> Michael S. Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected to announce the proposed limits on tailpipe emissions on Wednesday in Detroit. The requirements would be intended to ensure that electric cars represent between 54 and 60 percent of all new cars sold in the United States by 2030, with that figure rising to 64 to 67 percent of new car sales by 2032, according to the people familiar with the details, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been made public.

They are not going to get the adoption they want because they are attacking from the wrong angle. Their new regulations intend to drive down the number of ICE cars being made and drive up EV production, but the issue with EV's is all in their price, and this regulation does nothing to address that. Most folks (especially in this economy), cannot afford to spend $50k+ on a new EV, this is why used car sales have been so steadily high, folks just can't afford these new expensive cars.

I see this regulation backfiring, all it's going to do is keep older cars on the road longer.

Not just the price. Really the infrastructure is the biggest problem.

How do I go on a road trip from Miami to Seattle without very carefully planning around public charging stations and spending lots of extra time sitting around waiting on my EV to charge?

With an ICE vehicle, refueling is practically an after thought.

It’s even worse if you’re planning on hauling a trailer with an electric pickup truck.

We are definitely putting the cart before the horse on this.

I drove from Seattle to Denver with no planning (Tesla) and it was fine? It added about four hours to the trip as I recall but the car told me where to stop and charge etc..

EVs aren't the best road trip vehicle but that's ok, I don't road trip every day. They absolutely are the best 99% daily vehicle though if you have home charging.

Nothing is the best at everything, the EV compromise is pretty darn acceptable though. (that said, PHEVs with 80 miles of range would be even better)

In the early '00s, refueling was not an afterthought when roadtripping through the southwest. Driving a car with a broken gas gauge made that really fun. If you see a "last gas for 150mi" sign, you know the gas is going to be marked up at least $1/gal... buy now or risk it?

Today I drive a long-range EV, and level 3 chargers are pretty amazing. I can get a few hundred miles' charge in ~20 minutes. That's about the amount of time that I like to get out of my car to stay alert anyway. Granted, level 3 chargers are still pretty rare, but in Canada where I live now, Petro-Canada has seen the writing on the wall, and they're installing level 3 chargers at their gas stations.

At least in the United States there are still many parts of the country without any public charging stations at all, much less level 3 fast charging ones.

https://chargefinder.com/us/search

> the proposal is designed to ensure that electric cars make up the majority of new U.S. auto sales by 2032

With a 9-year horizon on this policy, there is lots of time and motivation to build out charging infrastructure. The lack of charging infrastructure today is not a good reason to be stuck on oil for the indefinite future.

It is not infrastructure. There is not enough progress in battery cell density. For example iPhone 5 (2012) battery density is 0.218 Wh/g, iPhone 13 (2021) battery density is 0.26 Wh/g.

This is such a tired repeated take. More EVs == more demand for charging stations == lots of businesses and tech rising to fill the charging needs, to make money. It will solve itself, it’s basic market forces.

I think you severely underestimate the amount of financial investment that would be required if even a quarter of the current cars on the road were EVs, much of it needed in our already strained electric grids that go out during extreme heat and cold. We’re not even close to the point where EVs are a viable solution for most people. Particularly those living in rural areas.

Charging at home is trivial and requires no infrastructure. It’s an improvement on going to a petrol station.

Long haul trips are the tricky bit, but that’s surely not that hard to solve.

It actually will require additional infrastructure or at least some changes to metering to encourage nightly charging instead of at like 5pm

Don’t all EV cars have timers built in? My low end model does.

It’s also only charging at the rate of a standard wall socket, so I’m not sure the grid cares that much.

Maybe we never set ours up. No reason to do that unless the utility changes rates based on time of use

This is very much a thing where I live in New Zealand.

I’m sure that I could save money by tailoring usage better, but ‘cheaper overnight’ is about all I know about it.

Is there a way you can drive for a few hours in an EV with someone? I think you may need to experience the trip planning tools to understand how preoccupying they are in practice.

GetAround, Turo, and the traditional car rental places will rent you a Tesla, but you can also go to a store and pretend to buy one for an evening (in participating states), but that would require effort and a willingness to challenge preconceived notions. Which if you're already convinced you're right about electric cars, and who wouldn't be, if they're using such a tired old take; it just ain't happening.

Unless we want to add regulatory requirements like that new construction should include EV charging, it's going to be hard to provide a motivation for building infrastructure. Increasing demand is a surefire way to speed this development along.

> How do I go on a road trip from Miami to Seattle

You could rent a gas-powered car for the trip. But how often are you ever going to do that? Most of us make a trip like that rarely, or never; I have driven coast-to-coast exactly once in my life.

> We are definitely putting the cart before the horse on this.

Greater demand will provide an economic incentive to invest in greater supply.

Also … it’s not like they are targeting 100% EV. So you just don’t buy an EV. It’s pretty simple.

You hear the same nonsense when it comes to riding bikes. There’s always some reason someone can’t ride bikes / drive an EV / walk more / whatever, and that means we shouldn’t make any changes ever. So dumb.

> How do I go on a road trip from Miami to Seattle without very carefully planning around public charging stations and spending lots of extra time sitting around waiting on my EV to charge?

How often do people do that? For this kind of trip, it's honestly better to rent a car anyway. You don't need to drive back, which is nice. Also, such a drive is generally pretty hard on your car. It's better to do it in someone else's car.

This is completely practical today if you have a tesla via the supercharger network. If you navigate, it will calculate an optimized route that tells you where to stop to charge and for how long.

Over the past few years, I've noticed that many superchargers now have competing CCS networks nearby.

Also, tesla has been opening up superchargers, and the other day I used one that can charge either tesla or CCS vehicles (via the "Magic Dock").

By the time this legislation starts getting traction, it will be possible and practical.

Just to confirm your point about price: On Norway they did give tax breaks for electric cars and raised taxes for gasoline/diesel cars, so making them comparable in terms of price.

For more info see: How Norway killed the petrol car. https://youtu.be/OJtzuZIO-88

It's signaling to car manufacturers which direction they should head in. More production will lower prices.

I get that line of thinking, tell automakers that X% of their cars must be EV and let them figure out the unit economics so their sales don't plummet. I can see that working, but I'm skeptical.

Is that really true? Average down payment is about $7k and average monthly payment about $700. That puts average car price on a 72 month loan at about $45k.

I would never pay that much but that is it.

Is that true? The average new-car price in America is a shocking $49k (partly because people are willing to take out 7-year autoloans). For that price you can get an electric: Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Nissan, Tesla, or Volkswagen.

If you can get it. Wait times are 3-6 months sometimes 2 years

The average new car price is $50K as of January 2023, with the median on some websites around $42k. New cars are expensive.

> Their new regulations intend to drive down the number of ICE cars

This is a time-tested EPA approach which increases cost and complexity due to enhanced engine management, exhaust recirculation and exhaust treatments, and partial hybrids.

The computers run heavy equipment diesels and you need a shop computer to successfully swap fuel injectors. Don't think about trying to swap exhaust treatment components without being the dealer, because serial numbers are tracked and enforced with huge core charges. Particulates are down dramatically.

Gassers are not diesels and gassers are already burning quite clean. From a societal health standpoint, is this where resources are best applied?

I need more coffee. I first read that as "E.P.A. Is Said to Propose Rules Meant to Drive Up Electric Car Prices Tenfold"...

Do we have reason to believe that multiple types of demand for these vehicles will not cause an upward inflation of their prices?

At least for the US market, the current price gluttony on new and used trucks has me wondering if they'll try to push things as far as they absolutely can, with knowledge that they can't as easily break the consumer trend due to related government interventions.

There is just not enough lithium on earth.

Unless cars weigh 500kg or we limit ourselves to electric bikes, we cannot make enough electric cars, and there is not enough carbon free power either to charge all those cars.

The world would require so much nuclear energy, and it's not possible to have both wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars and electric storage when there is no sun or wind.

I'm tired of techno-optimists who cannot understand we need degrowth BEFORE we can use new technologies if we really want to lower carbon emissions.

There is so much greenwashing it's just not funny anymore. Why can't we understand that all those companies are trying to save themselves instead of delivering realistic, proven ways to reduce co2 emissions?

Corporations can only save themselves through profit. Which means money hoarding through selling stuff in excess. Which means feeding the needs and/or perception of need through propaganda and marketing. Which works inside-out of the anxiety building infrastructure we call market economy.

IRL, that means you can only successfully sell battery propelled moving machines if you have people buying them in excess, given enough people have been properly conditioned to consume them. Sometimes pre-existing conditioning leads to market breakthrough, some other times the need for profit call for conditioning fabrication, so-called consent manufacturing. Leading causes of eco-anxiety, which partly drives the market for such machines, comes from both sides.

Wanna break the cycle? Be absolutely critical of each and every choice you make, considering that you are already fully conditioned on many aspects, and that there are no small choices in life.

None of that actually matters. The point is the market will fix it. Not enough lithium? Then price will go up and we'll mine more (remember when people thought we'd run out of gas by 1980?). And as the price and demand goes up alternative battery designs will become increasingly created (I must have read several dozen articles about new battery types being researched).

In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year.

The physics are there, if cars go electric and it drives the price of electricity up, it makes it much more cost-effective to build new solar panels (because the profit you make on them is high). Basically this is the magic of supply and demand -- when there isn't a monopoly it practically forces society toward a direction good for all. If we taxed externalities we'd already be heading there.

Not to mention the other metals that go into EV batteries - switching to 100% EV production means jaw-dropping increases in demand for copper, zinc, nickel, chromium, molybdenum, graphite, etc.

Then there's the fact that Russia is a top 3 worldwide producer of half of that list.

Fundamentally, electric vehicles are a huge mistake. It makes much more sense to power a vehicle with magnetism. I don't know why we (humanity) is going down this path.

What do you mean? An induction motor uses magnetism.

I got downvoted.

Why should I waste my time explaining this? It's not worth it.

All I will say is electric vehicles won't work as a primary means of transportation.

You make bold claims and present no evidence. If it's worth expressing the sentiment then surely it's worth making a convincing argument.

What do you mean “won’t work”? Already (hundreds of?) millions of people are using electric vehicles as their primary means of transportation.

Powered by magnetism? What process would that be?

BRIO train cars connect to each other with permanent magnets. Not sure that's the best system, but there it is.

trains?

I love my hybrid. It’s the best of both worlds, and I rarely need to fill the gas tank except for long trips-which are rare. I think hybrids are the way to go. I hope the new rules will recognize this option.

Hybrids are ok transitionally, but will ultimately disappear due to charging infra becoming ubiquitous and because hybrids will end up being a lot more expensive to build than a pure EV.

Does anyone know how this interacts with the current rules that people have said unintentionally incentivize production of larger SUVs? Would these new rules eliminate that? Are the aggregate emissions restrictions going to apply to SUVs too, or allow any other loopholes that accidentally just move more sales to larger (and higher-emitting) vehicles?

Raise the cost of owning and buying ice, lower cost of ev price and ownership. The rest will be natural.

epa rules get distorted and piss people off, mega trucks are the result currently.

We need the epa for clean water and air.