Canada expects to announce this week that all new cars will have to be zero emissions by 2035, a senior government source said, as Ottawa is set to unveil new regulations in the latest example of countries around the world pushing for electrification.
Sounds good to me but I do worry that new vehicles will be even more expensive than they are now and the used car market will go the way of the current housing market.
That’s a good point. I think one solution is smaller cars. For the past two decades, we’ve bought way more car than we need—everyone has huge SUVs and pick up trucks, despite the fact that families are smaller than ever and fewer people carpool than in the past. That’s because big cars are subsidized with relaxed regulations.
The other solution is fewer cars. We’ll always need cars, but there’s lots of low hanging fruit to improve our mediocre public transportation and lack of mixed zoning.
People are too stupid to buy a smaller car. Media tells them that bigger = safety and luxury, and that’s all they need to know. Just look at how many people scream “the grid isn’t ready”, “they don’t work in the cold”, and “the batteries cause slavery” about EVs because they heard it in a tik tok once.
Fewer car is the ideal solution but the people who will loose their cars are the ones with the least lifestyle choices, they don’t commute by choice. There will never be a lack of rich pricks to buy white Audi/BMW/Merc suvs.
Maybe in North America. Small cars are fine in Europe…
You might be right, but it would be a good motivator to have people pay the true cost of big heavy cars — including the negative externalities to health, safety, road wear, parking, and pollution. Drivers don’t currently pay those costs, which means we essentially subsidize big heavy cars now. If we stopped doing that, Canadians would act more like consumers in the rest of the world.
Also, strong agree on fewer cars being the ideal solution. In fact, fewer cars is a mathematical necessity. We can’t electrify ourselves out of terrible land use, e.g. the oceans of parking lots, crumbling roads, and inefficient highways that contribute to carbon emissions and environmental degradation.
see: Car Insurance Costs
you’re thinking a Road Tax like the UK? That’s coming; but I’ll only vote on it if it pays MoT AND MoT takes over a completely-public mass-transit
User-fees
E car; but I can get behind a levy on car insurance through our publicly-managed consolidated regional single-base-insurer, for Internal Combustion Engine cars.
It seems the only thing missing is the road tax; and that’s just because they’re in love with their volatile user fees for transit despite the near-collapse of CEO bonuses during the pandemic.
Car insurance only covers a small number of externalities. It does not cover tire particle pollution (tires are the number one source of microplastics in the world), air exhaust pollution, noise pollution, etc etc. Even if they never got into accidents, cars would remain one of the most hazardous things to our health. Cars are also the number one killer of children, by far, and insurance doesn’t bring them back to life.
Agreed that a road tax is a good start. But a road tax wouldn’t cover the fact that bigger cars cause MUCH more of all these harms than smaller cars, so externalities remain.
So not a single solution at all.
Raising the cost of living is a typical moron economics. The net result of large rises in the cost of living has always been and will always result in loss of life. Good luck getting voted back into parliament on the back of destroying the middle and low income classes.
How do smaller and fewer cars raise the cost of living? And why is the thing that’s successful everywhere else in the world not a solution? Your comment makes no sense.
How do you think people don’t already buy the cars they need with the money they have?
Cars are a waste of money. Doubling the price of them and increasing the cost of living is just stupid under current economic state.
Good luck with that claim.
Because they don’t sell smaller cheaper cars here due to bad regulation. Most European/Asian cars look nothing like the big stupid SUVs here.
And that’s just not how economic externalities work. When you ignore them, these costs don’t just go away and make things “more affordable”. We all pay for it. In fact, costs falls especially on the poor, who disproportionally tend to use public transit instead of buying big shiny new trucks.
I find this very hard to believe the claim entirely. Give examples. I know for a fact Hyundai (Korean), Honda (Japanes), VW (European), and more are sold.
Was this generated by AI . Wow. It has absolutely nothing to do with reducing cost of EVs or size of cars.
Are and here we are at the core of the bias.
You want to reduce the size and impact of vehicles on roads you don’t do it by doubling the cost of all vehicles, period. You do it with a road tax based on vehicle weight. That way all big vehicles are taxed equally and this includes EVs being taxed more: as they should be. Because of the impact (cost) to the roads and environment that they have. Personal transportation emissions are a very small percentage of transportation emissions which is a small percentage overall (8). EVs just shift the combustion to the energy generation which is just as bad and in some cases worse. EVs charge at night when the grid supply is propped up by the dirtiest generation. So we counter it with grid energy storage and home energy storage. If the grid is rolling renewables, this allows homes to store the energy when it’s the cleanest (home solar improves this vastly) to a point that it would be taking two f100s worth of emissions off the grid per home. This should be the priority, home/grid storage, not doubling the cost of personal vehicles under the false flag of environmentalism.
Of course I don’t mean that literally not a single small car is for sale. 🙄 Anyone who has done even the most cursory search knows that the market for small cars is extremely different in other parts of the world. When you’re misinterpreting my comments in such an uncharitable way, I don’t really see a point in continuing this discussion.
When did I ever say we should “double the cost of all vehicles”? What an insane way to argue with someone! You can’t just invent stupid positions and attribute them to your interlocutor.
I agree with your proposal. A road tax based on weight internalizes the externalities. It sounds like you think we disagree because you don’t know what an economic externality is. Instead of your glib reply, you could… look it up before replying.
I apologise, I reread your original post as I thought it was “1. electric 2. smaller vehicles”. Electrification effectively doubles the cost of sedans even after tax cuts and subsidies. Add to this not everyone can buy a small car, a family with two or more babies/kids for example require a large vehicle, trades people, the list goes on. in my country & state, luxury tax, stamp duty tax are waived for electric vehicles yet they still almost double the price. People buy small cars for small cost. This would push small vehicles beyond the reach of a lot of the population impacting entire households and families in ways we can’t imagine amplified in cities and towns with poor or no public transportation.
it’s weird how almost every word of what you said isn’t reality.
Said the no one adding nothing
Strangely enough china’s cheap-ass cars are coming to the rescue. Since they’re available. They’re making the dodges and Lincolns consider smart-car-sized bare conveyances.
I’ll buy they for c$12k
I don’t trust Chinese quality control on lithium ion battery packs. I don’t trust Tesla either, but that’s besides the point.
At least the are better diy ev options then there were 10 years ago.
We don’t have to buy them.
Their price point will push the expected price down for everyone.
Both housing and electric vehicles can be mass produced if the political majorities and bureaucracy are there.
Resources, that is raw materials, skilled workforce, construction planning and coordination, need to acquired. Among the requirememts for faster production is the realisation that luxurios amenities such as child-height radiator grills or ‘unique’ buildings that cannot create any shade are hindering cheap, that is accessible, mass production of electric vehicles and housing.
The ‘stuff required’ (political, infrastructure, bureaucracy, etc.) is unfortunately at odds with unrestrained capitalism. While it would be lovely to have everyone deal with a modest car and a modest house, companies will do everything they can to lure customers to a more luxurious offering; and the customers will work themselves into an early grave to be able to afford it.
I don’t care about grand narratives of economic ideologies anymore, but I wouldn’t call corruption capitalism. Apart from all 18th and 19th century ideologies being unfit for 20th to 25th centuries climate change mitigation and resilience, a few countries being held back by decadence will not stop change, as we have seen with the PV industry.
Scheming this into Cold War-style binary thinking of Socialism/Communism vs Capitalism is insufficient. We will have achieved either parts goals and the planet turns into a hot desert.
Make sure to buy a brand new ICE vehicle in 2033 because it will be worth a fortune on the used car market around 2040 😜
Maybe, maybe not. People follow the path of least resistance.
Right now, electric cars are a pain because there aren’t DC fast charges everywhere. They’re great for the daily commute because you can charge them at home, but they’re a bit annoying when you want to do a road trip.
What happens when adoption of electric cars goes up? We’ll see more charging stations, and fewer gas pumps. When gas pumps are as rare as DC fast chargers are, who is going to want the annoyance of a gas car? You’ll only be able to sell to hobbyists who don’t mind driving 30 min to a gas station. And will they really want whichever car you’re driving?