The European Commission unveiled a plan on Tuesday to drop the EU’s effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035 after pressure from the region’s auto sector, marking the bloc’s biggest retreat from its green policies in recent years.

The move, which still needs approval from EU governments and the European Parliament, would allow continued sales of some non-electric vehicles. Carmakers in regional industrial powerhouse Germany and in Italy had sought easing of the rules.

The EU executive appears to have bowed to calls from carmakers to keep selling plug-in hybrids and range extenders that burn fuel as they struggle to compete against Tesla, opens new tab and Chinese electric vehicle makers.

  • fort_burp@feddit.nl
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    9 hours ago

    Yes, a habitable planet for humanity would be nice, but have you considered the portfolios of a few selfish assholes?

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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    11 hours ago

    So from 2035 it was supposed to be possible to only sell cars with 100% reduction in CO2 emissions. They want to change it to 90% reduction and still allow to sell plug-in-hybrids which is bullshit because recent analysis of real life usage show that plug-in hybrids run on gas most of the time and are not nearly as efficient as estimated. They should focus on building charging infrastructure instead. German car industry is dying anyway.

    • wheezy@lemmy.ml
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      7 hours ago

      I’m really wondering how the west thinks they’ll continue to sell this cold war with China.

      China: Please buy our better products that we are selling at lower prices.

      The West: China is trying to destroy the western world! We must prepare for war!

      Everyone with an Internet connection: Uh, yeah, can we get one of those electric cars that cost half as much and is better in every way?

      The funny thing is that the answer to the wests failures is literally just to be more like China. Central planning in vital sectors like infrastructure and transportation. Instead we just have a ruling class that wants to burn oil and start wars with countries that aren’t attacking us.

      We literally just stole an oil ship because we made up a rule about trade that we don’t allow between two completely independent countries that never agreed to that rule. It’s comical how awful we are.

      Like, for some reason Venezuela can’t sell oil to Cuba because we said so. That’s it. It’s literally just because we said so.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 hours ago

        The funny thing is that the answer to the wests failures is literally just to be more like China. Central planning in vital sectors like infrastructure and transportation. Instead we just have a ruling class that wants to burn oil and start wars with countries that aren’t attacking us.

        That would require giving up on the ultra-liberal reduced-state no-regulation orthodoxy which has put so much power in the hands of Money and money in the pockets of Politicians.

        The entire top of the current Western power structures is against it, hence we’re going down the route of Collapse Through Stagnation.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      11 hours ago

      keeping the russia and the MIDDLE east economy afloat, because the politicians pockets are in too deep with these 2 countries

        • Bademantel@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          Was ist denn dein Problem? Scheiterst du an der Herausforderung, das Wort mit der Story in Einklang zu bringen?

          • realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip
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            23 hours ago

            Tatsächlich kann ich mit diesem einzelnen Wort nichts anfangen, es sei denn, du möchtest sagen, dass Europa bei EVs nicht komplett von China abgehängt wurde. In diesem Fall wärst du aber saudämlich.

            • Bademantel@lemmy.world
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              23 hours ago

              Nein. Der Realitätsverlust ist auf Seiten der Europäischen Kommission zu verorten. Nun kannst du die Punkte bestimmt verbinden.

  • WagnasT@piefed.world
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    24 hours ago

    this is what pisses me off about every net zero by 2050 or whenever plan, they will do nothing until 2045 and then just give up or kick the can again.

  • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    The great thing is that it won’t matter. EVs are going to become extremely cheaper and more efficient, making them the clear choice over the next couple years.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      Yeah, this whole thing sounds a lot like a section of horse-drawn carriage industry going down the route of committing suicide by using crooked politicians to try and stop the march of evolution via legislation rather that the route of adapting to an unstoppable change and thus surviving.

      In 20 years time most of the companies pushing for this will be either be gone or become cottage shops and this shit will almost certainly also have negatively impacted the rest of the industry in Europe.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      8 hours ago

      They’re already very cheap as long as you only want two wheels and aren’t fussed about having a roof.

    • JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Cheaper for the industry to manufacture, certainly. Cheaper for the consumer to purchase, I have my suspicions.

      I would love to see a return to smaller cars - sedans even - but the shareholders might not like lower profits per unit, so I’m not sure we’re going to see prices plateau let alone decline.

      • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca
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        3 hours ago

        I don’t drive but I’d like to see a return to cars that aren’t Orwellian spying devices.

      • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Cheaper for the consumer to purchase, I have my suspicions.

        Why would it be cheaper to produce, but more expensive to purchase? Because of bullshit rules that will not be long lived.

  • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    I think this is the difference between opening doors to the future vs closing doors to the past. When China funded EVs and battery research, they opened the door to the future. When the EU and US try to ban gas engines, they are trying to close the door to the past. Guess which one works.

    • Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz
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      23 hours ago

      Yeah, EVs will naturally take over the market as they become more desirable/affordable. Meanwhile, if anything, banning ICE cars will make personal cars even more of a luxury.

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        Why would it be more of a luxury? Fuel and maintenance should be cheaper, and with proper investments the cars should be cheaper as well. A lot of the battery research right now is showing batteries that could last say 1,000,000 miles. If you get decent standards for such, you could have parents getting a new car and moving their old battery into a cheap EV for their teenager. If it had 200,000 miles on it, they can keep moving it to their next vehicle, and next vehicle if they keep wanting to get new features. The average American drives 14,000 miles a year. In theory they can pass that battery down to their teenager as well, but at that point it’s probably better to just recycle it or use it as a backup generator for the home.

        Making repairable, recyclable, reusable batteries takes one of the largest costs down by a long shot.

        Notre; Obviously batteries don’t last miles, but for sake of this discussion it made sense to put it this way

        • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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          12 hours ago

          But in much of the EU, electricity is expensive.

          I had an EV for a while (tons of people have company cars in Belgium) and charging it at a fast charging station costs like 10% more per km than gas. A regular charging station is very slightly cheaper.

          Charging at home used to be cheaper, but now energy companies charge a fee for “peak energy usage” that is more than 15 minutes, so if you charge your car at 11kW at home once in a month, you will get an extra fee on your 250€/month energy bill of 50€.

          I am interested in that battery research though, because charge-cycle wise, only lithium iron phosphate subsection of EV battery chemistry would last even near that long. Lithium ion only lasts 500 cycles before degrading to 70% and LiPo is only 1000. My ID4 could do 420 km on a charge, assuming a LiPo composition, that is 420k kilometers, which is a quarter of what you say. That said, that is a pretty long lifetime for a car. Especially because all of the sensor systems would break down or be remotely disabled to force you to buy new ones long before then.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 hours ago

            The crash in the cost of Renewables is taking care of that.

            There are 3 main kinds of energy use in the West:

            • Things that use electricity, which nowadays includes EVs
            • Things that use oil or one of its derivatives, which nowadays is mainly ICE vehicles.
            • Things that use gas or one if its derivatives, which nowadays is mainly cooking and home heating.

            Only the first one gains from the current trend for ever cheaper electricity from Renewables which is ongoing: for example only a few years ago Gas Power Generation was cheaper than Solar, but now its now anymore.

            So to fully take advantage of that trend, as much as possible of power usage in the Economy needs to be Electricity use rather than other sources of power (other renewables too are useful, but it’s in electrical power generation that we are seeing the stronger and most sustained fall in costs).

            What you’re seeing in Electricity prices in many countries in Europe still being high is the inertia due to installed infrastructure (I bet Belgium still has lots of Gas Power Plants and buys lots of power from French Nuclear Power Plants) delaying things like fully taking advantage of, for example, very low solar panel costs. Also the installed generation industries are trying to delay the march of renewables - for example France has been for ages blocking the construction of power connection bringing cheaper power from renewables from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe because it would compete with their own sales of Power generated by their Nuclear Power Plants.

            Still, for some there are ways to go around it, though depending on one’s own condition - for example if you have your own house, and your car is there for at least part of the time of the day when there is daylight, getting solar panels to help charge that EV makes a lot of sense because one can feed the other directly and that power is at cost (which is basically just the cost of buying and installing the panel) rather than being the 4-times more expensive than wholesale power you get from a retail electricity supplier.

            Anyways, the trend in Electricity is for it to get cheaper. The trend in Oil is for it the get more expensive (as the easier to get to reserves get depleted and harder and more costly to extract or process stuff such as tar sands gets used) and the same for Gas but slower (since there are far vaster gas reserves than oil), so it makes some sense in the mid and long term to get the biggest power consumers at home to be using Electricity.

        • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          Pretty much everything about an EV can be made to last a milloin miles. Electric motors are rodust, they don’t wear out like ICE engines. No transmission to wear out. Suspension parts can be replaced. You’re pretty much down to rust.

        • Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz
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          14 hours ago

          I was thinking about the thing in terms of current purchase costs. Right now there’s a sizeable gap between prices of ICE cars and EVs in the same vehicle category.

          That gap will of course get smaller over time.

        • Tower@lemmy.zip
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          16 hours ago

          Which is exactly why the ruling capitalist class is trying so hard to not let that happen. Must consume. Line must go up.

          • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            It just means the ruling class made investments in things they haven’t figured out how to capitalize on quickly yet. Really they should be able to switch quickly and drive the market… But propaganda is shackling them to stupidity.

            There are very few rich people in the U.S., there are far fewer smart rich people’s in the U.S.

  • Simulation@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    Complete switch to electric will not happen until governments make it possible to essentially get one basic electric vehicle for pennies by trading your old ICE vehicle.

    Otherwise guess what, the vast majority of people don’t have 30.000 to drop on a new buy just because maa environment. Saying that, I am all in for a complete switch when there will be affordable cars that can do at least 700km on a charge.

  • claimsou@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    It would only allow cars emitting 90%less vs 2021 level. It’s not much of a change and it leaves room for innovation. It’s not that bad.

  • monad@anarchist.nexus
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    24 hours ago

    Yall missing the point!

    EVs have many flaws. They are not the future.

    What all this means is enforced :

    . Slavery

    . Poverty

    . Complete loss of privacy

    • neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      Perfect is the enemy of good.

      Just because something has flaws doesn’t make it bad.

      Things are relative. They are better than ICE counterparts for the environment, saying any different is ignoring a mountain of data and evidence to push propaganda.