You can only answer that in a country-specific context, and it depends on the scale, too, eg domestic install vs strategic national deployment a la Dogger Bank. But it is possible to say that the UK's CfD strike prices have typically been well below the average gas price for many years.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, there are millions of families installing a cheap panel and a battery in their homes, and thus having light at night, a way to charge their devices, and even the ability to run a fridge, for the first time ever. 9000+ mini-grids with community-scale solar and batteries are being rolled out, serving tens of millions more people, and this sector is expected to expand rapidly.

Just as sub-Saharan Africa largely skipped straight past landline installations and just used mobile phones instead, the same will happen here. National grids have never come close to serving national populations and have been wildly unreliable. The next stage of expansion is clearly also going to include large family deployments that support charging of battery vehicles -- from micromobility all the way up to cars and trucks. This is already happening but we are going to see explosive growth in two and three wheel transport, leading to oil demand destruction (fuel for two and three wheelers is a dominant fraction of current consumption in many African cities), rapid improvements in air quality and thus respiratory health, big cuts in balance-of-payments drains for national economies, stabilises household finances as daily unpredictable cash drains for fuel become stabilised amortised capex, massivley cuts risks and time spent by women and girls in particular eg for water collection, and further orients the continent as a whole away from the US and towards China as the enabler of all of this.

This is going to transform the region in ways we cannot fully grasp yet. No more kerosene heating at home means a rapid drop in respiratory conditions from indoor air pollution. Kids can study after dark, meaning better educational outcomes. Vaccine storage becomes much lower risk because small clinics have reliable power. Rural African communities can narrow the gap with urban.

We are on the cusp of some really profound changes for humanity, both for the better and worse, as climate costs and renewables & electrification accelerate.

Another take: we lack the imagination to understand properly that for humanity as a whole, and each of us individually who have more than a couple of decades of life left, there is *nothing* more important than climate change. It will be the overwhelming, dominant, existential issue that hangs over us like the sword of Damocles in the years ahead. We are in the foothills of the S-curve of its effects.

It's also not just human-centric. We are driving a mass-extinction event. Will life continue on Earth despite all this? For sure. There will be speciation, etc, etc. But the perspective of geological time is completely irrelevant to humanity's historical perspective, because our species will live in a denuded world for the next many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Those of us who feel it are right to be ashamed of this act of biocide. It may not be permanent for the earth, but it is as good as permanent for humanity.

It's been an interesting discussion, and I think we could go on for ages, but now is as good a time as any to bring it to a halt. Until next year and the next Slashdot EV article!

Thanks.

Sometimes these arguments remind me of the old story about how when contact lenses were being introduced, critics said they'd never work, and were able to think of all sorts of reasons why they wouldn't, from infection risks to going "round the back" to never being able to be removed. Turns out those risks were either non-existent or manageable, and that hundreds of millions of people found the pros outweighed the cons.

Although what these anti-EV arguments most remind me of is hifi buffs who, to this day, can be found angrily buffing their Linn Sondeks while muttering about horrible compression artefacts. A tiny market segment in a world dominated by digital music. (We're about to inherit my father-in-law's Linn Sondek, which he hadn't used in at least a couple of decades)

First off, merry Christmas and happy holidays! I'm glad to have a courteous but vigorous disagreement on Slashdot.

Now, on to the other things: my point about regulation and social engineering is that yes, all laws have social consequences and thus are social engineering. But CAFE has historically worked in the exact opposite way from the way you are describing. You said "If people want big cars and you want to regulate them out of existence with safety as an excuse that is an extraordinarily different thing and you know it" -- but CAFE encouraged people to buy trucks and SUVs in ever *larger* numbers, not smaller, because CAFE made those larger vehicles *exempt* from fuel economy standards. Had they been included within its scope, OEMs would clearly not have sought to build such a high percentage of large vehicles, because there would have no CAFE tax advantage to doing so, and consumers would have been much less interested in this segment, because it would have been more expensive to buy a larger vehicle relative to a smaller vehicle. So my point was that people chose large vehicles in *artificially large numbers* because CAFE made those vehicles cheaper relative to smaller vehicles. Either all vehicles should have come under CAFE (my preference) or none (yours). But what happened was the worst of both worlds.

I disagree with your contention that it wasn't for the government to regulate fuel economy per se. You argue that people aren't interested in fuel economy, but you need some evidence to demonstrate this. I would say that (1) successive governments that suppored CAFE were elected, which is a reasonable sign that CAFE had support, and (2) all governments act on a broad range of areas, and outside of direct democracies like Switzerland (and frankly even there), we have to use representation rather than delegation to ensure our society functions, because there's too many important decisions to ask the voters' will on each of them.

Finally, we definitely don't have smarter pedestrians. All those cities have large numbers of clueless pedestrians including the dumb and also tourists who don't know the local rules. These cities are not less efficient than American cities at moving people round -- quite the opposite, they're typically much easier to traverse. And you're also missing a broader point. Take a typical suburban street: a row of houses either side of the road. There's a base level of mixing of cars and pedestrians in that scenario. But the street ccan be made safer for vulnerable users by design decisions such as road hump, tight corner radii, keeping the road narrow, decent lighting, and by policy decisions such as the UK HIghway Code's hierarchy of road users, which states that "those in charge of vehicles that can cause the greatest harm in the event of a collision bear the greatest responsibility to take care and reduce the danger they pose to others. This principle applies most strongly to drivers of large goods and passenger vehicles, vans/minibuses, cars/taxis and motorcycles" and goes on to say that in practice, this means cars should give way to pedestrians crossing the road (and we have no jaywalking rules here, either).

Anyway, if you ever come to the UK, ping me and I will take you out for a beer and show you around. Hopefully you'll see how enjoyable a big European city can be no matter what form of transport you use.

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.