The UK joins a budge to ban gas and diesel cars by 2040
August 03, two thousand seventeen · 1:15 PM EDT
Electrified car.jpg
A sign for an electrical car charging station at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
The end of cars that run on petroleum may now be in view.
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Think 2050, the middle of this century.
The latest strong signal of the turn away from the internal combustion engine toward cleaner electrical motors is coming from the UK.
The British government announced last week it will ban the sale of fresh gas and diesel cars by the year 2040.
The stir comes just weeks after France made the same call. Other countries including Norway, the Netherlands and India have set or are considering similar goals along with a number of big cities around the world, including Paris, Mexico City and Athens.
The UK government says its ban will apply to cars that run only on gas or diesel. That means speeding up the transition over the next duo of decades to hybrids, which run on both petroleum and electrical play, as well as cars that run on electro-therapy alone.
Such cars presently represent a little segment of the car market in the UK and around the world, albeit it is growing rapidly.
Most drivers of this fresh breed of cars have made the switch largely out of a desire to cut their emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide. But the moves in the UK, France and elsewhere to phase out gas- and diesel-powered cars is largely in response to a more local and instant problem: old-fashioned smog from tailpipe emissions that make people sick.
Smog is still a big problem in many cities in Europe and elsewhere, and governments are under pressure to fix it.
The death of ‘clean diesel’
In latest years many European countries had put their faith in fighting smog in what some car makers called “clean diesel” engines that promised much lower emissions than gas engines.
But that desire has been largely killed by the VW scandal of the last duo of years, after the German auto giant was caught rigging millions of their diesel engines to make them show up cleaner than they indeed are.
Now, without “clean diesel,” a lot of governments and even car companies are attempting to make a quick pivot toward electro-stimulation.
The switch will require big switches in technology and infrastructure, however, which explains the long transition period governments are setting up.
The two thickest limitations right now are range — how far a battery-powered car can go on a charge — and access to charging stations — like gas stations but pumping electrons instead of liquid fuel.
Among uncountable other possible buyers, these challenges have discouraged The World’s own Jason Margolis.
Margolis possessed one of those tainted VW diesels, and when the company bought it back, he was looking to put the money toward an electrified.
But he ultimately determined not to. The one he had his eye on could only go about eighty three miles on a charge.
“I thought I was fine for commuting back and forward to work,” Margolis says, “but I was a little worried [that you] can’t indeed do much else beyond that. And the 2nd issue was, where do you charge it?”
Margolis says the charging cable that came with the car he dreamed was twenty feet long but the closest he could get a car to his house was twenty two feet — “2 feet timid of making it happen,” he says. There’s also no charging station at The World’s home base at WGBH in Boston, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find any public charging stations.
It’s a concern collective by many. Right now, at the dawn of the electrical age in Britain, there are fewer than Five,000 charging stations in a country of more than thirty six million vehicles, according to Agence France-Presse, potentially creating a lot of anxiety for drivers who might otherwise make the switch.
“People are reluctant to buy an electrified car until they see those charging stations out there,” says Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Lowering the barriers to going electrified
But Sperling thinks that problem is more psychological than actual.
“The reality is, most people are going to be charging, number one at home, [and] the 2nd place is at work,” Sperling says. “So the next campaign is to get employers to put in chargers. And public charging is indeed the third priority.”
Sperling is also certain the range issue will be worked out as manufacturers find ways to squeeze more batteries into all-electrics and plug-in hybrids come into broader use.
The thicker issue, Sperling says, is cost — batteries for electrical cars are still expensive, making the price of an average electrical car a good deal steeper than a gas counterpart.
“That’s very likely the more significant factor,” Sperling says. “The costs of these vehicles have to come down and be competitive. But I think we’re going to see sustained reduction in battery cost.”
Along with plug-in hybrids, Sperling points to a third emerging technology that he believes will be part of the global switch away from purely petroleum-powered cars: electrical cars powered not by a battery but by a hydrogen fuel cell.
“I own a hydrogen fuel cell car myself,” Sperling says. “I get about three hundred miles of range before I have to refuel it.” And like a battery-electric, Sperling says, it produces zero emissions.
Hydrogen-powered cars are already available in California and a few other markets, albeit, as of now, drivers face an even more limited availability of refueling options than drivers of battery-electrics. But Sperling believes they will become an significant part of the mix as the world starts to speed away from petroleum-powered cars.
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