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Comment by mhandley | Hacker News Reader

Different countries in Europe can set different road rules, though they cannot discriminate by country. If other EU countries wished to play hardball, they could always do something like setting a 5 km/h speed limit for any (fossil) internal combustion car registered in the EU after 2035. Not many people in Germany would buy a car that is effectively restricted to Germany, and none would be sold anywhere else in the EU, so no mainstream manufacturer would bother with type approval.

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>> Not many people in Germany would buy a car that is effectively restricted to Germany

There has to be a joke here about EVs not having the range to leave Germany anyway. Something like "they closed the boarders but nobody noticed as there weren't any charging ports within 100km of them".

Probably won't be long before it's not economical to stock petrol at many petrol stations in Norway (diesel will likely last longer due to truck use). By 2035, Norway won't be the only place. How long before people have range anxiety when driving petrol cars?

Edit, because I can't reply further: perhaps this won't at first be a problem on long journeys, but if you live in a small town and the nearest petrol is 100km away from where you live, you start to have to plan your daily driving to factor in a long detour occasionally. We're really used to having fuel available everywhere. This will change, the only question is when.

Considering most conventional cars can today drive half way across most European countries on a single tank, range anxiety won't be an issue for a long while.

Google says the average age for cars in Norway is 10 years. It will be along time before petrol stations close.

If banning ICEs fails because of adoption expect the black market to take care of it. Or people will import older ICEs from abroad using loopholes.

That's my feelings here as well. This winter I had -17'C for 5 nights in a row, I talked to a guy who owns a 2020 Tesla, he complained his battery storage could not go above 21% after whole night of charging. That wasn't enough range to go to his niece birthday.

Does banning diesel and petrol stop BEV manufacturers having incentives to improve? They will simply get the market for free and own it without having to improve batteries, charging speed and range.

Lol. -17 is like summer compared to where I am (prairies). It was -19 this morning. My phone says overnight lows will be down to -25 by the end of the week. That is in MARCH. Mid-winter we regularly see -30 for weeks, with occasional week-long dips to -40 and even -50 (before wind chill). EVs, as a concept, are laughed at here in winter. There are a couple Teslas in the area, literally two. They hide inside heated garages for half the year. Their owners both also own pickups. One of them owns two. The tesla is just for fun, right alongside his snowmobiles and dirtbikes.

Maybe ICEs have their place and don't deserve a complete ban?

Maybe we'll know by 2035 when the ban is due to take effect? And maybe car makers need an incentive to try?

These are edge cases that can be engineered around, and 12 years seems like plenty of time to do that.

Carving out an exception won't make these people's lives much easier. Eventually enough people will have gone electric that the economics of fuel distribution begin to deteriorate, and these people out in the boonies end up paying even more exorbitant prices for gas and diesel.

We might as well rip the bandaid off quickly.

And what? Give up personal mobility? Without cars/trucks, rural life stops. Good luck buying food in the cities if in the country farmers have to walk everywhere. EVs are not practical in our winters. The batteries would simply not survive without constant heating, which would defeat any carbon advantages they might have.

And as for fuel delivery, cars are not everything. Trucks/boats/aircraft together consume vast quantities of fuels. They arent going away anytime soon. So the infrastructure will remain a while too.

When did I say they would have to give up cars and trucks?

I said these cold weather problems could be engineered around, just as they had to be for ICE vehicles.

That's odd. My 2015 Model S doesn't have any trouble charging at colder temperatures than that even on a single 230 V, 10 A circuit. What charge rate was he using?

> Does banning diesel and petrol stop BEV manufacturers having incentives to improve? They will simply get the market for free and own it without having to improve batteries, charging speed and range.

Why would banning diesel and petrol cars result in BEV manufacturers not competing? They would still compete with each other to build the best BEV at the lowest price, just like any other market works. Just like the competition between ICE manufacturers resulted in ICE improvements for decades before EV turned up.

They need to compete against other techs, against other concepts. Making one tech the single and permanent option in perpetuity is just wrong. Tech has to evolve, not just incrementally improve.

Who’s talking about making BEV the only option in perpetuity?

Claiming we need ICE so BEVs have a tech to compete with, is like arguing in 2000 that we need the horse and cart so ICE has something to compete with.

Which they did. For decades horses shared the road with cars, still do in many areas. Even today they are not totally banned. Henry ford built a better product. He wasnt out there trying to make the old products illegal.

Big difference is the old products didn’t cause serious climate change that threatens the long term survival of our species.

I think we can afford to take a minor hit of competition to avoid that fate. Unless people honestly believe that BEVs will simply stop improving if ICE vehicles aren’t around to provide “competition”.

Well, except whole Eastern and Southern Europe, where BEV are unaffordable So from whole EU you are left with France, Austria and Benelux.

BEVs are unaffordable pretty much everywhere (if there are no government subsidies).

Every single BEV model seems to be 20-50% more expensive than its ICE counterpart. And the "cheap" ones are something like Renault Tweezy, useless to most people.

Total cost of ownership is reduced significantly with BEVs

Government subsidies exist for oil and ice vehicles as well.

I think if you subtracted all subsidies ICE must be far more expensive because oil infrastructure is obviously way less efficient.

> Government subsidies exist for oil and ice vehicles as well.

Maybe in USA there are subsidies on gas. Come to EU, 50% tax on gas, no subsidies.

So that price you pay covers it’s extraction, refinement and whole sale purchase and transportation?

You sure that isn’t subsidised somewhere along the line?

Yes it does and they do brutally profit from it.

Oh I guess all this news of a climate problem is just fud, because it was already priced into the oil. My mistake.

Electricity is very expensive here too.

> Total cost of ownership is reduced significantly with BEVs

Is it? With the electricity prices what they are and sparse infrastructure I doubt BEVs have a lower cost of ownership. At least in Europe.

> oil infrastructure is obviously way less efficient

Not sure it's obvious. If anything, oil infra has been optimized to be as cost effective as possible. Remember Deepwater Horizon? They were extracting oil from 10 km under water still at competitive prices.

Right, drilling oil from the ocean, then shipping it to a refinery then driving it to a station then putting it in your car is some how more efficient than a solar panel running electricity through an inverter into your car.

You'd be surprised.

Efficiency is rarely about how many steps it takes to get there.

And even taking into account all the steps that you call inefficient, ICE cars are still 20-50% cheaper to buy. And with electricity prices what they are ICE cars are probably the same, or even cheaper, to run.

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