That said this will only speed up electric vehicles but with these prices I don’t see how many people are gonna afford them.
In the end though, I won't miss the stupid cars that go up and down my street farting at 120db for no freaking reason because the owner "Want car go vroom!"
I consider myself somewhat of a car enthusiast and I absolutely hate the mentality of "Loud = Good". They just remove their muffler and then rave about how good their car sounds and then later rant about getting a ticket for their car being louder than legally allowed.
I love the sound of flooring it in my Model 3 Performance. From the outside, all you hear is tires on pavement. From the inside, I hear a slight "whoop" that quickly goes up in pitch as a few hundred kilowatts get shoved through the motors. It's quiet and sounds futuristic.
https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/news-on-air/news/kangoo-z-e-...
Also, if there is no enormous breakthrough in the next decade in battery technology, car ownership will become a luxury for the rich.
(I use public transport daily, by the way. And it is absolutely disgusting, overfilled and obnoxious. Absolutely hate it.)
individual cars are not going to solve anything, ev or ic or whatever
I also don't buy the argument that this is going to be a problem energy- or grid-wise. It's 12 years out and the grid has to change anyway. If it doesn't until then, then it will be the least of our problems.
And i don't think it has no impact, my trust that any car manufacturer would even consider this, leave alone see it to the end, without such regulation, is very limited.
The car I have owned and driven for years now cost me less than $1000, minimal maintenance, it's done 30,000 miles.
I don't think that a usable 100kWh lithium battery, alone, with no car attached, is ever going to depreciate to $1000 ($10 per kWh). As far as I know, the wholesale price of the metal itself is more than that.
The idea seems to be that loads of people just get priced out of driving entirely. So what happens to them? Are they all supposed to move out of all of the suburbs into urban housing that doesn't even exist yet?
It's not a matter of charging infrastructure, the viable replacement cars are going to cost 5x what they currently do as far as I can tell.
(Well, we know the answer....)
The manufacturing of batteries is going to be a problem if all vehicles are EV. That includes small personal transportation like motorcycles, large personal transportation like cars, and public transportation like buses. There are charging concerns as well. Currently Europe is struggling to generate enough power using non-fossil fuel sources to even keep running. If the electrical demands go up by 1.5x due to mass EV adoption as has been predicted, then Europe's going to have to turn to power rationing until they can build out the necessary infrastructure. And I don't think that's going to go over well with the population.
There's also the research that indicates that internal combustion motive engines in personal transport like cars, boats, and motorcycles have a comparatively negligible impact on greenhouse gases and airborne toxins in the modern age. The numbers dropped dramatically throughout the 1980s and then again in the 2010s, driven by CAFE (Corporate Average Fleet Emissions) standards in the U.S. and Euro 1 through 6 in Europe. I used the word comparatively earlier, because industry is the main contributor. Industries such as steel manufacturing, power generation, air transport, and farming are the biggest contributors to greenhouse gasses, while industries such as plastics manufacturing, ocean transport, and underground resource extraction are the biggest contributors to airborne toxins. There's been a lot of regulatory movement to restrict motor vehicles, but very little for industrial level problems. Bunker fuel, which is almost entirely sulfurous tar fuel oil, has been the standard for large container ships since the 1940s. Only in 2020 was there a global agreement to reduce the sulfur content in bunker fuel used by ships. Meanwhile there has been absolutely no substantial progress on the four major types of aviation fuel that are used. High octane kerosene jet fuel, low octane kerosene jet fuel, unleaded aviation gasoline, and leaded aviation gasoline. Aviation fuel is the only type in the U.S. that's still allowed to contain tetraethyl lead. Airliners continue using high octane kerosene jet fuel, while the military, farmers, and even wildfire firefighting teams continue using leaded aviation gasoline. Regulators continue squeezing the collar ever tighter on cars while airplanes get away with poisoning their maintenance crews and the people they fly over.
My personal conclusion has been that diversification and control of industrial emissions seems to be the solution, not concentration in EVs. Certain engines such as the Wankel and diesel will certainly have to die as the power/emissions ratio for them is atrocious. But Atkins cycle engines for example can work on hydrogen. For other engines pure E100 ethanol, while having about the same carbon dioxide output as and lower energy density than gasoline, is viable via compression ratio increases. Compression ratio increases also tend to create more drivetrain power output, so it's not really a mechanical loss. Ethanol's also renewable. The issues are that hydrogen is expensive to create and contain in pure enough form to be used as fuel, and ethanol requires large amounts of industrial farming that contribute to greenhouse gasses.
