[cataphract]

Do you think fuel efficiency or emission standards "slowed down innovation"? They brought a huge amount of innovation: lighter materials, better aerodynamics, higher compression ratios, direct injection, better mixture control, etc.

There will still be innovation; the solutions will just have satisfy the new parameters.

[eru]

Yes, they definitely slowed down innovation and decreased consumer surplus compared to the counterfactual of just taxing the behaviour you don't like (like taxing fuel or emissions).

[thrownthatway]

They tax the fuel as well, don’t you worry.

[eru]

Sure, but they could have taxed it more and not have any official fuel efficiency standards.

(And compared to most of Europe or Singapore, US fuel is taxed very lightly, and their CAFE standards are especially stupid. Especially since their loopholes led to the replacement of practical station wagons with silly and dangerous SUVs. With a more car-agnostic fuel tax, this wouldn't have happened.)

[close04]

You stumbled onto the pain point. The problem isn’t the intention but the execution. The EU historically has done a better job at nailing the execution of this type of regulation.

If it slows down innovation is debatable but even so there’s still a solid principle behind it, a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain. It’s usually a worthwhile compromise. You don’t run tour engine only in the red zone because that’s where it makes the most power.

[eru]

> [...] a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain.

And customers directly benefit from the efficiency gain by burning through less fuel. So no need to decide for them.

[close04]

In that same sentence I mentioned the slowing down of innovation, not cars.

The government gets to decide for the people because that’s what a democratic majority wants. If you don’t want it go full anarchist. Just don’t come crying to the government to protect you when you inevitably take it on the chin.

For example would you want laws that ban giving people the mother of all beatings in the street? Or just tax it really high? Someone might just have some money burning a hole in their pocket and an intense desire to teach a lesson in regulations. Everyone has some strong opinions about their own freedom until someone else’s freedom punches them in the teeth and then they’re little lambs lining up to ask for regulations.

[watwut]

The externalities affect everyone, including people who dont own cars.

[dzhiurgis]

And then when EVs become viable they went - naaaah look at those efficient diesels!!

[thrownthatway]

To a degree.

You can’t have infinitely improving standards for an infinite time, otherwise you end up with bullshit like Dieselgate, and ecotechnocrats forcing everyone to drive around in mobile inextinguishable incendiary devices.

[thfuran]

ICE cars catch fire at a far higher rate than BEVs.

[otherme123]

I noticed this first hand: past year I was driving near home and a ICE car was burning in the shoulder of the road, with the firefighters working on it. It didn't reach even local news, in the following days I couldn't find anybody who have heard about it. A few months later an electric car catched fire around 100km away from my house, and the day after everyone was talking about it at workplace and how dangerous they are.

I don't know why it happens. Maybe a case of "if a dog bites a man, it's not important. If a man bites a dog, it gets newspaper cover". Maybe it is that an ICE car burning is extinguished in minutes, and then towed away, while an electric car burning is basically a two hours firework show.

[thrownthatway]

All ICE cars, or only those as old as the BEV fleet?

At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?

[otherme123]

> At least ICE car fires can be extinguished

Well, kind of. You have some seconds to try to cut it short, after that they will burn to a crisp, exactly like an electric car. The difference is that a battery will burn until the end no matter what. OTOH, an ICE fire is potentially explosive.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?

They can and they do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu7tQ2-x61k or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKOQUE9U1Ek or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFvzTOZsnsg. That Youtube channel alone (Jersey Shore Fire Response) has more than a dozen ICE car fires, nobody comments nothing about ICE cars being dangerous, just "firefighters great job". ONE single case of electric trucks burning, and all comments are "lithium bad". ICE cars contain oil, gasoline, paper, rubber, plastics... They have some parts that get really hot on normal functioning, and any failure (e.g. an oil duct leaking, debris on the exhaust) could lead to a "spontaneous" fire. The difference is that a lithium battery can burn from a cold state without being our fault, while for an ICE car you can blame the driver for bad maintenance, parking over dry grass, reeving too much... we like to find causality, so we can convince ourself we can avoid that happening to us.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?

Any car can catch fire after any impact if the luck is bad. A gas or oil leakage can lead to a "spontaneous" fire very quickly. Any car can catch fire even without any impact, just driving around, as shown in the videos above. If your car catches fire, the fumes will be toxic, it doesn't matter if the toxicity comes from plastics, oil, rubber or lithium. Get far from the car quickly.

You are ignoring the fact that ICE cars are more prone to catch fire, proportionally. And the try to steer the debate to what is the cause of such fires, or if the ICE car can be extinguished with water. That would be a different debate.

[ssl-3]

> At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.

That's not quite right. It's not like a non-special equipment like bucket of water or a garden hose (and I, for one, always travel with one of each!) work well for extinguishing any working car fire.

The remains of ICE car fires I've seen while out and about, while very few, are usually just hulks of vaguely car-shaped metal that have turned rusty from the heat by the time I come across them.

Car fires are never good. They're seldom easy to put out. EV fires can be worse in a lot of ways, but that doesn't make the other kinds of car fires saintly or anything.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?

Nope. Except: One doesn't have to go very far on teh Interweb to find videos of car fires at gas stations, either.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact

Sometimes.

> and lock the occupants inside

Sometimes people can't get out.

> and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?

Nope.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?

Not usually.

People don't usually die from getting hit on the side of the road while pouring gas from a jerry can into their EV, either.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night

Not often, but sometimes.

> and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?

I'm not answering that. I take too much pleasure in ignoring uselessly-specific addendums to questions like this. You'll have to forgive me.

[ben_w]

> All ICE cars, or only those as old as the BEV fleet?

You tell us.

From the way you wrote this comment, you seem to have a pre-existing belief that ICE is safer despite the evidence to the contrary, it looks like this because you're asking questions that are nonsensically specific, to paraphrase "does a ICE car catch fire while charging?", given that depending solely on how you count the tiny little lead battery in an ICE they *either* don't charge at all but rather refuel *or* they continuously charge while running.

> At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.

False.

There are many different classifications of fire, each with their own special equipment; liquid fuel is amongst them, just as electrical fires are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_extinguisher

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petrol+station+fire&t=osx&ia=image...

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?

Re "lock the occupants inside", that sounds like you're talking about Tesla's design flaws, which is a "Tesla" problem not a "battery" problem. Other EV companies aren't as dumb as Musk has been with Tesla over the last decade.

Also, firefighters have for my entire life carried tools specifically for breaking open vehicles that had been smashed in ways that stopped the doors working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_rescue_tool

And window-breaker hammers have likewise been standard emergency kit for a long time, though I don't know when they started getting recommended for drivers themselves.

Re "from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery", petrol and diesel fumes are also pretty nasty.

Irrelevant framing aside, post-crash fires are actually more common in ICE vehicles due to fuel system breaches.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?

Yes.

Stats I've found with a cursory glance say that there's more risk from the ship's own engine than all the vehicles, ICE and BEV combined, that it carries.

> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?

Yes, and are more likely to than BEVs.