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
Isnt used still better than both? The work has already been done to make the car.
New cars are rolling spyware you can't repair and will never own. I'll be fixing old cars until its impossible.
You can buy an old EV
Sure but the range is abysmal
Misconception. Range dropoff is not dramatic and in fact is not terribly noticeable over the normal lifespan of the car.
Source: I have driven the same electric car for 10 years with negligible range loss. In south Florida, which is not a kind place to be for a battery.
Edit: Unless you have an old school Leaf where they opted to not use actve cooling, which very much does thrash batteries. Note that this is a relatively rare design.
My 11-year-old old school Leaf is still at 80% capacity and holding.
no
No cuz electric cars are still more carbon intensive to build than combustion cars... driving the EV is what offsets it in the long run, meanwhile driving the combustion engine does the opposite. Especially given how older cars are less fuel efficient.
That's not actually true. There is one Volvo white paper everyone quotes and no one actually reads, they compare an EV to ICE and conclude EVs take more carbon.*
*When you exclude the motor and transmission from ICE.
There is so much selective math and confidence bias in these papers. They calculate every fart from everyone who works in a lithium mine, but gasoline just appears in a fuel pump.
When does the press refer to oil extraction as "mining"? , why do they ignore how much energy is takes to refine petroleum?
From Alberta oil sands, it takes ~1,000 cubic feet of natural gas + ~24 litres of new nonsaline water to make a single barrel of extracted oil, which is then sent to a refinery which uses more energy, plus we have to move all this oil around on cargo ships, tankers, trucks...
But by reusing I'm saving all the factory materials and labor to build another car. Reduce...reuse..
Cars are recycled. They end up in parts wrecking yards for years, then the metal is recycled.
Eventually, sure
It makes the most sense to compare the cars by the lifespan of the car rather than who happens to own it at any given point.
If you sell an old ICE car thinking you're doing something great for the environment, you need to consider that someone else is going to buy it and drive all the remaining miles out of it anyway. Unless you send it to the scrap yard.
If you buy a used car, it simply means that the seller bought a new one instead of you doing that.
So by all means, buy used if you want to, it makes a lot of economic sense, but in the grand scheme of things, the only thing that matters to the environment is which vehicles get produced to begin with. So it's out of your hands unless you order new cars before they're produced. Once it's been made, someone will drive all the miles that it was produced to drive.
Now it might seem logical that repairs could offset the production of new vehicles, however with the difference between EVs and ICEs being soo large over time, it still makes the most (environmental) sense to buy a new EV instead of keeping an old car on the road.
We can also produce fewer
Yeah the best option is to live close to stuff.
no. I've seen recent studies that showed that driving your existing petrol car or buying used is still environmentally worse than getting an electric car. Not to say that I'm buying electric - I can't afford it.
I won't be searching for this to prove you wrong. you made the claim, so the burden of proof is on you.
I can't comment on repairability nor spyware, as I have no idea