to think the penny hasn't dropped yet, for many people, that the trade in new petrol and diesel cars is really ending in 6 years

[JadeClade]

I think the price of second hand cars will go through the roof, at first, when new cars are no longer available, and people buying new homes now really do need to be factoring in where they are going to charge an electric car, and all sorts of preparations and plans are simply not being made

YANBU - we need to be planning and preparing, as individuals and society.
YABU- we don't need to think about it.

Is there? That's good to know. I'm still learning about this issue, it is fascinating.

And yet I bet your street of terrace housing had significant amounts of space given over to accommodating cars. Make some of that space support secure bike storage and suddenly it’s a different picture.

It's the empty homes that gets me. Just so many of them. And all those empty flats above shops in town centres that have been empty for decades. I was sat in Specsavers yesterday and looked across the road at a row of shops - 2 or 3 floors and the flats above were clearly derelict, faded/torn net curtains, cobwebs and dust on the windows, etc. After I'd finished there, I kept looking above as I walked down the main shopping streets - it was the same at literally every shop. All those potential homes just sad idle that people could live in if there were serious incentives for the owners to renovate and rent out. Where's the national plan to bring all that real estate back into use?? Even worse that a lot of the ground floor shops are now boarded up and derelict too, and let's be realistic, most will never re-open as retail. There should be grants for owners to renovate and increased rates of business rates/council tax on empty properties as a disincentive for owners to just sit on them hoping for revival.

NIMBYS do the same where I live but if you listen to their objections- it’s about the lack of schools, doctors and infrastructure to cope with the extra people.

The same here.

Always new houses (fair enough) but still only one small school and a Dr surgery that cannot cope. No local police officer. A tiny corner shop with no parking on the main strip through the village, meaning it is often blocked with cars - many from surrounding villages who don't have any shops. No post office anymore, just a van that shows up about once a fortnight.

We are smack in the middle of the country surrounded by bigger towns and cities - which means more and more people live here but drive there. Little public transport to speak of, certainly nothing reliable (or clean!).

I've lived a lot of my life without a car but not here. I think it would be almost impossible here, tbh.

It’s taken 50 years to get us dependent on cars, it will take years to unwind car dependence, as it took ages in the Netherlands. But it starts with people understanding that the current situation can’t continue. Car dependency only enables crap public transport and high house prices, it’s a sticking plaster.

It actually starts with the Town Planners. The public transport systems are set up to take everyone to town and city center's.
But they are too expensive for business's we have out of town everything, hospitals, shopping center's, retail parks, office parks, technology parks, sports centres you name it, arenas, its out of town.
Which means for the majority it's at least two buses, one into town, one to the out of town.
Or you take the car, people work long hours they don't have time to be waiting on the occasional once an hour bus. Kids often need collected too.

I totally agree it's taken years to get into the situation it will take years to get out of it.

Absolutely agree that city centre property needs focus to be renovated for living. It could massivaly help with the cost of living and housing shortage for lots of people.

Round my way in London (and probably true in other cities and large towns) there's barely enough parking for people's cars. The thought of trying to find parking AND a charging point... I do walk to local shops and use public transport whenever possible. But if we try to significantly reduce the number of cars, then things are going to take a lot longer. Even if you can manage your shopping on public transport, even if you can reach your dentist or hospital or school, journey times are way longer by PT. Where are people going to find that extra time? Are we going to reduce working hours to compensate? Is our leisure time going to disappear? I can't help but feel there are too many practical problems right now for 2030 to be viable.

Exactly this. I live in a semi rural place, we have public transport like most places, reasonably reliable for the most part, bus services. We also have a train station. Until this past week the buses were half hourly, it has now changed to hourly on one route, the route I use to get to the train station. It used to get me to the station on time with just a ten minute wait for my train. The train timetable is the same as it always was but now it means a wait of 40 minutes. A lot of fellow traveller were considering taking their cars to the station in future or just not bothering with the train at all which kind of defeats the object doesn’t it. The object being less cars on the road.

The bus home from the station didn’t turn up at all at the weekend. DH had to pick me up.

@Lunar270 Thanks for being a voice of reason. I always hesitate to click on EV threads because of the usual nonsense being spouted.

It alarms me a bit that most people seem to have no idea of the enormous changes required to move the planet away from fossil fuel dependence. As a society we are in for a lot of changes this coming half century. EVs are actually one of the east ones.

*easy!

It's worth reading up a bit but for clarity.

Fully petrol or diesel engined car sales are due to end in 2030.

Hybrid sales are due to end in 2035.

EV only sales from 2035.

There is absolutely no requirement at this stage for everyone to shift, but we have 12 years of advanced notice.

At 2035 anyone with a petrol or diesel car (including hybrid) can carry on driving and you can still buy used. I suspect that a great many dealers will be assessing the situation and working with manufacturers to get rid of existing stock. Therefore my guess is that dealers will buy millions of new cars and sell them used to circumvent legislation. Kind of like now, where you can buy a pre registered car or ex demonstrator.

The government may slip but I believe there are penalties if we don't comply with global targets. Given the timeframes are really quite long, I don't think it's necessary but will see.

I don't think it will happen either. At the very least there will have to be an extension on hybrid cars.

There isn't the charging infrastructure. I am very happy with my self-drive hybrid and I would use an electric car locally, but I'd be concerned about long waits and possibly getting stranded if I tried to use an electric car for long journeys.

(another) extension on hybrid cars

Do you REALLY think this will happen by them not selling new petrol or diesel cars? Do you really think that people will just stop using vehicles altogether, that their requirement for one will just vanish 😂absolutely delusional

Not really sure you understand the car market there OP.

All those brand new expensive EV's will be old, fourth hand, used cars one day. It will be the same as buying an old ICE vehicle today.

But the 2030 "deadline" will not happen. The tech isn't ready and the infrastructure isn't ready.

They won't. And why do you think reducing the number of vehicles is a good thing?

Sunak dialed back on this yesterday, and given the Uxbridge result I imagine Starmer will be doing the same in the coming months.
Expect a commitment to all-electric vehicles by 2050 to start being drip-fed pretty soon.

No worries and thanks!

I totally agree with you. It's a big change and naturally there'll be resistance because people generally don't like change. I don't think for one minute that EV's will save the planet but they definitely better than us pouring flammable liquid into our cars and blowing it up in order to move a few miles.

EV's don't currently suit everyone but in time they'll evolve and we've actually got a long time to transition so think a lot of worry is misplaced.

It won’t happen, it is not popular and not a vote winner. Fine for people with houses inside the M25, but not for the majority. ULEZ will be stopped as well

Governments always push back deadlines!

The analogue radio network was scheduled to be turned off about a decade ago to get people to buy and use digital radios. The actual deadline has just been put back for another decade!

HMRC are constantly pushing back the deadline for their "file by internet" for self employed self assessment tax returns - as every year passes, there's another extension announced.

The new London underground line opening kept getting pushed back. Likewise HS2.

It's just a "nudge" - to encourage those who can to move over, i.e. those who can afford cars, those who can charge at home, etc. The more they "nudge" over the better. It achieves some of the goals at minimal cost. Basically picking the "low hanging fruit". The "harder" ones can be pushed back into the long grass, i.e. those who can't afford EV cars, those who can't charge at home, rural areas without adequate infrastructure etc.

They won't need a formal "deadline" once 75% of people are using EVs - ICE cars will just gradually fade away as the years pass, still available for those who need them, but in relatively small numbers that they no longer matter. After all, with cars capable of lasting 20 years or so, we'll still have petrol/diesel cars on the road well into the 2030's/2040's even with a 2030 ban on new ones, so there'll still be plenty of petrol stations around etc for another couple of decades. By then, there'll probably be alternative technologies or cleaner petrol/diesel anyway and maybe a trend back away from EVs.

It's unlikely that people are typically commuting long distances for the roles that you've listed. These are already 'local' roles in many instances.
It's people who work in the corporate world (professional services, insurance, banking, finance, tech) who tend to commute long distances, because these roles - certainly those which pay the most - are mainly found in major cities. So it would absolutely be helpful, from an environmental perspective, for this sort of worker to WFH.

No - but if you were making a big decision and aren’t in the wage bracket that buying EV is going to be an issue - then this is something it’s worth factoring in now.

when we bought our house, we had a short list of 3 - all the same price, 2 walking distance to the train station and one much bigger house that was further out and would need us to drive to the station. At the time both dh and I worked in central london and got the train daily - we thought about parking at the station costs and if we would need to make sure we were on the same train home etc to avoid having to run 2 cars. In the end we bought one of the smaller houses nearer the station .

Fast forward 14 years and neither of us work in London anymore, if we were buying now I wouldn’t factor the station into the decision. However dcs are settled at schools and id factor in walking distance to those /public transport for secondary child.

So if you are making a big, not easy to change decision in the next few years, this is something you should have on your list to factor in. Not everyone will move house - but many people will move house, pick a child’s school (that then younger siblings will go to), change career etc in the next couple of years.

the OP is right that this should be on your list of things to factor into your choices. (And yes, not everyone has the same range of choices, that doesn’t mean no one has choices.)

EV are likely to go the way of Betamax. Toyota will compete in endurance racing with hydrogen cell cars from 2026 with a view to developing technologies to decarbonise all road transport. The solution is coming, just not by 2030.

Electric cars are no better for the environment than petrol or diesel, it’s just different damage.

We need to change people’s mindset away from car use, not necessary car use to e.g. get to work/do their jobs/drive necessary distances, but this trend for driving to the corner shop half a mile away, doing the school run half a mile away, i have a family member who drives to his sister’s house which is in sight of his own. The level of unnecessary car use is ridiculous, and we need to get to a point where people start to realise that.

Too many people are reliant on their cars for journeys where there simply isn’t the need. Again, I’m not talking about absolutely necessary journeys, but a lot of people absolutely are using their cars for unnecessary journeys.

And with that decrease in use there will be an increase in people doing exercise of some sort, which will hopefully also have an impact on the obesity crisis.

And public transport needs to be increased in areas where having a car at the moment is a necessity. Because the UK is divided into two parts, te one where it’s necessary to own a car, and bigger cities where it isn’t.

I live just outside of London and the reality is that no-one needs to own a car for anything more than long distance travel or unless you have a driving based job. The number of people who drive the half a mile to the nearest station and park their car in the streets aroun it while they get the train to work is ridiculous. Where I live we have the infrastructure, there is a bus stop 200 yards from my house if people don’t want to walk to the station. but the station is a 15 minute walk max, and yet my neighbour drives his car there every morning, parks it, gets on a train to work, comes home, and drives it home. And before anyone says “you don’t know his circumstances, he may not be able to walk to the bus stop,” I think that given he goes for a five mile run four times a week and plays football every weekend, is constantly running around with the kids etc says everything we need to know about whether he is able.

We need t stop. Using the few people who genuinely can’t do these things as an excuse for those who can and who just choose not to.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Oh, I love a good laugh first thing in the morning.

Ahhh, well done you!

Absolutely needless move, but GO you!

Maybe, and this is just a suggestion, but maybe do some basic research on the automotive sector before moving house!!