new car law
Aug. 25th, 2022 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacCalifornia is proposing a law that new gasoline-powered cars will cease to be sold in about 13 years. This is in the tradition of laws (state or federal) that mandated seat belts in new cars, or that required new cars to run on unleaded instead of leaded gas. The car manufacturers whined over those, but they got them done.
What will really enforce this law will be the gradual disappearance, in subsequent years, of gas stations. Once it becomes too difficult to fuel your car, you'll switch. This happened with leaded gas. For many years stations sold both leaded and unleaded, but gradually the leaded disappeared, and if you still had an old car you were out of luck.
We need two things to make an all-electric car environment work. One is fueling infrastructure. We're building that, rapidly. Good. The other is to get the price of electric cars down. Right now they cost about 4 or 5 times as much as a gas car. That's too great a difference. Tax credits will not help the people who need help the most. Technological advances that make them less expensive to build would be ideal. The substitute would be rebates, built into the purchase price so you don't have to fork over the money and apply for the rebate afterwards. In urban areas we're already developing a system where it's easy not to own a car and just rent one when you need it, and that's good, but that won't work elsewhere without a massive rebuilding of the entire environment.
But what I want to know is: what about hydrogen fuel-cell cars? I test-drove one of those, and if they're technically perfected, become available at a reasonable price, and acquire a reasonable fueling infrastructure, I'd much prefer one. They fuel with a physical substance, so it's easier to figure out how much range you have left than psyching out electric charge; and I believe they're less harmful to the environment, without those giant honking batteries and huge electric charges zapping around: hydrogen is very easy to get. And as for hydrogen being explosive, so is gasoline and we manage that.
What will really enforce this law will be the gradual disappearance, in subsequent years, of gas stations. Once it becomes too difficult to fuel your car, you'll switch. This happened with leaded gas. For many years stations sold both leaded and unleaded, but gradually the leaded disappeared, and if you still had an old car you were out of luck.
We need two things to make an all-electric car environment work. One is fueling infrastructure. We're building that, rapidly. Good. The other is to get the price of electric cars down. Right now they cost about 4 or 5 times as much as a gas car. That's too great a difference. Tax credits will not help the people who need help the most. Technological advances that make them less expensive to build would be ideal. The substitute would be rebates, built into the purchase price so you don't have to fork over the money and apply for the rebate afterwards. In urban areas we're already developing a system where it's easy not to own a car and just rent one when you need it, and that's good, but that won't work elsewhere without a massive rebuilding of the entire environment.
But what I want to know is: what about hydrogen fuel-cell cars? I test-drove one of those, and if they're technically perfected, become available at a reasonable price, and acquire a reasonable fueling infrastructure, I'd much prefer one. They fuel with a physical substance, so it's easier to figure out how much range you have left than psyching out electric charge; and I believe they're less harmful to the environment, without those giant honking batteries and huge electric charges zapping around: hydrogen is very easy to get. And as for hydrogen being explosive, so is gasoline and we manage that.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-25 06:32 pm (UTC)There are some very expensive EVs but they are competing with luxury ICE cars that are also very expensive. You need to compare equivalent models. EVs like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt are not luxury cars and are not as expensive. There is a lack of very cheap EVs. The Mitsubishi iMiEV was too cheap and did not sell well. For a while, used EV prices were very low, and you could get an excellent used BMW i3 or Fiat 500e or Chevy Spark EV for cheaper than an equivalent ICE car. But then gas prices went through the roof and used EV prices followed. Given time, there will be a more robust used EV market. Used EVs are much more reliable and cheaper to operate than used ICE cars. It will be a boon to people of modest means when more used EVs are available.
I remember being excited about the articles in Scientific American about the coming hydrogen economy. It turned out to be a false promise. Hydrogen is an extremely difficult molecule to contain in tanks and to transmit without loss. A battery is big and heavy but so is a hydrogen tank. Moving electrons through power lines is way easier than moving hydrogen through pipelines. Also, most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and has a bad carbon footprint. Clean hydrogen can be made from water but it takes electricity, and the process is lossy. It is a better use of the electricity to put it in batteries. I think there will be some uses for clean hydrogen in the future, but it will be as a feedstock for making carbon neutral kerosene for aviation and other uses where electricity is not fully practical.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-25 11:07 pm (UTC)Now that batteries and motors are lighter, and getting better every year, hydrogen just wouldn't be able to compete.
Interestingly, a way to deal with hydrogen's propensity to leak through the walls of metal tanks is to line them with goldbeater's skin (made from cow intestines). For some reason (perhaps the hydrogen atoms on the outside of the long-chain organic molecules), it repels gaseous hydrogen. Of course, gutting enough cows to line a planet's worth of hydrogen pipelines and storage tanks would be a challenge - and the lining would probably need to be replaced periodically.