There’s an election going on in California today and I’m grateful to not be in the state so I don’t have to get too invested in the outcome, mostly because, from a casual glance, it seems that 900 people are running for governor and 1,200 people are running for mayor of LA. I don’t have time for that. I also don’t necessarily have time for a long, discursive rant about gas car bans, but somehow both have landed on my plate this morning.
The Morning Dump is going to be a lot of smaller news stories weaved into a larger narrative, primarily because I don’t want this to become The Evening Dump. It’s going to center on something that came up recently in the race for California’s governor. If you weren’t aware, California has a non-partisan jungle primary, wherein the top two candidates move onto a runoff. This is a bad system that results in sometimes whacky outcomes, though regular partisan primaries also result in whacky outcomes, so it’s not like I’m offering up a better solution.
Two of the leading Democrats appear to be former Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra and billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer. That the billionaire is the more environmentally active candidate here is interesting and, again, one enters the vortex of nonsense that is California politics at their own risk. You have been warned.
One Of The Candidates Told The Truth And Maybe Shouldn’t Have
Having worked on campaigns in the past, including a gubernatorial campaign in a large state, one of the ways you get endorsements is by filling out these long surveys from various interest groups, newspapers, The Expanse fan club, et cetera. In a survey from Politico, Becerra wouldn’t commit to California’s 2035 gasoline ban:
“California should transition from gas-powered vehicles when it makes sense — when infrastructure and affordability are there for California families,” he wrote in response to a question about whether California should maintain the strategy.
Becerra reiterated that position in an interview this week, arguing that the pace of the shift away from fossil fuels is dependent on support from the federal government, car manufacturers and the state’s own budget — all of which are in flux.
“We’re not going to live in a world that’s make-believe,” Becerra said. “If you could tell me where those things are, I could give you a much more precise answer. And if anyone says they can give you that answer, then they’re just making a lot of inflated promises.”
I spend a lot of time on BlueSky, which is a social network for performatively unhappy progressives and genuinely happy furries, and they were not enthusiastic about this response. Neither was Steyer, who jumped on the answer by saying this:
We know the reason why. Chevron and Big Oil have backed Xavier Becerra, spending well over $1.1 million collectively to boost their candidate of choice. This is the same Becerra who proclaimed, “You need Chevron. I need Chevron,” and called Big Oil cutting him a check “their prerogative.”
The reports paint a clear picture: Big Oil sees Becerra as the candidate who will protect the status quo.
Not my pig, not my farm, and I am not defending Becerra here on taking the money, but when you’re running against a billionaire you gotta spend a lot of cash, and it has to come from somewhere. It opens you up to attacks like this, so your mileage may vary on whether or not it’s worth it (if you’re in Texas, taking oil money isn’t as much of an issue).
However, I don’t think Becerra is necessarily wrong about the gasoline car ban. The reality is that it probably won’t work, that California has been historically bad about encouraging good outcomes for electric cars, and that propping up infrastructure and encouraging more hybrid sales will probably result in less fuel usage faster than failing to get people to adopt EVs. Reality and politics are not the same thing, so maybe it was more electorally convenient for him to lie about his feelings and continue the Newsom policy of pretending like it’ll all be fine if we just clap our hands and believe.
California Could Do It, But It’s Very Hard
The best argument for requiring companies to adjust to nothing but EV sales by 2035 (as both California and Europe have promised) is that even if we fail it’s a reasonable expectation that EV adoption will end up much higher than doing nothing. Many scientists and rational people (like me) believe there’s a climate crisis, and it’s therefore somewhat galling to say we should be pragmatic about all this. It upsets people. I totally get that. My personal belief is that not only should we make it possible for more people to own affordable EVs, but that we should reduce the necessity of having a car for commuting in general, which reduces energy consumption and leaves more room on the roads for enthusiasts to just go and have fun. Win-Win!
That’s true, but also it’s fragile in our modern version of representative democracy, and the politics of it are terrible. What do I mean? There’s a Patrick George TMD from 2023, when the Biden Administration announced it was making a big EPA push, I think about all the time. Patrick said getting all Americans into EVs could be “America’s next moon landing.” That’s not quite what happened, but this ended up being darkly prescient:
I do expect “Biden is forcing you to buy an EV” to be some kind of talking point in the next election. But this EPA stuff isn’t the same as an outright ICE ban like Europe (and California) are doing, just a huge push toward efficiency and zero-emission cars. Right now it’s safe to say that battery EVs are the furthest along in that race and getting the most support in terms of infrastructure buildout.
But we’re in an election season, right? (It feels like we always are; thanks, cable news.) Realistically, even if you’re a fan of this stuff or hate it more than anything, it’s worth asking what happens if Biden loses the White House in 2024, or the Republicans take the Senate.
Some experts I spoke to yesterday say that since these EPA rules deal with cars from 2027 onward, and the soonest a new president could toss them would be in 2025 and 2026 after their election, the car companies will already be on this course by then and that will be tough to reverse.
We know what Patrick didn’t know, which is how the election turns out. I will add, in full disclosure, that Patrick finished that paragraph by saying he thought the auto industry was “going largely electric anyway” and that’s amusingly something we used to debate all the time. He’ll ultimately be correct about EVs being the predominate car at some point in the future, it’s just that he, David, and I never quite agreed on how far away that future is.
It turns out that the politics of even what the EPA was trying to do were terrible. This gets very complicated, but there was never a national ban on gasoline-powered cars, even though by allowing California to have its own mandate (that other popular states followed) it did create something that amounted to a quasi-national ban. I don’t think President Trump won the election by saying he was going to stop a ban on gasoline cars, but it did make it politically possible for the President and a Republican-controlled Congress to effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, neuter penalties for violating fuel economy standards, and otherwise make the selling of EVs that much harder. While most Americans still think global warning is a problem, there’s been an alarming pessimism about whether or not anyone will do anything about it.
What’s most annoying about this is that, in the past, a Republican President (albeit, a Californian) teamed up with a Democratic Congress to address these problems and did so successfully. The California Air Resources Board, the EPA, and the passage of the Clean Air Act all worked together to result in serious change. As the EPA recently wrote:
The U.S. vehicle pollution control under the Clean Air Act is a major success story by many measures:
- New passenger vehicles are 98-99% cleaner for most tailpipe pollutants compared to the 1960s.
- Fuels are much cleaner—lead has been eliminated, and sulfur levels are more than 90% lower than they were prior to regulation.
- U.S. cities have much improved air quality, despite ever increasing population and increasing vehicle miles traveled.
- Standards have sparked technology innovation from industry.
- Reducing pollution from transportation sources has led to healthier air for Americans.
When it comes to making electric cars happen, though, I’d say that California’s results have been fairly mixed.
With the notable exception of Tesla (which also required a ton of money from the federal government go get off the ground), the state’s previous attempt to require EV cars sales resulted mostly in costly dead-ends typified by compliance vehicles that didn’t go anywhere. Anyone remember the Fiat 500 EV? The Plug-in Hybrid Subaru Crosstrek? The Honda Fit EV?
Maybe Steyer is correct and Becerra is wrong. Maybe this is absolutely practical and achievable. I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it’s terrible to say that it isn’t obvious what’s going to happen.
China Doesn’t Have An ICE Ban And The EU Is Already Trying To Walk Back Its Own Ban
People love to point to China as an example of what’s possible, but China is not a democracy and what they’re doing, I think, is often misunderstood. This is a country that’s invested so heavily in electric cars that it has an extreme level of overproduction and desperately needs to sell cars to other markets. And even then, last year only 55% of new cars sold in China last year were EVs. That’s in a country where there’s more choice, more affordability, and more infrastructure for EVs than anywhere else in the world.
There’s also Europe and, in particular, places like Norway, which is a country that mostly sells electric cars and has done so by subsidizing the cost of EVs by selling everyone else petroleum products. Even then, it was a gradual subsidy and tax that led Norway to this outcome.
Looking at the most recent EV sales in Europe show that gas prices are leading people to battery electric cars, PHEVs, and so many hybrid. Hybrids are the fastest growing part of the market and will likely remain so into the near future. Even with the increase in sales, the EU continues to walk back and adjust its EV bans in light of consumer preference and the reality that the aforementioned overproduction in China means the continent is at risk of being overrun by government subsidized cheap Chinese EVs. Also, you know what’s a large, advanced country that doesn’t have a national ban on gasoline cars? China.
The Very Visible Hand Of The Market To The Rescue
If you are a regular reader of TMD you have been down this road with me before, so I won’t entirely restate the point. If you care about the environment, and think it’s an emergency, you should want the fastest route to reducing emissions. That’ll involve a lot of EVs, but the existence of EVs doesn’t mean ignoring the interim step of hybrids. There are some consumers who may want an EV but lack the infrastructure to drive one (I’m one of them). There are some vehicle types that are popular, like trucks, that aren’t necessarily ideal EVs for everyone in every situation.
Americans do not like being told what to do, but they are logical enough to see that purely ICE-powered cars make a lot less sense in most situations and are therefore adopting hybrids at huge rates. While the President may not believe in global warming, or particularly care for electric cars, he has inadvertently helped adoption by starting a war with Iran that has caused gas prices to shoot through the roof.
Not every automaker puts out monthly sales data, but there’s a clear pattern with the automakers who do. Just this morning Hyundai and Kia released their reports and it’s a good time to be selling hybrids. Here’s Kia’s release:
Kia’s hybrid models saw significant growth with Sportage Hybrid (+171 percent); Sorento Hybrid (+101 percent); and Carnival Hybrid (+32 percent); each achieving best-ever May sales records and Carnival Hybrid also setting its best-ever any-month sales record.
Overall, Kia’s hybrid models (+179 percent) and electrified models (+133 percent) delivered the highest monthly and best-ever May year-to-date sales totals in company history.
And here’s Hyundai:
Electrified vehicle sales continued to drive overall growth, highlighted by the best ever hybrid vehicle sales month, up 90% year-over-year. Tucson HEV (+ 10%), Santa Fe HEV (+30%), Elantra HEV (+29%), and Sonata HEV (+250%) all achieved new May records.
Hyundai’s electric vehicles also posted gains, up 10% across the category and a new May record. IONIQ 5 (+28%) also established its best May ever, reflecting the benefits of Hyundai’s continued commitment to the EV market.
That’s good! Electric cars for some, miniature American flags for everyone else. And I also think the market responded to the potential government requirement for electric cars by producing a lot of relatively expensive electric cars. While Honda has abandoned its EV plans in the United States for the moment, automakers like Ford are pressing ahead with more affordable electric cars that will be sold without the federal tax credit.
Bans are not always great policy and almost never great politics, which is extremely true in the automotive world. What Becerra said was maybe bad politics, but it was a recognition of the reality of where California’s policy is an imperfect solution to a very real problem.
[Ed Note: I’ll just note that it was obviously always going to be gas prices that push people to drive EVs once those early adopters had bought in. And second, I think both governments and car companies pushing products that people don’t want is always a recipe for disaster; working in harmony with the market (focusing heavily on pushing hybrid options) instead of butting up against it would have reduced our overall CO2 emissions by a huge amount. -DT].
Ok, Now A Song
That’s right, let’s go back to Malaise Era Los Angeles with Rose Royce’s “Car Wash,” the unforgettable eponymous bop from the slightly more forgettable film.
The Big Question
Ok, have at me! Maybe I’m wrong!
Top photo: DepositPhotos.com
EVs would be perfect if we could get our current power grid upgraded by running it under roadways and using wireless charging. That would cut range anxiety and charging issues. The next issue is controlling cost but if the range issues were solved by the above then they could use cheaper battery packs and if necessary small generators to help charge for people that are outside of the power grid upgrades.
The grid can handle the EVs. That’s one of those FUD things.
100% I keep hearing from the anti-EV rural guys that the “the grid ain’t ready” and when I say “great lets build a better grid, loads of American jobs” they blink and change the topic.
As if there would even BE a grid in rural areas without the New Deal and its “socialism” LOL.
100%!!
Wireless charging in that application will be stupid inefficient to run and stupid expensive to build so will remain a dream.
Continued DC fast charging between destinations and a push to incentivize charging options in high-density housing (even with metered 110v outlets) will do much more.
Sidenote: I had a couple Blink chargers at my apartment complex which was neat and charged a crazy low $0.03/kWh. That got bumped up to ~$0.35-0.45/kWh and Plugshare absolutely refused to believe it existed despite photographic proof nor keep it on the map so that was annoying but an unrelated issue.
It will get better, we are still in the infancy of EV. It took about 20 years for the Gas Station to be come prevalent after the Model T. So in the next 10 years or so it will be much better.
Speaking of Malaise-Era LA, rewatch the early seasons of CHiPs. It’s shocking how brown the air looks in so many episodes.
As for elections, can we make all primaries jungle primaries, but with ranked-choice voting? Top 3 go to the general, which should also be ranked-choice. It would go a long way to busting up the 2-party duopoly that we’re forced to endure now.
See: Documerica
yeah – it wasn’t just the film stock making everything look sepia
Brown was the color of choice in the 1970s.
It was a four color palette: Brown, Avocado, Goldenrod, Persimmon
My wife and I refer to it as The Brown Decade.
The market is the best way to make changes, but one very crucial thing is always missing- making people pay, and fully pay, for externalities in the market. If increasing fees were implemented in say year 2000 on emissions, both criteria and greenhouse gasses, we would probably be much of the way through the transition away from fossil fuels already. But it would be political suicide, since even most “environmental” type of people really only care about their personal costs when it comes down to it.
Tax CO2 emissions, CH4, criteria, etc, and at a sufficient rate to cover the $7 trillion/year (and growing) of externalities worldwide. Then the market will take care of things. There will just be a massive amount of complaining.
Sounds to me like Becerra got flamed for an actually informed, realistic policy statement. Wishful thinking may win elections, but sucks as policy.
Can’t implement policy without first being elected. So, lie through your teeth then, well, damn, I need to get reelected, so lie through the whole first term. Then, well, damn, I want to run for some other office,…
It wasn’t the policy statement, it’s that he did it for a measly $39,200 donation. A mid-trim Rav4 is all it took to get himself on TV pontificating for Chevron. He could have had the same policy position and just not taken the money, and let the PACs do the work, or he could have taken the money and kept his mouth shut. Now he looks like he’s bought, and worse than that, he’s bought embarrassingly cheap.
Well, I do my best not to make political statements here, but today I’m going to wade into those dark waters. Puppies are cuter than kittens, but both puppies and kitens are cuter than baby humans.
Bunnies? What about bunnies?
My dog loves them. They’re crunchy.
But you make a good point, they’re pretty cute.
Edit: Before people start thinking I’m feeding my dog bunnies or encouraging her to eat them, I’m not. But, a couple weeks ago she caught one in the yard and munched it right down before I could do anything about it. She’s the most adorable 15 pound Beagle in the world, but she’s definitely a predator.
My ridgebacks like bunnies because they run and squeak.
What does a ridgeback squeak sound like?
the bunnies squeak when caught.
Only for a second, though.
I am reasonably confident my cat would eat ME if she were a little bigger and a bit less lazy. Whenever she is awake you can see the wheels turning when you look in her eyes.
Oh, undoubtedly. Sometimes my cat bites me just to remind me he can.
Oh man, our neighborhood has wild rabbits and our beagle loses his MIND at them. They were bred as hunting dogs so it’s no surprised. I am tempted to release the leash once to see if he’ll catch it, but I don’t really want to deal with all the blood if he manages it. I feel a little bad stopping him from his instincts but yeah, not a mess I want!
Well, my dog didn’t leave a mess, but it was a small bunny. Beagles are the hungriest dogs ever.
They are indeed. It’s our 2nd beagle and food is the biggest motivator. Too big, really.
They’re pretty efficient at dispatching them. One decisive head shake while they’ve got them by their neck scruff. Not very messy.
We dogsit our friend’s beagle now and then, and i have to be careful about how I let her out. Our lab loves to bark and chase bunnies when she goes out the door, but I don’t think there’s any real risk of her catching them before they get through the fence.
The beagle, on the other hand…
Finally someone asking the REAL questions!
I think kittens are cuter than puppies, but I’m more of a cat person than dog person, so I’m already biased that direction. Both are damn cute though and baby humans can be funny looking when they’ve first emerged.
It really is a toss-up between them.
I’ve heard similar arguments in the past regarding how we need to save the resource for future, enthusiast enjoyment so we need to be driving less or we need to have EVs. I don’t think it would work out this way.
If you make it so very little gasoline is needed except by hobbyists then no one is going to refine the oil into gasoline. In this scenario the demand plummets and so does any reason to maintain the supply.
Additionally, if we suddenly had no one on the roads because we live in a public transportation utopia where high speed monorail drops everyone off at their destination, why would roads be maintained at all?
I am not passing any judgement on EVs or other low-emission vehicles, or even the merits of public transportation. I just think this is a weak argument that ignores some of the supply/demand and consequences of the decisions we make. There are plenty of good reasons for EVs and public transportation without building ineffective straw men.
I think the point is to reduce the need, not eliminate. Imagine, for instance, if southern California had a half decent public transportation system with trains and metro and busses to get folks from the suburbs to locations throughout the city. It’d be a good thing for a lot of reasons – traffic, pollution, etc. Same with a lot of places who either half-@ssed it (LA, SF, Seattle) or full-@assed it (Houston, Dallas) as their cities grew because of the car/fossil fuel lobby
We could probably reduce the need easier by encouraging (through offering tax credits, etc) work from home where it makes sense.
Trains cost more for the install and upkeep to make it make sense. Buses are much better and easier of course. They all end up being places that no one wants to spend time. If people were willing to pay high usage fees for the trains maybe it could work here but I’m not seeing it as a viable solution in the sprawling environments most of the US finds itself in.
Now WHERE might we find some money that could be spent building the infrastructure and making it nice, so that people wanted to be there and use it?
I mean, clearly, it’s not like we’re spending trillions of dollars overthrowing governments around the world and bombing kids and stuff? If we were, obviously, we’d have no problem taking that money and using it for the betterment, instead of the destruction, of humanity.
Where’s the profit in that?
I hear you, and they’re trying with high speed rail and allowing multi-fam to be built in single-fam zoning near transit. The problem, as always, is deep corruption at the state and municipal level that stymies progress at every turn. The high speed rail route, for example, has been screwed every which way by various interests, so much so that the French, who know about high speed rail and were hired to consult on the most efficient route at the beginning of the project, walked away.
from Business Insider: “The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF), a French state-owned railroad operator, came to California in hopes of helping the state build a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco but left for North Africa in 2011 because the region was ‘less politically dysfunctional’ than the Golden State.
Within 7 years, they built a functioning high-speed rail system in Morocco, the New York Times reported.”
Why would you expect anything else in the land of NIMBYs and BANANAs, and where everybody and their uncle can file a lawsuit about damned near anything? That actually isn’t dysfunction – it’s the system working as we designed it to work. And it stops a lot of bad things from happening. Unfortunately it stops some good things from happening too. I assume you are all for the same methods stopping the construction of AI datacenters?
The French got lucky in a couple of ways. One – much of France that ISN’T their relative handful of major cities is empty farmland at best. Two – their cities are JUST far enough apart for HSR to make sense. Three – the population was relatively poor, so not everyone owned a car, so there was broad popular support for building the TGV network (it was also seen as a measure of French pride, like Concorde). And they built out the majority of the network long enough ago that the expense of doing so was not so ridiculous. Helped that the country is not riddled with earthquake faults.
And then in some countries (cough, China, cough), a command economy means the government can just say “make it so”, and it happens. I have no idea what Morocco is like, but I suspect it’s a hell of a lot more like China than it is California.
Not in any way to say I would not LOVE to see HSR in the US where it makes sense to build it, but I very much understand how the deck is stacked against it here in the US.
There really is no car/fossil fuel lobby. People are going to naturally do what is most convenient for them, assuming they can afford it. And even in places with GREAT public transportation, and I have lived in a few, it’s not the driving itself that makes you take the train/tram/bus, it’s the expense of doing it by car by direct taxation, gas costs, parking cost/inconvenience, congestion charge, etc. With rare exceptions, even the best public transit is a necessary evil and not really all THAT much fun. And since in the US, in the vast majority of places those external costs don’t really exist (the places they do, like NYC, have good public transit), people simply chose to drive.
To a large extent, we got screwed by our own success post-WWII. We were RICH, as the sole intact industrial power in the world. We didn’t need to do as the poors in Europe and elsewhere did and live close to work so we could walk or take a bus/tram with all the other poors. We could buy fabulous chrome-laden barges and a house out in the suburbs – so we did. Yes, I am poo-poo’ing some other factors around racism, etc.
There’s no fossil fuel lobby? What do you call it when Oil companies give money to political candidates? What do you call the API? What about the various auto company lobbying groups/
Minor, in the grand scheme of things.
Reality is that even without that money, politicians will not go against the will of the electorate. And only a VERY small subset of the American population has any real interest in making cars more expensive to own and operate. Nor do American consumers REALLY care about efficiency, or Canyoneros would not be best-sellers. Not going to happen, which is why all they have done are these asinine rules and regs on the automaker supply-side, and pretty much NOTHING that directly affects consumers wallets that would REALLY affect the auto market. As the midterms will show, fucking with the price of gas is a one-way ticket to defeat, even if in the long run it would be best for everyone AND the planet for gas to be massively more expensive than it is currently.
American cities were already decentralizing before World War II, if not as quickly and dramatically. The initial driver of decentralization in Southern California was the construction of the interurban Pacific Electric Red Cars and the Los Angeles Railway streetcars, which allowed the development of all those little bungalows and Spanish Revival cottages that dominated lower-middle-class housing across the L.A. Basin. Economic prosperity and strong wages relative to the cost of living in the ’20s meant lots of Model Ts were around to make suburbanization easier, but it was already in process. As Sears built out its brick-and-mortar stores, it picked what were then suburban “midtown” locations, and a few department stores (the original Bullocks Wilshire, for example) did the same.
The zeitgeist of the day was a reaction against living conditions in major cities, which weren’t quite as bad as they were at the turn of the 20th century (I’ve read that the immigrant tenements of the Lower East Side then are considered the worst ever in human history) but were still appalling, especially after 15 years when investment was hindered by the Depression and the war. Frank Lloyd Wright, American architectural hero/saint, proposed Broadacre City, where everyone would live in a detached structure on at least an acre. Radburn, New Jersey was a prototype of the coming middle-income mass suburbs. And there was a referendum in the city of Los Angeles just after the war on building a elevated rapid transit network (the lines proposed roughly mirrored the initial freeways in the Basin), which failed because the opposition asked voters if they wanted L.A. to be like Eastern cities, with all the associated crowding and ugliness. They did not. (Ironically, the first smog alert in L.A. was in 1943, a few years after worse and more fatal episodes further east.)
A like solely for the Radburn, NJ reference. Nice.
Otherwise, where does one acquire this knowledge??
The Fragmented Metropolis, by Robert Merton, which I read as the largest part of a paper I did on Los Angeles freeway development in college, and other sources I picked up then or later.
For sure – “trolley suburbs” were creation of the early 20th century – I grew up in one in Maine. But the car and post-war wealth caused it to absolutely explode into the endless sprawl that we see today. Those early suburbs are just the innermost ring. People could afford to buy a house on a patch of land if they moved out a bit from the center – so they did. Most people don’t like living like bees in a hive. Those that do seem to gravitate to NYC, LOL.
Ultimately, in most of the US, particularly the sunbelt, there was just so much room to sprawl that there really was no reason to constrain growth in any way, unlike in the densely populated East.
This is nonsense. There will always be a need for roads for the delivery of goods at a minimum. Police and fire departments are not going to be jumping on monorails. There is never going to be a rail spur to everyone’s house. Even horse-drawn wagons need roads.
And baring some radical developments in batteries, EVs will never, ever have 100% of the market anyway. In a land as sprawling as the US, I suspect 50% is highly ambitious.
We have roads that we can drive cars on because of the “Good Roads” movement started by …. bicyclists.
Indeed.
If I were in the market for a new/different vehicle, I’d consider an EV. I have a house/garage, so I could charge it for cheap, and I only drive an average of about 15 miles per day, so range anxiety wouldn’t be a thing for me. We also own another ICE vehicle, so if we were taking a trip, charging would not be an issue.
While I agree that charging infrastructure is still an issue for many, I saw a bunch of EVs in Mexico last month and never saw even one public charging station. So they have figured something out.
Jumper cables. They use jumper cables. /s
I agree with about everything in the article. I am car enthusiast, you know the one that likes cars with clutch pedals and vroom vroom noises.
Having said, no passion merits the destruction of our planet. So it is clear we need to reduce emissions and ICE cars are clear way of working towards that goal.
Having said that I am not sure what is the best way of doing it.
I would gladly have an EV car, but I don’t want to sacrifise comfort and ease of use (because that’s the point of having a car in the first place). If we have to sacrifice that we might as well sacfrifice the entire concept of having a car and be truly ecological.
Personally, I would gladly pay (through taxes, for example), for EV car subsidies, infrastructure building etc. I am not sure if full outright bans would really work, especially if there is no real alternative. On the basis, just as with car sacrifice example above, we might as well return to the middle ages to be truly eco.
One final thing. For 99% of the usage of cars (even for car lovers) are just as mere transport devices. For this debate to be truly meaningful we must leave our passion for cars out of it.
I guarantee you that for most of the driving you, even as an enthusiast, are doing, an EV would work BETTER than a gas car and require absolutely zero sacrifice while delivering more ease of use.
Possibly, but I just like the vroom vroom noises.
Having said that, is giving up ICE cars completely is the way to go, count me in.
Me too – but I don’t like those fake ones that get piped in. I can make them on my own if I want that
Not only that, but I don’t want them piped in. I want them piped OUT, so everyone else hears my mighty roar! VROOOOOM!!! LOOK AT ME!!!!
In the ’90s, we did this with Bazooka bass tubes and a Tribe Called Quest cassette…
Or, the beginning of “Hot For Teacher” on a loop?
Funny story, teenage me was driving my dad somewhere in the 80’s and I popped my Van Halen cassette in on side two.
The Hot for Teacher intro started and my dad suddenly reached over and turned the volume down, concerned that something was going horribly, grotesquely, mechanically wrong with the car and wanting to figure out where the noise was coming from.
I was perturbed because now I had to hit rewind to restart the song.
“DAD. It’s just Simmons drum modules triggered by Alex’s playing and tucked into the mix.”
LOL I prefer silent EVs myself
Same!
Noise-canceling EVs would be even better. Imagine how quiet the world would be.
Silence is underrated.
I am of the opinion that EVs need amplifiers like ICE cars need mufflers. EVs make lovely noises at full tilt, but they’re masked by road noise. So we need to make them loud enough that the “V8 or GTFO” crowd realizes what they’re missing.
I also confirm the notion that an EV is way more convenient 90%+ percent of the time if you have a place to charge at home. Europe has 220v standard, so just a normal outlet within 20 feet of parking at home is almost certainly all you need.
We can also keep a limited amount of engines for the vroom vroom noises, just run them of efuels and such. I’d be very surprised if the amount of gasoline/diesel that is burned by enthusiasts actually having fun is even close to 1% of total usage, so that can be done with the expensive clean fuels.
It baffles me why Europe doesn’t just phase out fossil fuels instead of the ICE bans, and allow anything from eMethanol in ICE to solar electricity in EVs.
100% agree, as an EV driver of 43k miles in 20 months. Rarely have I had to charge, typically when going skiing in the winter due to the distance and cold temps. But, stopping for a few minutes on a two hour journey to grab some food and again on the way home for 10 minutes isn’t horrible. In our gas car I would fill up the night before, requiring a few minutes to drive each way and pump gas. Then, I would normally fill up even if at half tank or so while in the mtns, and again when I got home or the next day. Charging was actually simpler than doing that and as a bonus I can hit the restroom or grab some snacks for the kids while the car fuels itself with electrons. The Model Y Performance is also a very comfortable place to spend time in winter, more comfortable and faster heat than a gas car. Even waiting for hockey games, baseball games, etc to start, no big deal, I’ll hang out in my silent car enjoying the comfortable seats, nice audio system and big screen, or read in comfort, using a fraction of the electricity vs fuel burned in the gas car. It is just such a better experience all around driving it everyday that I can’t see going back. Do I want a fun little convertible, yes, but day to day, nothing beats the utility and value it provides.
You crazy Europeans and your willingness to pay a little more in taxes if it serves the greater good! We don’t do that here in Murica. The greater good ain’t the every man’s problem and we’re perfectly happy with our comparatively low tax dollars propping up an apartheid state’s economy, indiscriminately bombing the Middle East, and providing billionaire welfare, thank you kindly! After all, all of us are just one lucky break away from being billionaires! FREEDOM, baby! YEE HAW!
In China, the busses and trains work. So a lot of those car purchases are not for commuting.
Copying China’s EV policy doesn’t just mean electric cars, it means making the city busses work and making long distance train travel work. This is what makes owning an EV makes sense and also cuts the use of gas cars as commuter vehicles in cities.
Maybe set an achievable target, like 10% of US commuters riding on hybrid busses in 5 years? This is the only way to solve our horrible traffic jams, and it would actually help the climate.
Public transport definitely needs to be part of the equation.
US workers and their places of employment are widely diffused. What percentage of commuters ride on any form of public transit today? I’ve seen an estimate that it’s in the neighborhood of 5%. What change would it take to achieve your target? The lead time for an order of transit buses is currently 18-24 months.
A lot of big cities that aren’t NYC have >25% transit ridership and then most other cities are below 5%.
But there are plenty of examples of mid-sized and small cities in the US with transit ridership above 10%, almost all riding on busses.
Tripling or quadrupling transit ridership in most cities from 3% to 10%+ is extremely achievable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_transit_ridership
And we could build buses. AM General would be happy to do it and keep South Bend busy.
Or Rivian. Or whomever.
Basically, the explanation is the same one used for a crappy husband: “If he wanted to, he would.”
Set your time window. Set your goal. Go.
Use the same ideas as the SMART objective fiction we all write in our yearly reviews, if you must…
(Achievable, Time-bound, Realistic, Measurable, etc…)
If there is widespread transit-oriented development.
You don’t need a lot of fancy “transit-oriented development” to get 10%+ bus ridership. Look at Lansing, Michigan: the home of Cadillac and very much a city built by and around the car industry. Most housing is single-story residential. CATA posts solid bus ridership , even on routes between these neighborhoods and state highway strip malls. We’re talking like 2.5x the ridership of Ann Arbor, which is denser and has a ton of new transit-oriented development. The difference is that the busses are reliable in Lansing because they figured out how to pay for the busses. It’s not complicated and doesn’t need any sort of special policy sauce.
We don’t need the buzz word, but we’d need service that aligns with where people want to go, and when. We know that the farebox isn’t going to pay for it. I’m pro bus.
With the glut of off-lease EVs coming I was hoping to pick up a CPO KN EV9 for cheap but now I am seeing prices creep UP again.
Y’all need to go read the Reddit threads about ICCU failure so I can have more inventory to choose from plz!!
It’s not just the ICCU now in EV9 land, it’s cells dropping and months-long wait times with cratered range!
Duh. Higher Gas Prices cause people to buy less gas. Page one of any Econ text. The downside is that the government can put its visible hand on the pump via taxation, which mainly hurts poorer people if not tempered with a flat rebate. It can also tailor registration fees to be higher on gas guzzlers. Like $1000/year for vehicles getting 20mpg or less (when new).
I’m guessing that graph, showing three times more miles miles driven and a huge drop in pollutants, is similar for other states due to the EPA’s existence, but perhaps not as drastic since CA is special.
Gas is actually a pretty inelastic good.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-5/using-gasoline-data-to-explain-inelasticity.htm
Agreed. Goes up pretty quickly — somewhere a butterfly sneezes — then slowly (if ever) reverts.
What I mean is that people (not every single person) will find ways to drive fewer miles per day, such that on a macroecon basis, fewer gallons are purchased.
Assumes a rational market, per Econ book, otherwise nothing can be predicted.
We need cheaper EV’s, but also we need states to stop punishing EV drivers with exorbitant additional fees. Michigan has some of the highest registration rates on EV’s at an extra $267 per EV. Our gas tax is 52.4 cents per gallon, so this is the tax of about 492 gallons of gas annually. I have a Chevy Bolt EUV. If I say that an equivalent car would get 35 mpg, I have to drive over 17,000 miles a year to break even. I probably drive it about 10,000 miles a year. I’m all for my fair share of road taxes, but it shouldn’t be that much.
This is on top of us having to pay registration fees based on the MSRP of the car which is already higher than that of an equivalent gas vehicle.
But those gas taxes and EV registration fees are giving us such great roads here in Michiga…. oh wait, never mind.
I am also wanting to jump to an EV (like a Bolt EUV, Equinox EV) since I am lucky enough to have a house with a 220v line in the garage, but Michigan doesnt make it easy considering I have a car that gets mid 30s MPG while running E85 mixed with gasoline (so about 50% ethanol) that has really taken the sting out of the higher gas prices. E85 has only increased a little bit in price since well, its mostly not gasoline. Couple that to my long commute that in the winter knocks a lot of range from an EV and the higher registration, I am in a minority of people where getting into an EV would take many years to offset costs.
The used Bolt EUV was a great deal for us.. but mostly because of depreciation and a battery pack that was replaced under recall already. So we got a fully loaded launch edition with an MSRP near $44k for about $17k with 40,000 miles on it and with 6 years and 90,000 miles of battery warranty left. There certainly wasn’t much else that nice and that new for that price. And I registered it for 2 years in late December to avoid the EV registration increase that went into effect on Jan 1st of this year. Luckily we got it before the gas price increases because they are much harder to find now.
Very nice find! Yea you can’t beat the used EV prices from before the Iran war. I know I missed the boat when they were practically giving away the latest new bolts as well.
I have said it before and I will say it again: ICE bans are unnecessary and likely counterproductive.
EVs have enough advantages they can sell on their own merit. EVs are already the best choice for many buyers and, as technology improves, even more people will be better served by EVs than ICE vehicles. Bans only build resentment and resistance to change by pushing people into vehicles that don’t meet their needs.
If we allow the transition to happen slowly (and focus on hybrids, PHEVs, and EREVs in addition to BEVs), people will naturally move away from ICE vehicles toward electric/electrified vehicles. We are fortunate in that electric/electrified vehicles genuinely have advantages over ICE vehicles – this would be a much bigger issue if EVs sucked.
Also, as much as climate change is a problem, it is not so severe we need to upend life as we know it to address it (which is what banning ICE/fossil fuels would do – like it or not, we aren’t ready to give up fossil fuels). Humans have adapted to changing environments in the past. Humans can and will adapt to a changing environment in the future. We can solve this over the next 100-200 years. Humanity will be fine.
All of Humanity may not be fine. People tend to forget that while we have dealt with climatic changes over the last 50-70K years we have been a species. We have only been farming for the last 10-15K years in the current climate, and now we have to feel 9-11 billion people in a climate that is changing faster than anytime in the past short of asteroid impacts.
I have seen nothing to suggest the world does not have the capacity to feed 10 billion people. Technology has improved the productivity of farming dramatically. The problem has always been with distribution of resources and not a lack of resources.
How about 15-20 billion, How about the war against science that will prevent that those technologies from being developed, how about the difficulty of preserving any wild lands and the difficulties of getting those 10 billion to live differently and make due with less. We need to be making changes to farm for 10 billion in a very different climate and we are not we are just waiting for “technology to save us”.
No offense, but I am struggling to see what point you are making.
Technology has allowed the world to support 7 billion people. I’m not sure why future technology couldn’t allow the world to support 15 billion people.
Frankly, life in 2026 sounds far better than life in 1826 – I’m not sure why people are so pessimistic about the future when, thus far, the future has been better than the past. Yeah, people in the future will face changes, but that is nothing new.
I don’t think it’s going to be technology, per se, that allows the world to feed 15 billion people, but *practices*.
And I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t collectively feed that large a population *IF WE EXAMINED OUR MOTIVIATIONS AND ADJUSTED OUR PRACTICES*
The current system of big ag, monoculture, petro fertilizers, etc – nope, probably not gonna get it done.
But it’s honestly more of a “what do you do with these gifts you have been given” thing than it is an actual impossibility.
And we might need to eat some different stuff.
The limits of one planet, so much arable land, clean water, so much solar input, population exponential growth, and the extreme speed and size of the climate change. There is a ecological concept called carrying capacity. This “the future will always be better” is like saying infinite growth is possible idea the capitalism is banking on. The population in 1826 was 1/8th of the current population. I do not believe in the magnanimity of human nature as much as the future will be wonderful people. I have studied environmental science and the history of science too long to be passé and make light of how easy it will be to save us, it will take real hard work.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aa/meta current research on global human carrying capacity.
Thanks for the link. I don’t have time to read it now, but I will check that out.
I’ve been bouncing an article around in my head for a while:
“We’re pretty fucked without petro-based nitrogen fertilizers unless we get really good, really fast at co-planting, integrated pest management, and turning the landscape itself into a no/low-labor food production system for all”
Why yes, “Changes In The Land” did have a profound effect on me when I read it, why do you ask?
In the 35-ish years I have been teaching Environmental science things have changed a lot. We use to teach about overpopulation and how providing birth control, education and jobs to young women would decrease live births/woman from 11+ in some places to more like 2-3 and raise the living standards and improve the quality of life through the demographic transition to now we have to say there is no upper limit to the worlds population we just need to hope redistribution magically becomes something every rich country will do voluntarily and mentioning overpopulation is now, violent, racist, xenophobic, and colonialist and will get you stripped of tenure.
Ah, the education-industrial complex.
Hey – do you know about Tom Wessels at all? Fascinating!
thanks for the recommendation!
Sure buddy, humans will be fine. We are not exceptional, we are going to go the way of the dinosaurs.
we are going to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Almost certainly. I don’t expect humans to be around in 66 million years with or without fossil fuel/climate change.
Statistically speaking, dinosaurs were the most successful taxonomic clade to ever exist, being the dominant terrestrial vertebrae for something like 135 million years. Not a bad record, overall.
I feel the attitude in the last paragraph is gonna bite us eventually.
Okay?
I do quite like living in a world where I don’t need to worry about acid rain destroying lake life, or deal with particulate pollution from heavy smog days.
Sure, I could survive, but having lived through those – I’d rather we continued to do better rather that to shrug, as was implied above, and adapt.
I’d rather we continued to do better rather that to shrug, as was implied above, and adapt.
In my original comment I rather expressly said that humans should and likely will transition away from fossil fuels in the coming decades.
I’m really not sure what you want out of me. I believe climate change is real and am willing (and have) made changes to reduce my fossil fuel use.
You’re not doing the “sky is falling” bit. you have too reasonable of a take.
“we aren’t ready to give up fossil fuels” …
Straw man much? Nobody is saying to cut it off right away. But we could definitely benefit from using less.
Throwing up the challenges as a way to justify not doing anything is super-super specious.
we could definitely benefit from using less.
I 100% agree with this statement. If you read my original comment, I am in favor of transitioning away from ICE vehicles over time.
However, there are plenty of people who believe climate change is so severe we must eliminate fossil fuel use entirely in the coming decades. I am arguing against that perspective.
Where do you get the idea that a fully ice-free Northwest passage, melting permafrost, disrupted agriculture, more severe storms, and deadly heat waves are not severe?
Where do you get the idea that a fully ice-free Northwest passage, melting permafrost, disrupted agriculture, more severe storms, and deadly heat waves are severe?
Well, they haven’t happened as frequently for a very long time, and the rapid rise in CO2 concentration has led to a rapid rise in temperature, thus destabilizing things that had been “permanent” for immesurably long stretches of time.
So – human activity and the weather phenomena are strongly correlated.
And they’re maybe not severe for a planet that will continue existing long after we do not, but on the scale we really care about: people are suffering because of this stuff, and we are making it worse, not better. So that’s severe on the human scale.
Another response would be to expend the resources caring for these people and getting them out of harm’s way. Ideally, we would do both – currently, it seems that only those of us who die want that, however. The well-insulated ones seem to be okay with “neither.”
So – human activity and the weather phenomena are strongly correlated.
I’m not trying to be sarcastic or snarky in repeating your words back to you, but I feel like I have to:
Straw man much?
I am in no way denying climate change or that humans are causing it. My biggest argument is that the cure cannot be worse than the disease. I think the symptoms/severity of the disease might be overstated and, as a result, the changes some people want might be out of proportion to what is necessary.
people are suffering because of this stuff, and we are making it worse, not better.
Have you read about life in the preindustrial era? People’s lives were short and brutal. Modern medicine/agriculture/etc. has made life dramatically better. Unfortunately, one of the side of effects of modernity has been climate change.
Yes, I will acknowledge that some people have and will suffer due to climate change. However, would these people even have had an opportunity to exist if it weren’t for the technology that has caused climate change? Whose lives matter more – the people who suffer due to climate change or the people whose lives have been improve by technology?
So; because they’re suffering less than their ancestors, we should still let them suffer?
I think we’re on different sides of the thing we agree on, but not actually that far apart.
Stuff is better.
Stuff could be better.
We are doing things that make it worse.
We should stop that.
There are lots of reasons why this is difficult.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
I agree.
I think we’re on different sides of the thing we agree on, but not actually that far apart.
I agree.
Good points! It is June 2nd and it is 112oF in Mauritania right now. I think there are people who forget the billions of human that cannot live where they do now when it is too hot to live there anymore.
If the Northwest passage was ice-free all those years ago, Stan Rogers would have been down one terrific song.
Didn’t expect a Stan Rogers reference today.
Gonna go listen to Make and Break Harbor now.
Agree on the comfort / climate change fight balance, but we still need to commit to fight this as much as possible.
we still need to commit to fight this as much as possible.
Honestly, I don’t disagree with you here. The only point of view I disagree with vehemently is what changes are realistic. Climate change will disrupt life, but an excessive response to climate change will disrupt life as well. There has to be a balance between addressing climate change and preserving life as we know it.
Okay, what does fighting it look like? Because to me it looks a lot like a bunch of idiot bureaucrats and/or politicians taking money under the table to a) push life-altering changes on an unwilling population that will not actually make that much difference, and b) becoming captured by the actual biggest polluters because they are also the money-makers, all the while c) ignoring actual scientific solutions to the problem.
Climate change is an engineering problem- it has engineering solutions, and all of them have a single common factor: the cost of energy. If you drive the cost of carbon-free energy down, everything gets better for everyone. Instead much of the Western world seems committed to doing the exact opposite, which leads me to conclude that all of these “fight for the environment” people are completely full of shit.
What if the cost of carbon-free energy cannot be driven down enough so that it is less costly?
We may need to subsidize it. That would mean giving up a bit of your wealth (or “freedom”) for the greater good.
That is the fight. You give up a little so that everyone benefits from it. But you have to be generous.
For China I don’t think there will ever be an outright ban on gas cars. The demand for gas engines will always be there, but I think eventually they’ll all be electrified and hybridized. So market forces (aka budget conscious Chinese buyers in a dying economy) are gonna converge on the cheapest option, which I believe is going to be electrified. An EREV layout to be precise.
GM and Wuling already offer an EREV version of their Hongguang microvan. Costs just a little extra (9K vs 10K USD) yet you get 60 miles of EV range. With current gas prices you’re going to break even in less than 10K miles. Not to mention the reduced engine wear, no transmission to break, no driveshafts and so on.
Once the hybrids cost less, its over for most budget gas cars in China. Buyers with less than 10K to spend aren’t rowing their own gears for fun.
Spot freaking on Matt. Reality is never as clean and clear cut as ideologies would like to have us believe, and California does not exist in a vacuum. There are simple supply and demand realities that dictate forcing such a massively disruptive EV mandate onto the CA resident will be destined to fail without MASSIVE subsidy.
To then go to the subsidy point, sure CA (or the feds, or LA, or whoever) can subsidize as they see fit. But that is an inherently expensive endeavor and a generally poor allocation of resources, which results in those in a strong enough financial position to be buying a new car. That money could be going to other things like clean energy subsidies, infrastructure or public transit, or more.
Despite the higher taxes and cost of living in CA, there are only so many tax dollars to go around, and the use of that money should be to maximize the public benefit per dollar. Dumping cash into whatever gets EVs on the road is highly likely to be worse than creating a strong Nuclear power base load, subsidizing public transit, or other green initiatives like advancing plastic recycling research. While it would be so hard to quantify the kg of CO2 per dollar spent, it would be such a great metric for someone to gather. Anything that stops policy makers from hiding behind the vibes of a decision, and forces them to realize what is actually pragmatic.
I give CA credit for their ambition and goals, but about a C+ or B- for execution given their dismantling of their Nuclear power plants which are objectively the cleanest and safest power generation method period.
I find it strange that Nevada, Arizona and other western states haven’t been on a nuclear building frenzy to satisfy the huge California demand. We have earthquakes and major fault lines, them not so much. Selling California clean nuclear power could be a huge boon to their economies and help buffer whatever renewable power they also sell.
Nuclear needs water. SMRs may need less water, but cooling a nuke plant is no joke.
Not necessarily:
https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/nuclear-reactors-dont-need-to-be-so-thirsty
And as the article points out reactors can be used for desalination. I expect that’s also true for waste heat.
Coincidentally there are massive saline aquifers in those states that could supply thirsty crops if only there was some massive source of heat and or power available…
I bought a Honda CR-V hybrid last November. To me, it made sense to dip a toe in the electrification pool (wait -that sounds dangerous) without fully committing to a full BEV. So far, I’m pleased with it.
As long as you are using pure de-ionized/distilled water in your pool you will not get electrocuted.
Yeah but where’s the fun in that?
Ponies. The real answer here is Ponies.
Of course!
It’d be helpful to the EV market if the government didn’t put their thumb on the scale in favor of ICE vehicles. The gas tax which has stayed the same for 30 years, ethanol subsidies, and whatever shenanigans goes on with the oil companies all effectively subsidize gas vehicle ownership.
The ethanol one is crazy to me. It’s a common complaint here that solar panels are a waste of good farm land. You know what else is a waste of good farm land? Literally burning 40% of our corn crop.
That’s not the whole picture though. The distillers grains left over from ethanol production are not garbage but animal feed that’s even healthier than the original corn. One could even argue the ethanol is a byproduct of producing corn based animal fodder.
Well said. The starch in the corn has the lowest value, and this is what is converted into fuel. The fats are removed and sold off to a different company to make a diesel substitutes. What is is left is a concentrated protein that gets blended with other stuff into a nutritionally balanced animal feed that has a much higher value than the original corn. Lots of this higher value is due to the fact that corn on its own is not a nutritionally balanced animal feed, and cows are very inefficient at digesting starch.
Whey prices have gone up so much recently that extracting the protein from distillers grain to make a concentrate for human consumption is going to become profitable soon I believe.
Solar and ag coexist very well. The shade provided by the panels is a benefit. Agri-Voltaic is a thing.
Also worth mentioning solar and food farms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact they can be complimentary. Solar panels can provide shade for crops and grazing animals that prefer it, help reduce evaporation and panels can be mounted vertically north/south for plants that prefer the intense noon day sun:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshpearce/2025/11/15/why-farmers-are-shielding-their-crops-with-solar-panels/
https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/article/2025/11/12/solar-panels-over-california-canals-generate-power-save-water
https://couleenergy.com/why-vertical-solar-panels-are-taking-over-in-2025/
Something else since you mentioned farms: IIRC a major contributor to the dust bowl was farmers trying to maximize their acerage by removing the trees and scrub between their fields. Those trees helped break up the wind and in their absence once the fields dried out there was nothing to stop the wind from removing the topsoil.
I wonder if modern wind farms act as a replacement to those lost trees, slowing the wind and helping to prevent another dust bowl.
“Those damn wind farms are killing the whales.”
“The real answer is crypto.”
“Very soon nobody will need to have a job.”
“We all will become bigly rich, like the world has never seen before.”
What’s with all these people and their rational arguments anyhow? /s
Now I want bleach….
One of the big problems with EV adoption in the US is the price of electricity. Until recently, in many areas, the fuel costs between gas and electricity were close enough that the higher purchase price of an EV didn’t work out.
What does Norway have in common with the 2 strongest EV markets in N. America, Quebec and British Columbia?
Cheap, clean electricity and relatively high gas prices. The governments in all three jurisdictions realised early on that EV’s worked from a financial point of view and encouraged/subsidised the charging network.
We have currently 31 000 public charging stations here, with a goal of over 100 000 by 2030ish. California has about 200 000 for 5x the population.
We’re close to 30% of new cars being EV’s here in Quebec.
We *COULD* have lots of solar and wind generation here in the US that would fulfill the “too cheap to meter” lie that built the nuclear industry back in the 60s and 70s. But where’s the rent seeking in that?
You could still build the solar and wind. Financially, they pay off.
Second best time to plant a tree is now.
Oh yeah – that’s the move. Personally and from corporations. Build it even in spite of the roadblocks being thrown at it.
It’s basically saying “f-you” to the corporate interests who are fine with the world burning AND good, responsible action because you’ll be ready to serve the market when they catch up to your forethought.
When we transitioned from horses to cars we needed no government mandate. People chose cars because they were better. When electric cars are better people will chose them. I am expecting responses about how todays situation is different than the horse transition because of the dire environmental concerns. Those people are unfamiliar with the environmental impact 1000’s of horses made in urban environments.
People want and EV infrastructure that matches the ICE infrastructure that it took 100 years of government support to create and they want it now.
You don’t speak for me
ok sorry I did not mean to offend, I also know that what I typed is true for most of the people I have spoken to about getting an EV.
I want an EV right now. I just want a plug in my (rental) garage where I can charge it at home.
Yes, but there were no Big Hay & Oats lobbyists and no government subsidies for Oats and Hay at the time….
So lets get rid of subsidies instead of mandating electric and creating more subsidies.
Electric wasn’t mandated. It was the obvious path to the goal, but not the only path.
If we want to get rid of subsidies, I’d be PLEASED to not be bailing out large corporate farms with the Ag bill money to prop up failed policy, or doing stuff like irrigating the desert southwest to grow alfalfa for middle eastern farming operations.
You expect too much from our political system. Half the voters would vote against you just out of spite.
That said, you’re welcome share my username.
I get your points, and to an extent yes the market will decide, but the current market is not balanced to objective. The combination of nearly non-existent gasoline subsidies coupled with Ethanol subsidies, relaxed regulations that artificially deflate the cost of inefficient large ICE vehicles, and subsidies for fossil fuels, the scales are not balanced in the slightest. Europe may be slightly biased in the opposite direction and is not entirely apples to apples due to differences in scale, but the EV adoption rate is far higher due to this.
To the environmental point, what we are currently facing is not analogous to localized pollution issues. I an fully aware that a lot of horse droppings have genuinely serious consequences on an urban area, but that is effectively a temporary harm as it can be cleaned and cleared and eliminated. A global climate change brought on by a large amount of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions cannot just be swept away, and will continue to persist even after the emitter of those emissions is removed. Horse pollution greatly hurt the lives of those that lived in a fixed area for a short period of time, global climate change due to GHG accumulation will negatively impact all people for centuries to come.
When all that stuff gets fixed I’ll consider an electric car.
Maybe horses were more polluting than ICE cars (if they had been as widespreadly adopted as cars), I don’t know.
What is clear is that we have a climate problem that has been traced back to (amongst other sources) ICE-related emissions.
While by no means the only source we have to act upon, it is one of them. So let’s do it; even if it costs “a bit more”.
America was built on ankle deep horse shit.
As is our current political situation in the USA.
And genocide. For the theft, you see.
With all the technology and data we have these days, it seems we are worse off for it. Everything these days seems to be all or nothing, corps need to squeeze every last drop of ROI, if not they will just abandon the project.
EVs seems to be all or nothing, if companies can’t squeeze every last drop of profit, they will pivot. EVs work great for some people, awful for another, ideally as a consumer you have choices between the two.
I have both EVs and ICE cars, I’d never go back to an ICE car for my daily drivers, even in-state road trips I’ll take the EV. However, my weekend cars, or camping\towing duty vehicles are ICE.
You mean like someone might go on a sailing pleasure cruise but book a diesel-powered ferry to actually get somewhere?
A lot of people who want to address climate change don’t actually care about reducing emissions if it doesn’t help bring about their other political goals. After all, what is the point of a crisis if one can’t create a revolution from it?
I don’t think its an emergency
After some nights this past days barely being able to sleep I would say it most definitely is.
Once people experience an EV they want one. Seeing more obvious EV’s always around is also a good advertisement that they’re a good choice. I’m seeing more and more EV’s on my commute, both the obvious ones (Tesla) and less obvious ones (Equinox).
Also, the social media posts I’ve been served have been more honest about EV ownership instead of rah-rah cheerleading. And the trolls are getting ratioed with truth when they spread FUD.
The more clear-eyed people are about their vehicles and the costs of running them, the better.
I will want one once the cost per mile to operate is less them ICE cars.
EVs are already there.
https://insideevs.com/news/797350/hyundai-ioniq-5-roadtrip-gas-financially-irresponsible/
They are if you charge at home. Obviously, it will depend on your local electric rates but our EV costs about $0.09 per mile while our prior ICE car that got about 30 mpg cost us $0.17 per mile. Right at about half.
Our electric utility offers off peak charging rates of about $0.07/kW and our EV gets about 3.5 miles per kW. My calculation also considered changing the EV tires at 20k miles vs the 50k for ICE vehicles.
Do your calculations include vehicle depretiation?
Over a 5 year period the depreciation isn’t nearly what you think it is since EV depreciation normalizes after 2 years.
Over a five-year period, EVs drop in value by about 55-60%, compared to 40-50% for gas cars.
So if you want to throw it in there my EV would be $0.30/mile and ICE is $0.55/mile. This assumes 100,000 miles over 5 years for both and a $50k starting price.
Do you believe equivalent ICE and EV cars cost the same??
What are you specifically getting at here? You don’t like that the numbers go against your personal opinions so you keep changing parameters.
But generally yes $50k would get you a new either ICE or EV with roughly the same features. Are there ICE cars that are less? Yes. There are also EVs that are less. Are bare bones ICE cars cheaper than the cheapest EV, sure.
If you want a specific comparison of the cheapest subcompact SUVs in America right now it’s still cheaper per mile for an EV. I picked the cheapest EV and ICE available right now in the USA.
The Chevy Bolt EV ($29k) vs a Hyundai Venue ICE ($22k) returns a cost per mile of $0.226 for the Bolt vs $0.35 for the Venus. I even gave the Venue a break and factored $4/gallon which is less than the country average of $4.30 but used the kWh average of $0.19 for the EV. I also factored in $1000 for tires every 50k and $100 every 10k for oil changes on the Venue and $1200 for tires every 20k on the Bolt. I also assumed a 50% depreciation over 5 years/100k miles for the Venue and a 60% depreciation for the Bolt. (50% on that Venue feels generous BTW).
You might not like the math but EVs are cheaper per mile to run and even if gas dropped 40% overnight they still would be.
Over a 5 year period the depreciation isn’t nearly what you think it is since EV depreciation normalizes after 2 years.
Which, on the other hand, makes young-ish used EVs a bargain, at least for the time being.
I don’t think anybody can predict EV depreciation correctly, as predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. As there are fewer mechanical and failure-prone components in an EV, they should theoretically lose less value over time than an ICE car.
Still, used car prices are determined by the market and a comparatively low demand for used EVs in the past. I am sure this demand will rise sooner rather than later, but the race is still on.
They’ve been lower for a long time. And especially now with gas having about doubled in my area.
Everyone who believes that is ignoring vehicle depretiation
So buy a used EV then? If you care so much about frugality, that’s the answer.
Used EV’s are cheap for a reason. They are essentially used up and cost too much to repair.
This is wrong. Used EVs are a fantastic bargain. Yes, batteries might need some repair and service, but there’s not much to wear out, otherwise, that isn’t a wear item for any other car.
AND – because of that federal tax incentive, used EVs and PHEVs have *MUCH* less residual value so they’re even cheaper than the gas version of any particular model.
Exactly. They’re not magic, perfect machines but in aggregate batteries are much better than the public believes and the values haven’t caught up to that yet.
Which is funny when juxtaposed with Hyundai and Kia hitting sales records when so many of their engines over the past 15 years made a reputation for burning oil, seizing or otherwise keeling over.
Yea that few to several grand in dealer-marked-up battery work makes for a great propaganda piece but at the same time few are writing articles about each instance of someone:
I wrote these here pieces about modern automobile DIY maintenance for this very site!
Still have this car. It’s at about 195K miles right now. No plans to dispense of it.
https://www.theautopian.com/the-pentastar-tick-could-kill-your-chrysler-dodge-ram-or-jeep-engine-heres-how-i-fixed-it/
https://www.theautopian.com/i-bought-a-new-car-11-years-and-190000-miles-ago-heres-how-i-got-it-through-its-midlife-crisis-so-it-feels-new-again/
Next door neighbors parked a 2nd gen Rogue in their backyard something like 5 years ago. I’m putting up a fence this summer if it’s the last thing I do. And yeah – it seems as if automakers have forgotten the basics of making durable engines.
“What do you mean, they just drop valve seats?”
Meanwhile, the Vice Grip Garage channel is full of revivals of old junk that starts off as a stuck 305, then transitions into hitting on 5 or 7 cylinders, before running smoothly with 60 psi of oil pressure and no overheating after 40 years of slumber.
LOL
So are used Volkswagens, but people seem to still buy those often enough.
We get it, you don’t like EVs. You do not need to buy one.
Literally broke out the math and no over 5 years EVs are cheaper.
Just say you don’t like EV’s. Instead of all this concern trolling.
Besides, depreciation is only a concern if you trade it in the first few years. Keep it for 10-15 years and it’s not an issue. Yes, the battery will probably be fine for that long. At that time a new battery will likely be the same price as a rebuilt transmission.
There’s currently (or maybe it ended 6/1) $8,750 incentives on Hyundai BEVs and I’m sure that had nothing to do with the increase in those Ioniq 5 sales.
That being said, we bit and bought an Ioniq 5 in May. The deal with the almost $9k off and the insane trade they gave us on my wife’s accord was too good to pass up.
Just ended yesterday. New (if there are any) haven’t been announced yet.
Yes, of course the market will be better at getting people into more efficient cars and the development and adoption of non-petro energy, including renewables.
It’s why, instead of all the comple hoops and systems set up to give away money (such as the $7500 tax break), real progress could have been made more simply by taxation.
And I don’t simply mean the regressive fuel tax that hurts the people who can least afford it the most.
Wealth taxes (not simply income), and reinvestment in things like transit (that can get built quickly. You think the regulatory red tape is ONLY just to make sure stuff gets done properly? Look, man, you snag everything in Byzantium, the solution that gets ahead of the regulation, like Uber, is gonna win before the rules catch up with it…)
It’s bonkers to me that I cannot take a train from my house south to Worcester or southwest to Springfield. The only way I could do that is to spend 2/3 of a day taking a train into Boston and then another out to Worcester or Springfield.
Of course, this is the government the vested interests have bought, not one for the people.
We did this to ourselves.
I tend to agree.
If people had to pay the actual cost of fuel at the pump rather than the subsidized cost of fuel at the pump and the subsidies hidden away in our annual tax bill – I suspect Americans would feel very differently about EVs vs ICE.
Completely agree, taxes and wealth redistribution will lead us to a more sustainable future.
True, on the one hand things do become much more sustainable when you starve hundreds of millions of people to death. On the other hand, retarded commie bullshit has been tried with horrific results, and maybe we shouldn’t do that again.
I see no demagogy in your argument whatsoever.
I think what he’s saying is that real American freedom is, of course, Rugged Individualism for you and me, and luxurious socialism for corporations.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
I am sure someone will come on here and pedantically tell me I am wrong. It just seems that there is a chicken or egg thing going on.
People want a complete EV infrastructure before they buy an EV, but other people don’t want to build and pay for an entire EV infrastructure before there are EVs is on the road.
It just seems like there needs to be some sort of middle ground where EVs get bought and EV infrastructure gets built.
it doesn’t help that there is a robust and well-funded FUD industry ready with plenty of stories about EV fires and “you can’t tow with that” and “there are no chargers” even though there sure are chargers.
And the whole fragile masculinity of people who see EVs as cultural genocide for their entire ICE powered lives. They have the 45+ minute drive to work, school, church, store and on the weekends all their hobbies are ICE powered ATVs, SXSs, snowmobiles, fishing boats, RVs etc.
Ah, you’ve met my co-worker.
Thankfully, it looks like I’ve convinced him to replace their Corolla with a Rav4 hybrid. (Even though the Corolla is, in itself, quite efficient)
It’ll help offset his 2024 Hemi powered Ram.
Possibly but I know I have met 100s of MN, WI, ND rural men that are certain that EVs were created expressly to emasculate them and their sons.
Strange how they’re so insecure. I thought they were supposed to be “ain’t skeered” and not give any fucks about your feelings and stuff?
Totally!
The “F your feelings” crowd actually has really big feelings, and they’re very easily hurt.
I have watched grown men yell at wind turbines in rural Iowa.
100% believe it.
That makes me think it’d be really funny to paint the tips of the blades with rainbow colors.
This one specifically 43.30910164030125, -91.81772792735931
Dubuque Quixote?
Decorah.
Quasqueton Quixote has a better ring, although there aren’t many turbines in that neck of the weeds.
The issue is that climate change is about cumulative emissions. Every day matters, and trying to build chickens and eggs while everyone drives a 15 MPG truck ain’t the move.
I still think EREVs are a great answer.
100% agree. I am looking forward to buying an EREV.
agreed, but where are they? my understanding is the focus will be on larger EREV’s first, but the midsize and compact market is huge!
something something “profitability”
And it is true, to a degree, that no company is going to be able to introduce even a midsize EREV that isn’t “luxury” and reasonably get it to be profitable over the short term.
The tightest planning window would be like 5 years, and that seems unrealistic. It’s a decade-long thing to execute, in reality.
And startups have other people’s money to burn while they frantically look to do something that’s just good enough to get the company sold, not actually deliver a solid product. IOW, they *definitely* don’t really care about you as a long-term customer. At least not more than their 10X exit, bro.
Established companies have pesky things like boards and shareholders and publically-traded stock. The Business Idiots™ in charge care about nothing as much as they care about quarterly stock price. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. No board or investor these days will ever say “yes, it’s going to take some time, maybe a few years, but in the end, it will have been deeply worth it.”
Yes the max quarterly profit and more every quarter is not long term smart.
oh I know, I just hope the tech trickles down fast, cause we want an EREV but are in the midsize/compact CUV space, we have a HEV Niro now and love it
It’s basically a neurotoxin for the environment…it builds up and doesn’t leave your system just because you stop drinking mercury smoothies with lead cubes.
You’re making me thirsty!!
Looks at the Excursion I bought less than 6 months ago
Well, shit.
Just swapped a 4xe WL Jeep for a Pentastar WL Jeep.
I quite like the Excursion, so I’m waiting to see where Edison Motors’ pickup truck kit lands price-wise.
Cause I’ll gladly slide their rolling EREV chassis under the Excursion body and drive off into the sunset (2.8L cummins w/generator and a 60kWh battery).
The market for restored/rebuilt Excursions is robust. That sounds pretty awesome with the Cummins/Generator
Their test truck (a 2nd gen ram) is gonna be towing a 30ft Airstream across Canada to test the system.
It’s also getting tested vs the original 5.9L gas engine, and the Cummins engine as a direct drive, for emissions and efficiency. They set up the test suite with a local university.
I’m stoked to see all the results.
That will be interesting.
One thing I always think about is how we could all just be satisfied with adequate performance instead of 1200 lb-ft of turbodiesel torque and find efficiency and emissions improvements there, too.
You’re getting 15mpg from an Excursion? Did they even get that when they were new?
V8 2WD. I top 15 on long trips when not towing. Got 13.5 towing my mini home over 900 miles.
The more common V10 couldn’t dream of that. LOL.
I daily an EREV with 100+mi EV range, and right now I’m driving around Thailand in a rental Nissan Kicks with the e-Power series hybrid. Nissan has done a fantastic job with this system, it just drives like a typical EV, and you almost never notice the gas engine.
Switch to EV mode and it can even drive for 1-2 miles without the gas engine kicking in. Its a fantastic stepping stone to EREV and even EV ownership, once you get used to EV motor propulsion (for commuting at least) there’s no going back.
Regular hybrids that can run on alcohol fuels is another great answer.
50% lower emissions on an energy adjusted basis means that a Hyundai Palisade Hybrid running corn ethanol has the same emissions as a gas car getting 70 mpg.
We did the ethanol-as-savior thing back in the early aughts.
TL;DR – using food crops as a fuel is bad alchemy.
Nobody ever got the cellulosic thing to work at scale so we could go from grass clippings to fuel.
Both growing corn and converting corn starch into fuel are much more efficient compared to 20 years ago because of numerous small incremental improvements to the process.
Converting cellulose to jet fuel is more desirable, and I like Circularity Fuels for this process.
Glad there’s been progress! Not that we need more jets flying around.
The irony of the COP symposiums where everyone flies in on jets to talk about climate change is absolute satire.
Twenty years ago ethanol refineries burned natural gas for heat to run the distillation column and the dryers for the byproduct animal feed. Today the natural gas goes through a combined heat and power turbine, the electricity is sold off to the grid, and the waste heat is recovered to supply the heating requirements. The next step is for them to stop buying fossil methane and replace it with biomethane.
The progress on corn yields is pretty amazing as well. The same acre makes 25% more than it did 20 years ago, so the majority of corn used for ethanol production is extra corn resulting from better seed genetics.
Interesting.
Who owns the seeds and the IP on the seeds?
Another interesting thing we have in some places around the Northeast are digesters generating power from livestock manure. Running farms, charging BESS onsite and selling power back to the grid. All from poop.
The German company Bayer owns the IP on the seeds now after they bought Monsanto. I probably agree with you on the need for open source seeds.
I am very pro-digester. It is a good way to turn cellulose into fuel. Something like sawdust can be put down on the ground or barn floor before the animals poop on it, and then everything goes in the digester. There is lots of evidence that co-feeding improves yields.
Isn’t it fascinating! The population at large still thinks of farms as what we are sold in Little Golden Books.
Luckily, there are Open Source Seed and Heirloom Seed projects around. Heirloom tomatoes will change your life. (And honestly, any home-grown tomato will do that. The ones in the store have been developed to survive shipping and storage, not actually taste like anything. My favorite is the Jersey Devil)
My wife buys all of our garden seeds from the Baker Creek catalogue, so we are sitting on a mountain of heirloom seeds over here.
I don’t disagree with your point but I’d argue that the EV infrastructure is far more built out that people realize and that what most people fail to realize is that you always leave home with a full “tank of gas”.
As someone who went through the progression of: EVs aren’t the answer to they only work locally to buying one. The issue is that it’s an entire new way of thinking and people fear change.
It also doesn’t help that there’s not a singular quick good resource to get quick answers for questions on how certain things function and what you should pay attention to when considering an EV.
Sure there are real issues on infrastructure for some rural areas but I can leave tomorrow for any location on the east coast in our EV and be confident I’d be able to get there without major issue. It just requires some planning and foresight.
I know but perception is way more important than reality.
Perception IS reality.
I think only the loud ones complain. The people who have bought EVs did so because their use-demand made it feasible. Others cannot.
My higher electricity rates make it less feasible, unless I invest in solar panels.
I would buy used, but the bigger issue is the unsafe lack of knobs in any vehicle built in the 2020’s. Especially in EVs. Also the nannyness of them.