Chris White Tech Reporter
December 30, 2019 11:49 AM ET
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Ireland is fast-tracking legislation that will effectively ban all gas-powered vehicles within a decade, leaving customers who are buying cars in January confused about what to do next, local reports show.
The country’s Climate Action Minister Richard Bruton plans to publish the Climate Action (Amendment) Bill 2019 enforcing such a ban, the Independent.ie reported Monday. The ban was officially announced in June, according to the report. One of Ireland’s political parties is pushing back.
“Fianna Fáil is mindful that families and businesses remain extremely reliant on petrol/diesel cars and that any phase out must be combined with greater investment in EV charging, public transport and cycling infrastructure,” Fianna Fáil climate spokesman Jack Chambers told the Independent.
Chambers noted that any phase out of fossil fuel-powered vehicle required an immediate transition to electric vehicles. The country’s automotive industry also suggested fast-tracking such a proposal, which was designed to eliminate carbon emissions, could create a lot of confusion.
“This only adds to the confusion, at a time when people are buying new cars. January is the biggest selling month for new cars,” Brian Cooke, director general of Society of the Irish Motor Industry, told reporters.
He added: “There are around 35,000 new cars sold in January, so it’s the key month for us.” (RELATED: Schumer Announces Plan To Nix Virtually Every Gas Powered Vehicle In The Country)
Ireland’s push is similar to one that U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York proposed in October.
“That’s why I am announcing a new proposal designed to rapidly phase out gas-powered vehicles and replace them with zero-emission, or ‘clean,’ vehicles like electric cars,” Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, wrote in an editorial that month after suggesting scientists agree that climate change represents an imminent threat to the U.S.
He added: “The goal of the plan, which also aims to spur a transformation in American manufacturing, is that by 2040 all vehicles on the road should be clean.” The plan would remove more than 63 million gas-powered cars from the road by 2030, Schumer estimates.
The senator’s office expects the proposal to cost roughly $392 billion over a decade. The Washington Post referred to the idea as “essentially ‘Cash for Clunkers’ on steroids,” referring to a policy from the Obama-era encouraging Americans to trade their old vehicles for fuel-efficient cars.
Cash for Clunkers was the mechanism allowing the federal government to offer incentives of between $2,500 and $4,500 to citizens who traded in their older vehicles for newer ones. Critics called the idea, which received generous media fanfare, a failure even if it was designed with the best of intentions.
Schumer has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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That would mean approximately 20,800 vehicles a month to replace the 2.5 million vehicles -cars, trucks, tractors and motorcycles. This will be an easy stat to track every month. Let’s see how that goes. Tic tic tic…
The ban is on new sales
so do they also plan to ban resale of older cars? or just ban re registering them in a new owners name?
Id be buying up some spares about now.
wreckers will do a roraring trade
until the EV wrecks come in anyway, with kackered batteries
of course if its a self immolating Tesla ?- no wreckers required and no parts
who is going to provide the landfill for all those batteries they cant recycle too?
The goal is to eliminate all gas vehicles in ten years according to the article. I haven’t read the proposal, only this article. I read that to mean I would need to replace my gas powered car w electric even if I only buy used cars. Even if that is not true pick a number for the end game. Still easy to track progress
Ireland doesn’t get as cold in the winter as Wyoming or Vermont — or the Windy City, for that matter. So, they might actually be able to get by with their virtue signaling.
Is stupidity a virtue now?
No, but the perception of intelligence and goodness are. Case in point: empathetic appeals.
Will Ireland en d up like Cuba with a lot of old petrol driven cars as the owners don” want to give them up.
Of course the Irish, that is those outside the progressive types, mainly in the cities, will vote these idiots out of office.
MJE VK5ELL
By what logic would a politician, be he from NYS or Ireland, propose to hogtie his own constituents (and his economy) in a daft proposal to reduce CO2 locally while India and China’s additional emissions will dwarf any reductions from these proposals when measured on a global scale.
A rational proposal would be to say “Call me in 2030, and if the “undeveloped” countries who are eating our lunch decide to have a complete ban on ICEs, we will consider it also.”
Ironically, aren’t both politicians firmly against frac’ing (Marcellus shale in NYS)? What are they gonna power these EVs with; they ‘re not going to build another Niagara Falls in New York!
Anything to pander to the rabid base.
This video gives an entertaining and insightful story on why EVs, of current technology, will not be a choice for private transport in Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afb0W8GJd1A
It provides a perfect example of range anxiety and the contributing factors. It is also noteworthy for the weather conditions in late autumn in the sunburnt country after 70 years of global warming. This is the same land that was burning up in late spring of last year.
Enlightening and important lesson. EV range is extended, along with battery charge, when it’s being towed.
Sitting on the side of the highway with no heat in winter, relying on misleading by omission manufacturer’s marketing materials. Then a towing bill. And a long wait to charge after that. Easy to fix all of these problems. Just say no to travel. Or go with the cheaper internal combustion engine already available. I’m not just guessing that most politicians will go with “Just say no to travel.”
It’ going to take something life threatening like 0 F to get me interested in stopping for an EV sitting on the side of the road. Let them enjoy the full measure of their meaningless virtue.
Reality/physics always wins. Just look at Venezuela, they have energy, resources, but incompetence now have people eating their pets, and dumpster diving for food. Reality and physics won out. The only question will be how long will it take for it to collapse. Just ask the French about trying to make farmers low carbon…..
The Irish politicians are treading on a staple of Irish tradition: The social consumption of fermented, carbonated, and distilled beverages ‘doon tae the pub’! The social life of Ireland is founded on CO2 yielding fermentation to produce alcohol. When the fomented Irish publicans and their customers become fully aware of the direction and eventual impact of stupid CO2 laws on beer and distilled amber liquids, I predict a heady reaction!
I really am amazed at how progressive politically/socially the Irish and the Scotts have become. Used to think of them as fighters. Warrior races. Ancient lands with big men with big stones and fiery women folk. Claymores and the pipes. Now?
Agree totally
Complete transparency – I’m Irish! And the Irish PM and his green cohort effectively give us a bad name. I have to say that the Irish Premier is a thick Paddy!!!! The countryside is a patchwork of small towns and villages with many small farmers, so are these folk suppose to relocate into Dublin, at a great cost as it’s one hell of an expensive city? And to do what I ask? The Premier has clearly stopped taking his medication.. poor fella!!! Happy New Year!!!
Interesting, in the light of the fact that Ireland is one of the few developed nations that doesn’t stipulate certified engines (oxygen sensor not required) in industrial equipment.
This will not end well.
Morons. Sorry, nothing else to say about this.
So it’s back to draft and carriage horses, then? Well, fine! The only gas emissions they’ll have will be flatulence on the part of equines.
But then there’s that problem of disposing of the deceased transport horses, once they’ve dropped dead in their tracks, kind of like those photos form New York before the gas/diesel-powered cargo carriers came into existence.
I’m sure it will make the Teamsters very happy.
Me thinks this is costly insanity!
I was in Ireland last year (I can say that now).
“Interesting” place. More Polish speakers than Gallic. Blame the English for EVERYTHING despite about 100 years of home rule and try to justify every part of their history as ‘blame the English’.
(They unironically describe the mercenary soldiers who fought for the French over the centuries as being motivated by a desire to continue fighting the English, and not say, as a thing that thousands of poor men with no future at their place of birth had been doing since the dawn of violence.)
Despite being proud of their independence from the English, they in real terms hide behind the UK for defence and will fight to the death for the right to be oppressed by the EU. I actually had conversations with people claiming that if Brexit happened the entire peace process would be invalid and they would be forced to start killing people again. Some of these people even seemed excited by the idea.
Ireland, I am afraid to say, is Woke and gets away with being Woke because other nations do all their heavy lifting.
Apart from that it is a wonderful place 😀
My Nan remembers the British Black and Tans in the 1920’s. Yes, Ireland now is “Woke”, has to be to get all the Euro subsidies it has been receiving since the early/mid-80’s.
“Fianna Fáil”
Was the political party who supported the IRA during the terrorist bombings in the UK in the 70’s and 80’s.
No the U.S. isn’t next to ban IC vehicles. Despite the remarkable number of climate-obsessed imbeciles in Congress, they are still in the minority and likely always will be. It takes a majority of both Houses of Congress and a Presidential signature to pass any legislation. For future reference, anyone who takes seriously what Chuck Schumer says is a few fries short of a Happy Meal, like Chuck.
One is street parking in cities. When I lived in Philadelphia I had no garage or no parking space. I would park my car on the street at the closest space that I could find to where I lived. How is that suppose to work for charging ? Would cities put charges in each parking spot. Many cities are like this and the suburbs close to the cities.
The objective is to not only to ban vehicles, however they are powered, it is to ban personal transport and freedom of movement.
Nailed it.
It’s almost like the Communist Manifesto wanted centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
“Welcome to Mondello Park and the Fiesta Endurance race. If you have just joined us, Team CarbZero is in the lead, but is about to make a twenty minute pit stop for a partial recharge, so it’s still anyone’s race to win.”
Nah, I just can’t see it. There’s just too many situations where you need to gas up and go as quickly as possible. (gas=gasoline)
OTOH, watching an uncontrollable lithium-fueled fire after a car crash could be fun to watch.
Next move will be to have all charging stations run via a stationary bike. Then to network all local stationary bikes to fee the grid.
A recent article in the Telegraph made the situation regarding electric cars perfectly clear. And this is written as someone who would love to see the ICE, whether diesel or gas, eliminated from our cities in the interests of clean air and quality of life.
This is the conclusion in October of 2019:
Prices start at £16,250 for the base-model Active 75PS petrol with a five-speed manual gearbox, to £23,350 for the GT Line 136PS petrol with an eight-speed automatic. Battery electric prices include a £3,500 plug-in grant and start at £25,050 for the Active trim, rising to £29,650 for the GT trim.
Basically the electric version is twice the price, has a limited range, and takes hours rather than minutes to fill.
This is not going to work. It is simply not possible to replace conventional vehicles with electric at these prices and at this functionality.
Even if you could, it would not solve the problem. The problem in cities is not simply air pollution from ICE vehicles, though that is huge. The problem is also that streets through which cars and trucks move at speed are not pleasant places to be. The problem is not that we need to keep all the cars and trucks but power them differently.
The problem is that we need to take back the streets and the cities from them, and make them into more pleasant places for ordinary human users and uses.
Right now we are treating city streets as places to drive through on the way to someplace else. This is what we need to change. Just replacing the engines on the vehicles driving through them will not make them much better places for the people trying to use them, as opposed to pass through them.
There’s a simple answer to this harebrained proposal: It just won’t work. Period. Irish politicians, like almost all other politicians worldwide actually, refuse to accept the physical limitations of EVs, as well as their exorbitantly high costs per unit, and their drawbacks on daily use, if compared to ICE-driven cars. Yet once people will have noticed all this, and will have voted the respective political proponents out of power, the EV-hype will be over again, and folks will ask themselves how it was possible to have come this far at all. But that’s simple: We are governed by clueless Lemmings, who have no idea anymore what they are deciding about, and only want to go with the flow, so as not to be responsible for their decisions. EVs are a fashion, nothing else. And like any other fashion, EVs will go out of fashion again soon, too.
Idiots and morons, when did the Irish lose their tiny minds?
Everyone is quoting this cleantech article
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/29/worlds-10-biggest-automakers-their-ev-plans/
Forced electrification of cars within a decade or so obviously means the forced bankruptcy of 4/5 of the car industry within the same decade.
Have they considered the political consequences of this? This means that in parallel with replacing fossil fuel with electricity for road transport, they have equally short term plans for replacing democracy with e-dictatorship.
I would not trust a site calling itself cleantechnica, the whole raison d’etre of the site is it is obviously factually challenged and based on the idea that CO2 is “dirty”. Don’t even bother reading their twisted attempts to talk up EV market.
This is my take on EV’s.
An EV (like the Volkswagen Golf E) will have a battery sized at around 65kWh. A full charge is equivalent to about 100 miles driving range, when the battery is new.
A battery storing large quantities of energy will have a “turnaround loss” of about 25%. Or if you like, “turnaround efficiency” of 75% . This is the unavoidable consequences of the physics and chemistry which results in energy loss. (There are tricks to make some types of battery storage look more efficient, but the tricks tend to consume ancillary energy -such as high temperatures – so they don’t change the overall picture.)
When an auto manufacturer says a battery stores 65kWh, I cannot tell if it mean 65kWh useful energy back out of the battery. So I have to adopt the assumption that 65kWh is the useful energy coming back out of the battery. Given the turnaround efficiency, this means it will need about 87kWh to be purchased “at the plug” to get a full charge. This is when the battery is new.
All batteries degrade with use, but getting information on degradation performance of EV batteries is not easy. The most important effects of degradation are:
* loss of peak power (the car will not be so nippy as it ages);
* loss of charging capacity (65kWh reduces and the initial 100 miles driving range will fall); and
* loss of turnaround efficiency (it will take more power at the plug to charge the battery).
As I can’t get information on these things, I’ll need to make some assumptions. I’ll go for a reasonably cautious position of a gradual process of degradation and there will be a 5% drop in performance on all measures after a few years. Let’s say 50kmiles.
A couple of points to note here.
Manufacturers provide a warranty with their EVs, but degradation is factored into the warranty conditions. I haven’t seen a warranty to check the design parameters for degradation.
If degradation is an issue, it may be possible to change the battery – but the batteries are installed as small cells spread around the body of the EV. It will not be an easy or cheap to replace: I find it hard to imagine that Volkswagen would change a battery for anything less than £6k ($8k). That’s just an assumption, but when I asked my local dealership, they politely dodged the question. If you don’t want to incur this cost, you can always trade-in your EV for a new one, but the same cost will be factored into the trade-in value so there is no escaping it.
Another hunch I have is that fast-charging (waiting 1/2 hr for a charge instead of a few hrs) will be convenient but bad for battery degradation. I also suspect operating at peak power (full acceleration) will tend to be bad for battery degradation. Once again, this is only a hunch, but it is generally the way of these things. So all of the above points on degradation (including the terms of warranty), will be linked to motorist behaviour and how the EV is used.
Finally the economics. The following assumes no additional infrastructure costs for supply of electricity to the plug, although I doubt this will be the case and the consumer will end up paying more than the rates mentioned below.
At the moment I can fill up my IC engine car for about £65 ($85) and get around 350 miles for mixed driving (£0.18/mile or $0.24/mile). This is an “at the pump” cost and includes all UK duties and taxes.
At the moment, the UK unit price of electricity is around £0.19/kWh (including 5% VAT which is a form of purchase tax). That’s around $0.25/kWh. For a new battery at the 65kWh capacity mentioned above (87kWh at the plug) a full charge will cost £16.50 ($21.50) including tax. This will get me about 100 miles as I mentioned, so a new EV will cost £0.16/mile ($0.25/mile) and it looks like I’d be better off at this point.
If I go with 5% battery efficiency degradation after a number of years (turnaround efficiency drops from 75% to 70%), charging the battery to get a useful 65kWh out will then take 93kWh. A 65kWh charge will then cost £17.50 ($23) and the mileage rate will have risen to £0.17/mile ($0.23/mile). For the uncertainties and assumptions I have used, I’ll suggest this is roughly same cost as my present car but I have the inconvenience of loss of range from around 350 miles per visit to the pump, to 100 miles per visit to the charging point. That’s not such a good deal in terms of cost and utility.
Maintenance costs will be different for the two technologies, and I suspect EVs will be much cheaper to service compared to IC engines. I’ll make an assumption that an EV will be about £1k ($1.3k) lower cost to service over the first 50kmiles.
But the degrading battery cannot be ignored. To make a like-for-like comparison, I’ll assume a battery which has provided 50kmiles will have performance degradation (capacity, power and efficiency) to the point that the EV is not attractive to own. I assumed £6k for the battery replacement, but a maintenance cost saving of £1k compared to the IC engine. This is a net £5k ($6.5k) additional cost over 50kmiles, equating to £0.1/mile or $0.13/mile net battery over maintenance costs.
On the economic question, the energy costs of an EV appear to be initially positive, but reducing with use to something that would be aligned with the IC engine. The loss of utility should be noted for frequent EV charging stops versus less frequent filling stops for the IC.
The net maintenance cost could be the penalty for owning an EV, when the cost of battery replacement (or reduction in trade-in value) is taken into account.
That’s my take on it. I’d be happy to hear other views and experiences as I find this an interesting topic and would like to check my assumptions.