- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
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.
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Okay, but give us better public transport options instead!
Yes, a habitable planet for humanity would be nice, but have you considered the portfolios of a few selfish assholes?
But have you considered that those assholes lobbied very hard to protect their interest? Shouldn’t their money and time investment be rewarded?
/s just in case
It’s only fair!
We are going extinct.
We’re finally hitting the brakes…
Regarding environmental protection.
… Again
What reset? This sounds made up.
These morons lost the EV race to china so they are trying their hardest to keep that oldass tech alive.
Lmao.
“We’re losing the race!”
" I know… Run slower!"
I’m really wondering how the west thinks they’ll continue to sell this cold war with China.
China: Please buy our better products that we are selling at lower prices.
The West: China is trying to destroy the western world! We must prepare for war!
Everyone with an Internet connection: Uh, yeah, can we get one of those electric cars that cost half as much and is better in every way?
The funny thing is that the answer to the wests failures is literally just to be more like China. Central planning in vital sectors like infrastructure and transportation. Instead we just have a ruling class that wants to burn oil and start wars with countries that aren’t attacking us.
We literally just stole an oil ship because we made up a rule about trade that we don’t allow between two completely independent countries that never agreed to that rule. It’s comical how awful we are.
Like, for some reason Venezuela can’t sell oil to Cuba because we said so. That’s it. It’s literally just because we said so.
The funny thing is that the answer to the wests failures is literally just to be more like China. Central planning in vital sectors like infrastructure and transportation. Instead we just have a ruling class that wants to burn oil and start wars with countries that aren’t attacking us.
That would require giving up on the ultra-liberal reduced-state no-regulation orthodoxy which has put so much power in the hands of Money and money in the pockets of Politicians.
The entire top of the current Western power structures is against it, hence we’re going down the route of Collapse Through Stagnation.
The greed and power tripping is a dangerous thing.
Realitätsverlust.
Removed by mod
Was ist denn dein Problem? Scheiterst du an der Herausforderung, das Wort mit der Story in Einklang zu bringen?
Tatsächlich kann ich mit diesem einzelnen Wort nichts anfangen, es sei denn, du möchtest sagen, dass Europa bei EVs nicht komplett von China abgehängt wurde. In diesem Fall wärst du aber saudämlich.
Nein. Der Realitätsverlust ist auf Seiten der Europäischen Kommission zu verorten. Nun kannst du die Punkte bestimmt verbinden.
keeping the russia and the MIDDLE east economy afloat, because the politicians pockets are in too deep with these 2 countries
this is what pisses me off about every net zero by 2050 or whenever plan, they will do nothing until 2045 and then just give up or kick the can again.
“We didn’t put in any effort until the last minute and now we can’t easily do it. It’s not fair to our shareholders”
If I tried to use that bs as a a reason for being late ate work I wouldn’t have a job there anymore
Or expelled with the same attitude towards rent
Or a presentation or an essay or exercise or utility bills or…
Or what?
So from 2035 it was supposed to be possible to only sell cars with 100% reduction in CO2 emissions. They want to change it to 90% reduction and still allow to sell plug-in-hybrids which is bullshit because recent analysis of real life usage show that plug-in hybrids run on gas most of the time and are not nearly as efficient as estimated. They should focus on building charging infrastructure instead. German car industry is dying anyway.
In Madrid there are several car sharing services. One of them is a joint venture between a major oil company (Repsol) and Kia. I use them sometimes. I have never seen one charging, or used one with an electrical charge. They always run on the ICE engine.
I wonder how plug-in hybrids are that bad in terms of gas-to-electric ratio. Might need a proper source on that. Most usage should be from work-home travel, and that should be reachable with just electric power.
Maybe the solution is not simply to block hybrids, but to solve the reasons they don’t drive electric. This could be putting more chargers at home/workplace or something else entirely (idk what the analysis pointed out as reason)
“27% of driving was done in electric mode” - this is how. It doesn’t point at any reason for that. And yes, there may be a solution to this but we don’t know if it even exists. We should first try to make plug-ins more efficient and then consider excluding them from the ban. Of course this decision has nothing to do with efficiency, it’s just Germany desperately trying to save their weakening economy.
The thing is, if only 27% drive in electric mode, that indicates deeper problems. If it was possible for people to easily charge their vehicles, most would use electricity, it’s way cheaper. The fact they aren’t indicates that the infrastructure just isn’t there. Most people don’t live in the suburbs, and I don’t know for other countries but here like 70% of parking is done on the street or on open parking lots. Even in larger garages, I don’t think there’s a single one here with more than a token 4-5 charging stations. We have to first fix that before electric cars become viable for the majority of people. If this bans normal ICE cars but leaves plug-in hybrids I think that’s actually fine, since as infrastructure improves these cars will become more and more like full EVs.
That’s not the point. EU wanted to go for 100% reduction in CO2 emissions from cars sold after 2035. Now car manufacturers are pushing for 90% reduction because they failed to adapt in time. In reality there’s only 30% reduction in hybrids. Even if the infrastructure is there and we reach 90% of battery driving for plug-ins that’s still less than the initial plan. But there are no plans to actually achieve the 90% battery usage so it’s all bullshit. They simply want to keep selling gas engines and plug-in hybrids are just the latest lie they want to use to avoid the ban. The first lie was e-fuels but I guess they realized now this is not going to work.
They want to keep making money on polluting technology and it’s up to us to figure out how to create the infrastructure to make it less polluting. It’s plastic recycling all over again.
The great thing is that it won’t matter. EVs are going to become extremely cheaper and more efficient, making them the clear choice over the next couple years.
Cheaper for the industry to manufacture, certainly. Cheaper for the consumer to purchase, I have my suspicions.
I would love to see a return to smaller cars - sedans even - but the shareholders might not like lower profits per unit, so I’m not sure we’re going to see prices plateau let alone decline.
I don’t drive but I’d like to see a return to cars that aren’t Orwellian spying devices.
Cheaper for the consumer to purchase, I have my suspicions.
Why would it be cheaper to produce, but more expensive to purchase? Because of bullshit rules that will not be long lived.
I wish I could share in your optimism.
They’re already very cheap as long as you only want two wheels and aren’t fussed about having a roof.
Yeah, this whole thing sounds a lot like a section of horse-drawn carriage industry going down the route of committing suicide by using crooked politicians to try and stop the march of evolution via legislation rather that the route of adapting to an unstoppable change and thus surviving.
In 20 years time most of the companies pushing for this will be either be gone or become cottage shops and this shit will almost certainly also have negatively impacted the rest of the industry in Europe.
Opens new tab?
had to hide the porn one
I think this is the difference between opening doors to the future vs closing doors to the past. When China funded EVs and battery research, they opened the door to the future. When the EU and US try to ban gas engines, they are trying to close the door to the past. Guess which one works.
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.
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
Battery cells degrade very different depending on how they are used. The cycles you mention are the typical values for charging up to 100% and then emptying them completely. This isn’t how EVs are usually driven. Cells that are only charged to about 80% most of the time live longer. And with large arrays of cells as in an EV battery, the charging electronics also don’t just charge and discharge all cells evenly but can optimize for lifetime. Many EVs also don’t charge all cells to full when the car says it’s at 100% to increase the lifetime (that’s why you sometimes see a “net capacity” mentioned, it’s the amount of energy the battery management actually allows compared to what the cells could do).
There are also studies that show that typical usage patterns with small charges all the time (from recuperating) and having long rest times (when the car is parked somewhere) results in a much longer lifetime than simulations with constant use had given, e.g. here: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/12/existing-ev-batteries-may-last-up-to-40-longer-than-expected
Battery chemistry is of course also something there is new developments in, for example CATL is starting production of sodium ion batteries, but AFAIK these are more about cost per capacity than lifetime.
The crash in the cost of Renewables is taking care of that.
There are 3 main kinds of energy use in the West:
- Things that use electricity, which nowadays includes EVs
- Things that use oil or one of its derivatives, which nowadays is mainly ICE vehicles.
- Things that use gas or one if its derivatives, which nowadays is mainly cooking and home heating.
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.
2024 reports in Belgium say 42% nuclear (53% import, indeed from France), 17.3% gas, and 17.9% wind, biofuel at 3%, and solar at 11.9% (probably mostly from residential feedback).
So gas is pretty much being eliminated. It dropped from 30% in 2020 to 17.3% in 2024.
And prices have only gone up with those savings. But that probably has to do more with extremely corrupt scammers that we have as energy companies. For example in the oil crisis at the start of the Russian invasion, gas exploded in price (3x more expensive) in November. My gas company (Mega) tried to say that we used 99.7% of our gas in November and December only. We apparently only used the equivalent of a single hot shower through the rest of the year. We work with a monthly “estimated usage” payment and then the difference between actual usage is paid at the end of the year. This resulted in us having a 3500€ bill at the end of the year.
Luckily we had a (now standard) smart meter so we could prove via a 3rd party that they were flat out lying and scamming us, but then it was “oopsie poopsie, how could we know??” Anyway, they get record profits every year, so that is probably a lot of the reason
Yeah, that’s also what I see in my home country - Portugal - which even though it has a ton of electricity generated from renewables (outside draught years, the average is now around 75%, down to around 45% in draught years because so much of it is hydro) but electricity prices aren’t really down much.
The local scam, set up by the totally corrupt politicians we have around here, was to increase “connection to the network” fees and “administrative” costs, so for me who was an early adopter of things like LED lights and even chose the components of my PCs based partly on power consumption hence tend to use a below average amount of power, outside the Winter months (were I use a lot of power for heating, as houses here are shit in terms of thermal isolation), most months half my electricity bill is those costs and only half is the actual cost of the power consumed.
So even that way I described to work around the electricity providers in my last post is only partly useful around here because one pays quite a lot merelly for being connected - I suspect that’s the way politicians together with the largest power companies (the biggest of which being the privatized state power company, which “curiously” employs in highly paid positons lots of politicians from the two main political parties here and is suspect in at least one large corruption case going through the courts) came up with to make sure than in a country with a lot of sun people didn’t just move en masse to self-generation with solar panels: unless one can generate enough to satisfy one’s needs the whole year, day and night (which means not just having more panels, but also sufficient power storage), one still needs a connection to the grid for times when self generation is not enough, and merelly having that connection is expensive.
Unsurprisingly solar self-generation in Portugal - the country in Europe whose capital has the most hours of sunshine of all European capitals - is way below even countries with far worse conditions for it, like Germany.
This is part of what I meant when I talked about the “inertia” in the system: in countries like Belgium and Portugal there’s also a lot of “bought laws”, “bought politicians” and other forms of entrenchment of such big businesses that have nothing to do with free markets and are used to the delay the transition so as to protect the profits of those businesses (and the board memberships and consulting fees they give the politicians).
Normal people then suffer because they’re still paying a lot for something that’s way more cheaper to produce than before.
Compare this with for example Finland, were you can actually get paid (I KID YOU NOT!) for using power at certain times of the day during Summer because there is so much power generation due to renewables that wholesale market prices turn negative and consumers with the kind of contract that fully exposes them to those prices will thus even get such extreme upsides of renewables as getting paid for using power.
This shit will eventually at least partially correct itself one way or the other (for example things like balcony solar will add further pressure for change) but it might take decades and meanwhile the gains of cheaper power generation due to renewables will keep being mostly captured by a handful of people which indirectly does things like delaying EV adoption because people who like you try using EVs (I don’t even have a car because I refuse to get one and can live without one) don’t really gain from having an EV instead of an ICE.
The consequences of the rot at the very top of politics in the Neoliberal age have far more widespread and long-lasting impacts that the it had back in the times when its was merelly people in the city hall getting a brown envelope with money for “expediting” some building license.
Pretty much everything about an EV can be made to last a million miles. Electric motors are robust, 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.
“Opens new tab” ? Is this written by AI?
No, it’s just an artifact of copying reuters
Complete switch to electric will not happen until governments make it possible to essentially get one basic electric vehicle for pennies by trading your old ICE vehicle.
Otherwise guess what, the vast majority of people don’t have 30.000 to drop on a new buy just because maa environment. Saying that, I am all in for a complete switch when there will be affordable cars that can do at least 700km on a charge.
The ban was only on the sale of new cars, not the existing cars on the road.
It would only allow cars emitting 90%less vs 2021 level. It’s not much of a change and it leaves room for innovation. It’s not that bad.
Yall missing the point!
EVs have many flaws. They are not the future.
What all this means is enforced :
. Slavery
. Poverty
. Complete loss of privacy
All of which has nothing to do with what engine is in the car.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Just because something has flaws doesn’t make it bad.
Things are relative. They are better than ICE counterparts for the environment, saying any different is ignoring a mountain of data and evidence to push propaganda.
