Professor Simon Kingham: Road-user charges can pay for more than just road maintenance...

Road-user charges can pay for more than just road maintenance – NZ could lead the way

The government heralded its plan to move New Zealand’s entire vehicle fleet to road-user charges as a fairer method of funding road maintenance.

Matt Ridley: I'll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban

The rush to electric vehicles risks killing our car industry, shackling us to China and bumping up our taxes to reduce global emissions by just 0.044%. That's why I'll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban.

Britain’s electric vehicle transition and the ban on petrol car sales from 2030 are a slow-motion car crash. The technology is not ready, the cost will be vast, the logistics are forbidding, the reliance on China is worrying and the backlash from the public is likely to be harsh.

Kate Hawkesby: Are we going to rush out buying electric vehicles...I don't think so

 

So we have on the back of the new cycle bridge for bikes, news of discounts for EV cars.

There should be no one in the dark as to where this government's priorities are by now.

But how much of it's actually going to happen?

The activist cyclists were breathless with excitement that their random peddle protest across the bridge had elicited real action. But hopefully they’ve cooled down their lycra enough to know it’ll probably never happen. Likewise I am skeptical about us all running out and snapping up EV's.

Bryan Leyland: “Things you know that ain't so” - electric cars

As the American humorist Will Rogers said: “It’s not what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”

"Government policies on electric cars is a winner on all counts."

The reality is that it is nonsense on stilts. No matter which way you look at it, it is madness.

Poor people will be worse off because the policies will increase the cost of second-hand cars. People who live in the country or run a business that needs pickups or minivans will have to pay more even though an electric vehicle is not an option.

The chances are that subsidised electric cars won’t make much difference to emissions because the extra electricity needed can only come from burning more coal at Huntly power station. When the CO2 emitted during battery production is taken into account, worldwide emissions may well increase.

Mike Hosking: James Shaw is trolling us with his car ban plan

 

Is James Shaw trolling me? It’s Thursday and he’s onto his second wacky idea for the week.

Tuesday, he was still banging on about that damn wealth tax despite the fact it, one, is not happening, and two, even if it was, it wasn’t solving the problem he was claiming it would solve, i.e. the price of houses and first home buyers trying to get into the market

Now its cars. Combustion engines to be precise, he wants them banned.

He’s not the first of course. Announcements have been made internationally, not least of which is in Britain where they are banning their import from 2030.

Why Boris Johnson did that given all he’s got on his plate I have no idea.

Lee Harding: Unethical Electric Cars

Anyone who says electric cars will save the world is dreaming. The adoption of electric cars over the next 20 years will barely shave a single percent from the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the batteries that power these cars rely on a nightmarish swath of human devastation. 

Most electric car buyers who pride themselves on “doing the right thing” have no idea of the birth defects, premature deaths, child labour, and virtual slavery it took to make their new wheels move. All this is to keep carbon out of the air and a few hundred ducks out of oil sands tailing ponds.

Electric batteries have far more to do with cobalt than carbon. Cobalt is an essential element in lithium-ion batteries, the lighter kind that packs more energy than lead-acid batteries. It is true that these “green” batteries are also found in tech devices and not just cars. But the 10 grams of cobalt for a smartphone battery or the ounce in a laptop are overwhelmingly outweighed by the 15 pounds of cobalt found in a typical electric car battery.

Matt Ridley: How the electric car revolution could backfire

The British government is under pressure to follow France and Volvo in promising to set a date by which to ban diesel and petrol engines in cars and replace them with electric motors. It should resist the temptation, not because the ambition is wrong but because coercion could backfire.

The electric motor is older than the internal combustion engine by about half a century. Since taking over factories from the steam piston engine at the end of the 19th century, it has become ubiquitous. Twinned with its opposite number, the turbine (which turns work into electricity, rather than vice versa), it drives machines in factories, opens doors, raises lifts, prepares food, brushes teeth and washes plates.

Bryan Leyland: Things you know that ain't so - electric cars

"Things you know that ain't so - our renewable energy resources will charge our electric cars."

The government is promoting (in effect, subsidising) electric cars because it believes that the electricity they need to charge the batteries will mostly come from our renewable energy resources – hydro, geothermal and wind.

The reality is somewhat different as you can see from my comments on a recent government press release:

Bryan Leyland: Things you know that ain't so” - electric cars

“Things you know that ain't so”: “electric cars have a bright future”

No. The reality is that electric cars are a solution in search of a problem. Electric cars exist because they have attract large subsidies for their development and for tax rebates and grants on the sale price. The subsidies paid in the USA, UK, Germany, Norway and other countries are costing taxpayers billions of dollars.