cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/46045941
“We need a reality check. Otherwise we are heading at full speed against a wall,” Mercedes chief executive Ola Kaellenius told the Handelsblatt business daily of the 2035 goal, adding that Europe’s car market could “collapse” if it goes ahead.
Banning sales of fossil fuel cars after 2035 is exactly the plan.
No. Banning sales of non-zero emission plans is the plan, it doesn’t specifically ban combustion engines. Combustion engine tech has stagnated like the last 4 decades, though, so it’s highly unlikely they’ll be zero emission within 10 years.
This is car manufacturers complaining that they haven’t made steps forward for 40 years and are now forced to switch to the technology that made them obsolete.
This isn’t true at all, combustion engines have improved by huge amounts in terms of efficiency and reliability in that time.
Reliability? Absolutely.
And on paper, they made significant steps to reduce emissions in their engines. But that’s on paper, the VW scandal a few years ago has shown us how trustworthy those figures are.
Efficiency? Not really. Combustion engines used in cars still only average to about 30% effiency, which is a number only marginally higher than what I learned in school over 20 years ago. This is largely because car engines mostly dont operate within their peak-performance/efficiency windows.
I guess that a hydrogen fueled vehicle would be allowed then, which is terrible since basically all hydrogen is made from methane currently. 🙈
It would indeed be allowed, even though it’s quite inefficient, wherever it comes from. However it potentially allows for storage of its energy source, which is its main selling point compared to purely electrical systems with the current battery technologies (although those are evolving as well).