intensive options in terms of transportation, but most people want to live in suburbs where they have a some room to breathe in their backyard, the schools are better, and a car is necessary---higher prices will effectively force them to spend more on fuel (at the expense of other things). The people in Marin County driving their Teslas and Priuses don't really care, but the lower-middle and middle-class gets clobbered by high energy costs (and has been leaving the state in droves, for that reason and others). And it isn't necessarily because transportation is more expensive; energy costs affect the cost of heating and cooling your home, the price of farming and delivering your produce, the cost of your clothing and smartphone, etc.! These sorts of regulations have led to the mass exodus of companies and jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry (which used to be the way many middle-class Californians made a living) to other states and other countries. Let's not forget that the least wealthy people are usually the least mobile as well.

Fossil fuels allow us to have an incredible standard of living. What if food, fuel, clothing, and transportation costs doubled or tripled overnight? This would certainly make the average person's standard of living a lot worse. And this is exactly what these foolish policies have accomplished and will continue to accomplish.

[0]http://www.npr.org/2011/11/21/142464818/can-electric-cars-he... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scrap...

I really appreciate the thorough, cited reply! There isn't enough of this deep dialogue on the 'net, much less on HN. Upvoted, for that alone. :)

All of your concerns are rational considerations: integrated costs of materials, existing demand for electric/plug-in hybrid vehicles (though I think you'll see there's been growing uptake since your 2011 source!), sources of power on the grid skewing towards fossil fuels...

The ultimate question (one that you and I may ultimately all on different sides of), is whether or not things will always be this way. Also informing this is where things are going to. I don't have my sources available for proper citation (happy to share them later if you are interested), but share of forecasted new power generation is dominated by solar. Graduated regulations are integrating the cost of externalities for sources like coal and other polluters that make them look less like the sure bet they were in the past. The battery density, range, and charging capabilities of electric cars are improving dramatically under concentrated R&D. Tesla's entire company objective is to bring their technology down to consumer-level with the Model 3 in 2 years time. These developments and more signal to me that we are moving to a much more friendly ecosystem for the technologies that could push gasoline cars to the sidelines in very short time.

In this dynamically changing market, some companies (Fiat included, likely) will find themselves lagging due to a combination of internal organizational conflict or maybe just failing to "read the tea leaves" correctly. Witness GM and Chrysler going under when Ford stayed afloat in the 2008 crisis... Sometimes companies get it wrong and fail to innovate, and regulation like California is pushing is designed to incentivize the right kind of decision making out of even those who drag their feet.

Thanks for being willing to have this discourse with me!

I'm mostly just avoiding the tedious task of refactoring some load tests, haha.

Almost all solar power is heavily subsidized by the government, and is still more costly than its worth:

"In spite of government’s best efforts to encourage innovation by solar energy companies and encourage Americans to rely more heavily on solar electricity, solar power continues to be a losing proposition. American taxpayers spent an average of $39 billion a year over the past 5 years financing grants, subsidizing tax credits, guaranteeing loans, bailing out failed solar energy boondoggles and otherwise underwriting every idea under the sun to make solar energy cheaper and more popular. But none of it has worked. Solar energy remains prohibitively expensive – often three times more than electricity produced from natural gas or other sources. As a result, less than 1 percent of the electricity consumers by Americans comes from solar energy sources."[0]

Solar has a cost problem and an intermittency problem: "At first glance, it looks like [photovoltaics (PV)] could be competitive with coal or natural gas plants if the PV cost were to drop below 10 cents/kWh. But there is an important difference between PV and the traditional technologies which makes this simple cost comparison invalid.

But first, take a look at the cost of electricity from a coal plant. The total cost is projected to be 9.5 cents/kWh per the [U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)] study. About 6.5 cents of this is capital cost and about 2.5 cents is the cost of the coal. Looking at the natural gas plant, one can see the capital cost is about 2 cents, and the fuel cost is about 4.5 cents.

Solar has no fuel cost element but significant capital investment.

But here is the rub. If you plan to power a city with PV, it is not sufficient to simply build a large PV array, because PV only produces power during the day. At night and during cloudy weather, a back-up power source is needed since there is no practical way to store the PV energy.

So the city must also build a conventional coal or gas plant, which will sit idle on many sunny days. The real cost of the PV is not just its cost, but also the cost of the back-up plant. Coal and natural gas plants do not need back-up like PV does.

So what is the real value of PV? It is principally the fuel savings which occur when the traditional plant can reduce output during sunny days. Or stated another way, PV is worth avoided fuel cost. The main point is that PV is not competing against the LCOE of coal or natural gas plants; it is competing against the variable operating cost of these plants, which is 2-4.5 cents."[1]

Solar is fine for heating your pool or providing a little energy on sunny days, but if I'm on the operating table, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I want the doctors to be relying on solar power without a fossil fuel backup.

Wind power is also very costly. It requires a lot of the rare earth mining I cited earlier and kills an est. 234,000 birds per year in the U.S. alone.[2]

My point is that there are negative externalities associated with all types of energy production; I don't have any problem allowing new forms of energy to compete for adoption. But competition does not mean taking a superior form of energy production (oil, gas, nuclear, hydro) and artificially inflating the price through regulatory policy[3] so that inferior forms of energy production (solar, wind) may become "viable" on a large scale. Undo the bad law/regulation which shackles nuclear, fossil fuels, and hydro (outside of some basic stuff like the catalytic converter), stop subsidizing wind and solar (and oil as well), and let them compete!

I keep coming back to this: cheap, reliable, portable, plentiful energy is what makes modern life possible---the more we can rely on machines to do the back-breaking work humans used to do, the better. The more energy a society uses, the wealthier and healthier its citizenry. As the name of that site I cited suggests, (fossil fuel, hydro, nuclear) energy production is the Master Resource from which all else is possible in a modern economy.

Regarding your last point, you cannot say on one hand that it is a "dynamically changing market" and car companies simply need to adapt, while acknowledging in the same breath that government regulatory policy has placed these undue burdens upon the companies in the first place! It's like California creating the conditions for fuel costs to rise, and then blaming the oil companies! Let's see it in action:

"Based on an Air Resources Board analysis, the Western States Petroleum Association last year extrapolated that cap and trade would add 16 cents to 76 cents a gallon to the retail price of gas. Other economists projected a 10-cent bump. Sure enough, gas prices skyrocketed this year, though it’s tough to disentangle the impact of cap and trade from other ill-conceived environmental policies.

State and federal environmental mandates have forced several smaller, inefficient refineries in California to shut down over the past two decades. Only 14 refineries in California produce the state’s pristine-burning fuel, and most operate at nearly full capacity to stay cost-effective. Few refiners outside the state blend California’s reformulated fuel.

In most of the country, a problem at one refinery won’t significantly affect retail gas prices. But in California, when one refinery shuts down, others can’t pick up the slack. And it can take weeks to import refined fuel by tanker. In the meantime, customers are stuck paying higher prices.

Hence this year’s price swoon. Following an explosion at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, and a labor stoppage at a Tesoro plant in Martinez this winter, gasoline prices rose nearly a dollar. Eventually, imported oil helped cover the supply-demand gap. But recently a Tesoro refinery in Carson reduced its output to perform annual maintenance, which has again stretched supply in the Southern California market.

In May Democratic state legislators held hearings to “investigate” the gas price spike. San Francisco hedge-fund grandee Tom Steyer has demanded subpoenas of oil-industry executives.

“As everyone knows, the oil companies have been charging Californians up to $1 billion per month more for gasoline than if we paid the national average,” the billionaire environmentalist asserted. “It’s time to put an end to the Big Oil giveaway.”"[4]

What I have done so far is offered an overview of a contrary position, which is basically a riff on this book: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels-ebook/dp/B00IN.... I would recommend it to anyone interested in the other side of the debate.

[0]https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power-issues/government... [1]https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power/solar-power-cost-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... [3]http://www2.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan/clean-power-plan-existing... [4]http://www.wsj.com/articles/sky-high-california-gas-prices-h...

Upvoted for more dialogue. :)

Re: Fuel costs and the competition with Coal & Natural Gas...

What you're describing is exactly the reason (from my perspective) that incentives for solar, wind, etc. exist... The up-front costs of R&D for new technologies, particularly those with long payback periods and uncertain progress milestones, are not well-provided for in a marketplace that isn't pressured by high costs of existing solutions. Without pre-emptive investment in alternatives, we'd just burn coal until we literally ran out, and there are significant economic and environmental consequences of proceeding in that fashion.

Beyond the basic subsidy concern, the cost of coal, natural gas, etc. is all-in. What we have to measure is not just the cost of replacing fuel in existing plants. What we have to measure is the lifetime cost of installing new capacity. We're turning on new power plants worldwide at a truly astonishing pace. I would like as few of those to be legacy technologies as possible. The trend towards new installations being solar comes from the latest Bloomberg energy forecast. [1]

The "we can't just do solar - what about nighttime" argument (and the same for wind, on a still day) is an acknowledged limitation that is being circumvented by battery storage, decentralized grids, and other infrastructure investments (witness the SolarCity/Tesla model where everyone has a battery pack on their home, much like you keep a propane tank on your off-grid homestead, as one example). It will never be the case that the shadow from a cloud interrupts your triple-bypass surgery, just as generators would currently take over in a brown-out on the current grid.

Re: dynamic market vs. stodgy old companies... My view is that people/companies respond to incentives at different rates and sensitivities. You can have a market swinging towards electric cars (GM is happy to sell you a Volt, Nissan the Leaf) and still have a company like Chrysler/Fiat dragging its feet. Regulatory pressures, be they a gas tax (I'm not a fan - too regressive), an electric car mandate, tax and commuting incentives for drivers of efficient cars, etc. are designed to serve as mobilizers for even those companies that are too mis-managed to follow the over-arching trend of the markets. This is how we get things to move faster in our favor, particularly when there are significant downsides to staying the course re: air pollution, environmental degradation, climate change, etc. Whether the price of gas rises due to taxes or swings of the oil industry, I'm indifferent - the price hike has the same effect on incentives. The only benefit to a gas tax (which, again, I'd rather avoid since it hurts the poor), is that when the price of oil goes down occasionally, the price of gas stays at the same high level. It reduces uncertainty in the market and allows everyone to uniformly plan for an economy that must absorb those high costs.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-hu...

60% of the electricity produced in California is from burning natural gas[1]. At present, switching to EV's is not going to reduce overall emissions unless an equal push is made to increase production of electricity by wind, solar, nuclear, etc.. However, the smog in urban centers like L.A. might be reduced even if overall carbon emissions aren't.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

Is it just me or is Bloomberg going full-clickbait?

Liberals LOL!

I imagine that the women in that picture is supposed to look like she's taking in a breath of fresh air, but she looks incredibly smug.

Maybe that's what her car really runs on. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smug_Alert!

The angry response to my post is quite telling. Guess I hit a nerve.

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