It really is the end of the car as we know it.

It does sound like grim news indeed and I still have concerns for how existing petrols and diesels will survive once sales of new vehilces using those fuels are banned.

Also as has been pointed out again in discussions on the radio this morning, we'll just be shifting the location of emissions from tailpipes to power stations, and not actually tackling the overall emissions issues.

I have hugely mixed feelings about these sort of announcements. 

On the one hand, we are continually berating governments for not thinking long term, so this ought to be applauded as at least some attempt at a "strategy". But on the other hand, I think we all have zero belief that any government (maybe I should add "in a democracy" to that phrase?) can actually make a strategy come to reality, as in they can't even predict or manage 23 weeks or 23 months, let alone 23 years ahead. 

A decision like this has such far reaching consequences and probably also lots of unintended consequences too, that it is an easy statement to make, but I'd say next to impossible to deliver easily. Here's my quick list of things I thought of - 
Power & grid - massive changes needed - more power; how to generate that power; higher grid capacity; charging infrastructure. It takes 20+ years to get one nuclear station running (maybe). We'd better start tomorrow then.....
Road pricing - loss of fuel duty means that road pricing is inevitable. People will never vote for that! how can that be squared?
Autonomous driving - will we even own cars in 23 years?  - perhaps this is really about the end of personal transport being "owned" - that sounds like a good way for governments to control us as the growth in personal freedom has been hugely helped by access to transport. The left hate cars - this will be golden opportunity to stick it to the middle classes as usual. 
Battery materials - assuming that batteries will be the main source for a moment, the arabs had their moment of glory in the 1970's when they deiced to make everyone pay more for oil. you can bet the owners /controllers of all the materials needed for battery production will want the same at some point.
Battery v hydrogen - people need to decide this now.  Batteries may be only an interim. What we really need is to build the hydrogen infrastructure that will be usable as fuel cells become more widely available. Batteries are really the VHS of the energy world. Not ideal but seemingly at the moment the one that we're stuck with. Hydrogen is Betamox - technically more sensible; longer term more sensible; but intially hard to make people invest in. 

I wondered about new houses too. Classic lack of planning and opportunity to make real changes to things for fear of upsetting people (or being too thick to think about them in time).  

The announcement said "cars" (I think - or at least that is what is being touted). So what about buses, lorries etc on the roads? And then, as you say, there is the entire "off road" use of fossil fuels. Not just hedge trimmers, but agriculture, industry, aviation. If road fuel use drops, that is only going to make refining less oil for those to use more expensive. Nobody has yet managed to design an effective electric combine harvester for example! So that comes back to my comments above about hydrogen. It's the only way forward really. I guess you can even make a fuel cell aeroplane if you went about it properly, although memories of the Hindenberg may make hydrogen fuelled aviation an uphill success story! 

It will be interesting to see how this all pans out, I do think we are on the cusp of a huge leap forward in terms of tecnological progress as all manufacturers will be coming on board and investing.

Charging could be an issue, I can't charge at home, however there are now charge points being installed in lamp posts, which will help greatly, but there needs to be more transparency amongst differing charge point companies and also a standard charging type across the board.

I'm sure there were similar murmerings when the first ICE cars appeared.

One good thing I see being suggested is that bus lanes, speed bumps and traffic light timing may now be reviewed to help the flow of traffic instead of restricting it.

I think we need to look at a bigger picture of personal transport. I'm slowly getting more and more convinced that my children (currently 8 and 10 years old) will have no need to learn to drive and may indeed never take a driving test, at least not as we know it now. Others have mentioned this issue of all those cars neing to be connected to a house by wire which will be hampered by lack of planning. That notion is based on current trends of having a car on the drive and people owning their own car. In 23 years time there is every chance that people won't have their own car. They will merely go to an app and ask for one, and the nearest available autonomous car will come to their door and pick them up. It won't need some big charging station because the roads will have contactless induction charging built in so it will be powered as it goes. Being autonomous means you won't need to drive it yourself. You may also find the pricing will be depended upon whether you want to travel alone or have it pick up other occupants along the way, which will be cheaper but take longer.

Thinking back 23 years to 1994, today's cars have moved on massively. I agree that a mk3 Golf TDI worked the same as today's mk7 and apart from a better interior and quieter engine it hasn't changed, but compared to the Golf GTE it is light years apart so there's every chance that another 23 years will see cars being almost unrecognisable to someone used to a mk3 Golf.

There's a mighty £255M being passed to councils to start this off, what a joke amount is that?

Michael Gove was talking about bus routes being altered, etc.
Fair enough but how about something more sensible?

For example, tonight I'll be going to visit my mum.
On the way out of the local town on the A914 there's a traffic calming island that stops traffic heading out of the town about 250 yards before the end of the 30 limit.
It wasn't there 5 years ago. At busy times I've been stuck there, engine idling, for a couple of minutes and then been faced with the need to accelerate from a standing start.
Before the island appeared I would've driven past on a steady throttle at 30.
I'm NOT responsible for the extra emissions caused by this, it was the planning authority's decision.

I presume that overnight my £15k petrol & diesel cars have lost a chunk of value?

Concrete as well.
I watched a couple of episodes of the documentary about Crossrail. The amount of concrete used was incredible and all in a location where there's huge pollution already.
This could sound the death knell for HS2 on environmental grounds!

I imagine this announcement will spell the death knell for the ICE in the same way as that invention spelled the death knell for the horse.

Cars with traditional engines will become a weekend hobby for those who can drive and those who bothered to learn. That said, I think most people will not own a car and will just hail an Uber* - be it driven by a person or autonomously driven.

* Other car sharing apps will be available.

Note re the above - quote thingy not working for me again - first paragraph was what I was quoting from alf.

If you accidentally click in the quote box and then type, it will add your comments to the quote.

It is sometimes easier when quoting, to use the BBCode editor rather than the preview editor and you can then see where the quote starts and stops.

You can alter which editor is enabled by default in your profile.  It's not something I can do globally.

Or you could stop people being able to own cars if they do less than 10,000 miles a year, which would clear the roads up nicely for those of us who have to travel a lot.