I would be more considered about remaining petroleum infrastructure entering a death spiral as demand drops rapidly. The cost per mile to drive an EV is about half that of a combustion vehicle, so the heaviest consumers will move to EVs rapidly, leaving the stragglers to shoulder petroleum supply costs.
I get you're being sarcastic here but it's clear that the market hasn't been a total success with EVs. They require much more charging infrastructure before many will consider buying, but the EV infrastructure won't be built until there is demand for it. This is a classic example of where a government can step in to tip the scales and force a desirable outcome.
So why ban instead of subsidize? (in the general case, we all know that states like NY love to ban things)
Rooftop solar got cheap enough to be not quite viable and then took off like a rocket with government subsidy. If people could install chargers at a negligible net cost to them you'd see them everywhere as landlords and house flippers jump to "check that box".
Because climate change is an emergency? Because it sends a stronger signal? Because it's what in line with countries across the world (and California) are already planning?
Everyone replying to you seems to be missing what I think is the obvious implication that new car sales won't really matter because if used car sales are still allowed dealers will just import those to sell and people will buy them if they are what they want. And if there is not enough charging infrastructure and whatnot gas cars will be what people want.
I feel conflicted when I see headlines like this. On the one hand, this is better than not having passed said law. On the other hand, 14 years is quite a while, and the current members of the legislature will likely have long since moved on. So this feels like a way to earn brownie points with their constituents who really care about this, without actually undertaking the hard work of making this a reality.
> under the new law, several state agencies are required to work together to conjure a zero-emissions vehicle market development strategy by the end of next year
I guess that's nice that the timeframe for coming up with a plan is shorter... but again, don't we need more action now, and not in a decade and a half?
Changes like this affect action today. If you are an automaker, are you going to spend limited development money on cars you won't be able to sell in NY in the future? Investors are already pricing in how well automakers are going to be prepared for bills like this and EU/UK laws. So bills like this actually cause a lot of positive change today.
> If you are an automaker, are you going to spend limited development money on cars you won't be able to sell in NY in the future?
If I were an automaker, I don't think I would care much about this. The writing is already on the wall for internal combustion engines (ICE) and ICE is already pretty established so I don't really need to innovate here anyway (as opposed to body style, electronic features, etc) and the time horizon is longer than a decade by which point I'm expecting ratio of EV:ICE sales to shift significantly. This shifts it a bit more.
I think what it might do today is inspire other states to pass similar legislation and otherwise normalize the notion that EVs are the future for those who aren't technologists or early adopters.
Exactly. Electric cars aren't even a great answer - reducing vehicle miles traveled with more public mass transit and denser cities is needed - but there's far more opposition to that than electric cars.
Its a general pattern with politicians. Announce a seemingly ambitious goal, but make sure that its date is a few years after you are likely out of office.
If you think about the kind of development schedules auto manufacturers do, this makes some sense. A lot of manufacturers seem to do a major refresh of a model every 5 to 10 years and and do incremental updates in between every year or two, so putting this kind of sunset on it says to each manufacturer that it doesn’t make sense to do more than about one major refresh or new model of ICE car. So this will see new models getting fairly scarce by 2030 I think. By then, they might keep a couple of lines going for those few years, but basically 100% of the new and exciting cars will be electric. (This is assuming similar laws in most Western markets).
14 years is nothing when electric vehicles are only 1% of the current market. There is a wide range of vehicles that have no electric alternative available yet, such as vans and off road vehicles. I will be surprised if it doesn't get extended.
Renault, Nissan, Opel, VW and Mercedes all have an electric van on the market and many more will no doubt be showing up within a couple of years. Now it could be that they aren't currently sold in the US, but that is an easier problem to solve
off road vehicles
Mercedes, Jeep and Humvee have all announced off road vehicles that will start being sold soon, and I'm sure others will follow
> Renault, Nissan, Opel, VW and Mercedes all have an electric van
None of which are cargo vans suitable for business use. They're all minivans. Mercedes and Ford have announced electric full sized vans but they are years away from general availability.
> Mercedes, Jeep and Humvee have all announced off road vehicles that will start being sold soon
That depends on what you mean by soon. Jeep has a plug in hybrid on the market now, so I guess that's a step in the right direction. Their full electric is only in concept and is years from production. The new Humvee is still vaporware. Mercedes has announced an SUV but it is not an off road vehicle.
None of which are cargo vans suitable for business use.
The Mercedes eVito , Nissan NV200, VW Transporter and Crafter, Renault Kangoo etc. are all electric cargo vans specifically targeting commercial use. Admittedly, one problem they all share is that they are big heavy cars built on last gen electric platforms, meaning they have pretty crap range. But they exist and are available on the market today.
I think this action is as good as we can actually do right now. There's basically zero infrastructure to support everyone owning an electric car and it takes time to build. There's a long long tail of edge cases that need to be accounted for before you can just pull the rug out from everyone with a petrol car.
* Every single parking space in the city that can or is used for residential street parking needs to have an electric hookup.
* Charging stations need to be at least as dense as gas stations and scaled up since the throughput of an individual station is lower.
* Electric vehicles need to get an order of magnitude cheaper both in terms of purchase price and total cost of ownership as well since people seem to underestimate the sheer number of people who drive sub $5k vehicles. Battery degradation absolutely destroys the used used market for cars.
* Commercial vehicles that by their very nature outrun the range of a single charge need accommodations so businesses can get deliveries and people can take taxis and busses that run 24/7.
Non-Solutions I've heard from around HN:
* "Just improve public transportation" If you can't afford to live in NY or $big_city but work there then you need a car. You literally cannot fix the physics reality of as you expand out the area you have to hypothetically cover with public transportation increases on the order of radius squared. You can try to have a hub/spoke model (and cities like Boston do) but surprise poor people get priced out of those too!
* "Get rid of street parking -- it's ugly anyway. If you can't afford $some_arbitrary_number then you shouldn't have a car anyway."
I want to disagree with you on the timeline issue, but I think 14 years was probably chosen for it not to be too economically disruptive.
I live both in NYC part of the time and in Vancouver part of the time and I see a lot more hybrid and totally electric vehicles in Vancouver, despite the fact it should be theoretically easier in NYC due to the density.
There's a large environmental push on the pacific northwest, but there are practical reasons people choose electric cars here- namely that there are taxes coming on non-electric cars soon. Driving a gas car will cost you $1000 a year soon, and then that rate will go up.
You can only avoid that tax with a hybrid or fully electric car.
Other incentives and taxes are coming that only allow plug-in-electric and fully electric cars. For example they allow electric and PEVs to use the HOV lanes on the highway, and there's rumor of possible parking and other benefits.
Back to the timeline... the problem right now is how little plug-in infrastructure NYC and NYS have. To pull off electric vehicles, you need plug-in stations everywhere. You want people to be able to charge their vehicles easily and nearly everywhere.
That's because charging time for cars is significantly slower than gassing up, and electric cars typically have shorter range than gas, so you need to make it convenient to charge up in more places in order to offset the inconvenience of time.
It's also going to be disruptive to various NYS industry, such as the gas stations, which will see a decline in their gasoline business and need money and time to switch over to offering electric charging.
14 years is a very long time, but I suspect if they had said ten years, people would have revolted at the inconvenience/impossibility of retrofitting or building so much electric infrastructure.
It shouldn't take this long, but I think this is the best they could have done politically.
You need a long on ramp for things like this so manufacturers start making more cars and there are enough to actually make the transition. This also aligns with California's date for ending new ICE car sales. This is one of many things states are trying to do, they're making both long and short horizon changes.
It's definitely too little too late and, what's worse, they are still going to build tonnes of destructive infrastructure for private cars, like massive new highways and bridges, while neglecting to fund and maintain the public alternatives like trains, buses, and bicycles, despite them being century-old proven green technologies.
These efforts really need to be accompanied by language or sibling bills that encourage installation of new community charging stations, force existing apartments to install X number of charging stations per resident, and requires all new residential buildings install them. The biggest hurdle I'm seeing among my friends and coworkers is simply that they would have to charge their vehicle 1-2x a week and have no way to charge at their apartment, while waiting 30 minutes at a public station is too inconvenient. Is this possibly something included in the Biden infrastructure bill (which I haven't really read or read into yet)?
NYC has a plan to install the largest EV charging network in the US. Federal incentives encourage local communities to adopt EV readiness plans to obtain federal grants (I contribute to and help develop EV readiness plans in my spare time).
This is stupid and will never actually happen. More generally, I'm growing tired of how signaling is usurping rational behavior. People are so focused on "being bold" and generating a headline instead of "being smart" and managing things rationally.
Could you provide some substantive backing you your claims? Why won't this ever happen? Why do you think this is about "being bold" rather than "managing things rationally"? What's irrational about electric vehicles?
They are not yet feasible in rural areas. I feel like most of these policies are made and passed by people who are completely out of touch with rural living. And that's a problem because about half the country lives in rural areas with minimal infrastructure.
Moreover, people like gas powered vehicles. There is a certain romantic appeal to a fire breathing engine. There are other ways of dealing with climate change and all of the doomsday predictions are rather unlikely worst case scenarios.
And in the grand scheme automobile emissions are a small fraction of total anthropogenic carbon output. Really if we want to make a dent in emissions globally we need to get container ships to stop burning bunker fuel.
0. The original sin of the car is the car itself, not the ICE. The car has externalities other than the ICE, battery cars don't address than and encourage forgetfulness. Arguably the car should be gradually killed off (I say this as a massive car guy) [1]
1. The problem with ICE cars is global warming, which is necessarily a global problem, not a local one (i.e. CO2 emissions barely effect the people who emit them more than those who do not). Therefore to address the CO2 emissions it has to be a global solution.
2. It's not obvious that battery technology can, globally, supply several orders of magnitude more batteries than currently.
3. Electrification of transport has immense promise, if done correctly. Assuming limited battery supplies, it is much more beneficial to use them to electrify big heavy vehicles by employing hybrid drivetrains.
I was very skeptical of the Toyota Prius 20 years ago, and I was wrong. It is a brilliant car that has done more good for the environment than any other car. My only criticism today of the Prius is that the Prius should have been a pickup truck, not a subcompact. However, I understand the marketing wisdom behind that decision 20 years ago.
4. With a hybrid drive trains ICE can achieve thermal efficiencies rivaling a thermal power plant (the vast majority of our energy in the US) -> See Mercedes F1 ICE.
5. With a hybrid drivetrain the stop-go energy loss of heavy delivery trucks is significantly reduced.
6. Nor is there any reason why heavy delivery trucks should run on gasoline or diesel and not CH4 like our powerplants. It's an infrastructure problem just like the one faced by electric cars.
So given the points above, if I were advising legislators, I would
- put massive incentives for blue collar joe to buy a hybrid F-150, or a Ford maverick as his next work vehicle (necessary condition for the incentive, it's used for work).
- put incentives to divert batteries to heavy road vehicles (although not necessarily big rigs. They have a more constant load).
That said, it's not obvious to me that:
1. NY's goal can be accomplished by 2035.
2. vehicle manufacturers wont just divert electric vehicles to CA, NY and Norway and only sell ICE everywhere else
3. It's economically possible within the time frame
[1]I don't zero-index. I use it here in the sense of the zeroth-law of thermo; as a prelude that to some is obvious, but turns out to be quite subtle.
Only considering the upside, instead of the downsides. True, an EV itself has no emissions but, how is that electricity generated, distributed? How are the materials for the batteries sourced (I hope you like strip mining and being beholden to China)? How are end-of-lifed batteries disposed?
I think EVs are the future, but we shouldn't put the cart before the horse on our way to get there. EVs are also already quite a bit more expensive a similar ICE vehicle. They'll only get more expensive if there's a government induced shortage of materials & parts due to a mandate.
This is signal to automakers that they must transition to EVs as they will no longer have a market for combustion vehicles to sell into. The more jurisdictions that enact these regulations, the greater the signal. Once automakers have retooled supply chains, the capital costs would be too great for them to switch back to fossil fuel vehicle manufacturing.
I think this is the real reason Toyota cut production targets 40%. Their insiders probably know that the politburo intends to make personal vehicles illegal for kulaks like me.
> More generally, I'm growing tired of how signaling is usurping rational behavior.
In what way is retiring gas-powered vehicles by 2035 not "rational behavior"? Climate change is very real and the deadline is 14 years from now. If anything you could argue that this law isn't rational enough because it doesn't take quick enough action.
The deadline has been 15 years from now for about 30+ years. Nothing about the climate hysteria is rational. Laymen are choosing the loudest and scariest voices to drive policy, but the truth is that we are just beginning to understand a complex, chaotic, metastable system, which oscillates with periods spanning days, years, centuries, millennia, and eons.
The likely worst case is a gradual migration (on the order of 100 years) away from coastal areas and places where the weather becomes less suitable for farming. There are other regions which will become more temperate and ideal for living. In a sense this is likely a positive development as it will become a steady source of economic activity, jobs for millions of people.
Runaway climate change, calthrate guns, and a venuslike earth are all low probability outcomes and even if they do happen they will take at least a century (probably longer) with ample time for developing a technological solution if necessary.
There is no way currently to prove that we are not simply at the peak of an oscillation, anthropogenic or otherwise. The vast majority of climate models have consistently overpredicted temperatures (which says a lot about the bias in the research community) and one of the major predictors, increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes, has not yet materialized. Things are most likely not as bad as most laymen have been lead to believe.
Please don't use "rational" to mean "agrees with the axioms I've chosen to be important." These people are acting rationally, but reason doesn't govern what you value in your starting assumptions, only the conclusions you draw from those assumptions. Signalling is the rational outcome of the core values encouraged in our politicians.
feel like more people need to understand this. being rational looks different for different people in different circumstances and with different motivations.
There is lots of uncertainty and perspectives around that. What if someone in the next 14 years comes up with a way to make gasoline from clean, low-carbon energy?
These kind of technology specific laws really bug me. What they should rationally legislate is lifecycle emissions. If the vehicle system (or energy system) makes more than x gCO₂-eq/mile then it's banned. How you get there shouldn't be specified 15 years in advance.
Rational behavior from a politician means doing whatever it takes to get yourself reelected. First, foremost, full stop.
People who don't do this don't get elected and are removed from the system. Whether their legislation is effective or not matters only as far as it will affect their chances of reelection.
Ah sure so you're commenting on the concept of elected leaders in general as a means of government as opposed to the higher-level actions people as a whole take to solve problems. Ok fair enough.
Not elected leaders in general, just elected leaders in our specific ecosystem of incentives for those leaders. For them to be acting irrationally, it would be necessary to show that genuinely solving problems is what they're trying to do, but people who put that above the negotiations and compromises necessary to be reelected do not survive or get promoted to higher offices. If we want to change the outcomes, we need to change what it takes for someone to be elected.
And that will not happen as long as people believe that anyone who disagrees with them or behaves suboptimally just isn't thinking rationally.
Why won’t this happen? Remember the state of electric cars are at the worst point now than they ever will be again, and they only fall short of ICE cars on a few factors and are already better on many. Every year they improve at a strong pace, whereas ICE technology is close to as developed as it will ever be.
There’s no reason to believe that EV cars will be worse than ICEs in any way in 10-15 years.
Do we really want a ban on all gas powered cars? There are no situations where a gas car is preferable or necessary?
There are simpler and less constraining ways to accomplish the real goal of this legislation, which is curbing carbon emissions. A simple, emissions-priced carbon tax on gasoline would make EVs preferable to those with no strong feelings on how they get around. My only claim is that a 99% ban is preferable to a 100% ban, because there most exist some circumstance where the internal combustion automobile is better. Expect this law to be walked back slightly in the future for this reason.
Could we not just reuse an existing gas car for these cases? It seems preferable to repair those than build new ones if we’re talking about environmental impact.
It's reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order, so inasmuch as this results in reduction of car sales, or extending the life of existing (gas-powered) cars, that's still a win in many ways.
Loopholes create perverse incentives. You can see this in things like regulations on certain vehicle sizes. "But what about trucks" turns into "pickups and SUVs grow to monstrous proportions".
If it turns out that in 15 years there is some grievous need for gas cars then, as you say, the legislation can be walked back. But that isn't a reason to not make it bold to start with.
The range of electric cars degrades considerably at low temperatures in my experience (75% of range sometimes). There is no scenario where gas trucks cars will not be utilized in Canada and the northern united states until this type of technological issue is resolved. Not to mention, the number of chargers would have to increase exponentially to support all of the electric cars coming online.
There are simply places in North America where electric cars will never probably work.
> Not to mention, the number of chargers would have to increase exponentially to support all of the electric cars coming online.
1. Infuriating misuse of "exponentially". Charging needs scale linearly with the number of cars!
2. Come on, they're outlets. Car chargers are just a different kind of grid outlet, and they cost no more than connecting a new building. This is cheap, not expensive.
Ok -- I agree exponentially was the wrong adjective, but I think linearly is wrong too, because the number of EVs being produced now (mostly because of TSLA) is not keeping pace with the chargers. You notice this because lines at TSLA chargers are common on the east coast. The competing charging networks in the US suck, and if TSLA opens up their network to non-TSLAs, this will just get worse.
I have no clue what it takes to construct the chargers (maybe someone here can chime in), but it isn't just "outlets" -- it presumably requires a larger-than-average power source to charge 8+ cars simultaneously at 250Kw
> There are no situations where a gas car is preferable or necessary?
For a passenger car? No, not really. And it's getting better and better as more fast charging services come online. Electrical infrastructure is extremely cheap relative to other costs like roadbuilding, there simply aren't any places you can go with roads but not efficient grid connectivity, all that's needed is building the right kind of outlets.
Do you mean specifically for the NY market or that fossil fuel power doesn't make sense in general?
I know there are some places out West where people may need to drive very long distances, even for groceries. They literally pack coolers full of ice to transport food back. We can maybe say they need to plan better on their trips, or they shouldn't live in the middle of nowhere, but I don't think that negates the fact there are some cases where gas is a better option (until electric ranges/refueling options are comparable in terms of time and availability)
>Electrical infrastructure is extremely cheap relative to other costs like roadbuilding
I think I disagree here, especially if you look at lead times. Some transformers literally cannot be manufactured within the US. Others were put in place using infrastructure like rail that no longer exists in that area. These are big risks that really drive up infrastructure cost.
> I know there are some places out West where people may need to drive very long distances, even for groceries.
None that don't have power along the way, or at least vanishingly few. Every little town or crossroads you see with a building? Every traffic light? Every railroad crossing with an alarm? That's power. The point wasn't that the EV charging infrastructure exists TODAY to support this, it was that it would be trivial to do within the timeframe required.
> I think I disagree here, especially if you look at lead times.
The lead time in question is fourteen years! And if you don't believe it just look it up. Stringing a cable is 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper than building a road (much, much more so in areas where you need to blast tunnels or grade mountainsides).
The only reason this even looks like an argument is because you presumably feel like "all the roads are already built", but they aren't.
I may not have done a very good job of explaining my point. My point is that there's more at play here than just the availability of electricity.
>The point wasn't that the EV charging infrastructure exists TODAY to support this, it was that it would be trivial to do within the timeframe required
Except it's not just the electricity availability that causes the issue I was pointing to. It's the energy delivery as a function of time. The range upgrade in pumping fossil fuels is currently just much more efficient. One can get 300-500 extra miles of range in less than 5 minutes. Even if electricity is available, it doesn't mean somebody can double their range in a few minutes (which is why I pointing out the planning counterpoint). I'm optimistic the technology will get there, but let's not trivialize the solution as a way of negating one option.
>The lead time in question is fourteen years!
Is this speaking about building a road? I don't quite follow how the comparison of building roads matters to this...presumably both electric and fossil fuel cars would use the same road infrastructure. Is your point that long road construction lead times means...what? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just don't understand the connection drawn here. Is the point, "Electrical infrastructure is easy because roads are hard and we already do roads"??
>all that's needed is building the right kind of outlets
>Stringing a cable is 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper
This is what I mean by trivializing the solution. Electrical infrastructure is much more than just 'stringing up cable'. The transformers I mentioned are much more of a bottleneck both from a manufacturing and resiliency perspective. There are some critical ones within the Unites States that would take 18 months or more to be manufactured overseas before even considering how to deliver them when there isn't the normal infrastructure to do so. The idea that we just need to "string up some cable" appears a bit naïve to me and perhaps spoken from a place of lack of domain knowledge.
If you look at the actual text of the bill, it already includes several "where feasible" caveats which will presumably be carved into more specific exceptions a decade from now if there are places where we can't transition to electric.
A carbon tax (along with rebate & tariff to make it fair) is much more fair and effective than a gas car ban, because it impacts old vehicles as well a new ones. It can be brought in gradually.
A complete ban is not a great idea because there's always somebody somewhere who need a new gas vehicle for some essential reason or another. There might be 5 of these people in the whole state but they'll dominate news stories as the date gets closer.
There are lots of effective ways to ban things without going for the full ban -- ICE vehicles are environmental disasters, put limits or even better, fees on some of those things. Like particulates, or CO2. The European fleet CO2 limit is a great example of such an approach.
And don't assume that a carbon tax is a complete non-starter. Here in Canada we have a Federal election in a few days. The 5 mainstream parties all include a carbon tax as part of their platform. Sure, the right wing party's carbon tax is ineffectively small and counter-productively structured, but it's symbolically there. The narrative has shifted from massive opposition to a feeling that any party without a carbon tax in their platform are climate change deniers.
If this law actually takes effect in 2035 it will encourage people to keep older, more polluting, and less safe cars on the road. Banning a gas-powered car sale is equivalent to imposing an extremely high tax, say $1 million, on such a sale. Even if you think global warming is a serious problem, the damage from a gas-powered car is not infinite. If it is say $10K compared to an EV, then that is what the tax ought to be.
The early 2030s will see a heck of a lot of gas sedans sold as the people who put on tons of miles buy them in anticipation of needing something to get them through until EVs meet their needs.
Is the calculation not a lot more complicated than that?
E.g. i can imagine they are predicting higher rates of walking and cycling in cases that would otherwise have been a 2-3minute car journey. You’d expect that to have a visible effect on public health at a state level at least.
Health, renewable energy storage, pollution, safety, there’s surely more factors than just pollution in that calculation?
Why? There should be significant cost down as battery tech improves, increasing accessibility. By 2035, why would electric cars be worse in any way than an ICE car anyway? All the exciting and interesting new cars will be electric, and there should be plenty of 2030-2034 ICE cars on the used car market for a few years after as people upgrade.
But Tesla is the only EV dealer that can sell in New York. New York does not allow other manufacturers to sell directly to consumers. They must go through a dealer.
I don't this is correct. Most major manufacturers have an EV or plug-in line now, which you can buy at their normal dealerships - the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Chevy Bolt for example. VW group and Nissan have their own lines.
New York does not allow a manufacturer like Rivian to sell directly to the customer. They must go through a dealer. Tesla has an exemption but only for them.
Hm, average lifetime of American cars is 8-12 years.
Most models have an update or iteration every 2-5 years.
This means car manufacturers need to come up with a solution rather fast and acceptance should be initiated very soon, if someone buys a brand new car in 2031, they might not want to give it up 4 years later.
Electric car infrastructure is not ready yet for this scale either and permissions to build might take a while.
Rd, testing and production are all very low.
Seems unrealistic to me, unless this legislation only covers new cars and selling used cars is still ok?
Just a small bit of nuance, but the age at which a consumer trades up their car shouldn't be conflated with the design life. Design life is based on a certain reliability level and the reliability of cars is generally increasing; 25% of vehicles are over 16 years old [1]. The 'lifetime' of cars may be independent from when consumers decide to upgrade.
Or, better, build more rail and bicycle infrastructure, more green spaces in place of more car lanes, and stop building so many roads which induce demand
Yeah, it's too bad nobody will be working on that issue over the next 15 years.
My gas car has a range of ~400 miles, then requires a ~10 minute stop. A lot of the experiences in this article linked below don't seem showstoppingly different to me, as my appetite for hours behind the wheel in a day is rarely > 10 hours.
Good luck hauling in those >10,000 lb. loads of [commodity] that are necessary for infrastructure with your electric powered truck. New York is going to also mandate the cessation of building skyscrapers and new sewer systems?
Fuel is illegal. Doubling the murders, looting stores, burning down your own city and treason to foreign marxists are all celebrated. Lawless madness.
"Per capita pollution" means nothing when you build everything for the rest of the world. If we left it to the foreigners our leadership fawns over, we would all be dead a hundred times over. Ask Cuba to feed you, or South Africa to deflect an approaching asteroid. See how that works out.
usually they have to put in a grandfather clause to these types of laws. The 5th amendment to my limited understanding, prevents them from doing an outright ban.
The infrastructure is not here for electric cars. Saying we gonna ban gas cars at X date isn't anything more than virtue signaling. They need incentives, infrastructure buildouts (apartment dwellers need plugin ports too), standardization, technological progress on "filling up"... etc.
Well, I hope that New York will pass a law that will make enough cobalt to satisfy battery demand exist. I suppose they may not need that law if they only want enough cars to chauffeur celebrities in clown costumes to the Met Gala.
By the way it seems funny writing laws for 2035 today. We might as well pass a law which would ban farting on Mars by 2095 and also ban import of counterfeit Romulan ale from Proxima Centauri B after 2345. Most probably neither of the laws is going to make sense in the years as they come because the reality is going to be different from what we imagine.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadActively managing things is ever so much fun.
Rooftop solar got cheap enough to be not quite viable and then took off like a rocket with government subsidy. If people could install chargers at a negligible net cost to them you'd see them everywhere as landlords and house flippers jump to "check that box".
https://www.coltura.org/world-gasoline-phaseouts
New York isn't exactly some unique snowflake here.
It's funny to me how the whole ICE vs. EV argument just isn't that much of a slam-dunk. Looking at page 5 here:
https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...
Completely altering the vehicle mix doesn't look like a game changer to me. I guess there's probably no low-hanging fruit.
In the future, no doubt not only will houses be unaffordable for the middle class and below, but also cars.
It appears that this only applies to sales of new vehicles. More details: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/09/landmark-new-york-law-p...
> under the new law, several state agencies are required to work together to conjure a zero-emissions vehicle market development strategy by the end of next year
I guess that's nice that the timeframe for coming up with a plan is shorter... but again, don't we need more action now, and not in a decade and a half?
If I were an automaker, I don't think I would care much about this. The writing is already on the wall for internal combustion engines (ICE) and ICE is already pretty established so I don't really need to innovate here anyway (as opposed to body style, electronic features, etc) and the time horizon is longer than a decade by which point I'm expecting ratio of EV:ICE sales to shift significantly. This shifts it a bit more.
I think what it might do today is inspire other states to pass similar legislation and otherwise normalize the notion that EVs are the future for those who aren't technologists or early adopters.
Most people don't pay attention to the details.
14 years is nothing when electric vehicles are only 1% of the current market. There is a wide range of vehicles that have no electric alternative available yet, such as vans and off road vehicles. I will be surprised if it doesn't get extended.
Renault, Nissan, Opel, VW and Mercedes all have an electric van on the market and many more will no doubt be showing up within a couple of years. Now it could be that they aren't currently sold in the US, but that is an easier problem to solve
off road vehicles
Mercedes, Jeep and Humvee have all announced off road vehicles that will start being sold soon, and I'm sure others will follow
None of which are cargo vans suitable for business use. They're all minivans. Mercedes and Ford have announced electric full sized vans but they are years away from general availability.
> Mercedes, Jeep and Humvee have all announced off road vehicles that will start being sold soon
That depends on what you mean by soon. Jeep has a plug in hybrid on the market now, so I guess that's a step in the right direction. Their full electric is only in concept and is years from production. The new Humvee is still vaporware. Mercedes has announced an SUV but it is not an off road vehicle.
The Mercedes eVito , Nissan NV200, VW Transporter and Crafter, Renault Kangoo etc. are all electric cargo vans specifically targeting commercial use. Admittedly, one problem they all share is that they are big heavy cars built on last gen electric platforms, meaning they have pretty crap range. But they exist and are available on the market today.
https://www.ford.com/commercial-trucks/e-transit/2022/
* Every single parking space in the city that can or is used for residential street parking needs to have an electric hookup.
* Charging stations need to be at least as dense as gas stations and scaled up since the throughput of an individual station is lower.
* Electric vehicles need to get an order of magnitude cheaper both in terms of purchase price and total cost of ownership as well since people seem to underestimate the sheer number of people who drive sub $5k vehicles. Battery degradation absolutely destroys the used used market for cars.
* Commercial vehicles that by their very nature outrun the range of a single charge need accommodations so businesses can get deliveries and people can take taxis and busses that run 24/7.
Non-Solutions I've heard from around HN:
* "Just improve public transportation" If you can't afford to live in NY or $big_city but work there then you need a car. You literally cannot fix the physics reality of as you expand out the area you have to hypothetically cover with public transportation increases on the order of radius squared. You can try to have a hub/spoke model (and cities like Boston do) but surprise poor people get priced out of those too!
* "Get rid of street parking -- it's ugly anyway. If you can't afford $some_arbitrary_number then you shouldn't have a car anyway."
I live both in NYC part of the time and in Vancouver part of the time and I see a lot more hybrid and totally electric vehicles in Vancouver, despite the fact it should be theoretically easier in NYC due to the density.
There's a large environmental push on the pacific northwest, but there are practical reasons people choose electric cars here- namely that there are taxes coming on non-electric cars soon. Driving a gas car will cost you $1000 a year soon, and then that rate will go up.
You can only avoid that tax with a hybrid or fully electric car.
Other incentives and taxes are coming that only allow plug-in-electric and fully electric cars. For example they allow electric and PEVs to use the HOV lanes on the highway, and there's rumor of possible parking and other benefits.
Back to the timeline... the problem right now is how little plug-in infrastructure NYC and NYS have. To pull off electric vehicles, you need plug-in stations everywhere. You want people to be able to charge their vehicles easily and nearly everywhere.
That's because charging time for cars is significantly slower than gassing up, and electric cars typically have shorter range than gas, so you need to make it convenient to charge up in more places in order to offset the inconvenience of time.
It's also going to be disruptive to various NYS industry, such as the gas stations, which will see a decline in their gasoline business and need money and time to switch over to offering electric charging.
14 years is a very long time, but I suspect if they had said ten years, people would have revolted at the inconvenience/impossibility of retrofitting or building so much electric infrastructure.
It shouldn't take this long, but I think this is the best they could have done politically.
https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/electrifying-new...
Moreover, people like gas powered vehicles. There is a certain romantic appeal to a fire breathing engine. There are other ways of dealing with climate change and all of the doomsday predictions are rather unlikely worst case scenarios.
And in the grand scheme automobile emissions are a small fraction of total anthropogenic carbon output. Really if we want to make a dent in emissions globally we need to get container ships to stop burning bunker fuel.
0. The original sin of the car is the car itself, not the ICE. The car has externalities other than the ICE, battery cars don't address than and encourage forgetfulness. Arguably the car should be gradually killed off (I say this as a massive car guy) [1]
1. The problem with ICE cars is global warming, which is necessarily a global problem, not a local one (i.e. CO2 emissions barely effect the people who emit them more than those who do not). Therefore to address the CO2 emissions it has to be a global solution.
2. It's not obvious that battery technology can, globally, supply several orders of magnitude more batteries than currently.
3. Electrification of transport has immense promise, if done correctly. Assuming limited battery supplies, it is much more beneficial to use them to electrify big heavy vehicles by employing hybrid drivetrains.
I was very skeptical of the Toyota Prius 20 years ago, and I was wrong. It is a brilliant car that has done more good for the environment than any other car. My only criticism today of the Prius is that the Prius should have been a pickup truck, not a subcompact. However, I understand the marketing wisdom behind that decision 20 years ago.
4. With a hybrid drive trains ICE can achieve thermal efficiencies rivaling a thermal power plant (the vast majority of our energy in the US) -> See Mercedes F1 ICE.
5. With a hybrid drivetrain the stop-go energy loss of heavy delivery trucks is significantly reduced.
6. Nor is there any reason why heavy delivery trucks should run on gasoline or diesel and not CH4 like our powerplants. It's an infrastructure problem just like the one faced by electric cars.
So given the points above, if I were advising legislators, I would
- put massive incentives for blue collar joe to buy a hybrid F-150, or a Ford maverick as his next work vehicle (necessary condition for the incentive, it's used for work).
- put incentives to divert batteries to heavy road vehicles (although not necessarily big rigs. They have a more constant load).
That said, it's not obvious to me that:
1. NY's goal can be accomplished by 2035.
2. vehicle manufacturers wont just divert electric vehicles to CA, NY and Norway and only sell ICE everywhere else
3. It's economically possible within the time frame
[1]I don't zero-index. I use it here in the sense of the zeroth-law of thermo; as a prelude that to some is obvious, but turns out to be quite subtle.
Only considering the upside, instead of the downsides. True, an EV itself has no emissions but, how is that electricity generated, distributed? How are the materials for the batteries sourced (I hope you like strip mining and being beholden to China)? How are end-of-lifed batteries disposed?
I think EVs are the future, but we shouldn't put the cart before the horse on our way to get there. EVs are also already quite a bit more expensive a similar ICE vehicle. They'll only get more expensive if there's a government induced shortage of materials & parts due to a mandate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic... (Places with planned fossil-fuel vehicle bans)
In what way is retiring gas-powered vehicles by 2035 not "rational behavior"? Climate change is very real and the deadline is 14 years from now. If anything you could argue that this law isn't rational enough because it doesn't take quick enough action.
The likely worst case is a gradual migration (on the order of 100 years) away from coastal areas and places where the weather becomes less suitable for farming. There are other regions which will become more temperate and ideal for living. In a sense this is likely a positive development as it will become a steady source of economic activity, jobs for millions of people.
Runaway climate change, calthrate guns, and a venuslike earth are all low probability outcomes and even if they do happen they will take at least a century (probably longer) with ample time for developing a technological solution if necessary.
There is no way currently to prove that we are not simply at the peak of an oscillation, anthropogenic or otherwise. The vast majority of climate models have consistently overpredicted temperatures (which says a lot about the bias in the research community) and one of the major predictors, increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes, has not yet materialized. Things are most likely not as bad as most laymen have been lead to believe.
There is lots of uncertainty and perspectives around that. What if someone in the next 14 years comes up with a way to make gasoline from clean, low-carbon energy?
These kind of technology specific laws really bug me. What they should rationally legislate is lifecycle emissions. If the vehicle system (or energy system) makes more than x gCO₂-eq/mile then it's banned. How you get there shouldn't be specified 15 years in advance.
People who don't do this don't get elected and are removed from the system. Whether their legislation is effective or not matters only as far as it will affect their chances of reelection.
And that will not happen as long as people believe that anyone who disagrees with them or behaves suboptimally just isn't thinking rationally.
There’s no reason to believe that EV cars will be worse than ICEs in any way in 10-15 years.
There are simpler and less constraining ways to accomplish the real goal of this legislation, which is curbing carbon emissions. A simple, emissions-priced carbon tax on gasoline would make EVs preferable to those with no strong feelings on how they get around. My only claim is that a 99% ban is preferable to a 100% ban, because there most exist some circumstance where the internal combustion automobile is better. Expect this law to be walked back slightly in the future for this reason.
If it turns out that in 15 years there is some grievous need for gas cars then, as you say, the legislation can be walked back. But that isn't a reason to not make it bold to start with.
The range of electric cars degrades considerably at low temperatures in my experience (75% of range sometimes). There is no scenario where gas trucks cars will not be utilized in Canada and the northern united states until this type of technological issue is resolved. Not to mention, the number of chargers would have to increase exponentially to support all of the electric cars coming online.
There are simply places in North America where electric cars will never probably work.
1. Infuriating misuse of "exponentially". Charging needs scale linearly with the number of cars!
2. Come on, they're outlets. Car chargers are just a different kind of grid outlet, and they cost no more than connecting a new building. This is cheap, not expensive.
I have no clue what it takes to construct the chargers (maybe someone here can chime in), but it isn't just "outlets" -- it presumably requires a larger-than-average power source to charge 8+ cars simultaneously at 250Kw
For a passenger car? No, not really. And it's getting better and better as more fast charging services come online. Electrical infrastructure is extremely cheap relative to other costs like roadbuilding, there simply aren't any places you can go with roads but not efficient grid connectivity, all that's needed is building the right kind of outlets.
I know there are some places out West where people may need to drive very long distances, even for groceries. They literally pack coolers full of ice to transport food back. We can maybe say they need to plan better on their trips, or they shouldn't live in the middle of nowhere, but I don't think that negates the fact there are some cases where gas is a better option (until electric ranges/refueling options are comparable in terms of time and availability)
>Electrical infrastructure is extremely cheap relative to other costs like roadbuilding
I think I disagree here, especially if you look at lead times. Some transformers literally cannot be manufactured within the US. Others were put in place using infrastructure like rail that no longer exists in that area. These are big risks that really drive up infrastructure cost.
None that don't have power along the way, or at least vanishingly few. Every little town or crossroads you see with a building? Every traffic light? Every railroad crossing with an alarm? That's power. The point wasn't that the EV charging infrastructure exists TODAY to support this, it was that it would be trivial to do within the timeframe required.
> I think I disagree here, especially if you look at lead times.
The lead time in question is fourteen years! And if you don't believe it just look it up. Stringing a cable is 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper than building a road (much, much more so in areas where you need to blast tunnels or grade mountainsides).
The only reason this even looks like an argument is because you presumably feel like "all the roads are already built", but they aren't.
>The point wasn't that the EV charging infrastructure exists TODAY to support this, it was that it would be trivial to do within the timeframe required
Except it's not just the electricity availability that causes the issue I was pointing to. It's the energy delivery as a function of time. The range upgrade in pumping fossil fuels is currently just much more efficient. One can get 300-500 extra miles of range in less than 5 minutes. Even if electricity is available, it doesn't mean somebody can double their range in a few minutes (which is why I pointing out the planning counterpoint). I'm optimistic the technology will get there, but let's not trivialize the solution as a way of negating one option.
>The lead time in question is fourteen years!
Is this speaking about building a road? I don't quite follow how the comparison of building roads matters to this...presumably both electric and fossil fuel cars would use the same road infrastructure. Is your point that long road construction lead times means...what? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just don't understand the connection drawn here. Is the point, "Electrical infrastructure is easy because roads are hard and we already do roads"??
>all that's needed is building the right kind of outlets
>Stringing a cable is 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper
This is what I mean by trivializing the solution. Electrical infrastructure is much more than just 'stringing up cable'. The transformers I mentioned are much more of a bottleneck both from a manufacturing and resiliency perspective. There are some critical ones within the Unites States that would take 18 months or more to be manufactured overseas before even considering how to deliver them when there isn't the normal infrastructure to do so. The idea that we just need to "string up some cable" appears a bit naïve to me and perhaps spoken from a place of lack of domain knowledge.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/a4302
A complete ban is not a great idea because there's always somebody somewhere who need a new gas vehicle for some essential reason or another. There might be 5 of these people in the whole state but they'll dominate news stories as the date gets closer.
There are lots of effective ways to ban things without going for the full ban -- ICE vehicles are environmental disasters, put limits or even better, fees on some of those things. Like particulates, or CO2. The European fleet CO2 limit is a great example of such an approach.
And don't assume that a carbon tax is a complete non-starter. Here in Canada we have a Federal election in a few days. The 5 mainstream parties all include a carbon tax as part of their platform. Sure, the right wing party's carbon tax is ineffectively small and counter-productively structured, but it's symbolically there. The narrative has shifted from massive opposition to a feeling that any party without a carbon tax in their platform are climate change deniers.
E.g. i can imagine they are predicting higher rates of walking and cycling in cases that would otherwise have been a 2-3minute car journey. You’d expect that to have a visible effect on public health at a state level at least.
Health, renewable energy storage, pollution, safety, there’s surely more factors than just pollution in that calculation?
https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/22/electric-vehicles-dire...
Seems unrealistic to me, unless this legislation only covers new cars and selling used cars is still ok?
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/a4302
Just a small bit of nuance, but the age at which a consumer trades up their car shouldn't be conflated with the design life. Design life is based on a certain reliability level and the reliability of cars is generally increasing; 25% of vehicles are over 16 years old [1]. The 'lifetime' of cars may be independent from when consumers decide to upgrade.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-...
The free market will take care of everything else. And you can fund infrastructure for EVs. Missed opportunity IMO.
Or, better, build more rail and bicycle infrastructure, more green spaces in place of more car lanes, and stop building so many roads which induce demand
EVs are cool but until we solve the range issue, I can't bring myself to be interested.
My gas car has a range of ~400 miles, then requires a ~10 minute stop. A lot of the experiences in this article linked below don't seem showstoppingly different to me, as my appetite for hours behind the wheel in a day is rarely > 10 hours.
Fun read: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a36877585/ev-1000-11-e...
"Per capita pollution" means nothing when you build everything for the rest of the world. If we left it to the foreigners our leadership fawns over, we would all be dead a hundred times over. Ask Cuba to feed you, or South Africa to deflect an approaching asteroid. See how that works out.