Following is in video description by @MoneyShift
The most common argument against electric cars is that once you factor in battery manufacturing and lithium mining, they aren’t actually cleaner. MIT tested that directly, and the answer is no longer ambiguous.
Researchers Marco Miotti and Jessika Trancik built a lifecycle model covering thousands of US zip codes, drilling down to individual driver behavior rather than comparing broad regions. They accounted for battery and vehicle manufacturing, fuel extraction and refining, regional electricity mix, local meteorological data, traffic density, trip length and duration, acceleration patterns, gas and electricity prices, and state fees. The study appears in Environmental Research Letters.
The concession first: building a battery is dirtier than building a comparable gas car, and an EV starts life with a larger manufacturing footprint. MIT states that plainly rather than working around it.
The findings: in most US locations, a battery electric vehicle reduces lifetime greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 60 percent compared to a similar gas vehicle, with larger reductions in urban areas. On cold weather, MIT found that in a climate like North Dakota, efficiency can drop as much as 50 percent on a particularly frigid night, but the effect on annual emissions benefits is minimal. Miotti’s own conclusion was that even in the most unfavorable conditions, EVs still reduce emissions substantially.
On cost, EVs are competitive with comparable combustion vehicles in lifetime ownership cost across most of the country, even without clean vehicle tax credits. Where electricity is relatively affordable, battery electrics tend to cost less outright. The study also found that individual driving behavior matters roughly as much as regional electricity mix, with the biggest reductions going to people who drive more, drive larger vehicles, and spend more time in traffic.
MIT also updated their public tool at carboncounter.com, where you can compare lifecycle emissions and ownership costs for nearly any car on the market.
None of this means you have to like electric cars. Dislike the steering feel. Dislike the brake feel. Want a manual. Those are real objections. The emissions one is finished.
Car news the way Doug DeMuro, Jason Cammisa and Chris Harris cover cars, every day
If the world governments were actually serious about carbon emissions and transitioning to EV, they would bring in standardization laws on EV designs. It’s currently a fragmented mess. Tesla casts their frames around a battery, making both replacement and frame repair impossible. We need to start with one standardized battery pack that is easy to replace. This would keep cars on roads 20+ years.
I’m all for standardization but the battery will usually outlast the car. What do you mean Tesla casts their frames around a battery?
Tesla cast aluminum frames on model Y are integrated with the battery pack. This makes battery replacement technically possible, but so expensive no one will do it, and when there is a crash, the battery takes damage.
https://tesla.zverski.eu/en/articles/my-4680-texas-battery-issues
Similar concept to phones that glue the battery in place to encourage disposal. Green Elon wants to make cars disposable.
“Tesla casts their frames around a battery” is a long way from “Tesla cast aluminum frames on model Y are integrated with the battery pack”
But yeah, saving a few % of weight and a few minutes fastcharging time should not make a simple battery repair such as a cell replacement much more difficult.
If the world governments were actually serious about carbon emissions and transitioning to EV, they would bring in standardization laws on EV designs.
That’s why I’m an advocate for a world government.
China good
When sodium batteries become the norm, lithium mining won’t be a factor and the picture will improve even more.
Another reason why I’ve been hesitant to be an early adopter. Clearly this tech hasn’t matured yet.
It’s such a catch-22. Do I want a car that goes 1000km on one charge? Or do I want to be limited to200km at a time but without some AI gooning at me 24/7.
I’d say you missed the “early adopter” period by like a decade. I’ve owned a Nissan Leaf since 2013, recently upgraded to a used 2023 Kia Niro. The Niro goes almost 300 miles, which is farther than almost any of our trips, and I don’t feel like AI is “gooning” at me, whatever that even means. It comes down to either you want to quit burning gas or you don’t.
It comes down to either you want to quit burning gas or you don’t.
I would rephrase that as “It comes down to either you want to quit spending a ton of money burning gas or you don’t.”
Yes, lower cost tends to be a better sales pitch for the general public than lower emissions.
If it’s 40-60%… (which is amazing)… then my gasoline car that’s past its half life should be used instead of buying a new electric one?
Your gasoline car will be used for its lifetime no matter who drives it. If your concern is to reduce overall emissions, just get an EV instead next time you change, whenever that is.
I plan to just convert mine but the engine still runs. The engine was built in 1998… Still runs though.
The immediate rewards of an EV are the lack of noise and high initial torque. I never thought I’d enjoy these so much, for some people, it could nudge purchase being sooner rather than later.
That’s why I’ve wanted to convert my jeep into one, I’m sure the diff and transmission and transfer case will have no problem with the torque =) Plenty of space, and I can always upgrade the coils for more batteries and throw a solar panel on the roof rack. Still have to figure out AC though. I really wish there were more companies that offered to do conversions.
I traded-in my last ICE for an EV because of:
- a sudden new engine problem.
- expenses of maintaining it rust-free.
- expenses of maintaining the suspension.
It depends on how much time and money you want to spend having the work done, and the cost of a replacement.
That’s true, and I highly recommend doing that. I keep my jeep because it has a AMC I6 engine. I can probably get 300k to 500k miles out of the engine. Honestly I don’t know how much mileage there is on it because the vehicle is a 2003 but the engine is a 1998. I work on my own cars so that makes it easy to maintain even though it doesn’t really need anything.
Oh no, not to maintain a combustion car. My maintenance expenses would have been much more than what the car was worth and a significant fraction of the cost of replacing it with an EV. Even when owning a home, it’s much easier to install an EV charger than it is to install a garage with all that’s required for the owner to do all that maintenance. You just happen to have the time to do so. That isn’t all of us.
They’ve outsourced our jobs to China for the past 50 years, haven’t increased minimum wage since 2009, and have skyrocketed the cost of everything with inflation but we can’t have cheap chinese EV’s in the USA because it’s bad for some reason. Honestly I think we need to shoot our oligarchs. I just have to say it. The only reason they aren’t letting us buy cheap EV’s is because the only way they can keep themselves rich is by rigging the economy using anti free market regulations. The rich USA oligarchs have effectively become communist. This is what communists do.
Lol because china is… pro free market?? Destroying foreign industries via price dumping is literally on page one of their playbook.
Trade with China is good as long as it’s the little people losing their jobs. But as soon a as a billionaire loses 5 dollars it’s suddenly bad. Sorry but fuck this. At this point I would rather have China running things than the evil bastards running the USA.
Bring me the Chinese EV’s. I want to buy one. In a free country I would be able to buy one.
Imo trade with china is good as long as it is value creating for both. If one side acts adversarial trying to destroy an industry, then fuck them and you should tarrif them. And destruction of the economy hurts the workers. And thinking workers have it better in china is utterly delusional.
$30,000 new cars are destroying America’s middle class. It shouldn’t be normal for people to go into debt to afford transporation. If China can sell us EV’s at one third the price, then open the damn door and let China sell us cheap EV’s. If American companies like Ford and Chevy can’t afford to stay in business, they deserve to go bankrupt.
These same companies willingly outsourced our jobs to China and didn’t give a damn when they destroyed American families in the process. Now we’re supposed to care about the rich bastard’s wallets?
Fuck no. China absolutely is the lesser evil here.
Now try an E-Bike.
Now my regular bike! Mostly because UK laws are dumb and limit ebikes to such a low speed that its pointless for me to get a legal one.
No! If you want an electric motorcycle, then get one and drive on the regular vehicle roads. The limits on ebikes keep them as bikes. I live in a very hilly town and a basic ebike means I can keep on biking now that a regular mountain bike is getting to be too much work. If defacto motorcycles are using the bike lanes and paths, we might as well allow cars and dump trucks on them as well.
If I can cycle faster than the legal ebike limit, isn’t it a bit low? I overtake legal ones on my way to work, illegal ones zoom past.
Just want a slightly higher limit. Like leave the motor power limit but drop the speed one?
No. Lower it. Classify fast ones as motorbikes and ban them from looking like bikes.
My friend in his 30s got run over whilst jogging by an ebike on a shared pedestrian/cycle path and hasn’t been back to work yet. His face had to be reconstructed and his leg and both hips are a mess.
If that was a road legal ebike, a regular bike would have done the same amount of damage given that I am going at a similar or faster speed than legal ebikes already. Then you have road bikes going even faster than I do.
Then you have sprint speeds which are even higher. For a short distance I can push close to double the ebike speed limit on a smooth path. There is a mile or so coastal path here that works really well for getting up speed. Downhill obviously allows even more speed.
I wasn’t there and didn’t see it, but I can’t imagine it was a legal bike, my point is that the fast ones need to look less like bikes so that the police can identify bikes that shouldn’t be on cycle paths easily.
I imagine that you as a keen cyclist have experience and road sense and pay attention to other road or cycle path users in a way that someone who has a lot of experience on the road has to do if they’re not going to end up in a crash. You don’t become a fast (pedal) cyclist without a bit of experience.
Police could just see how fast they are going and test the bike if it was going too fast.
Although they need to learn how to test it. Have heard a few expensive legal bikes being destroyed by the police because they keep using tests that will always produce a fail result. They just take the bike off ground and spin the pedals and if the wheel rotates over 15mph it fails. My bike isn’t even an ebike and would fail that test. Its not does the wheel spin, its does the motor provide power.
“EV’s” ? … no thanks …
Seems everyone is stepping into the shitpile here. EV’s don’t exist, but EVs do. Learn grammar and humor all you downvoting suckers.
EvEn ThE tIrEsSs?
For a while the right was claiming that evs, being heavier, caused more pollution from wear and tear on roads and tires.
Glad this article shows it was bs
If they truly cared about that, we’d have trams everywhere already.
