> You can continue to use the ICE vehicle you bought in 2034 in the EU until infinity.
Sure, if you can find fuel. By 2034 EVs will be enough of the market that gas stations are already closing (remember today new cars are 10 year old used cars, and there is every reason to think EVs will be half of all cars). There is still one on every corner, so you might not see this trend, but it will be in the statistics. By 2038 you will noticed it because many corners won't have a gas station at all. And of course the stations will already see this on the bottom line and will be less interested in replacing their pumps when the get old, and if they break they might just close that one island instead of fixing it. By 2045 fuel will be special order in most places.
Note that construction, freight, and other high energy use niches will still use a lot of fuel, so diesel will be available for a while longer. However those vehicles tend to use larger nozzles that won't fit in your diesel car. Gasoline will be hard to find - you can still make road trips, but you will need to plan your fuel stops like people plan EV charging today (on some roads you don't need to plan your EV charging, but there are others you must).
I live in a bedroom community of a major city. There are about 25,000 people in my town and there are 7 gas stations. There could be a single station in town and it would still not be inconvenient. Some basic math implies that this one station would be as viable a business as it is today even if only 14% of the vehicles on the road use gasoline. I would be shocked if there are fewer ICE powered cars on the road than that in 2035.
I pass multiple stations when I leave town to get to work. Where I work looks like here ( home ) from a station density point of view.
For longer trips, you may be right that you may have to plan. But there could be very few ICE cars on the road before one station every 400 km ceases to be profitable. And, unlike electric, nothing is stopping me from filling up a gas can before hitting a leg I am really worried about.
I cannot see “lack of stations” being a problem for ICE for a long time.
The cost of fuel could be a thing I guess but, if demand drops faster than supply, the economics of that do not really make sense.
Also, if I am somebody that uses a vehicle “once a week”, is this really the car I am going to take on a 1500 km trip through unpopulated areas? I cannot rent or borrow an EV for that trip?
What you are suggesting seems to be that ICE vehicles are going to end up being errand vehicles for farmers, or the old truck hooked up to the boat to go fishing once a month. Or that people that live and work locally need them for the occasional errand. For the latter use case, where I live at least, just the insurance cost would incent me to replace such a vehicle with a ride share subscription even now.
I think it is going to stay viable to run an ICE vehicle for a long time yet. I also expect fewer people will want to.
This announcement has the potential to push things like Teslas to 1000 km of range. What happens when it hits 2000 ikm ( over 1300 miles ). What are you going to want to head out of town in?
10 years from now, people that can afford it will have all gone EV. People who cannot will drive their ICE until it needs a major repair. And then they are going to go EV.
And the very remote areas that may have just 1 gas station are also least likely to have high EV penetration until the absolutely tail-end of the ICE-era.
I dont see how in 10 years most cars will be evs, when the ev sales percentage is 12% as of now.
Which equals to 9.5% of electric vehicles on the road today.
The increase in ev sales is in the low single digits per year, the math just doesnt check out.
EVs are not expected to have a constant growth curve. With the expected ban of ICE EV will be the majority in a few years, and by 2034 few ICEs will be sold.
I do expect ICEs will be just under 50% of total cars, you could argue they are more like 55% of all cars, but it won't be 75%.
I'm sure this will happen. But I think your timeline is way faster than it will happen.
I highly doubt gasoline will be hard to find in most places by 2045; I'd expect a lot fewer fueling stations, but I think even at 10% of the station count, gasoline will still be convenient and easy. And, if gasoline is less convenient, you can always use gas cans to extend your range. They're not too expensive, and not too inconvenient (epa 'anti-spill' nozzles that make it hard to fill without spilling not withstanding); long term storage is problematic, but if you're regularly using it, no big deal. Most gasoline powered vehicles have at least a 300 mile range, and it's not hard to find vehicles with a larger range.
They said something similar about radios and books quite a long time ago.
I'm afraid the problem of generating/transporting enough electrons to all places where cars, buses, trucks, need charging will not be solved completely within 10 years.
Turning gasoline into electrons is fairly straightforward. It doesn't make much sense for daily use, but for occasional corner cases (emergencies, backwoods, etc), it does. And corner cases are one of the big reasons people give against electric cars.
In my country (Poland) gas stations get more income from selling other things, mainly alcohol, because unlike other vendors they can stay open overnight. Margins on gasoline are extremely thin already. It makes sense for them to stay open regardless of the demand for actual gasoline.
This assumes future regulations will allow you to do this. There are already examples of commercial fuels today that sell fuel only to commercial customers at a different rate.
See "red diesel" in the UK - its just plain ole diesel taxed differently for commercial use, but illegal for use in privately owned personal vehicles. It's dyed red to allow its use in private vehicles to be discovered from the discoloration of engine parts etc.
Personally I expect rules on what can be pumped into what will be different by 2045 in a lot of places, and while it might still be possible it may not be so simple.
> See "red diesel" in the UK - its just plain ole diesel taxed differently for commercial use, but illegal for use in privately owned personal vehicles. It's dyed red to allow its use in private vehicles to be discovered from the discoloration of engine parts etc.
Maybe, but we're talking about the banning of ICE vehicles, not the banning of fuel.
I mean, "you won't find fuel because it will be illegal to possess it" is a substantially different argument from "you won't find fuel because no one will produce it anymore".
> Maybe, but we're talking about the banning of ICE vehicles, not the banning of fuel.
This is a bizarre point to make? Regulation of fuels and regulation or bans of ICE vehicles would obviously go hand in hand (it already does today!), if ICE vehicles were to be banned as discussed here. You can't have combustion without fuel... Controlling who can pump gas would be hugely important to the introduction of any hypothetical ICE ban.
My point also is not that fuel may be banned - it's that the regulations governing the pumps may be different than today, and that there is international precedent for this. If combustion really is largely relegated to commercial trucking by 2045, I'd be honestly shocked if the rules governing the pumps didn't change too in a lot of places.
look at the vast difference in fuel laws pretty much everywhere between today and the 1970s if inspiration required - remember we used to be able to buy leaded fuels?
Hint: You can continue to use the ICE vehicle you bought in 2034 in the EU until infinity.