China wants to ban gas powered cars.

I get that! I don't care if the reaction time was the fucking speed of light! Cars traveling at X speed need Y amount of distance to stop, period.

Right, and the lead car tells the cars behind it that it's going to be slowing down, so the other cars start slowing down as well. It's not like where you're in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the guy five cars ahead of you slams on his brakes, and you have no way of knowing this until you smack into the ass of the guy in front of you, who's hit the guy in front of him, and so on.

Works in theory - but let's say the lead doesn't just "slow down" it just stops dead in it's tracks from 55 to zero as in a car heading from the opposite direction just jumped the median and hit the lead car. Every self-driving car in the chain stops immediately - and lays down a nice smoking hot trail of rubber leading right into the ass end of the car it was trailing. Granted, this might turn a 10 car pileup into a 5 car pileup so I guess that's something.

Also are the cars programmed for hitting a sudden icy patch or snow, and "steering into the skid" and then back again and maybe repeat the process as needed? Or if a collision is inevitable to sideswipe the guard-rail or even another car to lessen the impact by slowing the vehicle and to avoid a direct hit which would be more damaging? Just bringing up some real-world things to consider.

But even if you had a human at the wheel, you couldn't stop a car "dead in its tracks," even if the driver spotted a problem the instant it occurred. The laws of physics prevent that. Self-driving cars, however, could communicate with one another, and one car could say that it was turning 10 degrees to the right to avoid the incident, this would let the car behind it know that it would need to turn 20 degrees to the right, and apply stronger brakes, in order to miss the car in front of it. The car behind that one, would know that it should apply the same amount of brakes as the second car, but turn five degrees to the left, in order to avoid hitting the other cars. A human couldn't figure all of that out. They'd jam on their brakes and swerve in one direction or the other, with no idea of what the car behind them was going to do.

I don't know if current models are, but future models will be.

Stability control in cars do that now. They detect a spin before the driver does. And can apply braking to one wheel to stabilize the vehicle. They can do they before a human driver can even react. Stability contrail can even prevent a driver from purposely entering into a skid.

Yup, this already happens to an extent with collision avoidance systems in aircraft.

Expect to see a lot of exploding cars in China when this hits. Cheaply made batteries suck ass when not mass manufactured in a rush. As for self driving cars, I have no intention of ever purchasing one, and when the inevitable legislation forcing them pop up I am going to become a very vocal opposing force. Driving isn't a freedom that should be surrendered.

Fine with me. More gas for us

It always baffled me why the left hates poor people so much, with all their lofty talk about the "working man" and needs of the downtrodden.

Ok I'll bite:

How does the move away from fossil-fueled cars over the next 2 decades hurt working men and the downtrodden?

Everything I've read indicates that electric powered vehicles cost more than their fossil fueled equivalents.

Back when automobiles were beginning to replace horses, some people convinced themselves that horses would always be needed because what else could you use to pull a damaged car out of a ditch? They never considered that you could use a second car, because they automatically assumed cars to be the deviation even when they became the rule.

I was watching some show on PBS about North Carolina, and I was surprised to learn that electric cars were a major thing here during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They even had a pretty robust infrastructure with charging stations all over the place.

I was reading in a Popular Mechanics issue from the 1990s regarding the history of the gasoline engine. At an engine show in the first few years of the 20th century, the steam engine was voted the favorite engine for road vehicles with electric ones coming in second. Gasoline engines were not thought of very highly at all. A main problem during that era was the wide divergence in the quality of gasolines available.

I heard about that too, not so long ago. Jay Leno owns one such model from the 1920s in his garage.

Unfortunately for the human race (especially Hurricane Country), gas became much, much cheaper far more quickly, so electrics went to the wayside until the 2000s.

That is changing very quickly as mass production brings economies of scale.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-cheaper-than-gasoline-models-within-a-decade

Until about WW1 most luxury cars were still electric because they started instantly, offered a smoother and quieter ride, and they didn't cause stinky fumes. In the 1920's they still had competition between steam powered cars, electric cars, and gas powered cars.

In 10 or 20 years when manufacturers have stopped building internal combustion engine powered vehicles, if we're still driving, there should be a lot of used ICE vehicles to choose from at bargain prices.

Today the resale value of used electrics is pretty low. Still I'm not sure the downtrodden are in the market for cars just off leases.

Since government policy doesn’t operate in a vacuum, some of the impact can be seen in the costs associated with every policy move.

E.g. embrace a policy that seeks to lower global temps by a few tenths of a degree by the end of the century, and see the consequences in the form of higher marginal costs of energy per kwh directly resulting from the tiny bits (proportionally) of the grid’s power derived from comparatively more expensive photovoltaic cells or wind generator equipment. Everyone pays a higher rate per kwh.

Add a bureaucracy to issue and monitor who gets Handicap Parking Permits and all of society pays a bit more (in form of sales tax, or real estate taxes - or rents for those who don’t own) for the fatass behind a desk deciding who pissed them off and thus should be denied the free parking pass (and all the costs associated with the supporting infrastructure for that fatass, least of which will be a reinforced swivel chair).

We make daily value judgements, as a “society,” that determine we’re fat and rich enough to make everyone pay a “little bit more” for the cause du jour; so that, e.g., a tiny percentage of disabled or handicapped can see their lives made a little bit less burdensome. The bottom quint is paying for all that too, both indirectly, from neglect of their ‘afflictions,’ and directly, when they buy things like a pack of extra-taxed smokes (general spending fund’s gotta come from somewhere) - since it’s much easier for ‘leaders’ to get credit for building a ramp than to undertake the much harder problem of fixing things like families, educating inner cities, or job training for those dislocated due to ‘globalization.’

TLDR: here’s an example of how everyone pays at the pump; the poorest are most impacted, proportionate to their ability to pay.

You keep saying solar is more expensive but in many parts of the world it is already cheaper than coal and globally it will be cheaper than coal in 10 years at current rates.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bl...-on-earth-look-skyward-as-coal-falls-to-solar

SDUT is my local paper and it is know to be very far right. The owner (until last year), Doug Manchester, quite famously said he wanted to be to the right of Fox News on everything. He was full of doom and gloom and wildly absurd predictions about how terrible absolutely everything the state government does and then when he was proven wrong (as he always does) he comes up with excuses.

For instance the Harvard study and a UCLA Study both came to the same conclusion that the extremely modest cap and trade bill would add about $0.015 to $0.03 per gallon in cost while Doug Manchester and the state Republican Party hyped a study that was later retracted by its own authors as being flawed claiming it would average an increase of $0.70 per gallon.

This was a recycling of a claim used against the 2007 bill which also never materialized and the same group screamed about the bill in British Columbia for ghg cap and trade only they were also completely wrong there as well.

You can claim that extra $0.015 is Democrats "hating the poor" but to do so you'd have to ignore the effects of climate change which cost a hell of a lot more. Sorry, man, but the financial numbers just are not on your side.

Only if you ignore the actual price of global warming. At least people decide to buy energy, rather than simply being burdened with other people's bills.

bummer

Why is that a bummer?

The United States has enormous amounts of coal. It's nice to have a commodity to export.

Needless to say we can't export solar and wind power.

Why not? We can export the machinery, we can export the batteries, we can export the technical know how, and yes we can even export electricity to nearby neighbors. Those are all exports and they don't even cause climate change, acid rain, black carbon pollution, or the premature deaths of millions of people world wide. It is win win.

wind mills kill birds.

Not if you slow them down via gearing. Also that is a far smaller side effect than sea level rise, desertification, and more extreme weather events.

Could you provide a link to the former? I've heard nothing about the capability of wind mills being made "bird safe".

Because solar and wind don't require geyenormous dump trucks.