Autoblog: Report: EU working to ban gas and diesel-powered cars by 2050

[katwalk]

Also, if we are moving towards electric cars and saving on fossil fuels, why not ban oil heating in homes and move to electric? An average home in northeast US will go through 50-60 gallons of heating oil a month, which works out at some 8 tons of CO2 per year, or about as much as my car will produce over 4 years doing 15,000 km a year.

This, defiantly this. The biggest issue with electric cars is the fact they need a portable fuel source like batteries. Houses do not move, they are easier to send electricity to.

 

[Dr_Grip]

On NPR today they were reporting that the proposed ban is only for city centers, not all of Europe. Banning all fossil-fuel powered vehicles for the continent would cause the supply lines for food, durable goods, medicine and emergency services to cease to exist.

QFT. I already said that on page one but everyone was too busy going OMG ecomentalists OMG eurocrats to even read Ford's press release. On top of it, it's only a draft by some sub-comittee. It's a good thing to get the lobbying machinery in gear early on, but this thing is not even on the way to become a law right now.
Everybody calm down!

 

[Pedrocas]

1876 - Nikolaus August Otto invented and later patented a successful four-stroke engine, known as the "Otto cycle"
Care to place a bet?

That means nothing. Nowadays technology advances way faster than 130 years ago. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in March of 1876. Martin Cooper came up with the cellphone in 1973. That's almost 100 years between them. 100 years to go from a telephone to a cellphone. Nokia launched the 3210 model in 1999, this being one of Nokia's most famous and most selling cellphone model. Now compare it with the 5800 model Nokia launched in 2008, less than 10 years. Monochromatic screen versus touchscreen. Monotone ringtones versus mp3 ringtones. Snake versus all the apps you can imagine. GPRS versus Wi-fi. All this and more in less than 10 years of evolution. Same goes with the car industry. The forward we move, the faster technology evolves. 40 years from now we may end up driving something completely different from what a car looks like now and call it a normal day ride.

 

[AiR]

You can disagree on the terms if you like but the Fukushima was level 5 of 7 (7 being Chernobyl) and while its not necessarily a disaster in the amount of damage/death toll it's a disaster for nuclear power. The TMI power plant had almost no impact on the environment yet that was one of the main reasons why US has not built a new nuclear power plant in the past 40 years or so? (not 100% on the timing)

You seem to think that I'm against fission power, I am not, I'm all for it I just don't think that with public perception the way it is we are likely to see it used as much as we really need it.

I did think that, sorry if I got agressive

I think the abundance of cheap and cheerful coal also had something to do with the US going for that instead. Especially with the US government and general public caring little about emissions up until very recently. But sure, TMI, where no person was killed or injured in the incident or in the 32 years that have passed, gave the uneducated anti-nuclears something to write on their placards. But their arguments are easily punctured and today the majority of the general public here and in most parts of Europe, coal loving Germany excluded, support nuclear power. As oil becomes more expensive and the effects of coal more apparent, I'm sure the US will come around eventually. According to this news, the US could get two new reactors in 2016.

(US generates 2.928 trillion kilowatt hours per year from fossil fuels, 806.2 billion kilowatt hours per year from nuclear power)

 

[calvinhobbes]

*sigh*

Why the fuck are Euromyths always gobbled up hook, line and sinker?

European Commission is not preparing a ban on cars in city centres
March 28, 2011

Contrary to comments made by a government Minister today, the European Commission is not considering an EU level ban on cars in city centres by 2050. Cities are of course best placed to decide their own transport mix.

Today?s Transport White Paper acknowledges that many European cities are struggling with the challenges of congestion, noise pollution, traffic jams and so on. Something needs to be done and phasing out conventional combustion engines is a realistic objective. The role of the European level is to help the shift to alternative forms of transport take place, and make them more attractive to users.

No one city or even country can act alone to bring on stream the technologies needed to tackle the challenges of transport in Europe?s cities. That is where action at European level can help. But a blanket ban on conventional cars is not on the table.

 

[Cobol74]

This is a standard Political manoeuver - trail (in the press) something see who objects assess the opposition then do it if opposition is slight or run away if opposition is strong.

But really why was it anything to do with the EU? Bunch of 'snout in the trough' pigs.

 

[calvinhobbes]

But really why was it anything to do with the EU? Bunch of 'snout in the trough' pigs.

The EU is the ideal scapegoat for national-level politicians, jingoists, archconservatives, xenophobes and other assorted pigheads. Not that there aren't any pigheads in the EU, but that's not what you asked.

 

[Cobol74]

I do not like our Politicians and I particularly hate EU Politicians. They are ours + extra crap that cost even more money.

 

[prizrak]

Need I remind you that the electric powered car is over 100 years old as well.

Do you play Forza 3? It has some nice little automotive facts in-between races. One of them says that electric cars were popular at turn of the century because they went slower and were quit so they didn't scare the horses. That made me crack up

On topic, that is exactly my point ICE has been basically the same since 19th Century, same thing for electrics. Battery technology has been around in a basic form since 250BC. Battery tech did improve quite a bit from 20th to 21st century but we have not seen much of an improvement in the past decade. Our electronics last better on batteries because we are better at making electronics that don't use much power not because of better batteries.

Problem with BEVs is that the batteries don't hold nearly enough charge to be anywhere near ICE based vehicles for range/power. There is also the issue with refueling it takes me about 5 minutes to fill my tank to the brim, it takes 20-30 to get a BEV to about 80% capacity. Another possibly minor but important thing is that estimating fuel usage is a lot more accurate than estimating battery usage. A/C, radio, navigation make very little impact in modern cars, in electric cars on the other hand it makes a much larger difference so there is a greater chance of running out of power.

QFT. I already said that on page one but everyone was too busy going OMG ecomentalists OMG eurocrats to even read Ford's press release. On top of it, it's only a draft by some sub-comittee. It's a good thing to get the lobbying machinery in gear early on, but this thing is not even on the way to become a law right now.
Everybody calm down!

Stop bringing facts into this, this is not how internet works!

That means nothing. Nowadays technology advances way faster than 130 years ago. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in March of 1876. Martin Cooper came up with the cellphone in 1973. That's almost 100 years between them. 100 years to go from a telephone to a cellphone. Nokia launched the 3210 model in 1999, this being one of Nokia's most famous and most selling cellphone model. Now compare it with the 5800 model Nokia launched in 2008, less than 10 years. Monochromatic screen versus touchscreen. Monotone ringtones versus mp3 ringtones. Snake versus all the apps you can imagine. GPRS versus Wi-fi. All this and more in less than 10 years of evolution. Same goes with the car industry. The forward we move, the faster technology evolves. 40 years from now we may end up driving something completely different from what a car looks like now and call it a normal day ride.

ICE are also being made/used/improved nowadays, yet we have seen very slow and slight evolution of it. Electronics are not a very strong example, the major breakthrough in the field of electronics was a transistor since then all we have been doing is using the same transistors but making them smaller and smaller. There has been no breakthrough in the computing field on par with the transistor invention. Making transistors smaller is not THAT difficult as it mostly requires more precision than any kind of innovative technological approach.

Also keep in mind that 40 year time span is not much in car terms considering that average life of a car is 5-10 years. Mine is 7 years old (2004 MY) and is far from outdated in pretty much every possible way. Even IF (and thats a huge if right there) there is a major breakthrough in engineering/design of cars it is still not really enough to get rid of ICE vehicles. For this to conceivably happen we need to have nothing but electrics being produced within the next 10 years or so.

I did think that, sorry if I got agressive

I think the abundance of cheap and cheerful coal also had something to do with the US going for that instead. Especially with the US government and general public caring little about emissions up until very recently. But sure, TMI, where no person was killed or injured in the incident or in the 32 years that have passed, gave the uneducated anti-nuclears something to write on their placards. But their arguments are easily punctured and today the majority of the general public here and in most parts of Europe, coal loving Germany excluded, support nuclear power. As oil becomes more expensive and the effects of coal more apparent, I'm sure the US will come around eventually. According to this news, the US could get two new reactors in 2016.

(US generates 2.928 trillion kilowatt hours per year from fossil fuels, 806.2 billion kilowatt hours per year from nuclear power)

No worries That is good news I'm hoping for more nuclear power and less fossil burning. I know EU is better with using nuclear (especially France).

 

[MadCat360]

On topic, that is exactly my point ICE has been basically the same since 19th Century, same thing for electrics. Battery technology has been around in a basic form since 250BC. Battery tech did improve quite a bit from 20th to 21st century but we have not seen much of an improvement in the past decade. Our electronics last better on batteries because we are better at making electronics that don't use much power not because of better batteries.

Logically speaking the longer something goes without major change the more likely it is that it will change soon. Saying modern engines are basically the same as engines from 1900 is kinda true, but so is saying that modern medicine is basically the same as 1,000 years ago, or that modern life is basically the same as the first multicelled organism. Reducing the complexity of your considerations is misleading. The only way to get the truth is to consider the totality of the development in question.

 

[narf]

Also, if we are moving towards electric cars and saving on fossil fuels, why not ban oil heating in homes and move to electric? An average home in northeast US will go through 50-60 gallons of heating oil a month, which works out at some 8 tons of CO2 per year, or about as much as my car will produce over 4 years doing 15,000 km a year.

Using oil for heating is much more efficient than using oil for electricity generation and then using the electricity for simple heat generation. Converting electricity to heat is good, pretty much an efficiency of 1. Converting oil into heat is also good, pretty much an efficiency of 1. However, converting oil into electricity is bad - depending on the plant you're looking at maybe 30-40%, too lazy to google.
Hence, oil -> heat yields roughly 1 while oil -> electricity -> heat yields roughly 0.4*1 = 0.4. Over half of the energy content of oil is wasted along the way.
It's a different story when heating with non-fossil-fuel electricity obviously... but then it still would be more efficient to turn off more oil/coal plants and use the oil/coal to heat your home instead.


Also, how to you arrive at 8 tons of CO2 for 60 gallons of oil burnt? As a rough figure, you get 3kg of CO2 per litre of oil burnt. 60 gallons is about 227l, so you'd get about 681kg of CO2.
Going the other way around, with 60 gallons of diesel your car will maybe do 3000 miles (50mpgus) or almost 5000 km - in other words, one month of home heating is four months of your driving, not four years.

 

[prizrak]

Logically speaking the longer something goes without major change the more likely it is that it will change soon.

Not really, there is such a thing as a plateau. Look at CPUs for a great example of this, there was a time where clock speeds were getting higher and higher with every generation. Lately however the speeds have not been changing because we pretty much reached the limit of the technology. Nowadays its all about the number of transistors you can put in a core and a number of cores you can cram into a CPU.

Saying modern engines are basically the same as engines from 1900 is kinda true

The problem is that engines have been the same since the 1900s, there are tighter tolerances now that result in less energy loss, there is better control over the spark distribution and AFRs, there have been improvements in materials and things like variable timing/exhaust but by and large the engine of today is very much the engine of 100 years ago.

modern medicine is basically the same as 1,000 years ago, or that modern life is basically the same as the first multicelled organism.

That's just silly. Modern medicine can look inside of a person without opening one up, it knows a ton of different causes for different diseases and can treat a large number of them, it can give a man a power prosthetic instead of a lost limb. Same thing with our life, in the developed world life is about having information and ability to manipulate it, in a tribe somewhere in South America its about being the fastest to kill w/e it is they would eat. Granted the basics are still there but the mechanisms for surviving and thriving are hugely different.

educing the complexity of your considerations is misleading. The only way to get the truth is to consider the totality of the development in question.

See the issue is that even if we suppose that there is a possible technological break through in the works for cars even if it happens tomorrow it will still take years for market viability. I mean look at fuel cells, they are pretty much awesome in every possible way and they have been around since 1842 yet right now there are only London cabs and Honda Clarity that are actually using them commercially.

It takes years, in some cases decades or even centuries in order for technology to become viable in the market especially if it's brand new. The reason why everyone is jumping on the hybrid and BEV bandwagon is because these cars are relatively simple to produce and parts are relatively cheap. There are ton of factories making electric motors and also a ton of factories that make batteries so making the two bigger and sticking them in a car doesn't require any major investment on the part of either of the manufacturers. Building components for a Mr. Fusion would require completely new technological processes as no one is currently making parts for them. The only way technological break throughs are quickly adaptod is when they use current technology to do something different. Like the iPhone or the Nokia you mentioned, there is nothing inherently original about those phones, it's a creative use of currently available technology.

 

[pepitko]

Using oil for heating is much more efficient than using oil for electricity generation and then using the electricity for simple heat generation. Converting electricity to heat is good, pretty much an efficiency of 1. Converting oil into heat is also good, pretty much an efficiency of 1. However, converting oil into electricity is bad - depending on the plant you're looking at maybe 30-40%, too lazy to google.
Hence, oil -> heat yields roughly 1 while oil -> electricity -> heat yields roughly 0.4*1 = 0.4. Over half of the energy content of oil is wasted along the way.
It's a different story when heating with non-fossil-fuel electricity obviously... but then it still would be more efficient to turn off more oil/coal plants and use the oil/coal to heat your home instead.

That is a valid point, and adds weight to my underlying argument that you can't just go around and start converting everything to be electricity powered, if you aren't making the electricity in a greener and/or more efficient way such as covernting oil/gas/coal power plants into nuclear.

I can't find how much electricity do you need to heat an average house, but let's say its 1500kWh/month, if you used the same amount for AC during summer to even out the annualconsumption, and powered everything by coal, which on average produces 570 grams of CO2 per kWh (too lazy to google where I found it), so you are producing some 10 tons of CO2 per year. So it really depends on where the power is coming from, so for me, nuclear is the way to go.

Also, how to you arrive at 8 tons of CO2 for 60 gallons of oil burnt? As a rough figure, you get 3kg of CO2 per litre of oil burnt. 60 gallons is about 227l, so you'd get about 681kg of CO2.
Going the other way around, with 60 gallons of diesel your car will maybe do 3000 miles (50mpgus) or almost 5000 km - in other words, one month of home heating is four months of your driving, not four years.

You arrived at the same figures as I have, I said one year of heating equals for years of driving .

 

[Dr_Grip]

This is a standard Political manoeuver - trail (in the press) something see who objects assess the opposition then do it if opposition is slight or run away if opposition is strong.

But really why was it anything to do with the EU? Bunch of 'snout in the trough' pigs.

The EU is the ideal scapegoat for national-level politicians, jingoists, archconservatives, xenophobes and other assorted pigheads. Not that there aren't any pigheads in the EU, but that's not what you asked.

I do not like our Politicians and I particularly hate EU Politicians. They are ours + extra crap that cost even more money.

There are lots of things politicians do that can rightfully be critizised, especially regarding the bloat of national and EU level administration.

This case is not one of these things.

An internal paper by some comittee has been misrepresented as an actual draft for a EU regulation (which would have to be made national law) by Ford of Europe in a lobbying initiative. That's not exactly fair play, but i'd count it as an instance of "in love and politics, everything goes".

Then Autoblog comes along and in an all-too-obvious case of trying to boost click numbers (and thus, ad revenue) dramatically overstates the content of Ford's press release (by turning "ban petrol powered cars from city centers" into "OMG all petrol powered cars will be banned"). That i just can't accept as it is a brutal breach of any kind of ethics of journalism, be it online or offline.

I can't see how the politicians are to blame for Ford and Autoblog misrepresenting and overstating facts. Drafting out several ideas, some practical and others not-so-practical and discuss them in some committee is an important part of the lawmaking process which ideally ends with the rubbish ideas (like this one) being thrown out before even debated in Parliament. Someone drafts this idea, the committee says "well, that's a nice plan, but it belongs on a local level", the idea gets scrapped, all move on.
The EU politicians did not even "trail" this idea to the press - Ford of Europe did.

While i am a supporter of the EU as a concept, i certainly am no supporter of the current waterhead state of affairs in Brussels. But i still think fingers should be pointed in the right direction instead of just defaulting to point at the EU administration.

 

[93Flareside]

They're going to ban fossil fuels, to try and get us to use more HYBRID'S. Last time I checked, they use a fossil fuel engine to charge the batteries...

 

[Dr_Grip]

They're going to ban fossil fuels, to try and get us to use more HYBRID'S. Last time I checked, they use a fossil fuel engine to charge the batteries...

Have you even read my post above? Or Ford's press release?
No, you just read the stupid Autoblog headline and posted away...

EDIT: Christopher, that's not directed at you personally. The majority of posts in this thread suffer from the "haven't read post #1 thoroughly" problem, yours just was the one too many. No offense intended.

 

[calvinhobbes]

I still think fingers should be pointed in the right direction instead of just defaulting to point at the EU administration.

EU = evil, I will believe any accusation

That's the entire thought process many people go through.

 

[katwalk]

EUAny government = evil, I will believe any accusation

That's the entire thought process many people go through.

ftfy

 

[Dr_Grip]

kat, you don't really want to live in a world without a government, believe me. Criminal groups like the somalian pirates are one of the better possible results of the absence of a government, mass rape and slaughter like in Darfur or Rwanda are worse scenarios.

The question weather there's too much government (buerocratic/corrupt bloat, welfare state, health care, but also wiretapping and the taking of personal liberties), if there's too much regulation from a federal or supranational level, these are things one can debate about. But not even radical libertarian or anarcho-capitalist thinkers like Robert Nozick or Jan Narveson want to do away with government altogether.

EDIT: kat, if you just wanted to describe other people's anti-government stance, please read above as "kat, these people dont really want to live..."

 

[Cobol74]

kat, you don't really want to live in a world without a government, believe me. Criminal groups like the somalian pirates are one of the better possible results of the absence of a government, mass rape and slaughter like in Darfur or Rwanda are worse scenarios.

The question weather there's too much government (buerocratic/corrupt bloat, welfare state, health care, but also wiretapping and the taking of personal liberties), if there's too much regulation from a federal or supranational level, these are things one can debate about. But not even radical libertarian or anarcho-capitalist thinkers like Robert Nozick or Jan Narveson want to do away with government altogether.

I agree with you we need a government to decide upon laws and run a 'liberal' state.

But - too much government - no that is not the real issue; it is the quality of people who are making up the government. They are selfish, self seeking, line their pockets with the poor punter's cash bunch of crooks, with no real honest beliefs.

The only difference between the European Politicians and the ones in-charge of the people you quote above is the quantum of their treachery.

BBC take on the topic. ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12879566