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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 07 2017, @06:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-have-methane dept.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40518293

France is set to ban the sale of any car that uses petrol or diesel fuel by 2040, in what the ecology minister called a "revolution".

Nicolas Hulot announced the planned ban on fossil fuel vehicles as part of a renewed commitment to the Paris climate deal.

He said France planned to become carbon neutral by 2050.

Hybrid cars make up about 3.5% of the French market, with pure electric vehicles accounting for just 1.2%.

It is not yet clear what will happen to existing fossil fuel vehicles still in use in 2040.


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:09PM (3 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:09PM (#536609)

    You can't do combined cycle power plants in a car. There isn't enough room in there, and the power-to-weight ratio is still important unlike a ground power plant. Also, notice your bit about cooling from water from a lake or river: you can't do that in a car for obvious reasons. So this comparison is totally invalid. There's no convenient working fluid around a car for it to dump heat into: you can't count on air to be moving (it only does that when you're at speed), and that air is liable to be 120F or hotter. It's very simple: if this crazy plan made any sense, someone would have tried it already.

    You can't run car engines as hot as rocket engines. Rocket engines use advanced materials like beryllium to do that stuff, and rocket engines cost an absolute fortune, plus they're not all that reliable compared to car engines. You can't make a car engine that can handle such temperatures at an economical price. Batteries and electric motors don't have these problems.

    We *are* tapping the full efficiency of gasoline-powered engines. There just isn't much potential left in them. The best you're going to get is the newest ideas of running gas engines like diesel engines, using compression ignition, but that's very problematic too because fuel quality varies a lot, which again is something that's not such a problem with large-scale power plants.

    because some part of society has a hard on for electric vehicles

    This bit is just plain stupid. Hydrocarbon vehicles create enormous amounts of pollution, and worse, they do it in populated areas where people have to breathe it. These engines are frequently not well maintained, and emit more pollution as they age. They're also causing global warming, whether you choose to believe it or not, which is going to have drastic effects on society. Moving to a more efficient solution isn't just some people "having a hard on", it's the only rational move, unless you're some kind of religious idiot.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 08 2017, @10:11PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 08 2017, @10:11PM (#536661) Journal
    I strongly disagree on your claim. It just hasn't been worth our while yet to build a more efficient hydrocarbon-based engine. In part, because it's not easy and in part because the economics of fossil fuels just haven't justified an engine that efficient.

    Hydrocarbon vehicles create enormous amounts of pollution, and worse, they do it in populated areas where people have to breathe it.

    True, yet not true. Hydrocarbon vehicles create enormous amounts of pollution, but they don't need to. A regulatory policy which eliminates the worst polluters would substantially drop the pollution from vehicles in the developed world.

    They're also causing global warming, whether you choose to believe it or not, which is going to have drastic effects on society.

    Unless, of course, it doesn't have drastic effects on society. It is worth noting here that advocates for global warming mitigation have had an extraordinary difficult time to actually find negative effects of global warming that significantly affect society and occur on a time frame where we can verify the affects in our lifetimes.

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday July 10 2017, @03:15PM (1 child)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday July 10 2017, @03:15PM (#537134)

      I strongly disagree on your claim. It just hasn't been worth our while yet to build a more efficient hydrocarbon-based engine. In part, because it's not easy and in part because the economics of fossil fuels just haven't justified an engine that efficient.

      Well, apparently, is HAS been worth our while to build both EVs and hybrids (both serial and parallel), because we have a shit-ton of them out there now.

      True, yet not true. Hydrocarbon vehicles create enormous amounts of pollution, but they don't need to. A regulatory policy which eliminates the worst polluters would substantially drop the pollution from vehicles in the developed world.

      Prove it. Let me see your zero-pollution hydrocarbon engine that costs on the order of a current EV drivetrain. Put up or shut up. I'm really sick of your idiotic claims that have no basis in reality.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:03AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:03AM (#537383) Journal

        Well, apparently, is HAS been worth our while to build both EVs and hybrids (both serial and parallel), because we have a shit-ton of them out there now.

        But not because of economics. Status signalling is a common human activity and EVs and hybrids play to that desire.

        Prove it. Let me see your zero-pollution hydrocarbon engine that costs on the order of a current EV drivetrain. Put up or shut up. I'm really sick of your idiotic claims that have no basis in reality.

        I'd say that most modern cars achieve that well enough, such as the already mentioned Nissan Tiida/Versa. Further, if we use renewable fuels such as biofuels, then we don't even have a global warming contribution.