New Delhi Forced To Withdraw Plan To Scrap Old Cars After Public Backlash (yahoo.com) 77
An anonymous reader shares a report: Delhi's government has been forced to reverse a controversial plan to effectively ban older vehicles from city roads after public backlash and concerns over how the policy would be implemented.
The plan would have seen "end of life vehicles" -- petrol cars over 15 years old and diesel vehicles over 10 -- denied fuel at petrol stations using automatic number plate recognition cameras, or ANPR, and, potentially, impounded on the spot.
The policy was set to come into effect this week but state environment minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said last week the government would halt the plan following widespread complaints. Mr Sirsa said the administration would not allow vehicles to be seized and cited "technological integration challenges" and a lack of coordination with neighbouring states sharing traffic with the capital.
The plan would have seen "end of life vehicles" -- petrol cars over 15 years old and diesel vehicles over 10 -- denied fuel at petrol stations using automatic number plate recognition cameras, or ANPR, and, potentially, impounded on the spot.
The policy was set to come into effect this week but state environment minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said last week the government would halt the plan following widespread complaints. Mr Sirsa said the administration would not allow vehicles to be seized and cited "technological integration challenges" and a lack of coordination with neighbouring states sharing traffic with the capital.
Ten years?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have a 2001 Honda Civic Ex (mine) with 133k miles and 2002 Honda CR-V Ex (wife's, who died in 2006) with 60k miles; they both run great, everything still works, and they still get mileage similar to when I bought them. As a bonus, I no longer have to pay annual property tax on them as they're over 20 years old. They will need re-painting at some point as they're kept outside and the clear coat is failing in places. Bigger bonus, they both have 5sp manual transmissions, which is almost impossible to ge
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There's property tax on cars?
Note to any tax agents .. uh yeah of course! Car property tax. Duh. I've been paying it. *nervous laugh* ...
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I just assumed he meant car registration, which is effectively a property tax.
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There's property tax on cars?
Note to any tax agents .. uh yeah of course! Car property tax. Duh. I've been paying it. *nervous laugh* ...
There is in Connecticut, Virginia, Mississippi, and Rhode Island which all charge between two and four and a half percent of the value of the car each year, whether it's registered or not. AI's try and claim that states that have vehicle registration fees based on the value of the car have a property tax, but that isn't a property tax as you can file a non operation certificate in California and not drive your car on public roads and not pay anything.
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In the US, some states have them and others do not. It's typically (but not always) paid at the same time as the registration. There wasn't property tax on my car in the state where I grew up, but when I moved to my current state I got quite the shock when I went to register my vehicle. I was expected just a $40-$50 registration, but on top of that there was about $300 in personal property tax. I think in most states it decreases each year as it's based on the value of the vehicle. So there's an incent
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That's pretty bad that my 1985 Alfa Romeo GTV6 lasted longer than your Ford. I got 250k before it needed major work.
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And I have a 1994 Toyota pickup. There are literally millions of "old" Toyotas on the roads which will likely continue running for decades -- because they're so well designed and built. I'm 72 years old and mine will certainly outlive me.
Re: Ten years?! (Score:2)
Maybe most of their cars are crap and fall apart much sooner
Re: Ten years?! (Score:1)
If it did they wouldn't need a law
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15 years is fucking crazy.
My current car is 18 years old, has 126K miles on it and runs perfectly! I can't imagine replacing it ANYTIME soon.
15 years? Totally fucking irresponsible to junk perfectly good cars.
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15 years is fucking crazy.
My current car is 18 years old, has 126K miles on it and runs perfectly! I can't imagine replacing it ANYTIME soon.
15 years? Totally fucking irresponsible to junk perfectly good cars.
It depends on what the pollution standards were for cars in India 15 years ago. Specifically thinking about the Tata Nano which I can see them wanting to phase out.
Think cars that were sold in India in 2010. Not Europe and North America. Cars sold today in India are much closer to what are sold in the rest of the world.
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If the govt bans the car you already have, then it needs to supply you with a suitable replacement, at no charge.
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You don't buy any car they drive in Delhi.
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I don't generally even buy a car until it's about ten years old. Still usually get about ten more years out of it without any major repairs. Average age of a car in the US is 12 years. This was a stupid plan from the beginning. Even if you are worried about the environment, keeping a car on the road is likely to be better for the environment than scrapping it and buying a new one. There is a lot of life left in them thar cars.
There are multiple dimensions to helping the environment, and sometimes what's good for one dimension can be bad for another. This is one of those cases. Yes, avoiding the carbon dioxide emissions incurred for manufacturing a car is a good thing, since the increased efficiency of a new car won't offset the car manufacturing for a long time and maybe never.
However, that's just from the perspective of greenhouse gases. There's also the separate issue of air pollution and its health effects. For that, it's
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There's also a consideration in terms of the emissions and other environmental degradation that was suffered as a consequence of manufacturing it.
If it was environmentally far more costly to produce the vehicle than to operate it, or if the environmental cost to produce a replacement vehicle is higher than operating an existing vehicle, then removing an existing vehicle from the road is a foolhardy move.
Similarly, if someone only barely drives their vehicle, then the environmental effects of driving the veh
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I think the plan was the right idea but the wrong values.
The older a vehicle gets, the higher the insurance.
The bigger the engine is, the higher the insurance.
The more accidents a vehicle model has, the higher service requirement to be insured.
You want to disincentivize running old vehicles that are safety hazards. If an old vehicle is reliable, then it's insurance goes up slowly. If a specific model of vehicle has a high safety failure rate (especially brakes and steering) then you put it on a list of vehi
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I don't really understand how this "safety insurance" would work. I don't insure my vehicles against mechanical breakdown. I just fix them myself. No mechanics, inspectors or insurance companies are involved.
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Average age of a car in the US is 12 years.
But this isn't about the US. It's about New Dehli. A rather upscale district in the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Poor people aren't supposed to be driving there. Just the upper echelons of the national government (mainly driving new Mercedes and Land Rovers). Everyone else: Take the bus. This is just another approach to what New York City is doing with congestion fees. Poor people, go away.
It's also interesting to note that India is doing nothing about the primary cause if air pollution in Delhi: f
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It's because of when the environmental regulations changed. The law probably says "cars not compliant with X", which gets translated to an age cut-off by journalists.
They are in a difficult situation. Pollution is harming everyone's health, but loss of access to a vehicle could also really hurt some people. In the UK they did a scrappage scheme, where if you have a non-compliant car you could trade it in for a fixed price well above market value, and use the money to buy a better one.
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keeping a car on the road is likely to be better for the environment than scrapping it and buying a new one
That is a very US centric sensibility. You live in a world privileged enough that you have a history of gradual improvements in technology slowly over a long time. India is a place that has from a regulatory standpoint been frozen in the 70s. With major changes happening right now they are trying to accelerate a change the USA made slowly over a period of 50 years.
That 10 year old car in the USA is far less polluting than that 10 year old car in India. Also this isn't about overall lifecycle emissions, this
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Yeah - modern cars last a long time compared to those of old. I get some motivation to replace old cars for environmental reasons, but nothing is free. A more efficient vehicle required a lot of energy output to produce it in the first place and will still require some form of potentially non green energy to keep it going in the future.
Even if it pollutes more, keeping an older vehicle on the road may be more environmentally friendly than replacing it due to having to effectively make up the production en
Wrong approach (Score:5, Insightful)
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While I'm generally ok with banning new sales of polluting vehicles, while thinking it it is not needed, I think forcing people to give up their existing vehicles is unreasonable. If you want people to scrap their polluting vehicles give them a positive incentive instead, such as buying up and scrapping the worst polluter first, giving people a leg up to move to cleaner vehicle.
Yeah, this is great when you're financially able to do so. Great for you that you can do those things. But seriously, the people that have a classic vehicle or a car that is rarely driven shouldn't be forced to give up assets just because some environmentalist says so. I don't know what country you're from, but here in the USA, I would hope such plans would be met with widespread outrage. Here in the states, there are millions of vehicles that are over 20 years old, some approaching 50-60 years old. T
Whataboutism for a sec (Score:2)
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The diesel engine in a truck is hardly like the two-stroke engines seen on lawnmowers.
A diesel truck will have sensors placed around the vehicle to check for things like oxygen and fuel concentration, these sensors will be attached to an engine control computer for carefully metering out both fuel and oxygen for maximum efficiency. A diesel truck will have a catalytic converter, and more sensors connected to a computer for dispensing DEF to minimize soot and other pollution out of the tailpipe.
The nice thi
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Re: Wrong approach (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Wrong approach (Score:5, Informative)
It arguably accomplished its goals of bailing out the major auto makers by forcing people to buy new cars (the "cash" was actually just a trade in credit - you couldn't get rid of an old car without buying a new one.)
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
"The formal name for the program was the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS). The CARS program gave people who qualified a credit of up to $4,500, depending on the vehicle purchased and its improvement in fuel economy over the traded-in vehicle."
Yes it punished poor people by destroying the traded in cars (not to mention saddling them with the debt of buying a new one if they couldn't otherwise afford it.) This robbed the market not only of used cars for resale, but the parts to keep cars that weren't traded in working (since the traded in cars had to be crushed, and the engines destroyed by deliberately seizing the engines.)
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/... [cnet.com]
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It wasn't CFC and the numbers prove it. (Score:4, Informative)
The 677K scrapped were not nearly enough to affect national used car prices over time because that was a drop in the proverbial bucket among tens of millions of new and used vehicle sales and scrappage. CFC did not target ALL used vehicles but select models.
Meanwhile the US total car fleet shrank by FOUR MILLION in 2009 (reflecting the 2008 recession far more than CFC
https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com]
Meanwhile the 2009 total scrapped was over FOURTEEN MILLION.
https://grist.org/article/u-s-... [grist.org]
"In 2009, the 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2 percent in one year. While this is widely associated with the recession, it is in fact caused by several converging forces.
Future U.S. fleet size will be determined by the relationship between two trends: new car sales and cars scrapped. Cars scrapped exceeded new car sales in 2009 for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million. It now appears that this new trend of scrappage exceeding sales could continue through at least 2020.
Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15â"17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people."
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Being a Boomer I should stereotypically believe unsubstantiated drivel propagated by industry-illiterates but it happens I've been wrenching including scrapping cars and harvesting parts from salvage since the 1970s including the CFC era. Facts are fun. I recommend inquisitive learning instead of AssUming correlation is causation.
I read the rules and checked the numbers because we went to auctions where CFC cars were bought by authorized yards where self and boss went to harvest delicious parts (I got all I could pull free if we had room to load them which was nice) some of which came from vehicles like CFC Jeep SUVs (no loss since their transmissions put many otherwise sound ones into salvage and transmissions to repair those on the road were legal to harvest from CFC vehicles). After skinning them out the mandated hull and engine got scrapped with any unwanted leftovers, but the harvested parts kept many others on the road during that recession era.
The number CFC crushed was not even close to enough to change used car prices and (this may be terribly difficult to understand because OMG math is hard) the impact of the tiny few recycled IN 2009 is not what drove used car prices up from then until 2025. (Vehicle price) inflation did because used car prices lag new car prices while driving them upwards. As new vehicle prices rise so do used, there being no reason to sell things for less than market value.
US auto production in 2009 alone was ~5.71 million units (per DOE). Total sales were around ten million for that recession year.
CFC didn't target anything of great cultural value (and though this may be painful for people who REALLY want a special vehicle but not quite enough to do more than blame circumstance for not un-assing the couch and getting one they were too slack to track down as I do) the few pretty toys were exceptions not rules hence irrelevant.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org] gives an idea of total vehicle sales over time.
Few understand 2009 also saw roughly 14 MILLION vehicles scrapped. People offed unwanted tradeable and untradeable (a few hundred for scrap cars moves a lot of iron) vehicles after the recession. That's where the "used" cars went in volume enough to briefly ri
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"Cash for Clunkers"
Now it's called "Cars for Kids".
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The idea is that people will buy their way into the carpool lane and then when the car is four years old and has lots of usable life on it, it will be substantially less valuable as it can't go into the carpool lane without multiple people being in the car, encouraging people to dump zero emission cars for cheap making them affordable to lower income people.
When the clean air act was passed California had
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We had a few similar schemes in the UK, one in 2009 after the financial crash, and then multiple more when places like London introduced charging for high emission vehicles.
They didn't have any real effect on used prices, not least because to qualify you had to have owned the car for at least six months so could not just buy an old one to get the discount. Air quality has markedly improved though, with corresponding health benefits.
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I think forcing people to give up their existing vehicles is unreasonable
Not at all. There needs to be a point where it is said enough is enough, otherwise you're forever stuck with polluting devices in your city. That said India went waaaaay too extreme on the roles. I live in a city which bans entry for petrol cars that are older than 2006, and diesel which don't meet Euro 4 standards, and diesel vans which do not meet Euro 6 standards. Banning older cars from certain areas has made a measurable improvement in air quality. Otherwise it would always be possible to keep an old s
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The rich have long had no excuse for not cleaning up their transport. We have reach the point that same is becoming true for the overage person. For poo
Smells like "cash for clunkers" (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds like the "cash for clunkers" deal in the USA. The success of that program is debatable in reducing CO2 emissions or improving air quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
While there's plenty of people that will claim "cash for clunkers" lowered CO2 emissions the impact was pretty mild by most every analysis. This looks to be a measure to drive more business to automakers, but they wrap this subsidy for the industry in a supposed effort to lower CO2 emissions in hopes to minimize public outcry.
Cars and light trucks, especially those more than 10 years old, make up such a small segment of total CO2 emissions that it's a pointless effort. This is doubled by recognizing that to replace these scrapped vehicles there would need to be more energy consumed in producing new vehicles than if simply allowing the vehicles to "age out" on their own from fair wear and tear.
The vehicles aren't the problem, it is the fuel. Provide an alternative fuel for existing vehicles that is low in CO2 emissions, and priced so it is competitive with petroleum fuels, and people will switch to the new fuel out of a desire to prevent worsening global warming, or out of peer pressure to "do the right thing" and buy the low CO2 emitting alternative. The low CO2 fuel doesn't have to be the lowest cost option, just being "close enough" in price would certainly get people to buy it in large quantities.
The studies I saw (Score:2)
So a whole bunch of perfectly good cars got destroyed for tax breaks by well-to-do people typically buying large SUVs often at the expense of a smaller car and us poor people like me kept driving our clunkers because we had to. It wasn't like they were going to give me enough money for my ancient Honda to go out and buy a new car.
Also by all measures
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"Emissions problems" are more reasonably approached by repairing the problems rather than replacing the entire fucking car and sending the old car to a landfill.
I replace the catalytic converter in my vehicle (14 years old at the time) for about $700. It's probably good for another 14 years.
Replace the entire car instead? That would just be fucking stupid.
Simple economics (Score:3)
Poor people need cheap cars. Cheap to insure, fix and run. Low-cost mobility is at the foundation economic mobility and lifting yourself from poverty.
New cars are anything but.
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Poor people need cheap cars. Cheap to insure, fix and run. Low-cost mobility is at the foundation economic mobility and lifting yourself from poverty.
New cars are anything but.
Maybe newer cars would be cheaper to repair if right-to-repair laws were put in place.
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It's the upfront cost and high insurance cost that makes them unfeasible for the poor / lower classes.
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Poor people need cheap cars. Cheap to insure, fix and run. Low-cost mobility is at the foundation economic mobility and lifting yourself from poverty.
New cars are anything but.
Maybe newer cars would be cheaper to repair if right-to-repair laws were put in place.
Not really. Repair costs are so high simply because cars have WAY too much shit in them now, even a simple accident can run a 5 digit repair cost. Combine that with limited repair shop availability compared to demand for services and he only way to REALLY come out ahead is to drive an older car (without all that shit) that you can repair yourself.
Four years ago I did a complete suspension, steering and brake overhaul on my Jeep. Spent about $10K, doing the work myself. If I had paid someone, it would have
Re:Simple economics (Score:5, Interesting)
Poor people need cheap cars. Cheap to insure, fix and run. Low-cost mobility is at the foundation economic mobility and lifting yourself from poverty.
New cars are anything but.
India tried this with the Tata Nano. Designed to be one step up from a motor scooter, it was simple and inexpensive to build, run, and maintain. They were deeply unpopular as they they became a symbol of shameful poverty. It turned out that people would struggle and scrimp and save to aspirationally buy a used older model of a more prestigious brand rather than buying a brand-new pauper-mobile for the same money. People are strange...Nothing is simple.
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Even "rich" people who want to live below their means need cheap cars. Cheap to insure, cheap to repair, cheap to operate. Low cost mobility is a good approach to keeping yourself out of poverty entirely.
Agree that new cars are best avoided by large portions of the population.
Memory isn't as good as it used to be, but I THINK I have not spent a single penny on repairs (and certainly nothing on payments) on my 18 year old Jeep so far this year. Sure as fuck beats paying the new average car payment for seven
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Low-cost mobility is at the foundation economic mobility and lifting yourself from poverty.
Personal vehicles are all expensive, they never offer low cost mobility. Low cost mobility is walking, transit, biking or catching a ride from someone.
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None of which is a suitable option if you are an adult, independent individual who cares about their time and doesn't want to spend 3 hours walking to the nearest shopping centre.
Just shut up.
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There is a reason low income people live in places where there is transit and near the places they need to go. If you are an idiot you buy an expensive car, insure it and pay for gas when you can easily live somewhere its a lot cheaper.
Of course some people will do it for a variety of reasons. But we shouldn't plan around them. And those low income people don't buy new cars. They buy junkers if they need one.
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New cars are anything but.
In what way? Are you comparing them to Teslas or EVs? Then I agree with you. That said in general reliability terms the data on combustion engine vehicles is clear - they are more reliable than ever.
Low-cost mobility is at the foundation economic mobility and lifting yourself from poverty.
In many cases people don't calculated TCO or are stuck in a situation where they are forced into a higher TCO due to lack of up front capital. Think of the most extreme western example: The people who bought EVs because they were cheaper to run and maintain their older petrol cars. You can see these choice refle
Age is not condition (Score:5, Insightful)
>"The plan would have seen "end of life vehicles" -- petrol cars over 15 years old "
15 years?? That is a RIDICULOUS policy! I just traded in a perfect condition, higher-end, 16 year old car, with 42,000 miles on it. "Age" of a vehicle doesn't say much about its condition. And there haven't been many breakthroughs in 16 years for pollution controls or safety (if that was the motive).
To do such a policy correctly would require some mileage component and probably also actual screening of the vehicle with objective metrics applied.
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>"That stopped being correct when half the shit under the hood began to be replaced with plastic."
There are many types and qualities of plastic. If selected and used appropriately, plastic can last a very long time without failure. Of course, the inverse can be true as well.
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And there haven't been many breakthroughs in 16 years for pollution controls or safety (if that was the motive).
This is where your point breaks down. There have in fact been enough breakthroughts in pollution controls in the past 16 years in the west to make a policy like this sensible, but we're not talking about the west. We're talking about India. A 16 year old car in India is nothing like the car you just traded in. They are trying to speedrun road regulations that the west introduced gradually over 50 years.
Want an example of this? The USA EPA requirements (by far not the strictest in the world) introduced requi
Ration registrations (Score:2)
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The simplest way to limit vehicles is to ration the number that can be registered. Then people who have a car registered can sell their registration to someone who wants to buy a new car. Then someone buying an EV really will be replacing an ICE vehicle instead of just adding one more car to the road.
I can see that backfire in a big way.
Consider some guy that likes to drive out to the woods on the weekends in his Ford F-150 to hike or hunt. Or has a truck for better handling in snow. Maybe has a trailer for a boat, camper, or whatever. Perhaps some combination of the above. With fuel costs creeping up he decides to buy a Chevy Bolt for his daily commutes in fair weather, saving the truck for the weekends and winter driving. So, you limit this guy to only one vehicle, which vehicle do you believe he
"90 barrels of beer on the wall..." (Score:2)