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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

Instead of governments announcing bans (I believe france announced a future ban a couple months back), I would rather see these governments committing to only purchasing electric vehicles for all government fleets. Why not put your money were your mouth is and help pump money into the industry via purchasing orders, rather then simply announcing a ban?

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Because this does exactly that, and more. The gov have effectively committed to buying only elecrtic fleets because thats all that will be sold.

Not really, these bans are set so far in the future that they are almost meaningless, a problem for the next government to figure out, or delay even further.

On the other hand, the current government could easily announce that starting in 2020 all new government fleet purchases are required to be electric and it would help create a lot of new competition to bid for those orders.

This is leading by decree. At best the next government has to deal with it (or exempt themselves).

Purchasing electric fleets in order to speed up development and adopting of EVs is leading by example.

For one example [1], Copenhagen is converting the buses and harbour ferries to electric. Already, many of the busiest or most-central routes use LPG or hybrid buses.

Many of the city's other vehicles are electric, for example the vehicles used for collecting litter or moving the workmen who do minor repairs.

That isn't the national government though. I don't know what cars they use.

I don't want to link to the kind of newspapers that report on European royal families, but the crown prince of Denmark takes his children to school/nursery by bicycle. (Last time I saw them, the oldest was riding her own bike.)

[1] https://www.sustainable-bus.com/electric-bus/copenaghen-purc...

Perhaps they do?

In Norway you're going to have a hard time finding a petrol or diesel car that fits the government requirements.

See §5: https://lovdata.no/dokument/SF/forskrift/2017-12-11-1995/§5

Why are buses exempt? Too cold for electric buses?

Not sure, probably the fact that they need to run all day without stopping to charge.

We have plenty of hybrid buses where I live though (in Norway).

Oslo has six electric buses in use right now, and will add 70 more by next summer so electric is absolutely an option, but this is a pretty recent development. Much like Denmark none of the major parties here want to actually enforce the 2025 "ban" on fossil fuel cars either, so we can't really expect anything to happen to buses either (at the national level). On the local level the public transit in the Oslo metro area is planning to be fossil fuel free in 2020 and zero emission in 2028.

As with most things in life, it's not black-and-white... both are happening (although fleet vehicles tend to be more visible at the municipal level). You do still need national-level policy to set market certainty and reduce risk, though (a car maker is much more likely to invest in significant retooling if they're guaranteed a market for that retooling).

Even in the US, the USPS is experimenting with electric mail trucks: https://about.usps.com/what-we-are-doing/green/vehicles.htm

If the ban is the stick, the best return on the carrots would be increasing public charging infrastructure. SF runs chargers in front of city hall, for example.

> Why not put your money were your mouth is

"Rules for thee and not for me"

The government is happy to tell everyone else what to do but when it comes time to buy their own vehicles they don't have to play by those rules so their decision making process does not reflect the presence those rules and they wind up buying ICE vehicles for the majority of use cases because from a strict numbers perspective those are what make sense in a majority of use cases.

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