Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a petrol head at heart. I love my gasoline fueled power plants.
But even I’m coming around to the idea of purchasing an electric car as my next vehicle.
The only thing that has really held me back from doing so is the lack of manual transmission options with electric power. Electric motors tend to shred transmissions to pieces when ungoverned (watch some videos about the electric S-10 drag trucks; those things make 911 Turbo S’s look slow in the 1/4 mile run) but at least with automatics there is still research and development being applied to them to make them suitable to mount to electric engines.
Manuals are pretty much dead. There’s no R&D being put into them anymore. The manual in my 2018 Civic SI has been in production since 2006 with only a handful of minor changes. When you drive it, it shifts exactly the same as the transmission in a 2007 model Civic. In that same time frame, Honda has introduced three new traditional automatic designs and a new CVT transmission for non-Turbo models.
Its a lose-lose. It only gets us there by banning (or partially banning) current vehicles. It does not create the technology to replace them. Thus my car/horse analogy.
If you ban fossil fuels now, worldwide millions die. While the truly “green” may think that’s a positive, others wont.
And the depletion allowance is the only thing that even comes close to being a subsidy to fossil fuels. There are not all these vast imagined subsidies.
Putting a tariff on fossil fuels is not “ending a subsidy”.
That is incredibly misinformed. Getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies and having subsidies on renewable energy does not in any way ban or partially ban current vehicles
You make some good points, but ICEs have been around for more than a hundred years- let’s play it safe and stick with them. I’d really miss going to the gas station.
All the additional subsidies of one form of energy and all the penalties added to the other form of energy won’t cause people to switch en masse from one to the other.
If an economic and workable battery is found, people will switch.
If an economical and workable battery is not found, people will not switch.
You can’t make a technology exist just by wanting it to happen a whole lot.
What happens when the people who love their aging technology are all dead and electric cars are what those who are still alive prefer? Younger generations tend to embrace new technologies, not shun them.
