Oh wow, another EV thread with a bunch of oil industry mouthpieces telling us how the studies are wrong and what we didn’t think of. Thank you Mr. Shell, I almost forgot not everyone has a charging point at their house and it takes time to charge an EV.
Color me surprised.
I’m sure we’ll eventually get to the point where they invent rapid charging batteries that can fully charge in 5 minutes. But realistically we don’t need it, you just change the way you think about fuelling up.
It’s fun to imagine an opposite world where everybody has EVs and other more efficient forms of transit, and then industry wants to introduce ICE vehicles to the market.
You fill it with flammable liquid poison and it shoots gaseous poison out the back while it’s running, and nobody can refuel at home, and it’s immensely more mechanically complex, but at least it’s quick to fill with fuel at the fuel store! Just try not to inhale the poisonous explosive fumes or spill the poisonous volatile liquid on yourself while you do it.
Most issues require nuance, and the internet does not have the concept of nuance at all. I did my research and bought my EV, no regrets at all. Not only do I know it’s better because I haven’t consumed gas now in over 2 years, it’s also simply the best and easiest car I’ve ever owned. It’s a no brainer to get one. Anyone who says otherwise I think firmly needs to think about their connection with propaganda.
If you want to be better than that, look for cars with LFP battery. They tend to be used in the less expensive cars and in lower capacity configurations. Their carbon footprint is roughly half of the regular NMC batteries and the only mined metal they need is iron and no zink, mangan or cobalt are needed in their chemistry.
That and try to use renewable energy, eg with home owned photovoltaic. If you do all of that, the break even is way before even 2 years and life cycle CO2 footprint is only a fraction of an ICE vehicle.
“We decided to let the earth and all living things on it die, as it would be too hard on the economy if we tried to save it”. /s
Burning petroleum is one of the most destructive things you can do and it is absolutely common to do it. Everyday a single vehicles emits enough pollution to kill countless people. It gives them cancer and when combined with lead has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths. It is absolutely insane people continue supporting this technology.
Burning gas is so extremely bad that even throwing away your old ICE car and buying a new electric car is better than driving the ICE car until it „falls apart“. This was the research finding in Switzerland, but this result was so unwelcome that the research got hidden away. https://www.republik.ch/2025/06/11/amtliche-selbstzensur
Everytime you bring it up, you get a whole lot of people with gasoline powered cars getting very angry. Sure batteries are not ‘perfect’, but they are a whole lot better in almost every way compared to gasoline powered vehicles.
The anger is less about how bad EV’s are and more about being expected to buy a hilariously expensive EV when someone has a perfectly functional car. Make them cheaper and people will buy them, because other than the environmental aspect EV’s just require less maintenance overall, making them cheaper to run.
I’d rather spend $100k converting an old ICE car to electric than give the auto industry another dime. The surveillance crap is literally a life or death decision for me. I have a 20y/o ice car I’ll likely have to convert, so no one try your dumb “new car math” with me.
If any fuckers want to make what I’m doing illegal, people will die.
Yes THERE is the issue that everyone seems to forget about new cars. I have a project car that I’m thinking will become an EV when it needs an engine because it will be so much easier to deal with. And it won’t call home to the feds every day.
Old muscle cars converted to EV I think are so cool. There was a show that converted an old K10 truck and hid the batteries in the bed tool box.
A 80s station wagon, a Country Squire, or 70s luxury cruiser like a Cadillac or Lincoln would be awesome.EVs, or just newer cars in general, are just so boring and cramped. Not to mention all the connection and surveillance concerns.
Boring, cramped, and almost impossible to see out of.
I think Ford straight-up sells an electric motor swap that will fit right in their older cars.
I have a weird little 4x4 that would be amazing if it were electric. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting in a situation where the engine is tilted too much and it’s simultaneously starving for fuel and oil.
Literally no one expects that of you. We just want the bootlickers to stfu and stop being part of the problem.
The difference between the cheapest EV and cheapest ICE is 7k currently, the savings on gas cover it.
The price difference between the car I have and an EV is considerably more than 7K. Also, 7K is quite a lot.
That’s new, there is also used. But the fact is you can’t compare it to your junker since, like I said, no one is asking you to switch right away.
The 7k seems like a lot but it isn’t since you get it back quickly with the savings on maintenance and gas.
Except the comment I originally replied to literally said it was better for the environment to trade in my car rather than drive it until it dies.
Burning gas is so extremely bad that even throwing away your old ICE car and buying a new electric car is better than driving the ICE car until it „falls apart“.
Yes it is, and that’s a step to take if you can, but no one is saying you are a bad guy if you don’t.
It’s being an oil industry mouthpieces that is the problem.
throwing away your old ICE car
But most people wouldn’t send their old car to the scrap heap, they would sell it on the secondary market to someone else (or a dealer, who would auction it into the secondary market). The old car would then continue to burn gas for likely many more years, until it “falls apart” anyway.
Stepping back, your old car may be the first in a chain of older (or more falling-apart) vehicles getting traded out, all the way down to one that really does get fully retired, or replacing one that was totaled in a collision. So choosing to keep it deprives someone else of its availability and thereby drives up used prices slightly.
For any study of this type of net effect, the authors need to pick a boundary for what gets considered. How many secondary market transactions do you study in that replacement chain, and what do those buyers substitute when the original ICE vehicle is not replaced with an EV? How far do you go in the pollution and other supply chain effects of manufacturing a new vehicle? I didn’t read a machine translation of your Swiss link, so I don’t know where the study authors drew the bounds, but I suspect it’s easy to choose and defend framing that supports either conclusion.
In my personal calculation, I can only see one step down the used chain, wherein my old vehicle would continue to be driven by someone else, so replacing it with an EV wouldn’t make a substantial difference. I love my old car with no surveillance, so I’m in no hurry to switch even though I’ll presumably buy an EV eventually.
Ultimately this is just one more example that that’s no ethical consumption within capitalism.
oh wow I didn’t know that!
would make sense to give more a lot incentives for EV buying if so!
I wish they weren’t so expensive though.
IMO the biggest incentive of all is that the battery exists for the life of the vehicle and can be recycled at the end (the lithium inside does not disappear!), vs the gas which is literally burning money away.
They are getting a lot cheaper overall. The EV Bolt is less than $4k more than a Camry. In expensive places like California, or with gas as high as it is, you can quickly make back that additional cost and get ahead over time, especially if you are able to charge from home. And TBH the Bolt isn’t that bad of a car, and get’s great distance per charge.
That and there’s only so much gas, once we burn it all up it’ll take millions of years to replenish. Yea, you could say the same about battery materials, but those get reused for what a decade before they start to degrade? And the actual energy is free once we have the means to harvest it (wind, solar etc are all “free” infinite energy so long as we have the panels and turbines)
That and there’s only so much gas, once we burn it all up it’ll take millions of years to replenish.
Umm, AFAIK, we actually can’t make more oil, so there isn’t going to be any more gas, just work harder to find what’s left. We absolutely should be moving to alternative energies to power civilization.
When I say millions of years I mean the plankton and our decomposing bodies will eventually make some oil, but by then our planet will be gone anyways lol. I’m sure human civilization won’t make it to see any more oil produced
Pretty sure the conditions on the planet when oil/coal formed were substantially different from today. In particular, there are now various organisms which feed on the decaying matter that’s at the start of that process. These organisms eat that matter and emit CO2 as they live and breathe, returning the carbon to the air instead of burying underground.
Socialize losses, privatize gains. I don’t want my tax money incentivizing some rich asshole to buy an EV. Nobody that needs help buying a car can even consider an EV, their too expensive. The cheapest ev u can buy in USA is 30k, the cheapest ICE is 22k. And people that need help buying cars can’t afford either. Only middle class + people are buying these things, and they don’t need poor people’s tax money to subsidize their purchase from a private corp. I’m all for evs but let’s be honest the people buying them DONT need help buying them. Id rather see my tax money go toward renewable infrastructure or research on batteries and such! We can’t keep relying on the private industry to fund research, in technology or in medicine or any science imo. But that’s just my angry fist wagging opinion as somebody who refuses to spend more than 3k on a car because I’m not made of money. I’m not exactly poor, I’m a home owner under 30 and make around 60-70k a year depending on OT and bonuses. But if I went and got a loan on a Chevy bolt for 30k I would not be able to make my mortgage payments even with subsidies, so why should somebody who makes more get help buying a new car? Horseshit
There’s more reason to incentives than to “help people who can’t afford new”
- the faster we develop an EV market, the sooner and cheaper used EVs will be available
- the incentives get us to price parity sooner, so encourage people who don’t want to spend extra, whether they can or not
- the faster market transition encourages investment in chargers. If you couldn’t be confident in a fast growing market why would you invest in chargers?
- the faster market transition encourages and supports legacy manufacturers investing in new technology
EVs are inevitable, but we need to be encouraging a faster transition for environmental reasons. But the incentives were at least as much about trying to save legacy manufacturers as they were about encouraging consumers down that path.
Note that as soon as the US stopped incentives, legacy manufacturers withdrew from the EV market. Some were just reaching price parity, such as Chevy Equinox, but the few remaining choices will never have the volume to be profitable. Now they’re heavily protected, at the cost of less choice and much higher prices for all Americans, but that can’t last forever and they appear to be digging their own graves
While I agree with you, roll back of regulations has also contributed. For example the hemi was going to get killed but now their coming back, diesel emissions have lightened up, and epa no longer cares about the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and repealed it. There has been a LOT of factors this administration has changed that made EV less appealing and shifted us back to high pollution combustion and shitty refrigerants. I’m not convinced ev subsidies are the way forward, we need better renewable infrastructure to properly fuel our EVs and i think that should be funded by our tax dollars rather than hoping that if more people have evs more private corps will build the infrastructure for it. That’s like encouraging building trains without any tracks to ride on! Plus renewable infrastructure isn’t just for evs, that will help make all our homes greener too!
Have you never heard of financing? I make $50,000 a year and bought a used EV. The only reason I was able to was because of rebates offered by IL-EPA. If not for the rebate, I’d still be driving an ICE vehicle and paying $50/wk on gasoline.
I have heard of financing. My buddy is currently on his way to paying 32k for a 15k car lmfao. The bank already owns my house, they don’t need to own my transportation too. I spend 40 or so a week on gas during the winter, but in the summer I ride motorcycles every day so my fuel cost is 12-20 a week for 8 or so months of the year! No car payment is going to be cheaper than the transport I own cash right now, simple as that. I have too many bills and shits too expensive to incur another monthly payment!
This isn’t exactly correct or truthful. A new EV Bolt is only $4k more than a new Camry, and that difference is quickly made up from the gas saving, especially when gas is $4+ a gallon.
And when you want to accelerate adoption of something, you incentivize it. The US already spends $40+ billion in direct subsidies for oil (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-hidden-ways-the-government-rigs-the-market-in-favor-of-fossil-fuels/) Imagine instead of giving that to oil companies, you used that to accelerate the development of EV’s and their roll out.
A comparison of subsidized oil would better be served by having the government subsidize clean energy production and infrastructure. It’s not like the government is handing out subsidies to buy gas cars 🤷♂️
The government is doing that already (IRA law, although a lot of that was pulled back by the current administration). And like oil had, you would need continuous investment, which hasn’t happened, so a discounting program to incentivize purchasing seems like the best of both worlds. It seemed pretty effective as well at kicking off early adoption, which was then hampered by inflation, high prices, and government divesting from EV investment.
I’d recommend buying used over new. Before Iran war bolts were going for $12k
That’s still 4 times more than I have spent on my last 12 cars with exception of one crazy nice Audi I had that ran me 7500 lol. And I regret spending that much on a car, despite loving the 400hp fire breathing V8 under the hood. I honestly mainly drive motorcycles, which has been the cheapest way for me to reduce my carbon footprint. I get over 50 mpg on my cruiser and near 80 on my dual sport, and both my motorcycles + my Subaru + my jeep all cost less than one POS chevy bolt LOL. I understand I’m a special case because I work on my vehicles so it’s very cheap for me to own a beater, if I didnt have the ability to make all my own repairs and have shop cost on parts and stuff i might consider an EV more strongly but its just way too expensive for now even factoring in what i spend on fuel and repairs.
I don’t want my tax money incentivizing some rich asshole to buy an EV
I mean… why not? I’d like if every rich guy had an EV instead of ICE. Less pollution is less pollution
They have the money to buy an EV, rich people don’t need my tax money to subsidize their purchase. If the EV is that much less appealing than an ice car, then the EV is not ready for market yet! Subsidizing their purchase of a quasi luxury barge that happens to be electric is just giving money to the elite class on both ends at the expense of the proletariat. Encourage the production of affordable, cheap even EVs and infrastructure not 50k+ leather wrapped battery packs on tires lol
“rich people” in your mind is who, exactly? Here in Canada only cars below a certain MSRP qualify for subsidies, so “luxury barges” are not subsidized. Also, a $50K car is not luxury anymore, have you seen car prices recently? New ICE cars are expensive as hell too!
What do you mean by hidden away?
I provided a link that explains that in detail.
Energy grid wouldn’t survive quick mass EV adoption most likely. Heck, how would you even charge a car if you don’t own a house - ideally parking places would have a slow charger where you could recharge car during night for cheap.
Idk they’re making it work for data centers and those need way more energy
Litte remarks regarding EV and not having a point of charge at home.
I have an EV but don’t own a house to charge it. Neither have a charging point on my appartement parking or my office (too complex/expensive to install). So I delayed buying an EV during few years. But I did the switch last year and don’t regret it at all.
The solution?
I found a charging station with good price at 7km of my place.
When I come back from office and I’m starting to be below 30% battery remaining, I go there and charge up to 90% during ~30 min.
I read a book on my tablet while waiting in the car with the music and air conditioning (as it quite hot currently) while charging at approx 80~90 kW/h… A nice break before going home to be honest ^^
I really handle the EV like a classic combustion engine car but with a small tank. Instead of having 800km of autonomy, i have 400~450km.
The key is to have a reliable and cheap charging station near your daily travel. Best being having it at home but it’s definitely not mandatory.
I’m currently at an average of 4.02€ for 100km driven and my charging station doesn’t require monthly fee. Just register an account, associate your car once and now it’s plug and charge.
I share your view regarding the grid, you need to prepare it properly and good charging station is the first step.
We have them in public parks here in my area, and people will park their EV’s and just go for a hike or a walk. It’s not that complex.
It’s cool that charging works for you that good. However, now imagine
ga rush of new EVs storming your charging point at the same time of the day. And also imagine people driving a lot more than you, charging each day for half an hour - that’s quite some time spent as charging point. While I agree that having a charging point at home is not mandatory, it’s much much friendlier, specially in case of mass EV adoption where chargers would lag behind demand.Seems pretty easy, instead of incentivizing and infrastructure around gasoline, you incentivize electric already. Data centers are already pushing this for their own use, why would it be impossible in your mind to do this for a transition to greener energy usage?
While I agree that having a charging point at home is not mandatory, it’s much much friendlier,
Even a normal outlet can handle slow charging an EV if you drive less than 100km a day.
Typical EV usage : 18kWh per 100km
Typical “granny” charger : 1800 watts (240v,7 amps)
10 hours at 1800 watts = 18kWh = 100km.
Get home at 6pm, plug in car, car is charged at 4am , leave for work at 7am. Enough spare time there to shift to charging outside peak evening usage at 9pm instead.
Here in the US typical outlets are 120v 15A max. Sure thats also 1800 watts but for a margin of safety, typically, appliances won’t use anything over 1500 watts, or about twelve and a half amps.
It’s 12 amps even. It’s the 80% rule for continuous draw, defined as expected use to run for 3 hours or more. That’s why a space heater is 1500 watts, but a hairdryer is 1800.
120v
Oopse. Good catch. Will edit. Missed the “0” lol
Yes, exactly. But if you live in an apartment, you don’t have even such outlet.
Not to be “um actually”, but I owned a Nissan Leaf 1st gen over a decade ago, and the pain points you worry about weren’t really pain points back then, and there was a loooooooooooot less EV infrastructure in place back then. Less reliable, too.
A couple of years ago I rented an EV with a friend who had zero experience with them. I explained everything, we had no evse at the hotel so needed to use public points, still was no issue at all. Each point we used was about 20% to capacity, they all had places to stretch, eat, etc at. No points were damaged or giving less than maximum output. It was extremely pleasant, and we used about $25 in fuel costs, vs $100+ for gasoline in a comparable vehicle.
I also didn’t have an evse installed at home - I used the 110V, ‘level 1’ charger that plugs into an outlet for my Leaf. I drove a ton - 10k miles in 4 months, so 2.5x the national average. Even with heavy reliance on public points on a network that was in its infancy and prone to downtime, I still got by just fine.
And that was 12 years ago.
That is very anecdotal, and unlikely to apply to anyone else. If you charge 30-90% in an hour, that means that you must have found a cheap super charger? Not even just the regular 22kW fast chargers? Where I live all the super chargers is quite expensive, like 1.5x the price of gas /km. Which is fine as you would mainly use them fore rare long trips. Meanwhile charging at home is like 1/4th the cost of gas /km, and regular public 22kW chargers about the same as gas.
Having to regularly wait 30 minutes somewhere to charge can definitely be a real inconvenience, but I buy that it’s nice to just sit and relax for a bit though.
Also, isn’t regular super charging very bad for the battery health in the long run?
No, I don’t think so
We’re blessed that it can survive the datacenters though
The quick mass adoption is happening in Scandinavia now, and we’re ok
Heck, how would you even charge a car if you don’t own a house
How would you even fill a tank if you don’t own a gas station?
Gas tank fills in 5 minutes if you are empty and have a large tank to fill, otherwise less. Also, if I know that I am going to be away from gas stations for awhile (camping, offroading) I can fill up my can and carry that with me.
EV adoption can’t happen in a second. If more EVs are sold, countries can just expand grids and charging networks with it.
Expanding energy grid is a slow process. Like really slow.
Is it? Seems data centers are able to do it quite quickly, and all at the cost of local taxpayers.
It can be, and traditionally has been. But how fast do you think you can bring a solar farm online? Securing the land and zoning is probably the biggest delay, followed by running lines to the grid.
You would need huge farms and huge batteries. The first can’t be built in the city or in any densely populate area and the later is a big challenge.
Huge is subjective, but there are many solar farms today running on just a few acres. Some quick googling says that community-based and commercial farms typically run on 10-40 acres, generating between 50-200 megawatts. If you consider 40 acres to be a huge farm, then sure. But it doesn’t make much sense to run these in a decent populated area anyway. This is no different than coal, gas, or other power plants today, albeit for different reasons.
As for huge batteries, yes, we will need them once solar power capacity reaches a point where generation in the day exceeds the demand. As it stands, many places still have off-peak pricing at night. Solar would need to counterbalance that completely before we need huge batteries for solar.
Just like replacing all cars.
Tell that to datacenters
AFAIK many datacenters try to build their own generators/powerplants. Also datacenters are at one location, not sparsely around.
That makes it worse. Feeding a little more electricity spread across many locations puts a much smaller strain on the grid than trying to feed a huge amount to one location.
You have only one line to upgrade if you feed it from energy grid. If they have their own PP, it’s even less of a problem.
What do the datacenter’s generators/powerplants run on?
In all probability diesel or natural gas.
Or even nuclear (in case of Three Mile Island NPP). Regardless of what they run, they don’t require extensive energy grid since they are located nearby.
My point is that EVs is supposed to reduce pollution, not just just move the pollution to a DC instead of a car.
Seem like the greatest solution, these EV can also act as battery storage for renewables.
That’s tricky though. Would you deplete it during night to have it empty in the morning? Wear expensive battery? Plus, I assume, car is disconnected from grid for most of the day (i.e. when you are at work).
But you park it at work there could be slow AC charger, to slowly charge it when you are away.
Placing solar on rooftop of car also seem as good idea
“solar-powered cars” have been tried many times because it’s a great headline, but the math never works. Cars simply don’t have enough surface area to capture a lot of solar power. The amount of energy is low enough to not be worthwhile, except in the most extreme edge cases.
You don’t have to charge 100% using solar
Yeah a day you can get 2% of battery, but this would make extend range and make it more susteninable considering rooftop and hood space is always unused
2% is probably near the theoretical maximum, too. Actual output considering weather, efficiency losses, etc is probably less than half that. Solidly in “not-worth-it” territory for most use-cases. Heck, my car won’t even properly charge on a 120V outlet when it’s too cold, because it needs to heat up the battery to a safe temperature first and at -20°C that takes more than the ~1kW available from the outlet.
UMich research cited in the article estimates a carbon dioxide emissions per year (using constant mileage typical per year) break even time between EV and ICE SUVs to be 1.6-1.9 years.
Promising. But, is carbon dioxide emissions the only environmental impact? Humanitarian impact (e.g. rare metal extraction labor conditions)? I’m not an environmentalist researcher/academic. I wonder how accurately just one emissions prediction portrays the full picture.
It’s not like oil extraction and processing doesn’t have it’s issues, and you have to do that for every trip.
Once your battery is made, the materials are there and can (probably, needs some work) be recycled forever.
There are sodium batteries without any rare metals in production.
As long as both use tires that contribute 45% of the world’s microplastics, this is focusing on the wrong issue
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05002
So I say, let’s not get distracted
Look at you now getting distracted by an issue you can’t solve.
I don’t see what this has to do with climate change. It’s bad yes, but irrelevant for this debate.
Even if we forget about microplastics for a second, extractivism is still doing its thing, manufacturing billions of cars emits co2, that’s how it has to do with climate
Are you looking to increase or decrease CO2 emissions?
For personal transportation do you have an alternative to tires? I mean shit even bicycles contribute to this. I know the answer is better public transport, but for PERSONAL transport it’s pretty hard to avoid tires!
The amount of tyre wear pollution from a bicycle is negligible, to the point where they are not even worth mentioning in these types of conversations.
Kind of like how it’s not worth mentioning tire micropalstics in a discussion about EV vs ICE emissions?
The contribution from bicycle tires is peanuts by comparison. The weight of the vehicle is a fraction, the forces starting and braking are a fraction. It’s not zero, but compared to that from a 2000kg EV: that from a ±28kg EV bicycle or <15kg non-electric bicycle is pretty dang close to zero, especially when adding to the equation a regular speed of 50-120kmh <> 10-25kmh…
In a properly urbanized environment owning a car would be both unnecessary and inconvenient. We should strive to properly urbanize our living areas.
Bringing back true suburbs would be good, too. People living a half hour train journey from the city by high speed rail would mean small walkable islands could form in small towns the way they used to.
To the bike tire point, let’s face it, if we replaced every car with a bicycle we would probably reduce the amount of microplastics by a massive amount because a bike tire could never contain the amount of plastic a car tire does, cars have four and weigh a lot more. It’s incomparable, but you compared it so I had to point that out.
Oh ur absolutely right, bike tire pollution is probably so insignificant it doesn’t matter. But that comparison was in the spirit of the original comment talking about focusing on the wrong thing and bringing up tire pollution when comparing EV to ice as if EVs aren’t significantly reducing emissions. In the hunt for perfection people will sacrifice improvement. It’s ok to make things better without perfecting them, as long as we are moving in the right direction.
I mean, it’s an existential threat. It doesn’t really matter what’s required to make it stop -it’s necessary.
Yes it does require a transformation of our infrastructure, of our culture, and that in turn means a transformation or our institutions, a big crackdown on lobbies and corruption, etc. It’s the biggest challenge of our lives. Not trying to give the impression it’s easy
Yea people don’t like talking about problems that don’t have solutions, but to find the solution you must first talk about the problem!
I dont know where you ate, in Australia they are in par or cheaper than Ice.
Changing tires seams an easier upgrade than fuel and drive systems. Won’t need to change the whole car and infrastructure!
I keep hearing this and the opposite
What about different battery types? Those with/without kobolt for example
Also manufacuring might be done differently in different places… wonder how much pollution renaults batteries do (made in france) compared to those made in asia
I keep hearing this and the opposite
Any sources I can read?
Yeah, they’re all over Facebook!
/s
Here’s one out of MIT: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae0c23
Batteries can have their materials 99.9% reclaimed. No need to keep mining after a certain point.
I keep hearing this and the opposite
I never heard the opposite. Sources?
I’m surprised you haven’t heard the opposite. It’s wrong, but a really common talking point for a while was buying an EV wasn’t actually good because of the pollution involved in manufacturing the car. Then a few years later they updated the rhetoric to talk about the minerals mined for batteries. I assume it was pushed by Fossil Fuel companies.
This The Guardian article mentions the minerals one. You can see an example of The Daily Telegraph pushing the myths with the headline: “Electric cars are made of pollution and human misery.”
These figures are also heavily dependent on where and how the car was manufactured, too. If the factory is powered by clean energy, doesn’t that reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emitted during manufacturing? If EV tech advances enough that the mining rigs are electric-powered, does that not also reduce the amount of GHG emitted mining lithium? Eventually we’ll also have enough batteries to recycle that too (batteries are basically a very rich lithium ore), can’t we do that in clean-powered factories?
Basically, I think the conversation on “how much manufacturing a given product pollutes” is entirely focused on the wrong thing…
Also, a lot of these studies compare an EV’s complete lifecycle with just the tailpipe emissions of an ICEV. Mining, refining and transporting gasoline has a huge carbon impact before you even put it in the car.
But the guardian article mentions the points but comes to exactly the expected conclusion:
The data we have leaves little doubt that resource extraction will be significantly lower for electric cars compared with their petrol or diesel equivalents as recycling increases.
Unfortunately, even if their batteries are 100% EU made from raw materials, their cars still suck ass compared to everyone but Dacia (worse) and Peugeot/Citroen (same level).
But isn’t Renault just assembling the cells into larger packs in France, with the actual single cells manufactured elsewhere?
their cars still suck ass
Compared to what?
And says who? Renault 5 is pretty awesome. I know someone with a dacia spring who absolutely loves it. What about VW’s EVs? BWM/Audi/Merc?
Compared to many others in the same price range that I’ve tried. It’s marginally worse than VW ID3 AND ID4 which also aren’t a joy to drive. Personally I’ve found KIA and Hyundai the best budget options for EV, at least the ones I’ve tried. I tried the megane etech and it was absolutely horrible. The entire car interface was a shitshow, the driving felt awkward and disconnected, and their charging and BMS seems laughable compared to other new models.
The Dacia is just a fucking death trap, some of the lowest EURO-NCAP scores in a long time, along with other Renault models.
The Dacia is just a fucking death trap, some of the lowest EURO-NCAP scores in a long time, along with other Renault models.
As a former owner of a dacia spring I have to say I disagree.
And I say former because mine was totalled during a car crash that people say it was a miracle I could survive it, let alone walk out of the car by myself.
I was in a highway, there was a traffic jam and all the cars were still in their lane. I was the last one to arrive so my car was the last one in line. Behind me arrived a semi-trailer at 90kmph that, according to the police report, was “driving distracted”. So distracted that he didn’t see the cars in line and hit me at almost full speed. My car was overturned and ended completely destroyed, but the cockpit didn’t deform and all the airbags worked, so I just got 4 broken ribs and a broken vertebrae that fortunately didn’t touch the spinal cord.
In a car with better safety you probably would have sustained fewer or less severe injuries. There’s also a heavy dose of survivorship bias in your story.
Sure, if I had a €60k car, I probably would have sustained less injuries, but I had a 15k city car because that’s what I could afford. And because this kind of car wasn’t probably designed to withstand a semi-trailer impact at 80-90kph. Yet it did, I’ve seen people in similar city cars and even bigger ones get wrecked way worse than me with just another car.
There are also €20k cars that are also significantly safer, you don’t need to spend €60k for a notably better car.
Wow, that must have been some shock!
Yeah I agree, Kia and Hyundai make better cars full-stop.
I’ve never been a fan of Renault but the Renault 5 has turned my head. Regardless of my minor gripes with Renault/Stellantis I’d rather one of their cars over a Tesla or something Chinese.
