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Transportation Canada

Canada Lays Out Plan To Phase Out Sales of Gas-Powered Cars, Trucks By 2035 (www.cbc.ca) 405

"EVs mandates are coming to Canada whether you like it or not," writes Slashdot reader Major_Disorder, sharing a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "Here is what my Canadian brothers and sisters need to know." From the report: New regulations being published this week by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault will effectively end sales of new passenger vehicles powered only by gasoline or diesel in 2035. Guilbeault said the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard will encourage automakers to make more battery-powered cars and trucks available in Canada. "There's no mistaking it. We are at a tipping point," he said, noting sizable growth in EV sales in Canada and demand that has previously outstripped the available supply.

Automakers will have the next 12 years to phase out combustion engine cars, trucks and SUVs with a requirement to gradually increase the proportion of electric models they offer for sale each year. The electric-vehicle sales mandate regulations will be published later this week. They are setting up a system in which every automaker will have to show that a minimum percentage of vehicles they offer for sale are fully electric or longer-range plug-in hybrids. It will start with 20 per cent in 2026 and rise slightly to 23 per cent in 2027. After that, the share of EVs will begin to increase much faster, so that by 2028, 34 per cent of all vehicles sold will need to be electric -- 43 per cent by 2029 and 60 per cent by 2030. That number keeps rising until it hits 100 per cent in 2035.

Guilbeault said the government is working to revise the national building code to encourage the spread of charging stations. The updated code would ensure that residential buildings constructed after 2025 have the electrical capacity to accommodate the charging stations. [...] The policy will be regulated under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and will issue credits to automakers for the EVs they sell. Generally, a fully electric model will generate one credit, with plug-in hybrids getting partial or full credit depending on how far they can go on a single charge. Manufacturers that sell more EVs than they need to meet each year's target can either bank those credits to meet their targets in future years, or sell them to companies that didn't sell enough. They can also cover up to 10 per cent of the credits they need each year by investing in public fast-charging stations. Every $20,000 spent on DC fast chargers that are operating before 2027 can earn the equivalent of one credit. Automakers that come up short for their sales requirements will be able to cover the difference by buying credits from others who exceed their targets, or by investing in charging stations. Automakers can start earning some credits toward their 2026 and 2027 targets over the next two years -- a bid by the government to encourage a faster transition.

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Canada Lays Out Plan To Phase Out Sales of Gas-Powered Cars, Trucks By 2035

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  • funny (Score:2, Insightful)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 )

    it is hilarious, Canada exports oil and gas and comes out with this. Of course the government pushes this to 2035, this way the current one doesn't have to deal with the consequences of its own idiocy.

    • Re: funny (Score:3, Insightful)

      If they had integrity theyâ(TM)d ban the extraction and use of these oil and gas products but are probably addicted to the revenue

      • That would require stupidity not integrity.
    • Re:funny (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @08:38PM (#64092135)

      Canada exports oil and gas and comes out with this.

      Doesn't matter.

      Fossil fuel reduction needs to happen on the demand side, not the supply side.

      There will always be someone willing to pump oil as long as there are willing buyers. Cutting the supply requires the cooperation of Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, etc. That's never gonna happen.

      But anyone can reduce the demand.

      • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

        by MacMann ( 7518492 )

        Fossil fuel reduction needs to happen on the demand side, not the supply side.

        I agree, we need to attack the demand for fossil fuels. I'll believe politicians are serious about lowering demand for fossil fuels when they start yanking out the political hurdles for nuclear fission and synthesized fuels. Banning the internal combustion engine means banning any option for carbon neutral liquid fuels. We need more options for lowering emissions, not fewer.

        I watched a YouTube video earlier today where someone was commenting on some new EV chargers he saw in the UK. He commented on how

        • If we are going to have practical low CO2 transportation then we need to retain the option for liquid fuels. Not everyone can handle the large charging cables that come on newer chargers, and not everyone will have the luxury to wait for a recharge. Maybe we could see new technologies or practices address some of these issues.

          We have technologies in the UK to address both of these. It's called "slow chargers installed in lamp posts". You charge using a normal, thin cable when you are at home.

          The goal isn't

        • Remove political hurdles for fission? Apart from maybe Germany, they've been removed. The USA has been really quite supportive, especially the NRC.
        • If someone can't handle cables for EVs they are probably going to have issues pumping gasoline too given how stiff some of the pipes are in the UK, plus how hard you have to grip the triggers.
    • It's policies like this that have sunk them in the polls. He has handed the conservatives a majority government in the next election repealing this will be wildly successful in the campaign.
    • The single best thing that Canada could do for the environment & mitigate global warming is to stop turning Athabasca into Mordor.
  • by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @08:29PM (#64092125) Journal
    There has been no work by the same government to ensure there is infrastructure to support said "non-ICE" vehicles. And supply chains will break when all transport trucks will only be able to carry one third to half of the existing loads because batteries will be taking up the rest.
    • Happen to have a citation on the half to third? I'm not aware of the mass fraction penalty being that severe.

      Also, building the infrastructure would be part of the plan.

      That said, I fully expect it to experience mass underperformance and thus be riddled with exceptions and pushed back, date wise.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      There has been no work by the same government to ensure there is infrastructure to support said "non-ICE" vehicles.

      What infrastructure? Do you mean electrical outlets? We already have those.

      Do you mean charging stations? Those already exist all across Canada and more are being installed every day.

      And supply chains will break when all transport trucks will only be able to carry one third to half of the existing loads because batteries will be taking up the rest.

      A Tesla electric semi has a 10,000-pound battery and carries 80,000 pounds of cargo. That is 12.5%, not half.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Erioll ( 229536 )
        All of the energy produced by burning fuel will need to be replaced by the electric grid infrastructure. Petrochemicals are very energy dense, that's why they're used. Has there been a corresponding ramp-up of the electric grid overall capacity? No there hasn't. And this is ALWAYS capacity, not when the sun shines and the wind blows, because that's not actual capacity. What's the base load? That's the real number.
        • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @10:08PM (#64092319) Homepage Journal

          All of the energy produced by burning fuel will need to be replaced by the electric grid infrastructure. Petrochemicals are very energy dense, that's why they're used. Has there been a corresponding ramp-up of the electric grid overall capacity? No there hasn't.

          It doesn't work that way. Cars don't consume power from the grid while you drive them. They consume power from the grid when you charge them. The vast majority of charging happens at night, when grid power consumption is at its lowest. In most places, the difference between power usage during peak hours on a typical day and the power usage during the middle of the night is larger than the power requirements for charging enough EVs to replace every car on the road.

          They haven't built up grid capacity because it isn't needed in most places.

        • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @10:09PM (#64092321)

          All of the energy produced by burning fuel will need to be replaced by the electric grid infrastructure.

          This has been debunked over and over.

          America generates 4.25 trillion kwh of electricity annually.

          Americans drive a total of 3.2 trillion miles per year.

          An EV uses about 0.25 kwh to drive a mile.

          (3.2 * 0.25) / 4.25 = 19%.

          There is way more than 19% of spare capacity during off-peak hours when EVs are programmed to charge.

          EVs also mesh well with intermittent renewables. They can be programmed to charge when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and then stop when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind pauses.

          EVs can even be programmed to feed power back into the grid during peak demand, so there is less need for gas turbine peakers.

          No extra capacity is needed. Even if it was, the transition will happen over decades.

          • by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @08:45AM (#64093111)
            I don’t know why everybody comes up with this off peak hour charging shit. Transport vehicles and long-haul trucks don’t have off hours. They need to rapid charge constantly. Right now the only people that own EV are silver-spooners, who works in a cube farm, or works from home. I think you need to step outside your bubble and realize that not everybody can plug their car in at night. Hell most people can’t even plug their car into a trickle charger to keep their battery topped off. Scaling out the use of electric vehicles to the entire nation of America based on the experiences of super rich douche bags, who happened to have a McMansion is the worst case of management engineering I’ve ever seen. I sure hope you’re not a decision-maker in your line of work, that’s terrible, it shows complete lack of vision when it comes to big picture. Even some high income workers live in condos with their own parking garages. Even in that circumstance, it would be a monstrous feet to outfit every parking spot with a charging station. For your average commoner, you don’t even get a carport. You just get a parking lot. That leaves them entirely dependent on rapid charging stations. So the other poster may have exaggerated some. I think your shortfall was to assume the entire planet would exist like you do. It says if you don’t look around when youre out in the real world. Hell Domino’s Pizza just rolled out a fleet of delivery vehicles because the stupid 2017 tax change doesn’t let the drivers claim miles. The duty cycle of that vehicle is 18 hours a day. There’s no overnight charging that’s going to make That up. I am sure they drive more than 300 miles a day. In order to have 100% adoption you have to get off the concept of off-peak hours. There will be no such a thing. Hell the very name implies that the demand on the grid is much lower at that period of time but if every single car on the planet is charging at that time, I seriously doubt it will ever be considered off-peak ever again.
          • This debunking has been debunked as well.

            "Total electricity generation" is basically irrelevant because nobody cares about the giant 3-phase arc furnaces, and other industrial users that use the other 79% of the electricity, and have their own substations anyway.

            When people talk about "the power grid" in the context of electric car charging, they are normally talking about the "residential electricity grid". i.e. "people's houses". That's the "power grid" that all these cars are going to be plugged into, an
        • by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @07:04AM (#64092951) Journal

          > All of the energy produced by burning fuel will need to be replaced by the electric grid infrastructure.

          Eventually, perhaps, but only the sale of new vehicles would end in 2035. It's not like all existing ICE vehicles already on the road will vanish. It'll probably be another 10 years before the majority of those are retired.

          > Has there been a corresponding ramp-up of the electric grid overall capacity? No there hasn't.

          About +15% in the past decade and projected to grow another 15-20% by 2035. If there's reason to believe the future demand will be there - like, say, a government mandate that would guarantee more electric vehicles on the road - then you have not only something to plan for but the economic outlook to justify the investment.

          That's really the biggest, least discussed part of laws like this: They create a clearer future scenario that businesses and utilities can plan for, rather than pure speculation.

          > What's the base load? That's the real number.

          If only there was some way to store energy... like maybe store it right in the vehicles that will eventually use it. Man that'd be great...
          =Smidge=

        • by shilly ( 142940 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @09:50AM (#64093297)

          How did this shite get marked Insightful?

          At least acknowledge that while fossil fuels are very energy dense, about 70% of the energy they produce in transportation is wasted as heat rather than actually, you know, propelling vehicles forward. So you don't need to replace fossil fuel capacity on a joule-for-joule basis, or anything like it.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You have it arse about face. The point of passing a law like this is to create the mandate to spend money on that infrastructure.

      We have seen it happen in Europe. Once a cut off date was set, governments were able to invest in meeting it. Private companies had the certainty and timeframe needed to invest in collecting guaranteed profits.

    • Well they are spending billions of tax payer dollars on a battery production plant so they need to force everyone to buy them. The taxpayer now gets to double pay.
    • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @09:33PM (#64092257) Homepage Journal

      There has been no work by the same government to ensure there is infrastructure to support said "non-ICE" vehicles. And supply chains will break when all transport trucks will only be able to carry one third to half of the existing loads because batteries will be taking up the rest.

      The proposed policy doesn't cover anything that qualifies as "transport trucks". It is about passenger vehicles.

  • Things can always change, but the liberals are projected to lose the 2025 election in a massive landslide, and the first thing the conservatives will do is eliminate this regulation. The new regulation conveniently doesn't take effect until 2026. The liberals have been in power for the past eight years, they had plenty of time to do this sort of thing, and if they had, it would be much harder to reverse.

    • You are seriously referring to "projections" for 2025?

      Want to read some sheep entrails while you're at it?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        Projections based on current polling which views these policies negatively. Doubling down on unpopular policies that further damage the wealth of Canadians isn't going to turn popularity around or climate change for that matter. Trudeau is a political dead man walking.
        • by Lord Dreamshaper ( 696630 ) <lord_dreamshaper@ y a h o o .ca> on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @10:25PM (#64092357)
          2015, 2019 & 2021 a plurality of voters elected Liberals in large part due to their environmental platform. Despite themselves, they'd be further along too, if every conservative provincial government didn't throw sand in the gears all the way to the Supreme Court.
          • Did you pay attention to their share of the vote dropping in each one those elections as well as losing the popular vote? They've been trending down. Are you seriously trying to pretend like the Liberals aren't wildly unpopular with voters at the current moment? How out of touch are you? Unless something major changes the most probable outcome currently is that the Conservatives will win the next election. You may not like it but pretending otherwise just makes you look like a fool.

            The person you are
            • butthurt? out of touch? you're selectively reading what you want from my comments. Sure Liberals are likely to lose, though 2 years is loooong time and I wouldn't rule out them being on either side of yet another minority government and then everyone can be miserable. Feel better now? Still doesn't change the fact that their policies were popular enough through 3 elections, that was my only point, dunno why that's a bridge too far for you
              • Yes you've demonstrate gross butthurt and are completely out of touch with the current reality. You lost it over a mundane most likely scenario being told.
  • Wrong nation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spywhere ( 824072 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @09:20PM (#64092223)
    Absent an order of magnitude improvement in battery capacity and charging rate, Canada is a terrible country for this.
    A good example: the Alaska Highway. "Major" cities and gas stations are very far apart, and the infrastructure to deliver enough power for car (let alone truck) charging does not yet exist.

    Key highways to remote areas are much more sparsely populated, and the cold makes matters much worse.
    • With the exception of hydro its also a horrible country for renewable energy production.
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        With the exception of hydro its also a horrible country for renewable energy production.

        Well, Canada is 60% powered by hydro [wikipedia.org] with more than a few provinces having over 90% hydro.

        Hydro is a great renewable source - it's a great inertial power plant (water was way more inertia than turbine blades) so it keeps the grid frequency stable, it's fast to react (minutes) making it useful for both base load and peaking power production, and given it only needs a valve to be operated, it can be used as a black start p

    • It doesn't matter that we're in a generally cold and spaced-out country. It doesn't matter that the Trans-Canada highway is more of a 'plan b' and that it is often better to travel through the northern US to cross Canada because of the more frequent fuel & rest options along the way.

      The EV conversion needs to come, and it's not right to tell the rest of the world to do it while we don't have to 'because Canada is special'.

      My worry is that we won't get the EV costs down enough or their performance up en

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Canada is a terrible country for this.

      Why? As a side effect, they don't want you wandering too far outside of the metropolitan areas. People that live and work in the countryside (Alaska Highway for example) probably shouldn't be driving 'passenger cars' anyway.

      The best thing we can do for emissions (here in the USA, probably in Canada too) is to keep large parts of the population from wandering around in the wilderness. The carbon footprint for that just sucks. Want to see the Grand Canyon? We'll install web cams.

    • Absent an order of magnitude improvement in battery capacity and charging rate, Canada is a terrible country for this.
      A good example: the Alaska Highway. "Major" cities and gas stations are very far apart, and the infrastructure to deliver enough power for car (let alone truck) charging does not yet exist.

      Key highways to remote areas are much more sparsely populated, and the cold makes matters much worse.

      Except those gas stations do exist, and if they have power, which I suspect they virtually all do, then you can charge an EV. And if the power lines somehow aren't good enough for a charger you just need to add a second local (slow charging) battery to help out.

      And, if you're really in trouble, it's generally easier to find an outlet then a gas station.

      Another thing to remember is a gas station is a pretty big undertaking. You need to dig giant holes in the ground to put in the tanks, all sort of environmen

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Norway managed to do it in harsh conditions. It's not that difficult.

      • Norway also has about the same percentage of urban population as Canada (in the low 80s).

        People see the vast wasteland of Hoth taking up most of Canada on the map and assumes that is significant, where as half the people live in the tiny blip at the bottom known as the "Quebec Windsor corridor"

  • Not About Consumers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by crow ( 16139 )

    This really isn't about consumers. With the right policies, EVs are already taking over in places like Norway, and as prices drop, they'll do the same elsewhere. This is much more about telling car manufactures that they can't drag their feet and survive. Canada has a huge business as a parts supplier for Detroit, so a major shakeup in the auto industry is not in their interest.

    It will probably be quite difficult to sell ICE vehicles well before 2035. EVs are much simpler and cheaper to make apart from

  • Reason: give time to get the infrastructure for large-scale public EV charging in place. By 2030, EV charging on a vehicle going 500 km (310 miles) could be done in under 8 minutes even if the battery charge level is only 5-8%.

  • From the OP

    They are setting up a system in which every automaker will have to show that a minimum percentage of vehicles they offer for sale are fully electric or longer-range plug-in hybrids. It will start with 20 per cent in 2026...

    It seems they just need to have 20% of offered vehicles to be BEV or hybrid. The only question remains, 20% of all models, trims, or actual individual cars? If it's models, you just need to make sure that 20% of models are EV, maybe there will be a Chevy Bold, Colt, Volt, Dolt differing by max battery size, or seat layouts. If Trims, just add new trims to your only EV until the number of trims constitutes 20% of all trims sold. If it's 20% of units, if a manufacturer builds 800,000 ICE car, they

  • F*ck Trudeau (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @05:24AM (#64092847)

    Idiot in office needs to go.

    Good luck driving anywhere in this country in an EV outside of a major metropolitan area.

  • Trudeau is already mentioned as the worst Prime Minister in Canadian history. He can't even go out in piblic without a large team of bodyguards for fear he'll be attacked. And, it wouldn't be the first time that the succeeding government threw out all the previous regime's legislation. Hint for other countries, don't elect a leader whose previous job was as a substitute high school drama teacher. Not a good idea.
  • by FofE IT Guy ( 1464431 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @11:12AM (#64093495)

    From the perspective of a Canadian, currently entering a Canadian winter, this new legislation is going to fail or have very detrimental side effects.

    First, Canadian winters, or winters anywhere if the temp drops below 0C, cars charged in unheated areas are going to take forever to charge. That is unless the batteries are heated. The batteries are going to be unable to deliver their full charge in a useful way unless the batteries are heated. Seems to me we will be investing plenty of electricity in heating the batteries. Add to this the demand put on the batteries in order to heat the passenger compartment, or at least keep your breath from frosting the inside of the windshield.

    Second, I’m already accustomed to regular power outages during the winter. I have access to two backup generators as a result of not wanting to freeze in the dark snowy night. What will it be like when all those electric vehicles are also charging on that same electricity grid. The one that nobody wants to invest time and money to upgrade.

    Third, the plan seems to be to give incentives, and use the whip of changed building codes, for those that install publicly accessible charging stations in residential dwellings, single and multi-unit. Well has anyone been watching the news lately and noticed the rise in electric vehicle fires? I have. My wife suggested I build an attached garage so when she gets her “dream” electric truck she can park it inside. That would partially help with the first issue, but I am not willing to take the chance of her driving over tree debris on the road, damaging the battery pack, and then burning me to death in my sleep. Not a pleasant thought. Apartment buildings are going to require updates to their fire suppression and fire stop construction. I don’t imagine that is going to be included in the building code updates, politicians need to get re-elected.

    Fourth in my list, but not the last issue with this jump on the bandwagon legislation, this will effectively restrict the movement of people in the Canadian winter. Imagine the first time you plan to drive more than 3 or 400 km in your all-electric air fryer and find yourself in need of a charge. You find a charger and hook up only to watch the charge status creep up at a glacial pace due to the cold battery. Will you do a road trip again? Yes, but in the old diesel truck running fryer oil when the Dino-juice is made illegal.

    The only way to do this right is for the legislation to mandate hybrid electric vehicles. In fact, at this stage of the technology, all electric cars should be hybrid electric in order to spread the increasingly hard to source and environmentally expensive resources needed for the batteries among more vehicles. To build one 500km range all electric car is nuts when most of the daily range need is under 100km. Build 5 100km hybrid cars and you get 5X the benefit for the environment, range anxiety is gone, cars hauling obscene battery weight is reduced, and we can all sing hallelujah into the greener future. Oh, and fix the building codes.

  • by tom_bkpk ( 773288 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @11:43AM (#64093575)
    Road transport is roughly 12% of global emissions, and that includes busses/trucks/etc (which will be harder to electrify). Even if we are charitable, electric cars reduce emissions by at most 2/3 since they have a much higher footprint whilst being built. Our efforts would be much better spent in reducing emissions in other areas, if only there were some. The problem is there is no good place to start, emissions sources are too fragmented (see linked pie chart).

    https://ourworldindata.org/ghg... [ourworldindata.org]

    If we are going to meaningfully reduce emissions or their effects ... it will be with Geo-engineering, adaptation techniques, or moonshot energy sources (hydrogen, etc). Forcing folks into electric cars won't do much.

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