* Uber/Ola do not own cars, and the owners take out loans to get one. Electric cars can be expensive to be financed for that income group. Uber's endgame is to own self-driving cars and not a normal car, atleast that was the dream :).
* Indian car companies do not have electric cars (a real car can go for atleast 200kms a charge/refill).
* A car factory(even non-electric) would take atleast 5 years to start churning cars.
* Even in that case, it will have to import 40% of the cost ie batteries as India cannot make them. If it starts today, it can in 10 years.
* Import duties of fully assembled, SKD and CKD electric cars is very high makes them uncompetitive to petrol/diesel cars.
* Direct importing is not viable as it requires certification.
* 60% of India's electric supply is coal based.
And to top it;
* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly.
The point that many people make: "* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly."
It is not just overall pollution, but where and how it is done that it is important. There is a huge difference between controlled pollution, from a factory away from large cities, and thousands of cars spewing emissions right into the core of urban centers. The second would cause more direct health issues and potentially deaths and overall unpleasantness.
> The point that many people make: "* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly."
You're completely wrong. This may be the case for a weekend vehicle that is sent to the junkyard before you put 30,000 km on it, but is 100% wrong for a taxi, that drives >300,000 miles over its life.
It takes 6-12 tonnes of CO2e to produce a car. [1]
Taking 35 mpg, every 10,000 miles driven is 285 gallons of gasoline. 1 gallon of gasoline produces ~8.9 kg of CO2e. That's 2.5 tonnes per 10,000 miles driven.
After 50,000 miles driven, the typical car breaks even with its manufacturing emissions.
The average taxi (in NYC) puts on 70,000 miles. Per YEAR. [2] In a single year, it's fuel emissions exceed manufacturing emissions.
If you want good return-on-investment, taxis are the first vehicles we should be regulating. They drive a lot more than the average car.
Electric cars produce more CO2 during manufacturing.
Indian taxis/cars on Indian roads do worse.
India's electric market is 60% coal.
"If you want good return-on-investment, taxis are the first vehicles we should be regulating. They drive a lot more than the average car." - Who is the you here? The car driver who is trying to make ends meet?
> Electric cars produce more CO2 during manufacturing.
How much more? Sources, please. The internet tells me that adding an 85 KWH battery in a Tesla adds ~1 tonne of CO2e. [1]
Tesla, as a whole (Which includes non-manufacturing, but does not include the carbon cost, of say, smelting the steel that went into their cars, or Panasonic manufacturing their batteries), produced ~300,000 tonnes of CO2e in 2018. They shipped ~250,000 vehicles in 2018.[2]
Bloomberg claims something completely different, but doesn't provide any concrete numbers. [3] The study it seems to cite is [4], which claims that a Tesla's battery is ~15 tonnes of CO2e, if manufactured in a factory powered by 50% coal power. There seem to be no other studies on the subject.
Panasonic, which manufactures Tesla batteries, is doing some work to make their batteries carbon neutral [5][6]. It's unclear how much volume this factory produces, and what the emissions of their other factories are.
> Indian taxis/cars on Indian roads do worse.
This also means that the existing ICE taxis don't have a long prospective life, and at least 40% of them are due to be replaced by 2026. It's why this legislature is coming into play in 2026, and not in 2020.
> India's electric market is 60% coal.
Thanks to Carnot efficiency, even if your electric car is powered by a coal plant, it is still more carbon efficient than powering it with gasoline. Your V6 engine doesn't reach the temperature differential that utility coal plants do. Electric vehicles also have near-zero-cost regenerative breaking, which increases waste energy, that would otherwise go into heating brakes in a non-hybrid ICE.
> Who is the you here?
Someone who is comparing the environmental benefit to the monetary cost of switching from ICE to electric. You get a lot more reductions, for the same dollar spent, from electrifying taxis, then from electrifying heavily-used personal vehicles. You get more reductions from electrifying heavily-used personal vehicles, then lightly-used weekend vehicles.
Indian cars/manufacturing/importing has different economics and pollution impacts. You are free do your own research and make up your mind.
I am not against electric cars, I want them. I am against the idea to replace cars which have already contributed to significant pollution being removed from road.
The lowest hanging fruit for me is to get US and other top polluters to reduce pollution. India and China are doing good already as they are increasing more green cover. The reality is the India car drivers cannot afford the cheaper electric cars, forget about Tesla.
> Indian cars/manufacturing/importing has different economics and pollution impacts. You are free do your own research and make up your mind.
No, you don't get to go ahead and do that. The burden is on you to provide evidence for your claim, not on the person you are talking to.
> I am against the idea to replace cars which have already contributed to significant pollution being removed from road.
Didn't you say that taxis in India don't last as long as they do in the West? If so, won't it be possible to electrify 40% of them by 2026, through natural attrition? The whole point of this law is to give a heads-up on a multi-year process.
> The lowest hanging fruit for me is to get US and other top polluters to reduce pollution.
Agreed. The West has had modest per-capita pollution reductions, but needs to go much further then that. As does China. (It's overall per-capita pollution has matched that of the European Union. If you look at its urban areas, alone, they pollute just as much, per-capita, as the US.)
China is no longer a developing country. It's a 350-million person developed country, with all the same carbon footprint as any western economy, sitting on top of a 1-billion person developing country.
> India and China are doing good already as they are increasing more green cover
Increasing green cover isn't anywhere close to enough. If we tore down every city, uprooted every field, and covered the entire planet with trees, we'd offset only a few years of global emissions.
Pollution in large facilities like coal-fired power plants can feasibly be controlled using technology that cannot be miniaturized and fitted to the tailpipe of every car.
Coal is not good for the climate, but coal-fired electricity using best available emissions control technology is far, far better for public health and air quality than internal combustion vehicles.
Overall pollution is a real hard problem. Computer top that, local pollution is more like a temporal inconvenience, it will pass (except for its share in overall pollution)
Even if that number is right, I would think that Uber/Ola cars have higher after-production emissions due to them being driven all day and being driven in city settings (as opposed to on a highway where cars are more efficient.)
Does anyone have a release from what the directive actually says? I know the article says cars, but did they maybe mean to say fleets? An “auto” in India could mean an auto-rickshaw (tuk tuk), and you certainly can order those through Uber there. It’d be a lot easier to imagine autos going electric.
Also to the parent’s point about self driving cars as part of Uber’s strategy, while totally valid, I really can’t imagine autonomous vehicles working in the places I’ve been in India. I’ve had drivers hit traffic jams and just literally turn around and drive into oncoming traffic for a while. It’s pretty impressive how traffic flows there — I can’t imagine an autonomous car figuring out how to do it.
There are some electric cars already available or ready to launch (videos available in YouTube): Mahindra e2o, Mahindra eVerito, Tata Tigor, Tata Altroz.
These are some of the electric cars arriving in India this year (at least 11 models): Hyundai Kona, MG ezs, WagonR Electric, Tata Altroz, Tata Nexon, Mahindra eKUV100, Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe.
And the car size, range and pricing competitive? A VC handing out money to a startup will not usher electric taxis. People will need to start buying them because they are better, cheaper and more powerful.
I want to ask you about some things. But first, you say
>* 60% of India's electric supply is coal based.
The long-term plan is that this all be replaced with non-polluting sources of electricity. But I am assuming you already knew that.
Now what I want to ask you is, if electric cars are a bad idea for reducing co2 pollution, what would you recommend? Or is it your position that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, and we should just stay on fossil fuels?
Ofcourse I don't; as I am not a climate scientist who is doing research on it. I am from India and am giving a reality check. As for how switch to electric cars, I have answered @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117147.
HN threads are for healthy discussions and I would not expect a solution to climate change here.
Your language is aggressive & attacks me personally and I am not going to respond further.
>Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly.
This is generally the reason why most legislation of this type tries to dictate new car sales rather than actual usage. That route would yield slower results, but it is a more efficient approach.
That said, we also need to keep in mind that these electric cars aren't going to be replacing 5 year old vehicles. The strong secondary market allows those used cars to flow down market to push out much older and lower quality vehicles. Those low quality cars are also likely the worse polluters. Think of the Cash For Clunkers program. That was a failure on many levels, but one of the successes was modernizing some of the vehicles on the road which led to both better fuel economy and safety (although I should note that other aspects of the program had negative environmental impacts that might have made the program a net negative overall).
Ola/Uber cars are mostly new taken on loan in India.
China has shown the way to do the transfer. Super high taxes for registration of a petrol/diesel car and free registration for an electric one. Build cars at home and subsidise its components.
No hand-waving required. Just make it more affordable. Let capitalism finish the job.
This comment and your following comment seem to show a reluctance to accept EVs as solution. You haven't considered some major points:
1. "Import duties are high", "Direct import is not viable" - it's the govt we are talking about. They'll HAVE to ease the import to make it work.
2. Vehicles age; and they break down faster on indian roads. Current vehicles will eventually expire and open up space for electrics. no one is going to ask you to smash a new car.
I mentioned the facts and your observations about my personal opinions are incorrect. I want EVs too but the price conscious Indian market won't buy them at current prices/performance.
1. Even the top courts in India have questioned the government on it but the government has no answer. I am not sure what information you have that you can emphasise that it has to. There is no political/public pressure only a marketing one.
2. Exactly! But enforcing of shorter deadlines by government is not going to help anyone and result in a few outrages by the road by the drivers and forgotten by everyone by the next news cycle.
* Indian car companies do not have electric cars (a real car can go for atleast 200kms a charge/refill).
* A car factory(even non-electric) would take atleast 5 years to start churning cars.
* Even in that case, it will have to import 40% of the cost ie batteries as India cannot make them. If it starts today, it can in 10 years.
* Import duties of fully assembled, SKD and CKD electric cars is very high makes them uncompetitive to petrol/diesel cars.
* Direct importing is not viable as it requires certification.
* 60% of India's electric supply is coal based.
And to top it;
* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly.