https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...
Hopefully new regulation will fix it rather than make it worse
SUVs seem to increase in popularity following the American fashion, unfortunately.
In 2020… if you have an SUV with kid sits… it barely fits TWO kids. It is totally produced by legislation, although it’s for safety, you have to be extremely rich to carry 3 kids in a car today.
There is no magical switch, we have to accept that any transition will be long and messy.
Here (not France) you can drive an EU moped (45km/h) on a car license, which could (and should!) be a great alternative to a smaller car. The problem is that it's difficult to get to and through the city without touching the highways, which are strictly off limits for the mopeds for obvious reasons.
What's needed is something in between a full sized MC and a moped that can be driven on a car license and that can reach at least 80km/h to keep up with inner city highway speeds.
In France you can ride a scooter or motorcycle with a displacement < 125 cc with a car license. Certainly not ideal for long trips, but it’s enough for small stretches of motorways in the daily commute. Indeed it’s a good alternative to large cars but it can be dangerous depending on the state of the roads.
Max speed is told to be 130km/h but I'm pretty sure I drove my C-zero faster than that without much issue
[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/29/us-car-cost...
The public fast chargers cost pretty close to the equivalent Diesel cost for my ICE car. That is after paying extra to go electric compared to a cheaper ICE car.
We are not there yet to get more folks like me to give up their ICE cars and go electric. I’ll keep my VW Golf kicking until the situation improves and hopefully soon.
This is in Munich, Germany, so basically an unimportant remote place. :P
They’re even cheap to buy because you can buy just the car and lease the batteries on a monthly basis. For small city cars with batteries that aren’t too heavy, this kind of design makes an EV workable for a lot of people who might otherwise not consider one for the reason you’ve stated.
In my city supermarkets have charging on their parking lots, so my car charges when I'm shopping.
Sadly it'll probably need protection against people whose denial of the climate crisis involve violence and vandalism.
For road trips, Nio has 10-minute battery swapping stations, but modern 800V BEVs can be recharged in 20 minutes.
City use is an even easier case, because most cars will spend hours parked somewhere. If not at home, then in a parking garage at work. There are street-side chargers too. In many cases you don't even need a fast charger.
The Tesla model 3 is right on that limit with 1.980 Kg, whereas the model Y weighs 2.4 tonnes.
In Denmark the model Y is by far the most sold car in 2023, with 1 out of every 10 cars being a model Y.
So I think it will be an uphill battle to enact the same law in Denmark.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_cn/GUID-5656213...
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_cn/GUID-E47C4A6...
The Model 3 is undoubtedly still a heavy car, but the bulk of that is the battery pack, so the weight will go down as battery tech improves. Maybe it already has compared to your source?
I wonder what made the Parisians choose 2 tonnes, lowering the limit could certainly be justified.
The Model 3 and Y weigh twice that of my current drive, which is quite the difference.
Climate denial and related arguments seem to involve a lot of people who know they are wrong but have chosen a side.
I'm reminded of the research that showed climate denial increased with science education. Dumb Republicans don't have enough science education to know what the right and wrong answers to specific questions are. Educated Republicans (as you find here at HN) know what the right answer is, but also know what the accepted answer in their tribe is, probably even have a little misleading factoid at the ready to deploy.
An article on the research:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/education-plus-ideol...
That means from 1.1.2025, for passenger cars 93,6 g CO2/km average (which is impossible with ICE-only cars of current sizes and technology) and the manufacturer pays a fine for anything above that. But that can be relaxed if they sell at least 25% EVs (0 g CO2/km), and higher percentage of those means higher permissible average emmisions. So the manufacturers will be highly motivated to sell more EVs and we can expect all the big manufacturers will hit the 25% quite soon.
Then from 1.1.2030 this goes down to 49,5 g CO2/km and at that point ICEs are goint to be increasingly niche. From 1.1.2035 the limit is 0 g CO2/km.
And I’m not saying don’t buy an electric car, just that EV sales have decreased.
I’d be a little more sceptical of the media sources doing this well-reporting, if I were you.
That's a plot of the first derivative (which is still positive [+42% at the last measure, meaning for every 100 EVs sold in Nov 2022, there were 142 sold in Nov 2023]) and the slope of that line is a derivative of the first derivative, or a second derivative.
tl;dr: EV sales are growing. That rate of growth is slower than it was before.
In Europe, if you're driving a huge North American truck (which some people do) your parking options are very very limited. We don't build everything for their sizes only because there's some of them on the road.
And the change will probably not increase the amount of cars on the road, because at the same time, bikes and public transport are becoming more attractive in cities all across the continent.