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.

I thought of this thread yesterday as I said "I can't see it happening by 2030". The OP was very adamant though!

Regardless of opinion, anyone with half a brain would logistically see it was never going to happen so quickly.

Interesting about changes to rental properties as apparently that pushed a lot of landlords to sell up.

Quite a few car manufacturers have been pretty pissed of by this announcement.

Aprilx - I'm sure some will give up cars, car sharing schemes are becoming more common in cities

Probably thinking about their profits, that's the bottom line

Also, electric cars are not necessarily that good for the environment!

They don’t have to be good for the environment. They have to be less bad for the environment than ICE cars. Which they are.

The electric does have to come from somewhere.

Yes, it does. At one point yesterday or the day before, wind was providing over 60% of our electricity, and gas less than 15%.

One good thing Rishi did yesterday was to remove the effective ban on onshore wind in England. Onshore wind is far and away the cheapest form of electricity, we need more of it.

We also need massive investment in the grid, to increase its capacity, so that power can more easily be moved from point of generation to point of demand, and in storage facilities (pumped hydro, batteries, and others) to help flatten out the spiky nature of wind and solar. Plus initiatives such as time of use pricing and last winter’s Demand Flexibility Service, to even out demand/match it better to supply.

Aprilx - I'm sure some will give up cars, car sharing schemes are becoming more common in cities

I don't understand why we don't have far more school bus services? that would surely reduce cars on the road.

Do you have a link to those wind power statistics?

Well, yes thats the point of a business. They've invested hugely in developing electric vehicles, stopped progressing petrol ones, adapted production lines etc, all on the basis of a deadline thats been pushed back 5 years.
Its very intersting what happens next, and how much impact delaying a ban has. Will manufacturers just plough ahead with their developments and you'll find in 2030 you can buy petrol cars, but they will be the same as the ones as now and if you want all the newest developments you buy electric.

@OrwellianTimes it was from Here, but it was an instantaneous reading, I just happened to look when wind was over 60%.

More car sharing schemes would be good. I would use one if there were one in my area.

And we don't have more school bus services because councils won't pay for them.

Why on earth do you think the number of cars on the road will be reduced?

No, not everyone will be able to afford a brand new electric car. However lots of people can’t afford brand new petrol cars now.

If you normally buy 10 year old petrol cars, then you will still be able to buy 10 year old petrol cars until 2045 (10 years after the ban on sales of new ones.)

After that point there will be a glut of 10 year old electric cars you can buy for a bargain price instead. The technology will also have massively advanced by then, and prices reduced.

No one is going to have to give up driving because of the ban on petrol and diesel cars.

What will happen to the batteries of all these electric cars once when they stop working? Can they be recycled?

The EU has voted on a battery law where basically 95% of the battery needs to be recycled. Cant remember the exact time frame but its not far off. They are also investing in battery manufacturing to make it possible. Norway definatley has a huge battery recycling centre set up already as they are early adopters of ev. There is lots about making sure there is a circular economy in batteries.

You can also create battery banks to make use of batteries that still have life but maybe not reliable enough for a car. They can help the national grid out..

Again, not saying they are perfect or without consequence, but technology is rapidly evolving all the time and people are actively tackling all the big issues.

@loveandpoprockz Yes - they can be reused, to start with. A battery that's no longer good for a car is more than good enough for household solar storage.

The Tesla LFP batteries have an expected lifespan of 2 to 4 million miles. I likely won't have to worry about recycling if during my lifetime.

Helpful article here:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/01/do-electric-cars-have-problem-mining-for-minerals

"Yet overall, the mineral use for electric cars is much, much lower than petrol and diesel as soon as oil enters the equation. Transport & Environment (T&E), a Brussels-based thinktank, found that a petrol car will burn an average of 17,000 litres of oil in its lifetime – about 12.5 tonnes.
And most criticisms of electric cars’ mineral use miss a hugely important point: the majority of battery materials used in cars are likely to be recycled. That will drastically cut down the amount of wasted material compared with fossil fuels which disappear".

No, they are selfish for being old and disabled and are the cause of climate change and global boiling 🤣 OP obviously hasn’t thought any of this out. Manufacturers aren’t going to stop making petrol and diesel cars for man years if ever.. hopefully all this nonsense gets sorted out

@VoiceOfCommonSense - they are already scaling down production of petrol and diesel.

I do think the OP was right in a way, if you are making a major life decision in the next couple of years that you would have to live with for a decade or more (like which school to send your dcs to, changing career, moving from a town to an isolated village etc), then factoring this into your plan is worth pointing out. Even thinking about how long you’ll keep your current car If you want to replace with petrol.

some people will be negatively effected by this and have no way of adjusting their lifestyle to minimise the impact, but others can and should at least think about it before buying one of these houses with no off road parking in an area with no public transport and no public charging stations nearby.

I just looked and wind power right now is under 5% though, and all renewables together under 15%. And this is the problem - we can produce lots of renewables but we're not currently able to store them well and we can't produce them on demand.

Beggars belief that the majority of research is not into tidal power which is infinite and will only increase when we melt all the ice caps

I agree, and also rivers etc - yes I know they're not ideal and rely on rainfall uphill, but even in dry weather, there's usually still a fair amount of flow (unless a full on drought in which case we'd have solar). They're how we used to power mills and light industry - it's why they used to be built alongside tributaries etc to power water wheels which in turn could power an entire mill. We could use that natural water flow to turn turbines to create electricity. Rainfall is less in Summer, which is when the national grid could rely more on solar power. As it is, in Winter, solar is a lot less useful and if there's little wind, wind power isn't helpful either, so add in turbines powered by streams and rivers, it could help make up the shortfall River/stream turbines would also be a hell of a lot cheaper than blocking off estuaries to harness tidal from the sea.

I didn't mean to block off anything but to harness tidal differently. I saw something years ago on some science programme that had 'snakes' that floated on top of the water and somehow harnessed tidal power. There is research into it, just not enough.
They also need to make EV car batteries a lot lighter and be made of less precious metals, elements as all tech needs to including mobile phones that people seem to change all the time. It all matters.

Ummm, maybe it will be delayed by (at least) 5 years?