The has got to be an alternate route that is nicer than that, that's wild.

But I get that sone areas are incredibly car centric and leave you little choice.

The government's purported logic is that emissions standards from 15 years ago were lax and are much tighter now and therefore vehicles of that age are contributing to pollution. On the face of it that makes sense; Delhi's AQI is one of the worst in the world, and emissions standards here were pretty meh until the 2010s.

In reality it's because the auto industry wants you to buy new cars. That's it. If the government was actually focused on limiting pollution they'd be investing heavily in efficient public transit and walking/biking infrastructure and enforcing things like a congestion tax to push people towards said options, but they're just offloading it on to regular people so they can make a fuckton of money without having to spend any.

Sounds like how the EU is usually doing this. Limit the companies, not the people directly.

Policies like these are almost never about overall environmental health. It's to address acute problems. Delhi has a lot of smog that causes health problems. That is the specific problem they're addressing

Isn't it true that once a car is built, it's basically better for the environment to drive it until its wheels fall off instead of scrapping it

In terms of global warming; maybe. It depends on many factors when looking at a specific case. Another commenter already put some numbers together.

The environment, however, in this case is Dehli, a city with terrible air quality. Removing an active source of CO2, NOx, heavy metals, etc is good for that environment. Especially human lungs.

Every 35000 km or 21000 miles a gasoline car going on average 20km/l or 47mpg why H have produced the same amount of CO2 that it takes to make an electric car.

So if over the lifetime of the car you go less than 35000km you shouldn't be changing it with an electric. Otherwise please do 😁

The break even on carbon emissions from manufacture vs. daily use is somewhere between around 3 and 10 years. Big trucks on the low end.

The environmental break even period for EVs is getting shorter and shorter as the power grids get cleaner and cleaner.

It was a somewhat solid argument against buying new EVs to replace working ICE cars over 10 years ago, but now it's really not.

I used to live next to some folk who would drive 300 metres to the gym

I used to walk 500m round trip to nearby restaurant for lunch, everyone i met will comment on how far that is. Of course, i take it to heart and now drive my 4x4 there.

Nah just kidding, i now ride a bike, often 3.5km round trip for lunch.

On the streets of New Delhi this will probably take just as long as walking. Need the AC though.

Certainly seems so. From the picture the OOP posted, it doesn't look like there's paved walkways

Government-mandated to reduce emissions?

On the surface, yes. In reality they're just offloading environmental responsibility on to citizens (and making them buy "better" ICE cars so the auto industry gets the profits) instead of improving and expanding public transit to make it easier to get around without a car.

Whoa! Cool it.

The mandate isn't from "government". Apparently, the government failed to do much about pollution, so a regulatory body was set up by the courts, which body did some good things (ban diesels) but also some hamhanded things like judge only based on technology age rather than the odometer. Throwing away a ton of steel and manufacturing that has had minimal utilization isn't going to help any.

You should've dissed the people who made scrapping the dedicated bus lane an election issue some years ago. I guess that never made it to the newspapers, and hence wasn't discussed online either.