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Comment by throwaway12iii | Hacker News Reader

Fossil fuel cars get a huge discount for causing pollution and health problems. If other countries subsidized the damage that fossil fuel cars do as much as the USA then I'm sure there would be similar adoption as in the USA too.

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A brand new Ford Raptor will clean the air in most cities. You'd have to drive that 465HP fuel guzzling toy over 3,887 miles to equal the particulate output of 30 minutes of yard work with a 2 stroke engine.

So not as much of a discount as you might have thought.

It removes CO2? magic

He wrote 'particulate'.

Not CO2, but particulate matter [1]: basically tiny solid particles caused by exhaust, tires etc that stay suspended in the air. They are linked to a range of health issues in the concentrations found in many urban cities. When you hear about cities banning diesel cars or ICE cars or old cars, that's a measure to reduce suspended particulate matter, not CO2. But luckily unlike CO2, particulate matter can be caught by a HEPA air filter.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulates

It is true that many cars will clean the air of particulate matter these days. That is the only kind of pollution that a modern ICE car will remove, but it is not the only kind of pollution worth talking about....

CO2, NOx and others are just-as, if not more important and your air filter won't do jack diddly for those.

NOx exhaust aftertreatment systems are standard, so a compliant vehicle today will have considerably less NOx in exhaust as well. As for CO2, well, it's not a small chunk, but cars and light trucks account for less than half of transportation sector CO2 emissions; and the transport sector accounts for about 28% of overall CO2 emissions. It's not silly to reduce CO2 emissions in light trucks and cars, but at most reducing those sources would only cut about 15% of U.S. CO2.

"only 15%"? That's huge!

Keep in mind, this is in a country where light trucks and SUVs account for a huge proportion of personal vehicles, and where the average age of a car on the road is about twelve years. As the window of vehicle years shifts further, you can expect that proportion to shrink.

Citation for exhausts having significantly less NOx than city air?

> Citation for exhausts having significantly less NOx than city air?

I absolutely, unequivocally, did not say that.

It's LITERALLY killing the planet we all depend on, yet you can always depend on car fanatics to justify their pollution.

Seriously, sell your car and take the bus.

Externalities aren't paid by the perpetrator in America because they don't truly believe in personal responsibility.

Fossil fuels are heavily taxed in Europe, it’s not even funny.

What kind of health problems? I was under the impression that the emission standards for the last 40 years or so have been quite stringent.

Air pollution, of which transportation is a huge contributor, kills tens of thousands per years in the US. There are many other effects like asthma which afflict millions. Transportation is certainly a lot cleaner than it was but there's still a lot of improvement that can be done. Below is a link to a basic overview, it can give you hints on where to dig if you are interested in specific studies.

https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/vehicles-air-pollution...

Brake pads are pretty bad, in addition to the auto emissions. Electric vehicles help a lot there too.

Are there brake pad emission standards? I don’t know.

I just looked up the brake pad emissions. Pretty scary stuff but it seems like it would be trivially solved by some form of containment around the brake and the disc that captures all of the dust. Probably needs laws to enforce it before car makers would add such a thing.

Regenerative braking sounds more useful than dust containment (not to say dust containment can’t be cost effective).

Cars in Norway have a CO2 tax. But EVs get breaks on things not related to CO2 in Norway. According to Tesla's website, you don't have to pay VAT.

https://www.tesla.com/no_NO/support/incentives?redirect=no

Edit: from an old reddit post, it seems like there's a VAT, weight, engine, CO2, N0x tax. In theory, in an 'even playing field', I'm guessing EVs should be paying VAT, weight, and engine taxes. Not completely sure which of these they pay (or if the list is even correct).

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