France to ban fuel-powered cars by 2040?

Yesterday's big news. So, do we care? Without getting too political, think that will happen here?

It's more of a "resolution" then a law. You can't exactly enact a "law" that goes into effect in 23 years.

I'm fine with eliminating gas vehicles from new production. I'm not fine with eliminating gasoline. I still play with boats and old cars, and imagine I will do so in 50 years as well.

Overall I support the idea though.

I know some folks who would approve of a law banning private car ownership*. So, yeah, this isn't out of the realm of possibility.

*please don't judge me because of some company I used to keep.

Given that France is slightly smaller than the state of Texas I could see how it would be more feasible there than the entire United States. We are a big country, with big miles that limit the current generation of purely electric vehicles usefulness.

I wonder if they'll also ban those little cigarettes on a stick.

One of the parts I find interesting is the idea that banning ICEs for the sake of air quality. To me, that points out the failings of the Euro emissions rules vs the US. They heavily biased diesels for use, which has turned out to be a mistake.

Now they appear to overreact in the opposite direction.

Note, I'm not talking about CO2 and global warming, but the gasses that have a much more immediate impact on health: HC, NOx, and CO.

I'm still not convinced that pure battery electric is a solution, too.

On a bigger scale, France will have an interesting job integrating new power sources into the grid over the next 25 years, since HC based fuels are a no go, and nuclear has gotten the cold shoulder.

Maybe we will see a massive increase of grape production to make ethanol fuels.

Nothing bad could come from this decision...

Nope...NOTHING.

Nothing at all.

volvoclearinghouse wrote: I know some folks who would approve of a law banning private car ownership*. So, yeah, this isn't out of the realm of possibility. *please don't judge me because of some company I used to keep.

The same misguided people who think we can put the global economic genie back in the bottle.

Unless we start producing massive numbers of horses.

2040? That's more like closing the door behind internal combustion vehicles. Very few people will be DD'ing anything with an ICE by then.

GameboyRMH wrote: 2040? That's more like closing the door behind internal combustion vehicles. Very few people will be DD'ing anything with an ICE by then.

Respectfully disagree. 2040 seems like a long way off, but in reality, that's 23 years. Roughly 20 years ago GM gave the world the EV1, and in those 20 years, electric cars came to dominate somewhere between 0.1 and 1% of new vehicle sales.

The average age of all cars on the road now is something like 11 years. And increasing. Which means that, for a prognostication of even 1/2 of all vehicles being daily driven in 23 years to be non-ICE to come true, then non-ICE vehicle sales are going to have to overtake ICE vehicle sales sometime in the next decade.

And remember- even hybrids still have an ICE.

I don't think even half of the new cars sold in 2040, let alone half of the cars being regularly driven, will be be absent any sort of ICE.

volvoclearinghouse wrote: Nothing bad could come from this decision... Nope...NOTHING. Nothing at all.

Have you ever seen just about any industrial site related to oil extraction or refinement? This is not different to any one of them. Lakes of toxic sludge are nothing unusual in those industries. Sometimes they stretch across whole regions and ecosystems. Sometimes extra sulfur is lying around and is simply piled into giant ziggurats. And of course, sometimes oil spills out of a hole in the side of a pipeline, the bottom of an oil tanker, or just uncontrollably out of a manmade hole in the ocean floor.

We should be happy to have just a few rare earth mines in place of all this. Best of all, rare earth mining carries no risk of causing earthquakes, and transporting rare earths carries no risk of vaporizing small towns. And since batteries can be recycled, people are less likely to go to war over them.

GameboyRMH wrote: 2040? That's more like closing the door behind internal combustion vehicles. Very few people will be DD'ing anything with an ICE by then.

I still don't see a realistic path for that.

Obviously France doesn't have the lobbyist we have here. It will never happen in the US because industry writes our laws, not the legislative branch.

Tax incentives and petroleum prices can push the industry that direction, but anything that extreme won't happen in our lifetime.

The city of Paris has been restricting or banning ICE operation within city limits for awhile now hasn't it? Like you can't drive old cars, and can only drive ICEs period on certain days or something? So after the largest city in the country has been setting the example for over 20 years, the entire nation is expected to follow suit.

If it comes to the US, that will be the start. Cities will take action first ( looking at you Pacific NW), and after a decade or two of that becoming the "norm" it might be instituted on a broader scale. Considering our larger size, and love of the automobile I think it would take longer than the 20 years that France is planning though.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

Don't forget entire towns that have a fire perpetually burning beneath them.

volvoclearinghouse wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: 2040? That's more like closing the door behind internal combustion vehicles. Very few people will be DD'ing anything with an ICE by then.

Respectfully disagree. 2040 seems like a long way off, but in reality, that's 23 years. Roughly 20 years ago GM gave the world the EV1, and in those 20 years, electric cars came to dominate somewhere between 0.1 and 1% of new vehicle sales. The average age of all cars on the road now is something like 11 years. And increasing. Which means that, for a prognostication of even 1/2 of all vehicles being daily driven in 23 years to be non-ICE to come true, then non-ICE vehicle sales are going to have to overtake ICE vehicle sales sometime in the next decade. And remember- even hybrids still have an ICE. I don't think even half of the new cars sold in 2040, let alone half of the cars being regularly driven, will be be absent any sort of ICE.

You're assuming a linear rate of progress. This year we're getting the Tesla 3 and Chevy Bolt. Those are certainly competitive with new ICE cars, coming from the EV1 20 years ago. You could say EVs have quite nearly caught up with 100 years of ICE development in just 20 years (considering that they were basically forgotten from the early 1900s to the late '90s). At that rate, what kind of EVs do you think we'll have in 5-10 years, and how many people would choose an ICE over those?

I think more than half of all new cars being pure EVs by 2027 is a sure bet, and by 2040 even hybrids will be a niche product.

NEALSMO wrote: Obviously France doesn't have the lobbyist we have here. It will never happen in the US because industry writes our laws, not the legislative branch. Tax incentives and petroleum prices can push the industry that direction, but anything that extreme won't happen in our lifetime.

For the idea that industry is a better lobbyist, I agree.

But nobody has yet to come up with a realistic replacement to ICE bases transportation, as I see it. Electric on a small scale is fine, but making that +40M cars annually is a bitch.

To me, the best hope are fuel cells.

Unless we have a massive shift in society that no longer needs personal transportation. And that need is millennia old.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

No, EVs have not caught up.

They have a long way to go.

And ICEs still have some left in them.

GameboyRMH wrote: You're assuming a linear rate of progress. This year we're getting the Tesla 3 and Chevy Bolt. Those are certainly competitive with new ICE cars, coming from the EV1 20 years ago. You could say EVs have quite nearly caught up with 100 years of ICE development in just 20 years (considering that they were basically forgotten from the early 1900s to the late '90s). At that rate, what kind of EVs do you think we'll have in 5-10 years, and how many people would choose an ICE over those? I think more than half of all new cars being pure EVs by 2027 is a sure bet, and by 2040 even hybrids will be a niche product.

I work in the railroad industry. The vehicles I work on travel on a set of steel rails that are firmly embedded into the earth. They would literally be the easiest possible vehicle to make autonomous. And yet....we still have train operators.

And we still have diesel locomotives. Actually, way more of them than electric. Again, it would be pretty easy to electrify the lot, if one were so inclined.

I'll take your bet. You say: 2027- 1/2 of new car sales (by volume) will be something other than ICE. I'll bet you they won't be. What should the wager be? How about a tank of gas (or charge of electrons) for the winner's car?

In reply to volvoclearinghouse:

Ok, I'm curious. Yesterday's conversation where I brought up big rigs, I was thinking about trains too.

The rails are already there, the trains are already there. Why don't we have more electric or autonomous trains?

Edit: I actually thought the operator was more there to make sure the computers didn't catch fire than to drive the train these days and that they'd been automated for a while.

I understand for high speed rail or mag lev were talking about upgrading everything, but just to automate the trains or some sort of charged rail or kinetic gathering, seems like it's something that could have happened years ago. It's not like a train can swerve away from traffic or a cow anyway, as long as it stays on the right tracks and stops where it should, to an outsider it seems simple to do, particularly because of electric street cars and subways. To an outsider it also looks like magic sometimes too.

In fact removing the human from the control stick could probably make things safer. An automated train won't take 40mph turns pushing 100, like some of the more recent high profile train accidents have involved.

Also, 70 years ago, we were all supposed to be driving flying cars, and we were supposed to have figured out what to do with nuclear waste, other than bury it. It looks like progress wasn't as fast as they thought.

The energy density of batteries isn't yet enough to give something as big as a train enough range. Similar to the big rig problem, but at an even greater scale. The smaller a vehicle is, the better it will work with a lower energy density power source. That's why electric RC cars have been zipping around like flies on crack for decades and practical and affordable EVs are a new thing. As energy density improves, bigger vehicles become practical targets for electrification. Large aircraft will actually be the last because they need the most energy-dense fuel.

Also don't forget that there are electric trains that run on grid power, like every subway train.

As to why there are no autonomous trains, it's not a matter of it not being possible, it's that it makes sense to have a person supervising such a huge and dangerous machine (on-site, in case of comms failure). There are a few fully autonomous commuter trains. Human-driven trains are already semi-autonomous - they can be given signals to stop automatically, obey speed limits etc.

In reply to RevRico:

Automated trains would, in my mind (and those of others in this industry) absolutely be safer. But, to understand the rail industry, let's take a look at another example that goes further back in time: emergency braking.

Now, trains have had this feature called "slip slide control" for a long time now- at least as long as it's been available in cars (anti-lock braking). It works the same way- when a computer senses a wheel 9or, actually, an axle, as wheels are connected side to side) turning slower than the rest of the axles on the train, it reduced braking effort to that wheel. This greatly reduces stopping distances, and prevents "square wheels", as we like to call them.

However, when the operator pushes the Emergency Stop button, the braking system bypasses the slip-slide function and just dumps all the air, applying maximum braking effort. Wheels slide, heat builds up, the train doesn't stop as fast, and wheels get huge flat spots and have to be changed.

Why do they do this?

So that, when the Eastbound Express to Tuscaloosa plows into granny's Buick that stalled on the tracks, the railroad's lawyers can say "the operator locked up the brakes- he did all he could to stop that train."

Read into that...and that's why we don't yet have autonomous trains.

As for why we don't yet have mostly electric trains...I have no clue. String a bunch of catenary and boom, electrified territory. No need for batteries or anything. In fact, some passenger train agencies are even scrapping electric locos for new diesels.

GameboyRMH wrote: The energy density of batteries isn't yet enough to give something as big as a train enough range. Similar to the big rig problem, but at an even greater scale.

Trains don't need no stinkin' batteries. Trains do this: