[mkoesel]

Originally Posted by fbsm

I'll keep my eye's open for John Deere to start manufacturing all electric farm equipment and for GE to STOP making diesel electrics that run the overwhelming majority of all trains

Ok.

[Meeni]

Originally Posted by fbsm

Its been mentioned here and elsewhere that folks are cherry picking bits/pieces that they feel good about instead of looking at the larger picture

First and most glaring issue is the upfront "cost" to produce an electric car from a so called environmental perspective is far higher than a standard internal combustion engine....gas OR diesel.

I'm not exactly sure why you quote me here. I was comparing gasoline vs diesel, not talking about hybrid or electric. But what you say may have been true a couple of years ago, but battery technology is evolving fast. Price, capacity and manufacturing intensity are evolving very rapidly, as the tech is kinda new (so big discrepancy between current technology and potential "best", where ICE have been worked on for a long time so we are close already to "best" for the tech). Also, consumer electronic is a big driver in funnelling innovation, so batteries are getting better no matter what happens in the automotive consumer market.

For all these reasons I think that we'll see more and more hybrids, and possibly at some point electric vehicules will become so good that ICE will look like horse cariages. We're not there yet, but hybrids are pretty compelling at this point already (and not only for tree huggers, the 330e is a nice performance package for exemple). Hybrids can be diesel or gasoline based, maybe it doesn't matter much since in urban environment the car would run mostly on batteries anyway.

And for the record, in europe almost all trains are electric. Diesel engines are used only on second grade rails to small towns. Anything on major rail roads is electric powered.


Anyway, the point is that the surprisingly lenient regulatory regime for diesel cars in europe may not last forever, especially considering that smog, which had been mostly eliminated since the 70s, has made a comeback in recent years, as a consequence of the massive adoption of diesel in the consummer car market (at some point in France 85-90% of new registrations were diesel). People do not like smog one bit. It's one of these things you can actually see trying to poison you, and nobody likes to see that.