[ajsnigrutin]

But nobody forbid horses, cars just became better and people transitioned to a better option.

Here we're forbidding ICE cars without having the infrastructure for electric ones in place and a relatively short time to do it.

[sho_hn]

Well - there are also new external factors motivating this increase in urgency.

[ajsnigrutin]

Like what? CO2? From the industry that is moving from germany to china now, because of cheaper energy sources there (mostly fossil fuel ones)?

Instead of building the infrastructure first, so people would naturally transition to electric, we're forcing people by mandates...

And again, we're doing stuff that affects billions of people and letting the industry pollute as much as ever.

Just an example: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/nw-salmon-sent-to-chin...

[sho_hn]

These are adjacent but separate problems.

Regulating the supply chain for car and battery manufacturing and electricity generation is not trivial, but can be tackled and is perhaps easier than refreshing the fleet of cars. While making the fleet electric you can work on the energy mix in parallel. With combustion engines, there's a lot fewer options to work with.

There are solid models for comparing the footprints of ICE cars and EVs (including models and studies funded by car OEMs, like my employer). Most of them will show you that there's a higher upfront CO2 footprint to manufacturing an EV and therefore a certain number of miles driven until the EV "breaks-even" compared to an equivalent ICE car. There's a lot of factors that read on it - the manufacturing location of the battery (due to local energy mix and shipping overhead) is a major factor, as is battery size, cell chemistry, etc. Once thing that's immediately noticable if you look at the studies done from 2015+ is that the EV industry has managed to outpace basically every prediction for 2020, 2025, already. The trajectory and velocity is good. I'd back that horse. The market can do a lot once it gets going.

[ajsnigrutin]

Not just car manufacturing, a lot of industry is moving from europe to china due to energy prices,.. some literally moving production there, and some left unable to compete in price with china made products.

If we're talking energy generation, we can already forget about solar, since most people will be charging their cars at night... unless the bad scenario plays out and people will be forced to wait in their cars after work every few days to recharge them... but during winter, that's tehnically 'at night' too, since there's not much sunlight left.

I believe that there is a time and place for electric vehicles, but forcefully mandating them without the infrastructure to support them in just short 12 years is way too optimistic. Germany is literally demolishing villages to dig coal for electricity production, everybody is way too afraid of nuclear, and two charging points per 100+ car parking lots are not enough. Even if we start building nuclear powerplants now, it will take 10+ years to get them to produce power (which is funnily enough the main excuse to why we are not building them now, even though we know we'll need them then too).

I might be a pessimist, but i prefer an approach where we build the infrastructure first, and people see all the charge points and lower price and buy electric due do that (instead of a mandate).

[sho_hn]

Can you think of a historic precedent where we ever built infrastructure at scale first without clear incentives or regulation, though? I'll humor you on the preference, but what's the chance of pulling that off? If we had that kind of foresight and predictive planning, we may not even have a climate crisis on our hands. For example, the problems with solar you cite could be mitigated to some extent with grid storage infra too - that we however haven't built in advance. I feel policy making is needed here to advance.

[ajsnigrutin]

You don't need to build all the infrastructure before you introduce electric cars, but you don't ban ICE cars before you have everything built for electric vehicles.

Otherwise, we've done that with many areas, including ICE cars... we didn't forbid horses, cars were just better, and gas stations, repair shops, etc. followed the needs of the drivers.

We also didn't ban kerosine/whale oil/... lamps, we just built the electric infrastructure and people used electric, because it was better, cleaner, etc.

So, build power plants, to bring electricity prices down, since they're already way above the pre-covid era, build more charging station, fix the grid, so people have incentives to put solar on their roofs, build charing stations and incentivise private sector to build them too (in parking lots where workers park). So, cheap and conventient (car charging while at work, for cheper than gasoline) and people will slowly switch. Once enough people drive electric, the others will follow, since there will be less and less gas stations, less ICE cars available in general, etc.

A few years ago buying an electric car was great... the office building i work in built 2 charging spots right by the entrance, and you could charge your car there for free, and it was right by the entrance and reserved for electic cars. So one guy bought an electric car and we were all jelaous... free energy, premium parking spot. Then another guy did the same, and they both parked there. Then someone else bought one too, and tree cars, to charging stations, and one of them coulndn't charge his car anymore. One of them would literally come way too early just to get a charging spot, while the third one had to wait for one of them to leave, to charge his car for an hour or two atleast. With hundreds and thousands of electric cars, the situation is even worse.