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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the Norway one was widely reported as a ban, but it is not. The official government policy is that they "have a goal that all new cars should be zero emission (ZEV) in 2025".

Nobody who's actually crunched the numbers thinks this is realistic (that we reach 100% new cars are ZEV), but maybe we'll reach 60% by 2025. Currently we're at 30% of new cars are ZEV, up from 10% in 2014, and it's highly likely we will see a sigmoid growth curve with a long tail.

One of the issues is that a very large portion of Norwegians like to ski in winter (which typically requires a roof box) and to go e.g. boating or caravaning etc. in summer (which typically requires a tow hitch). Currently there are exactly zero EVs on the market that can do both of those things.

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I don't believe that a large proportion of Norwegians own boats and need tow hitches with which to move them around. Do you have a source on that?

A roof box can be attached to pretty much any vehicle, and if the market in Norway demands it then EV manufacturers can pretty easily add roof hooks for mounting as an option in-country if they don't already. There's no fundamental incompatibility with EVs here. Google searches reveal that plenty of people are already mounting roof boxes to Teslas, so this is already a solved problem.

I'm talking abut someone who has a boat OR caravan OR does home improvement and needs a trailer, easily 30% of the population. It's important to keep in mind that Norway has low income inequality and high median income. Average middle class person can easily afford a boat.

As a data point, on the Norwegian version of Craigslist (Finn) the number of boats for sale right now is 10% of the number of cars for sale, the number of caravans is 5%, and we're still in winter season.

There certainly will be EVs (or maybe hydrogen powered cars) that meet requirements of this demographic at some point. But they won't be available in volume at a price point people can afford before 2025, especially not when EV subsidies have started phasing out.

As an additional point of data - there is one registered trailer for every two cars in Norway: 1.4 million trailers and 2.7 million cars. For reference, we're almost exactly at one car per household.

https://www.ssb.no/en/transport-og-reiseliv/statistikker/bil...

A roof box on an electric vehicle - also known as "how to kill your range"...

Huh? The aerodynamic effects are exactly the same as on an ICE car. What's under the hood doesn't matter here. You'll get equally reduced range in a gasoline car, and pay more for the privilege to boot.

Toyota RAV4 EV: https://www.toyota.com/rav4ev/

Tows 400+ kilos and has a roof box.

With tow ratings you subtract the weight inside the vehicle. At a tow rating of 800lbs you're not going to be pulling much of anything, and with a 41 kW/h battery it is not going to be going far at all either while towing.

I would love to replace our ICE tow vehicle with an electric if any existed, but the electric range would drop by at least half while towing. That's a lot of stopping.

As a comparison a v6 Dodge Durango's tow capacity is 6200lbs/2800kg. A v6 tow vehicle is a part-time tow vechile not intended for large loads. That durango can pull some boats and smaller camper trailers. We have used it to haul rock/gravel/stone as well. Electric would be great because the transmission wouldn't be as much of a concern but it would definitely need a lot of battery and would need a larger cooling system for the batteries and motors just like ICE tow vehicles need larger fuel tanks and larger radiators.

For comparison, a 400 kg tow rating you get on a Fiat 500 with the 0.9 L three-cylinder petrol engine...

2025 does seem challenging. But remember that it's new car sales. People will operate their ICE cars for decades after that date.

And in the context of the discussion of VW's investment the difference between 80% of the market being ZEV and 100% is not that big...

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