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A comment on Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions. Parent comment

Re:Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road t... by barnacled on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @04:24AM (#25134770)
This is hilariously impractical. Have you seen curbside chargers? There's some up the road from me and by no means does it look simple to install them, not to mention that you'd have to do it along _every_ single residential street _everywhere_ and we don't have the electrical capacity to do it anyway!

If it really is so simple, why when I live in London do I not see entire streets filled with chargers? Surely you'd think that'd be in place by now given the time frames?

I think it's hand-wavey to say 'oh you can just charge at low current'. And if you've ever seen a petrol station near a motorway here you'll realise the idea of parking your car for x * 10 mins to charge would simply not work, there'd be multiple mile tailbacks.

Overall the govt treats this issue like it's a smaller problem than it really is.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road t... by adrianN on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @06:37AM (#25135671)
You don't see streets filled with chargers because almost nobody has an EV yet. Just like you didn't see many gas stations providing unleaded fuel two years before catalytic converters became mandatory.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road t... by barnacled on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @07:50AM (#25136162)
It's funny because I actually remember the unleaded/leaded transition and petrol stations were stocking it very early on. The equivalent simile here would be if unleaded was going to be made mandatory in a year and basically 3 petrol stations in the UK stocked it.

The govt are going to make these cars mandatory soon. London is the ideal place to do this due to infra + rich people with EVs (more than you might think, far from 'almost nobody'), yet I don't see any street that has charges along it.

My point is that it's not easy. Having to upgrade the grid and dig up tons of roads is simply not easy no matter how much people want it to be.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road t... by adrianN on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @08:40AM (#25136567)
That wasn't the case in Germany. Unleaded fuel actually was available only in a handful of gas stations until shortly before the transition.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road t... by PJDK on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @07:56AM (#25136211)
There are several thousand in london already, embedded in lampposts so you might have missed them.

Here's one within 100 meters of my very run of the mill flat https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4689844,-0.1013741,3a,30.1y,...

[ Parent | on HN ]