That's quite a clickbaity headline!

It's forcing lexus to disable the remote starting of ICE vehicles so that they can be idled and warm-up pre-use.

Idling is regulated in a bunch of places, for reasons of emissions and air pollution. For instance it's illegal to park up and idle your engine on a public road in the UK.

Is this move by the German government reasonable? I'm not sure, but it's not completely out of the blue, or as severe as the headline would lead you to believe.

> it's not completely out of the blue, or as severe as the headline would lead you to believe.

The part of this that makes it major news is that they're retroactively taking away a feature from a car that people already bought.

It’s hardly major news either way.

Yes, it’s bad for owners if they removed a feature. But if the feature wasn’t legal and contravened CO2 and air-pollutions laws then I guess that’ll happen. Previously that might have required a recall.

Well. not retroactively - if you used the heater last year they won't take that from you. But otherwise legislation can change and affect existing objects as well, like you can't take knives anymore on the plane while 50 years ago you could. But all metaphors aside, idling an ICE is against the regulations in many places (Switzerland, UK...) so Germany is just catching up.

Most regulations aren't like this one, though. E.g., when RoHS passed, the government didn't go through everyone's houses to confiscate and destroy all old electronics that were made with leaded solder. And even for things that aren't legal to do anymore, things you own shouldn't enforce laws against you.

Preheating is not in general forbidden in Germany, but you need a proper stationary heating system (can be even combustion based). Lexus probably has implemented it with the main combustion engine as remote start, which is a poor-man solution and considered inefficient and illegal.

Modern trucks have webasto heaters even for main engines to reduce NOx emissions.

And VW T6 Multivan and California often have two, the other for interior pre-heating.

OTOH remote engine start is dangerous and not just inefficient.

Think of all CO that it may emit in a closed box.

Looking at Gadget Review's front page, stories are a bit creative and sensational. The article is not a news report, but an anti-green diatribe; for example:

> Your luxury car just became the latest battlefield in Europe’s climate wars, where bureaucrats decide which buttons work in your own vehicle. The real question isn’t whether remote start causes pollution—it’s whether you still own the features you bought.

There are still real questions here. I wonder how the feature was sold in the first place. Does it predate the relevant laws?

Also, what would it take to add an aftermarket electric engine warmer? I know people in some northern climates have accessories that plug in and warm the engine, but maybe those come with the car.

Fortunately there are only approximately 5 lexus cars in all Germany.

My audi can do this without the engine running I dunno why lexus cant…

At the very least, the incendiary tone makes this article suspect.

That is a wildly misleading headline…

Specifically, it's disabling remote start, rather than the actual heating.

While I understand the concern...

> regulators who decided warming up your car counts as environmental terrorism.

... this is rather hyperbolic. They decided it counts as excess emissions. That's debatable but it's a pretty strong case.

Anyway, yeah, don't connect your car to the Internet. Including for remote starting.

> Anyway, yeah, don't connect your car to the Internet. Including for remote starting.

Don't modern cars all have SIM cards built in somewhere that's really difficult to remove?

Another incentive to go buy an EV.

EVs still are less than half the utility of normal cars. Until charging becomes as standard as filling your car (i.e don't have to go find a charger, every gas station has one, and so on), no matter what the advantage they give you it won't overcome that fact.

> half the utility

Utility measured how? Be specific.

value/dollar in terms of what you can use a car for (transportation, carrying stuff, time spent driving versus time spend filling up)

Cheapest EV is 30k right now - nissan leaf.

For that much, you can get a Prius Prime , which can be driven like an EV to work and back, charge at home, and when you go on a long trip, you don't have to worry about finding charging stations

You can also get a hybrid Ford Maverick. While you can't charge it at home, It gets 500 miles tank of gas, a full bed for carrying stuff, outlets in the bed for tools or camping, and offroad capability, and again, can fill it up at any gas station.

If Nissan leaf was like 100 mile range, basic vehicle for $10k, then it would be a different story. But right now, paying the same for way less capability doesn't make sense.

So you don't have a quantitative measure of utility of which you can precisely determine a "half", you have a vague idea of "value" on which you want to place a veneer of quantitative analysis that will last exactly until someone calls you on it. That's not specific.

Lets say utility is time that you can spend driving the car versus it sitting still, multiplied by amount of weight you can carry, divided by cost of vehicle.

Let's say that every unit of time spent driving a vehicle is of equal utility for every person, and that the utility scales linearly with the absolute length of a given stretch of driving or time between. Let's say everyone uses their car to go basically the same distances to the same kinds of places carrying the same cargo and passengers, with basically the same costs for needing an alternative. Let's also say that cows are frictonless spheres in a vacuum.

Or we could just not pretend that "utility" is a concept that can be applied uniformly across all car-shaper objects.

I haven't had to find a charger or think about them in over a year. I just plug it in when I get home and I'm done.

I did a ~10000km road trip around western Europe and while I started with ABRP, I switched to just driving normally and stopping at an EV charger when I was below around 20% and happened to see a sign.

I'm not saying this is the case everywhere, I opted for an ICE engine when I visited Australia for example. "Half the utility of normal cars" is utter nonsense in my experience though.

The thing is, if you just plug in when you get home, you likely drive very few miles. Id be for a $10k brand new EV with 100 miles of realistic range (i.e not having to keep speed below x). These don't exist. You pay for higher range in even cheapest EV, so you are paying for utility that you don't use most of the time.

There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point…

And if it’s sitting at home for 14 hours per day, a normal 120V outlet will get you 70 miles of charge. That’s fine for most commutes, but if you actually need more than that, you can use a dryer outlet that gets you like 4x that charging rate (280 miles of range over that 14 hour charge). Or installing a proper wall charger will get you twice that again, but it’s really not necessary.

>There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point

Yes, because a modern gas engine that makes a measly 112 hp is still a very complex piece of machinery that requires a lot of precision manufacturing and assembly.

An EV is dead simple by comparison. To make a 100 mile range ev, you don't need fancy motors. Industrial AC motors will work.

And as for charging, this requires you to be at your house every few days. If thats your average use case, you don't need high mileage EVs.

I guess, what's the general breakdown of cost between engine and the rest of the car, and the amortized R&D?

Most commuters use it mostly for commuting, but also day trips, and 100 miles is really cutting it close for day trip round trips in a lot of US metro areas.

Isn't it more an incentive to buy an older car that cannot be controlled remotely? You know, a car that can be fixed with a spanner.

With the cold snap in the eastern US I'm quickly learning EVs range and charging short comings in below freezing weather.

I agree. But if you are stupid or want humongous car aka PHEV - there are now some that support remote heating using batteries.

I'm flagging this one because the whole article is sensationalised without evidence or even pretending to objectivity.

How is it "without evidence"? I can find plenty more articles about the same thing and no doubt whatsoever as to the veracity.

The tone in the article is so off. We are clearly headed for a climate disaster, being whiners about having to manually de ice your windshield is so very childish.

I understand there is a broader topic of regulators impacting what can and can’t be done but isn’t that just having a government?

It is an article that doesn't care about facts, just feelings. It should have no place in any serious discussion.

Headline (HN and original) is misleading. It suggests Lexus needs to disable heating altogether via an OTA update.

Rather, it sounds like they want to disable remote engine start for preheating the car. Which is a very different proposal.

If this was 1970s, I'd maybe feel differently about it, but since we put so much CO2 into the air already, winters are really tame in Europe anyway.

That’s great! People who do that are often inconsiderate of how it affect others. First of all, it generates unnecessary noise, which is annoying for neighbors who are still trying to sleep. Pedestrians/cyclists also need to breathe those exhaust gases.