California will give $2000 if owners convert their ICE cars to EV (opens in new tab)

It's an excellent idea if the conversion market can be bootstrapped. In France there are already firms offering the service.

Millions of cars exist in the roads and they have 90% of what an electric car needs. There is absolutely no point of sending them to the garbage pile and remanufacture then add electrics, all for the good of the environment.

Why are legislature actions written about this way?

Everything about bills, even other branches of government like court cases are written so ambiguously, you never know from the headline or article about where the bill is in the process, what court is involved to gauge effect, but compared to something high tech there has been hundreds of years to get better at that

I agree with your comment

It's targeted towards ideologues who want to see something done. Not all legislation is meant to be actionable unfortunately

There are cheaper mid-range cars that can be totaled by expensive engine maintenance, in such cases it might make more sense to convert them to EVs instead of swapping an engine or rebuilding one.

A 2008 Toyota Corolla will still be running in 2030, so it isn't really the prime target for a conversion. A 2014 Audi A4 would be.

> No-one is doing a bottom of the barrel EV conversion on a run down 2008 toyota corolla.

Right, but California wants them to, so they are offering a subsidy.

The EV market is still growing and we will have to re-invent a lot of the well-established secondary ICE markets. These markets include engine rebuild, transmission rebuild, and component rebuild (starters, batteries, alternators, water pumps, etc.)

California is subsidizing the creation of secondary markets for reusing EV battery packs while also potentially increasing demand and service life for used cars. A savvy EV converter might target cars with particularly weak or undesirable powertrains for conversion. 2008 Toyota Corollas are already in high demand, but what about a mid-2000s GM crossover SUV?

> no-one will actually use it because EV conversions are exceptionally rare and generally high priced.

Damn, if only there was a way for the government to make conversions less expensive and provide an incentive to grow that industry...

California has had a cash for clunkers type of program off and on for many years. Basically, if you had a car n years old that was still passing smogchecks (ie, still on the road) then the state would offer to buy it off you for $2000 and then crush it. This had the unintended side effect of making it harder for teens to buy their first cars.

Anyway, California already has a pattern of behavior to spend 2 grand to take a polluter off the road. This bill seems to be in the same vein but instead of the car getting crushed, it stays on the road as an EV.

I wouldn't be so sure! There are companies which are developing ICE->EV conversion kits which put the price point in a pretty reasonable place.

This company has it down to 5000 Euros: https://youtu.be/98mlJ1N50DU

That 5000 figure is after EU subsidies, so who knows how such a system would shake out with CA subsidies, but even still: it's possible.

I wouldn't be so sure. That's exactly the kind of project my dad loves to do to his old cars. $2k isn't going to break even, but it's a nice little marginal incentive.

Im a master diesel engine mechanic by trade and I can say with all certitude $2000 doesnt begin to cover parts labor and disposal.

the engine in a car, even a 20 year old car, is a touchstone of the vehicle. Things like air conditioning, heat, and windshield wipers often only run on vacuum from the engine. traction control, antilock brakes and AWD all rely on engine speed sensors from either the crankpin position or transmission data and have to be considered as well. ECU states in turn send measured return data to things like ECC components (radio, etc..) and even the anti-theft system. Engine data is even a component of the SRS (airbag) system in a lot of cars.

I would bill ten or fifteen hours of labor to safely drop the transmission and change an engine. then i would bill you for fluid disposal and parts disposal and we're assuming you have a drop-in replacement kit for the ECU/OBD components youll need to power things like brake lights and turn signals because they wont work without some input on the engine status either. Id also have to have an installer certified for the high voltage stuff, typically billed higher than a normal mechanic because electric cars are still pretty exotic for aftermarket custom maintenance.

A lot of the conversions that I've seen use smaller packs, like 60KWh or less. And most of them use used Tesla motors and packs. So perhaps this is where the price comes from ... the fact that the pack & motor are used. But $14k does seem quite low, considering the labor involved..

> I think this would be a fun project for a vehicle hobbyist but I can't even fathom doing this for $14k and a $2k rebate is not much of an incentive in my opinion.

The point to the rebate, FWIW, is to increase uptake at the margins. The assumption is that there is a population of users desiring the change for some external reason, and that a significant number of those are "on the edge" because of cost. So for comparably little public expenditure you can get an amplified signal. Think of the rebate spending as the base current in a transistor.

Given that you're already in a population (truck owners) who are heavily anticorrelated with the target population (people who want an EV), you aren't likely to be well served.

If the government wanted to get everyone to drive an EV from first principles, they'd just buy you a Rivian.

Sodium Ion chemistries will drop to $40/kwh at pack level, based on bill of materials.

So a 100 kwhr battery will be 4,000$, and that is likely overkill for almost all conversions.

I would imagine these would be "city car" 100-150 mile range conversions, so probably 40-50kwhr packs and 2,000$.

YEs that is OEM supply cost, so we'll see what happens.

I think they'll become huge in classic cars, because the EV motor is compact, and the batteries can be placed in flexible ways. Classic car owners can ditch inefficient motors that they have no parts for. It's not like classic car owners routinely drive 1000 miles, they just toot around on the weekends/

I would wager that most of the people in support of this law didn't even think about your use case (a truck), and if they did, they probably just assumed that nobody with a truck actually needs one (something I hear regularly asserted all the time), and after you give them a use case they'll just say "well most people don't actually need them" as if that makes it ok now to utterly screwing that minority using the law.

By the time they're done with it, it won't just be the rebate (carrot of "carrot and stick") they'll use to motivate you. It will also be when gas $30+ per gallon (stick of "carrot and stick") as a result of other policies they'll develop when people aren't moving fast enough to get electified. Between artificial production limits/quotas/taxes/etc the EV cost to own and drive will be a lot more competitive and most people will do what they want just to stop the pain.

I think EVs are the natural future as tech improves (and I'm glad for it because we do have to get away from combustion for energy), but the amount of pain and suffering people are willing to inflict on others in order to accelerate the timeline really shocks me sometimes.

It's never going to be any sort of economical to do this on a already existing truck, you'll get complete trash efficiency.

Yep. No way it's going to cost 14k, even where I live (Portugal) where labour costs are significantly lower than the US, you'll pay a few k for a "simple" engine swap.

I have some experience with this.

I live in California, have a Subaru BRZ, and for a while I had a Flex Fuel "kit" installed onto my fuel line/ECU, along with a specialized tune.

At least for that platform the cost depends on how you want to run E85. For me it was roughly $2000 or a bit more for: the tune itself (on a dyno, there are some canned tunes that are cheaper but not necessarily as reliable), the flex fuel kit, and the license for the tuning platform.

In the end, the mileage was worse. I think on pump 91 I can average 26mpg with a good mix of highway/city driving, less if purely city.

With E85 I was lucky to get 16-18mpg. And I've heard it's worse for cars with more power (BRZ's are relatively underpowered, about 185hp at the wheels).

Price-wise, E85 was cheaper, sometimes a difference of $1 to $1.50 less than pump 91 (required octane for my car).

I guess it depends on what the goal is, because for some cars it'll mean filling up a lot more often; I'd be curious if the delta in emissions between pump 87/91 and E85 is substantial enough for the additional fill-ups to be worthwhile.

E85 hurts fuel economy too much for that to make sense in a "zero carbon by 2035-2045" timeline. The Ford Taurus from the 90s would get 12.8 mpg on E85 in city driving, vs 18 mpg on gasoline. Plus, additional ethanol production would drive up food costs even more.

California's gas is already E10 (and they'd probably go higher if it wasn't illegal federally).

There is even a TV show (based in UK ) where they do classic cars conversions to EVs, called "Vintage voltage", the conversions they make consider all the related issues (weight/braking/etc.), though they don't look like cheap at all.

No idea how they actually manage to have the modified cars approved for street use, though in the UK AFAIK there are more possibilities (for prototypes and similar) than in the rest of Europe.

But there has been recently another show, this time Italian, called "Electromod con Mario Biondi", so there must be some way even in other EU countries.

There's a small market for converting vintage cars to EVs. The cars are already unsafe, so it's a way for enthusiasts to save a car's body long after the drivetrain has failed.

I would not worry about weight distribution too much. That is the easy part. You just pile upp batteries where the engine block used to be and the luggage department up to the original weight.

The main concern is probably electrical safety and fire protection for the batteries.

People do not charge at peak time, PG&E is waaaaay too expensive at peak time for that :)

Do people usually charge at peak time?

This is what I was worried about. It's unfortunate when subsidies end up only making a few people's hobby cheaper.

This sounds pretty reasonable actually, but it would need to account for miles driven too. Does Norway?

Any sort of mass transit system requires a certain density of locations and passengers to make sense. While there are certainly urban centers in the United States that answer to that description, a good chunk of the country doesn't. There was a recent HN article that talked about this a little bit (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34475508). Whether your goal is to cut emissions or cost, it seems like there would be a good chunk of the States (in both space and population) where more net harm would be done than good.

On a less strictly policy level, the idea of "punish everyone until they do what I want" makes me at least a bit uncomfortable. On top of the authoritarian undertones to it, there is the more basic idea that clearly a large amount of the population doesn't believe that switching to an EV is in their best interests. People can certainly be wrong, but disregarding the signal out of hand seems a bit short-sighted.

Or we could do both? Personal transportation is never going away completely. Personal transportation should absolutely subsidize public transportation such as through car tabs. But we can still incentivize the types of personal transportation we want to see on the road through subsidy, especially when those markets are still emerging.

>The correct sustainable choice is to use public transit

How do you know this?