The European Commission unveiled a plan on Tuesday to drop the EU’s effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035 after pressure from the region’s auto sector, marking the bloc’s biggest retreat from its green policies in recent years.
The move, which still needs approval from EU governments and the European Parliament, would allow continued sales of some non-electric vehicles. Carmakers in regional industrial powerhouse Germany and in Italy had sought easing of the rules.
The EU executive appears to have bowed to calls from carmakers to keep selling plug-in hybrids and range extenders that burn fuel as they struggle to compete against Tesla, opens new tab and Chinese electric vehicle makers.
Yeah, EVs will naturally take over the market as they become more desirable/affordable. Meanwhile, if anything, banning ICE cars will make personal cars even more of a luxury.
Why would it be more of a luxury? Fuel and maintenance should be cheaper, and with proper investments the cars should be cheaper as well. A lot of the battery research right now is showing batteries that could last say 1,000,000 miles. If you get decent standards for such, you could have parents getting a new car and moving their old battery into a cheap EV for their teenager. If it had 200,000 miles on it, they can keep moving it to their next vehicle, and next vehicle if they keep wanting to get new features. The average American drives 14,000 miles a year. In theory they can pass that battery down to their teenager as well, but at that point it’s probably better to just recycle it or use it as a backup generator for the home.
Making repairable, recyclable, reusable batteries takes one of the largest costs down by a long shot.
Notre; Obviously batteries don’t last miles, but for sake of this discussion it made sense to put it this way
But in much of the EU, electricity is expensive.
I had an EV for a while (tons of people have company cars in Belgium) and charging it at a fast charging station costs like 10% more per km than gas. A regular charging station is very slightly cheaper.
Charging at home used to be cheaper, but now energy companies charge a fee for “peak energy usage” that is more than 15 minutes, so if you charge your car at 11kW at home once in a month, you will get an extra fee on your 250€/month energy bill of 50€.
I am interested in that battery research though, because charge-cycle wise, only lithium iron phosphate subsection of EV battery chemistry would last even near that long. Lithium ion only lasts 500 cycles before degrading to 70% and LiPo is only 1000. My ID4 could do 420 km on a charge, assuming a LiPo composition, that is 420k kilometers, which is a quarter of what you say. That said, that is a pretty long lifetime for a car. Especially because all of the sensor systems would break down or be remotely disabled to force you to buy new ones long before then.
The crash in the cost of Renewables is taking care of that.
There are 3 main kinds of energy use in the West:
Only the first one gains from the current trend for ever cheaper electricity from Renewables which is ongoing: for example only a few years ago Gas Power Generation was cheaper than Solar, but now its now anymore.
So to fully take advantage of that trend, as much as possible of power usage in the Economy needs to be Electricity use rather than other sources of power (other renewables too are useful, but it’s in electrical power generation that we are seeing the stronger and most sustained fall in costs).
What you’re seeing in Electricity prices in many countries in Europe still being high is the inertia due to installed infrastructure (I bet Belgium still has lots of Gas Power Plants and buys lots of power from French Nuclear Power Plants) delaying things like fully taking advantage of, for example, very low solar panel costs. Also the installed generation industries are trying to delay the march of renewables - for example France has been for ages blocking the construction of power connection bringing cheaper power from renewables from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe because it would compete with their own sales of Power generated by their Nuclear Power Plants.
Still, for some there are ways to go around it, though depending on one’s own condition - for example if you have your own house, and your car is there for at least part of the time of the day when there is daylight, getting solar panels to help charge that EV makes a lot of sense because one can feed the other directly and that power is at cost (which is basically just the cost of buying and installing the panel) rather than being the 4-times more expensive than wholesale power you get from a retail electricity supplier.
Anyways, the trend in Electricity is for it to get cheaper. The trend in Oil is for it the get more expensive (as the easier to get to reserves get depleted and harder and more costly to extract or process stuff such as tar sands gets used) and the same for Gas but slower (since there are far vaster gas reserves than oil), so it makes some sense in the mid and long term to get the biggest power consumers at home to be using Electricity.
Pretty much everything about an EV can be made to last a milloin miles. Electric motors are rodust, they don’t wear out like ICE engines. No transmission to wear out. Suspension parts can be replaced. You’re pretty much down to rust.
I was thinking about the thing in terms of current purchase costs. Right now there’s a sizeable gap between prices of ICE cars and EVs in the same vehicle category.
That gap will of course get smaller over time.
Which is exactly why the ruling capitalist class is trying so hard to not let that happen. Must consume. Line must go up.
It just means the ruling class made investments in things they haven’t figured out how to capitalize on quickly yet. Really they should be able to switch quickly and drive the market… But propaganda is shackling them to stupidity.
There are very few rich people in the U.S., there are far fewer smart rich people’s in the U.S.