His contention is that by 2035 he will no longer be able to buy a new ICE car that fits his needs where he lives (California) and that upsets him. Which is true barring delays in the implementation of the law via extensions, which I strongly suspect will happen.
I get it. EVs don’t currently work well for me either as a one-vehicle household, though I suspect that will likely change as I retire and age out of certain activities while infrastructure continues to improve. I’m in CA as well and am contemplating buying a new non-plug-in hybrid before the deadline if it looks like a) it is going to happen on schedule and b) I still need an ICE by then and also c) they’re still manufacturing and selling those sort of hybrids in the 2030’s.
Of course that law says diddly about used ICE cars which will be available and part of modern life until well after most of us more well-seasoned board members shuffle off this mortal coil. Bob will almost certainly still be able to buy a fuel-hungry panel truck and gas up at Chevron until after he is dead.
But change is coming to the world of Bob_Blaylock and he doesn’t like inconvenient change, goddamnit! What’s the world coming to! I sympathize just a little on my worse days, when I can be a big fan of dissolute stagnation. But that’s just life - the world changes.
The 2035 law, which will almost certainly be pushed out, is about new vehicles. It does not affect used car sales. If I were Bob I’d buy up some real cars now and profit in the future
Once new petrol cars are unavailable it probably doesn’t matter you can buy used ones, the petrol stattions will likely not be able to stary in business on the revenue generated from used car holdouts.
Average age of vehicles on the road in the US is 12.5 years. While gas stations will be serving a shrinking slice of the pie, and that shrinking will increase in speed after 2035, it will take quite a while before all gas stations are unprofitable. Competition will slowly drive some of them to close. Some of them, like the big ones at major Interstate exits, might well transition to charging stations. The business model has always been pull them in to buy gas and make most of the profit with giant margins on snacks and beverages anyways, so no reason not to just shift that model to charging bays as the draw. Can stick one gas pump in the back corner for the holdouts, and the underground tank infrastructure is already in place and paid for.
To be fair, when those tanks age out, they might not be replaced. Though they could switch to a smaller above ground tank maybe. Old gas tanks are a pretty serious ground water contamination issue.
Not to mention, those old tanks can end up with water in the gas, which sucks for cars. I remember when that was a real issue. As recently as the early 90s I remember a few stations with shitty gas thanks to bad tanks.
The fines and clean up costs in NJ at least got so high, that stations stopped ignoring such issues. As a collateral and good thing it means selling a house with an inground oil tank is difficult in New Jersey at least. One more reason for people to switch to gas or now heat pumps.
True. Above ground tanks are the standard in small town gas stations in Saskatchewan for those reasons, and that might spread to larger centres as demand slows. And quite possibly when gasoline demand drops to a certain tipping point, retail gas will become largely unavailable because the infrastructure costs will be amortized across to little fuel to bear them, which will drive most of the last ICE cars off the road. At that point you’ll have to go to airports or the like to find combustible petrochemicals, and maintaining running ICE vehicles will become a niche hobby. But in that world there’ll be fast charging stations on every other corner and battery technology will be 2 decades or more advanced from where it is now.
And that’s the trick. If you know where the charger is and just drive there your battery does not precondition. I don’t know if you can precondition the battery without putting the SC location in Google maps