If the state government was serious about this, they would be installing chargers all over the place.
I think there is a significant chance that a backlash against this kind of coercion will reduce support for climate policy as a whole and will ultimately be counterproductive for efforts to reduce emissions.
Seen the charger network in California lately? They’re… quite widespread. And the state is definitely helping with infill to keep adding more. The state is even adding them to rest stops, which is unusual in California since rest stops here are normally very nearly free of any services or amenities.
So yes, they’re serious, and yes, they’re doing exactly what you suggested they’d be doing if they were, and have been for years now.
Electric cars are still a luxury for people who have dedicated parking spaces with chargers at home, and the voters all know it.
By the way, I am not against electric cars. I own one. I'm just being realistic about their practicality for the general population.
Just a reminder for everyone, the average car on the road is over a decade old. Since this ban only applies to new cars, electric cars are unlikely to be a majority on the road until the 2040s possibly even the 2050s as maintaining old gasoline cars will become more desirable the harder they are to purchase new. There is plenty of time to build out the charging infrastructure and chargers will naturally be built in larger numbers as demand for them increases.
Otherwise known as "setting a goal," often considered a requirement to meeting a goal.
Don't worry, they will do that too at some point.
for context (2 min google search) https://ecology.wa.gov/Blog/Posts/June-2019/Cleaning-up-In-t...
The state is taking steps to develop and expand charging infrastructure, both through extensive funding of utility-side upgrades, building standards and codes, as well as grants and tax incentives. <a href="https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/laws/ELEC?state=CA">Here</a> is an overview if you are interested.
2035 is too far out. This could have been implemented 2025.
This is going to result in a voter backlash if they really try to force it through. And that backlash could very easily result in a backlash against climate policy in general, especially if the left follows their normal habit of responding with even more strident moralizing rather than compromising with a more incremental approach.
We're now starting to see affordable EVs (e.g. Bolt EV/EUV) but one of the ways they keep costs down is making a trade-off for slower charging making road trips painful (and limiting their mass appeal).
And while costs are coming down, demand is also shooting up as multiple countries/areas roll out EV mandates and incentives. The high[er] demand is offsetting low[er] costs.
A gasoline car will not be able to compete with an electric car in terms of performance and cost. The only reason electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars is because of the lower production volumes at the moment + the car manufacturers can charge a premium for an electric car at the moment.
Charging stations will be available everywhere. It's fairly easy and cheap to install and consumers will require it from the restaurants, stores, municipalities etc. It's a selling point and also a source of additional income.
(I'm talking consumer cars here, not some heavy duty vehicles or other special vehicles which might still benefit from a combustion engine).
This is not true, it is because the battery costs 10's of thousands of dollars. It costs Tesla around $200/kwh to build a battery, and it's batteries go between 50kwh ($10,000) and 100kwh ($20,000). This is the estimated cost to manufacture just the battery. Meanwhile you can buy a Chevy Spark for $15,000 retail.
The truth is that the only reason there are any substantial sales of electric cars is huge government subsidies. In the long run this will change, battery cost will go down, but also the subsidies will go away. It is likely that if there is no fundamental cost floor to the batteries that prevents it, electric cars will end up cheaper to manufacture in the long run because they are simpler and have less parts. They are certainly going to be cheaper to maintain and more reliable. However, that is in the long run, the things you are saying are not true yet and there's no reliable way to know when they are likely to become true.
Regardless, I prefer seeing "virtue signaling" over "vice signaling" — for example: "Drill Baby Drill".
Not if it distracts from accomplishing things that actually matter. Think about plastic straw madness. They take up very little room in landfills. By volume they make up very little of ocean waste. And if you get a plastic straw at a restaurant that isn't on the beach, it is hard to even imagine how it would get in the ocean. Yet society moved mountains to stop using plastic straws. What is the cost of creating these mostly-unnecessary alternatives? What could people have done with their time that would have been more productive?
The costs of virtue signaling are real.
"Saying virtuous sounding things without any intention of acting in accordance with those virtues."
(I don't think that's what's happening here)
"Saying virtuous sounding things that are so in line with the virtues of the zeitgeist that they take no moral fortitude to say."
I think that this is closer to what they meant. It's not necessarily a valid criticism in this case, but I hope you understand how people could find it off-putting when people signal their virtue in the couple of ways I mentioned.
Reading the history of man shows that the opposite is many times true.
If the point is to question the reasoning behind the act, the act is still virtuous regardless. If the problem is it won't work well or well enough, how strange that typically no plausible better path is never suggested. Well other the implied - do nothing.
Obviously there could be local needs (like old apartment building with original electric wires from 1930) but nothing major.
Another article [1] suggests that it's not actually raw generation that will be the constraining factor, but actually power quality -- the authors suggest that cleaning and converting the power for high-voltage DC charging could be a much bigger task than scaling generation.
[0]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=883...
[1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=933...
https://twitter.com/firstsquawk/status/1564771213506818048?s...
Horseshit. At current adoption rates states will have no troubles expanding power generation to keep up but instantly transforming every vehicle into a BeV would require nearly 50% more generational capability than we currently have.
I suppose there are people who regularly drive more than the long-range vehicles currently available, but last time I took a long road trip I rented a car instead of taking one of my ICE vehicles. For me the future is definitely electric, and I'll have a charger at my house, and probably solar.
The interesting point will be when gasoline is less available, as a kid I lived in BFE and my parents had like a 300 gallon gas tank they had to buy and maintain and get refilled from a tanker truck. Places where selling gas already has thin or negative margins will no doubt stop at some point, and ICE will become even more expensive in a lot of places.
California is restricting water usage but they refuse permission for private companies to build desalination plants (Huntington Beach).
I could see banning gas-powered cars, but after 90% of the people have already switched to electric and it's working great.
there's more than enough electricity to go around.
The infrastructure needs to be ensured before the mandate kicks in. Could be conditional on infrastructure targets, like X charging station within Y miles for all Californians
Almost all major industrial countries plan to ban ICE car sales by mid-2030s, some as early as 2025 (Norway). California's plan is not particularly ambitious.
If anything, America is lagging behind the trend.
My biggest issue with it is there is no plan to help poor people who will need to buy a new car or they won't be able to drive anymore in the city. Those policies must happen fast, but we should not sacrifice poor people to do so.
Sales of EVs will continue, old gasoline cars will still exist. Then there's biking, walking, public transit, and living closer to your day-to-day needs. If anything this will help the poor.
Here's a better thing to think about: why do we as a society in various countries require poor people to buy a car in order to participate in society? Maybe instead of doing that, we should treat cars as luxury objects and an after-thought and instead actually build correctly and in a equitable and afforable way?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32562475
yesterday
People who can't afford an EV can get a bicycle (electric even). Actually that's what those cities want most people to do, even those who can afford an EV. The government doesn't owe a car to anyone.
Yeah, I found this suspicious, too. I watch plenty of UK motoring shows and I thought new ICE vehicles were banned as of 2030 or 2035 already.
EDIT: Nevermind, found it much further down in the article.
>The governments of Canada, Britain and at least nine other European countries — including France, Spain and Denmark — have set goals of phasing out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles between 2030 and 2040. But none have concrete mandates or regulations like the California rule.
America is in the unenviable position of having banked their entire postwar modern infrastructure on cheap oil, miles of superhighways, and the internal combustion engine.
I feel like the rise of EVs + cheap solar + self-driving cars might be the lucky mix that turns around America's car & highway bet, not ruins it.
this is national virtue signaling and there's no way that ICE cars are going away. I know several people who sold their electric cars and are back to ICE because these electric cars struggle during cold weather, snow, and uphills. Not everybody lives in a flat terrain
ICE cars are not going away unless they are able to suddenly produce EV in such massive numbers that it will become cheaper than ICE AND handle the load on the grid.
EVs struggle in mountainous and cold weather regions which Japan and South Korea regularly go through. On top of that there is a growing water shortage which means the nuclear power plants being built will be capped.
All of this weird wokeness and virtue signaling is only making the world a worse place. The bulk of the co2 production comes from countries that make cheap goods for Californians and in wealthy nations. But you won't give up your goods now for a better world right? It has to be the talking points by ESG lobbyist and corporate interest.
What a sad pathetic world. At this rate MIT is dead on money about society collapsing.
Germany is planning to ban new ICE sales by 2030. Japan and South Korea, 2035. You can keep saying "they are not going away," but the truth is that they are going away, whether California bans them or not. Sooner or later, there will be no BMW, no Toyota, and no Hyundai that's running on gas. You may be able to buy a Ford a bit longer, but in a world where your potential ICE car market is dwindling year by year, production of an ICE vehicle will increasingly look like... "virtue signaling." Companies won't be able to make money from that, so they'll stop.
So, in the grand scheme of things, California is not in a position to make an independent decision anyway. But I'd say California is still right in making these decisions now, even from a purely economical point of view, because when the whole industry shifts you want your country to be on the right side of it.
And what does water have to do with EVs?
Until we can accurately build in negative externalities (probably never) it will always be cheaper to pour industrial waste in the river, spew sulphur dioxide into the air, chop down ancient forests, overfish the oceans, and drive cars based on cheap fossil fuels that warm the planet.
We endow the government with the right to make long-term decisions that are good for society, even if they are less profitable to us in the short-term. (Not that the government always does a good job of it, but that is one of its mandates.)
That's what they told you and you believed it. Hope you enjoy the crickets they're gonna make you eat while you charge your car. All in order to 'save the planet' I'm sure.
This has always been the plan. We are migrating to electric because of the harm gas does to the environment, not consumer preference. Just like the migration away from leaded gassoline, or chlorofluorocarbons was done by regulation, not preference.
When you compare the places worldwide and in the US where governments are pushing and where governments deny change and intentionally do nothing, there is a stark difference in progress. There can be no doubt that current levels of government effort basically perfectly correlate with the amount of progress done. California's government is the only reason the United States has any competitiveness on electric cars, lithium batteries, solar panels, and without CA, the other 49 aren't in the same universe as China or Europe in this space.
Ultimately, I don't think there is any future for human civilization as we know it if climate policy is purely a grass roots, bottom up, consumer and market oriented change. I believe the government-minimum scenario is the billions die when breadbasket regions fail and mass famine hits scenario
From the article ....The decision, to take effect by 2035, will very likely speed a wider transition to electric vehicles because many other states follow California’s lead on tailpipe emissions....
Edit: That makes 2026 almost exactly a linear forecast of the current trend, but 2030 is higher: https://i.imgur.com/J48LULx.png
I can't speak to economic feasibility, but with the Toyota RAV4 being one of the most popular cars in the US and already being available as a PHEV, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to have these kinds of vehicles becoming a large portion of those sold.
I've wanted an EV for a while. The Bolt is very competitively priced right now.
I hope more people hop on the EV train. Every little bit counts. While I do not like regulation, I see more and more giant cars on the road, and it kindof makes me sad that this is the direction people seem to continue to be going.
According to Google, the Chevy Volt battery capacity is 60kWh.
So $21 instead of $12.
[1] https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/wcnav_externalId/a-fr-elec...
They should also couple a "nationalization" of PG&E with this too. Municipal run power is typically cheaper than investor owned power.
If you are in an apartment complex, how will charging look? Is it realistic to have charging ports at every (or even a majority of) reserved parking spots? It feels like there are some obvious logistical concerns for condo parking garages.
All you really need is a standard 120V outdoor outlet at each spot. Consider that for every one or two cars that need a single outlet (even if you put it on a dedicated circut), there is an entire apartment with about a dozen circuts, multiple outlets per circut, likely a mixture of 120 and 240 outlets, and several appliances that switch between 0 and 100% load unpredictably.
If we can figure out the electrical engineering to make that work, I don't see the problem with wiring a garage for charging.
1) While that does technically work, it will be pretty slow. My Tesla Model Y charges 3-5 miles of range per hours on a 120V outlet. Perhaps fast enough for most though.
2) I was just in the Canadian Rockies (with said Tesla) and all outdoor parking spaces had outlets. AFAIK they were for the block heaters for harsh winters. It made charged over night slow but nice. Any parking space had them. Cold climates accidentally made it super convenient to park and charge for long stops.
Really reminds me of this clip from The Office (US):
Chevy Bolt is $25k, before a bunch of credits. After it can get down to $16k or so.
The thing that is actually worrying is the fuel economy restrictions by 2026. Most ICE cars will never get 55mpg by then. Mfgs will have to switch to selling hybrids, which most are not ready for (the pandemic pushed any such plans out by at least 3 years). If that doesn't get pulled, it could potentially damage automakers' sales and production plans.
More annoying than the push for electric is the trend towards computers in cars. Cars used to be fairly easy to diagnose and maintain yourself. But nowadays you need more and more sophisticated troubleshooting equipment. I'll probably end up having one cool 90s car and one cool 60s car.
> Experts said the new California rule, in both its stringency and reach, could stand alongside the Washington law as one of the world’s most important climate change policies, and could help take another significant bite out of the nation’s emissions of carbon dioxide. The new rule is also expected to influence new policies in Washington and around the world to promote electric vehicles and cut auto pollution.
If they were good enough, people would automatically switch without any need for a ban.
Reason: many people simply won't be able to buy a new electric car and will pay as they go to keep the old clunker going (especially given where the economy is headed).
Fun times ahead.
[1] https://discovercorps.com/blog/why-is-cuba-filled-with-class...
