They're well positioned if that global pivot to EV flops and populist politicians undo all the "EVs mandatory by 20XX" laws. This seems to be what they're betting on.
Even without demand from electric cars, battery technology will keep improving (perhaps slightly slower) because of all the demand from mobile computing gadgets. Aren't batteries the main cost disadvantage of electric cars compared to ICE?
So even without misguided mandates, electric cars might be here to stay.
(I explicitly call the mandates misguided, because the Right Way is to tax what you don't like, eg carbon emissions, and let people figure out by themselves how they want to solve it. Electric cars might be one way. Or moving closer to work, so you only have to drive half as much might be another way to react; and is just as good in terms of emisions as getting a car that's twice as efficient.)
This is only if the thing "you don't like" doesn't have serious (like deadly) externalities. Just taxing leaded fuel more wouldn't have made the transition as quick; just taxing ICEs more won't force manufacturers to switch to electric and hybrid models quick enough. The threat of a ban will.
What makes you think so?
You don't have to get rid of leaded fuel completely to get most of the benefits. If you get rid of 99.99% of leaded fuel, you reap approximately 99.99% of the benefits.
And in fact, leaded fuels aren't banned for all applications. So whatever benefits we have gained, we have gained with some leaded fuels still being in use.
Btw, we allow deadly externalities all the time. Driving your car, whether ICE or electric, at all is a stochastically deadly externality for pedestrians and cyclists and other drivers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program for a successful program of trading in externalities.
Why is lead or CO2 from cars special? We still allow lead from some other engines, and we allow lead in eg solder and other applications. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have a uniform tax on its emission into the environment, instead of a ad-hoc patchwork of bans?
> [...] just taxing ICEs more won't force manufacturers to switch to electric and hybrid models quick enough. The threat of a ban will.
How quick is quick enough? And why wouldn't a high enough tax do that? If you tax carbon emissions high enough that ICEs effectively cost an extra millions dollars to run, wouldn't that effectively have the same effects as a ban? (A handfull of billionaires might still run some ICEs for fun, even at those punitive taxes. But they are a rounding error.)
In any case, my point was more aimed at making the life of polluters harder, instead of giving subsidies to electric cars. In my view, a tax on emissions is best, but a ban on ICEs is still better than a subsidy or an explicit mandate for electric cars. That way you don't distort the decisions between riding your pushbike vs moving close to work vs riding an electric car.
I don't think anyone made an argument one way or another _how_ lead is bad: all the arguments so far works just as well whether lead is 'poisonous' or bad for the brain in some special way.
You are right that private planes are mostly used by rich people. But that's not true of all products that contain lead, or processes that emit lead into the environment. (For example, there's lead in some batteries and there's lead in some solders. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead#Applications for more.)
The harm of lead is finite, and thus a finite tax would be a reasonable way to deal with it.
So I'll bite the bullet, and say: yes, of course. Ideally, a large part of that tax would go towards (the estate of) the victims. That's more productive than locking people up: that's just a straight up loss for society.
We also already tax stochastically-killing people; or in some cases, we don't even tax it and just allow dangerous activities. Eg we allow people to drive cars and we allow people to run coal-fired power plants.
Going from a small percentage chance to a larger percentage chance (nothing is certain) is not a qualitative difference, only a quantitative one.
Anyway, unleaded fuel is now approved for those planes so the transition should be pretty quick now.
Currently for me it's cheaper to buy gas than drive electric.
It's only cheaper if you are well off, have you own drive lane and can charge off solar panels, might even be cheaper without the solar panels but if you can afford your own drive lane or parking spot you have those as well. Here in NW Europe that's a minority and the vast majority does not have this advantage.
Also Europe has more expensive petrol prices than the US in general, that calculation is aggressively region-dependent.
The real kicker is GP is correct, mostly. You don't have to do much for optimization for the day-to-day operating costs to be less, but you do have to generally be wealthy enough to own your own home with a garage to install a charger in (or be super lucky and have one at an apartment, which is quite uncommon still).
So the electric cars will keep improving their position relative to ICE. (I don't want to express any opinion on whether they are better or worse at the moment than ICE already.)
But I guess some people live in SV? I'm in Singapore, for what it's worth.
Only if you can charge your car at home every night. And even then, maybe not on EU electricity prices.
But the elephant in the room that you're missing is gasoline tends to be taxed to hell and back.
What do you think will happen when enough people switch to electric that the states notice the loss of revenue?
For example, I bought my last car, a 2002 Honda Accord, slightly used in 2004 for $4k. I sold it for the same this year. Obviously it lost value when you factor in inflation, but even so that almost rivals bicycles in affordability. Operating costs were negligible even with the cost of gas being what it is, certainly not enough to tip the scale for EVs.
Toyota had a huge success with the Prius and then just slept on it for almost two decades. I had a 2nd generation, loved it but Toyota had nothing suitable on their lineup when I wanted to replace it. The newer Prius were just too little, too late.
> https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-i...
So they're finding a way to make it work. Granted, Norway doesn't get as cold as parts of the upper Midwest...
https://www.climatestotravel.com/climate/norway
Rarely below freezing on the west coast and maybe 5C below zero in the north? Norway doesn’t get as cold as New York
I do think oil scarcity could be a major problem, but if that starts to happen in our lifetimes then electric vehicles won't need to be mandated. They will be the more economical choice naturally at some point.
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/02/driving-on-electricity-...
Just a small quote: "Now, 93 percent of the country lives where the average EV is better than the most efficient gasoline vehicle (57 mpg)"
Now keep in mind, we need lots more electricity to power even a modest shift to EVs. Will your efficiency stats for EVs account for the energy used in building EVs to replace prematurely discarded gasoline vehicles, and building massive infrastructure everywhere to support EVs? Of course not. The officials pushing these impractical vehicles don't want you to think about all that.