It has nothing to do with pollution and everything to do with regulatory capture and enabling hooks for multiple dubious goals such as planned obsolescence and increased access to marketable data and surveillance. The newer a car is the more potential it has as a cash cow to the manufacturer and the various "partners" it may have signed on to. The buyer is buying a hardware platform that to do most of what they want they will have to keep paying. The kind of car that lasted for twenty years with only minimal problems is anathema to modern marketers.
Also, there is surveillance and data mining. Lots and lots of money in that!
Also, consider the value of keeping the roads clear of traffic Electric cars and privatization of highways is a hook to restrict freedom to travel or at least travel without interruption to just the better heeled.
It has disruptive potential similar to "Cashless cities" - in its exclusionary effect.
(in case you hadn't noticed, neoliberalism- like any self respecting
doomsday cult, almost worships disruption)
Also, how do you decide who is profitable, and who isn't?
If you don't know, who gets the shrinking number of jobs when you're in charge and they are rapidly going away. The "wrong people".
Insurance is a biggie. So are the areas you frequent. Maybe you live near a toxic business thats causing cancer for its neighbors. You dont know that now, nobody does, but in 20 years, the data will stand out like a red thumb. Would everybody who spent a significant amount of time near it - as long as 20 years earlier, become "uninsurables"?
The simple answer is, if the math justified it, and maybe a little more.
They dont want to turn away customers unless there is an actual risk. Some toxic exposures can also be transgenerational, or "epigenetic". To figure out who is at risk, they need a granularity of information that was never available before. Previously it was too expensive to store all that information also. for example, RTK location data from a cell phone may contain spatial resolution of 2 cm or less and be sampled as much as 20 times a second. of course, the motion of a car cannot tell potential customers much about its drivers heartbeat. But the amount the car moves downward when he or she gets in can be compared to other similar data to give a very accurate picture of their weight at a given moment in time.
Where you go, how fast you drive. Whose cars park near yours. They can use all that data to build up a profile of the kind of returns they might get of marketing efforts to you.
They wouldn't go to all this effort if the data was not valuable to a multiplicity of buyers.
How do you think they decide who is a good health insurance risk and who isnt, (necessitating they deny coverage, or charge much more for it) Location has a lot to do with it. Also, by who the owner spends time with, where.
Also, how much money is likely to be spent by person A vs person B. (how much profit is to be made on them)
What they will do is create huge taxes on older cars, or continually require new capabilities in cars allowed on the roads which only the newer cars have.
Perhaps, but for now, and hopefully the forseable future, governments are elected and much as they might like to impose their will "for the long term good of the nation" (or for the benefit of their cronies and / or post government revolving door employment), there is always a limit to what the voters will tolerate. Especially if a large part of the electorate is disaffected by a reversing economy.
Yes, if you replace "corporations" for nations. Corporations are the new people.
Taking away (relatively) cheap but dirty motoring from the masses and restricting cleaner, but not pollution free, electric motoring to the wealthier may seem attractive, or at least an acceptable option to descision makers in cities like London well served by public transport, but it may not be so well received out in the sticks and poorer towns and cities. Think Brexit...
Not knowing about the thing I'm trying to tell you about already caused both Brexit's win, and the 2008 financial crisis, and I can prove that easily in both cases. Its easy to see for yourself, want to know how? in the first instance, look for pictures of a red London bus rented by the UK's "UKIP" party and driven around london in the days before the leave vote, and report back what was printed on it.
The second can be shown by looking on the last page of the last attachment to the last "Specific Commitments" document (Supplement 3) or SC90 Supplement 3 filed in Geneva at the WTO by the US on February 26, 1998 the line about "Glass-Steagall Act reform"
The fact that we still don't know this otherwise huge piece of real news tells us that that information vacuum will be exploited again before this is over, you can bet on it.
The point I am trying to make is that we're all being led into a state of delusion as to our current situation.
We would like to think we have democracy. But do we?
We had it in the past but right now, its at best in the very gravest of danger.
The very idea of a livable, inclusive society and planet, is in grave mortal danger. Because that dream, that good society we all see as desirable is not the one that corporations want, because its one where their ability to exploit the maximal profits out of every advantage they ca possible get, unfairly - is limited - For example, corporations may not want people who have no money dead, but they dont want them. Its not personal, they just see no value in a person who is not making them money, and the space they occupy if it might be occupied alternatively by somebody who was, they see as a negative.
Because that planet PEOPLE want is NOT - not even close, to the planet MNCs want. For one thing, what happens when people just dont have anything that they want? When nothing that they may be able to do for them has any value. When they no longer have any money to spend and a 50 cent piece of electrovics can do more with in ten seconds than they could in their entire life.
The worst actors - the corporations whose lobbies are bringing about these shifts, can be shown to think completely differently than sane people do.
Do sane human beings see large scale job losses as a gain? No. But, the lobbies of these multinational corporations, and the economics establishment that legitimizes them, as well as the governments that are pushing this system, have all created a alternative reality that selectively builds a value system that bears little or no relation to that held by the rest of the planet.
So, one dirty little secret behind trade agreements is that they frame job losses as 'efficiency gains'. Pretending that those millions of people will simply be freed to do other things. This would be unlikely to be true under the most favorable of economic conditions, but coming as it will during an unprecedented shift in business settings to automation - accompanied by a rapid increase in trans-border specialization, whose acknowledged primary goal is cutting costs, I think its inaccurate to call it anything resembling a gain of any kind, except for those huge corporations which will have created the optimal conditions not just for their own growth but for the creation of a mono-cuture which will likely eliminate many millions of smaller businesses, leaving a vast number of our planets citizens with nothing.
An ideal situation for polluters though, because damages are based on lost wages so unemployed people, the aged and childrens lives are worth - a portion of their lost wages- unless its both an open and shut case, and they have to be given extremely costly care, its not worth a lawyers time taking the case.
This conclusion - that its the definition of insanity to be allowing what they are doing, their stealthy bypassing of the checks and balances we have set up to keep our systems sane and healthy by creation of a global "trading" system to keep the people down and keep the currently up up,. subvert the world's brief experiment with democracy,, is very likely to end in disaster, seems like a logical one to make.
Otherwise, why are they hiding what they are doing? Why do they refuse to discuss its growing list of glaring failures.
What I am trying to tell you is we're being led into a trap that is forcing a cult like mess onto our nations stealthily replacing what people expect with its Doppelganger, or evil twin.
All of the efforts to force corporatism on the planet have a single unifying theme to them all, divide and conquer.