Tampere in Finland goes down to -32C and here’s an article, already three years old, about their EV bus fleet and how it manages in cold weather.

https://cris.vtt.fi/ws/files/5...

Finland is just as cold as Canada overall, and yet has lots of electric buses. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. We know you don’t have a will, but others do.

You could be more gracious about this and acknowledge the fundamental point I was making, which was that all policy decisions involve social engineering, it’s inescapable, and it applies as much to “right-leaning” as it does to “left-leaning” decisions about transport. And laissez-faire decisions are impossible in some areas.

On the specifics: the question isn’t whether people and cars should be kept separate, because at some point they are going to mix, because pedestrians exist in the world and need to get to places and will have to cross the path of traffic etc. So the question is who should you prioritise when you build streets? For example, should a car have to stop for a pedestrian or a pedestrian for a car? A decision has to be made and whichever you decide is social engineering. It’s unavoidable.

Also, it’s just rhetorical bollix to say that people will still buy SUVs and trucks if we did away with CAFE entirely. I was able to walk downstairs last November and I can still walk downstairs today, but not having a cast on any more means I get there a lot faster — ie the importance of CAFE isn’t that it was the *sole thing* causing people to buy SUVs and trucks — I literally listed out a bunch of other drivers in my post. It was, however, one important accelerant.

Also, you sound very much like someone who’s completely unfamiliar with relative pedestrian death rates in Europe (pedestrians commingle much more freely with cars, death rate relatively low) and the US (pedestrians much more separated from cars, death rate relatively much higher and going in the other direction). If you had been at all familiar with these, you surely wouldn’t have made the rookie error of suggesting that the safest way to manage streets is to keep pedestrians well away from cars, when that’s clearly not borne out by the evidence. If you’d ever been to Europe, from Oslo to Paris to London to Amsterdam to Madrid, you’d see this for yourself: the streets are clearly safer in both urban and suburban settings and yet pedestrians mix much more freely with traffic.

Motes and beams, Kernel, motes and beams. The US populace largely drives big vehicles because of the policy choices that the US government made, including:
1. CAFE exemptions for “light” trucks; the chicken tax that drove US OEMs away from making smaller vehicles. This is favouring one segment of the market over others, ie social engineering
2. Section 179 expensing that allows larger vehicles to be written off rapidly. As above, social engineering
3. Crash standards that focus mainly on occupant protection, secondarily on people in other vehicles and not at all on pedestrian safety. This is about as blatant as social engineering gets: it makes it much more dangerous to be a pedestrian than a driver or passenger, pushing people off the streets
3. Road designs, including Wwide roads, large radii and large parking minimums that make life easy for people in large vehicles. Again, you can’t get more blatant in social engineering terms than this. Fast roads with big cars in suburban and urban residential zones are incredibly shitty and dangerous for pedestrians
There’s plenty more beyond this, but the broad point is this: the notion that only Europe engages in social engineering is for the birds. All policy is social engineering, including laissez-faire policy (which is most assuredly not what the US has ever had in the auto industry). We can choose what kind of social engineering we pursue as a society, but it’s inescapable. You talk about individuality and low levels of regulation, but ultimately, someone has to decide something mundane like what the turning radii of a suburban street is going to be, and if it’s wide it favours big fast vehicles and harms vulnerable road users, and if it’s narrow the opposite is true. There’s no developed world anywhere that just has a free-for-all, they all have these rules in place, and many more like it, eg safety standards for OEMs to keep to, trade policy rules, etc.

Was this meant to be a response to what I wrote? It seems orthogonal to the point I was making

I thought you were making a more general point about small cars being undesirable, and I was pointing out that they are often highly desired by consumers. Policy choices influence consumer preferences including on car size, and there are major policy differences between the US and Europe. Absent those policy choices, OEMs would make and import a wider variety of vehicles for the US, and consumers would find it easier to buy an actually small car if they wanted them. Also, it's worth pointing out that we make our individual choices in the context of the market in which we live. People are comfortable to drive a supermini in countries where there are lots of other superminis around, and a lot less so in countries where most other cars are SUVs and trucks that are quite literally twice the size.

My point about the Chevy vs V class etc was to point out that stupid packaging can make a massive car like those Chevys cramped inside, while clever packaging can make a small car surprisingly spacious (the Hyundai Inster is a great example).

What an incredibly witty rejoinder. Such repartee! What must it be like to be unable to respond to the substantive argument and then unable to come up with anything but the shittiest of jokes to make yourself feel better. Terrible for you.

You’ve completely missed the point.

The mistake you’re making is confusing the mere fact that business costs are deductible with how and when costs are deductible. Ordinary businesses are indeed taxed on profit, but cannot immediately deduct large up-front investment costs for long-lived assets. Instead, they must capitalise those costs and write them off slowly over many years. Oil and gas companies, however, get to treat intangible drilling costs as investment costs and expense them immediately. That is special treatment: the subsidy is the timing. A deduction today is worth far more than the same deduction spread over 10–20 years: it boosts cash flow, it lowers risk, and it cuts the effective tax rate on drilling. It’s an interest-free loan from the government that applies almost exclusively to oil and gas, which is why every institution involved treats this as a tax expenditure. If oil and gas were taxed like other industries, many drilling projects would never clear the hurdle: IDC is a subsidy that makes them economic.

I agree. I think Renault has a chance of survival, as do maybe VAG, BMW and Mercedes. But the latter keep vacillating between an ICE and an EV strategy, instead of milking ICE cashcow margins to invest in the EV future.

Could you at least learn *some* fucking basics about EVs. Batteries do not use rare earths: they use Li, N, M and Co or Li, Fe and Po, none of which is a rare earth. Some EV motors do use rare earths, although not all.

Convenience is in the eye of the consumer. Charging at home is a lot more convenient for me than using a petrol station ever would be. I charge away from home maybe four times a year, and even that is more convenient for me than fuelling with petrol would be, because I plug the car in and go inside for a meal and a break on a long drive, and by the time I'm ready, so's the car.

The weight of the average vehicle isn't going to increase by 1000 pounds. That's absurdly high. Like for like differences (ie similar models) are more like 300 pounds. And no, that won't make any difference. Semis and other very large vehicles do essentially all the damage.

This beautifully sums up the imaginative gap you, along with many other ICE drivers, suffer. You think that fuelling a car has to be strictly analogous to charging a car. But the way we behave is different because the affordances are different. People roll the costs of putting in a home charger, conceptually at least, into the purchase price of an EV. They largely put these in for *convenience*, above all. They like being able to come home and, once a week or so, stick the plug into the car and walk into the house, knowing it'll be charged by morning. Charging a car is like charging your electric toothbrush -- something you do every so often, no big deal, easy and quick, ready again a few hours later.

Turning its back on ambition and new technology is why the US has lost the global auto industry to China. The *main reason* China went all-in on EVs was as part of a systemic response to needing growth without air pollution. That's why Beijing's air improved dramatically in a decade, from the kind of thing that was the equivalent of smoking a pack a day to being okay to breathe.

On top of this, most remote places have electricity closer to hand than a petrol station! The examples are always of someone going to a remote mountainside camping site, as if this is something that most of the population does, rather than being a tiny niche.

Air and noise pollution are a huge problem irrespective of CO2 emissions, and they get removed from urban centres and massively reduced, potentially to zero, with EVs, and do not with ICE vehicles running on combustion engines. Plus while vehicles are relatively long lived capital assets, fleet turnover is about 15 years, so it's not *that* long in the general scheme of things. Only 5 years ago, most black cabs in London were still ICE only. Now, it's rare to ever be in anything other than an LEVC EREV. It happens faster than you think. That's why Oslo and Shenzhen have such quiet streets, as do Marylebone and St John's Wood, with other areas in London following fast behind.