Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Pollution restrictions are not per se a ban on gas cars. If restricting exactly how many noxious fumes cars may emit counts as "fucking with the specs" then that war was lost in the 70s with the clean air act. Nevertheless, gas cars have prospered since the seventies. I don't think it's reasonable to expect zero restrictions on what are textbook externalities, no matter how great the private benefits of cars are.
The ICE-only phaseout is more like what I was thinking of, so thanks for the link. Although I personally like hybrids a lot, I can understand people being upset about it.
Hybrids are also a straightforwardly superior technology to pure-play ICE for pretty much every use case except long-haul freeway driving. They're not backyard-maintainable, but nor are modern ICEs. (And the backyard-maintainable ICEs of the late C20 were so polluting that in a world where alternatives exist, they really shouldn't be allowed in cities or suburbs).
I still miss those illegal German diesel engines that cheated the emissions tests though. Performance competitive with petrol, and you could get from London to well past Edinburgh on one tank of diesel.
My sense is that the Toyota Dynamic Force engines are still mostly backyard-maintainable (there will always be a question of level of effort as well as some specific sub-systems), and they're pretty darn efficient. Seems they got there with just good old fashioned design optimization and only a couple additional computer-controlled subsystems.
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