Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
It’s important to ask these questions about EVs’ hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered “exhaustively” — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas.
Public transportation is even better yet
For inner city folk yes.
You can still have public transit/trains on suburban areas. See Germany or the Netherlands.
Its not a “you can” problem. Its a “we don’t” problem. I cannot get to work on time (7am) using the only public transport we have (bus) in a county with a million people. Also would take about 1.5hrs longer than by car. to be 15m late (assuming the bus is on time) every day. puts it around 4 hours travel to/from work, so work takes up ~12 hours of your day.
It sucks that this is so commonly the case. I’ve had times when I’ve been able to commute by bus to work and it genuinely makes the trip so much more pleasant - even if it takes thirty minutes longer (as it did in my last job where I did it) the ability to be on my phone for the whole trip was so nice I’d go back in an instant if I could.
Or Japan, or China, or South Korea, or Italy, or Argentina, or Lancaster PA, or parts of New Jersey even. Fuck man so many places have public transit.
How I’m imagining public transportation in Lancaster, PA:
I mean close but instead think a fleet of like 20 bus routes that spread out in every direction for miles and miles into suburbs and farmland. And the buses have real time GPS tracking.
But otherwise very similar.
Japan beats everyone.
The US used to have an incredibly comprehensive rail network, combined with street cars in every town. This “public transit is only for cities” nonsense is pro propaganda.
I used to live outside a town of 3,000 people. Prior to the 1950s it had a trolley that would take you to the 15 miles to the nearest city, and from there you could catch a train to go pretty much anywhere.
Saw a rural bus system working perfectly fine in South America. If they can figure it out, so can we.
In Japan, taxes collected on the Tokyo metro (which is privately owned but heavily regulated) help subsidize a thousand little suburban and rural bus and rail lines. It’s not rocket science, even in the US a similar scheme is employed by the Post Office to ensure everyone’s mail costs the same to the consumer.
And when we actually get that going I’ll stop making sure I always have a car available.
yay for privilege I guess but we can’t all do that
Can’t all use public transportation? I don’t know what you read up there, but I’m in favor of it, I just don’t think we’re ever going to do it. We’ll bring back corporate owned worker’s barracks with corporate scrip before we actually give ourselves good public transportation.
No. The other thing.
Because the conservative machine, despite the love of Elon’s right-wing antics, never stop talking about how bad EVs are. Funny, the only time they act like they care about the environment is when they talk about how bad the EV batteries are to manufacture. While they roll coal and drive gas-guzzling mall cruiser bro-dozers all over the place.
Give him a few years into a potential Trump victory, and he will make Tesla to manufacture petrol cars.
zombie engineer voice “traiiiiiins”
Its about 40% more power efficient per mile but theres a couple of other trade-offs, still better yeah.
We’re going to run the country into the ground because we have such a large group of people being totally fine with (or even encouraging) their lack of education and the ability to reason properly. They’re just proud to be “against” something together, they don’t even care what it is they’re against.
There are already EV battery recycling plants springing up now that there are enough used EVs to warrant them, there wasn’t much point building them when there weren’t any battery packs to process.
The renewable energy switch is already happening, because even without subsidies they’re still cheaper.
But no… gotta get out there and roll coal.
This is the bottom line. We all know who these morons are and they’re never going to care what actual repercussions are for their actions. They think it is funny to “own the libs” no matter what the issue may be. I’d a left-leaning person advocate for one thing, their automatic reaction is to oppose it without question.
It’s truly scary to look around (especially in red states) and to know a good percentage of those around you are that dumb.
I don’t consider myself intelligent. One of the scariest moments of my adult life was realizing I’m above average intelligence, maybe by a decent margin.
I live in Virginia and the other day I saw a Tesla with a custom license plate for friends of coal. like I don’t even…
Wasn’t that what Desantis did, put a coal sticker on his Tesla? Then had dealerships write up a bill to restrict people from purchasing vehicles directly from manufactures without going through a dealership, keeping the costs higher for the people. The bill had an exemption for certain vehicles… Like the Tesla he bought.
I must admit this is a big-brain move — being for electric cars in order to have more coal-fired plants rather than burning gasoline.
Even a coal burning EV emits less carbon than a gasoline car. The payback threshold may increase uncomfortably though. A while back I read something doing that analysis per US state. I believe the threshold ranges from 2 year in states with cleaner energy, up to 14 in coal burning West Virginia and Wyoming
I just find it funny. It’s perfectly logical for someone who really cares about burning more coal to drive an electric car, but I’ve never seen anyone make that connection before. It’s like… I don’t know. A vegan lobbying against lactase pills?
And 14 years isn’t really feasible given battery decay.
“There are two states that have such shitty electricity production systems that it may take more than the lifetime of an electric car for the carbon emissions to break even. That’s how terrible electric cars are!”
🙄
Eh, maybe.
If you want to age something artificially, you run it through cycles of use very quickly. To age a wood joint, you run it through cycles of high heat and humidity and then drop it back down to cold and dry, and do it as fast as you can for weeks or months. Aging a CPU is similar; heat it up and then cool it down. For batteries, you hit them with a lot of charge and discharge cycles.
This artificial process may, if anything, be harsher than any real world use. So there’s reason to think that manufacturer estimates are pessimistic.
This does appear to be the case; modern EVs have been around long enough now that we can get some real world data, and batteries are lasting longer than expected: https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-long-do-ev-batteries-last-study-says-longer-than-you-think
But the coal is cleaned, so it’s better to burn it for electricity. Duh 🙄
That feels like they’re trolling or making fun of themselves a bit. I know a few people in Kentucky with EVs and they also have “friends of coal” plates.
AFAIK it’s the only way to get a black plate hence why they do it. Looks cleaner on darker cars.
The end of life battery recycling has been the #1 thing I’ve been looking at. Glad to see they aren’t going to landfill.
Battery upcycling is also becoming a thing. Just because a battery is not fit for a car anymore does not mean it isn’t useful. Like you could convert it into a battery for home or grid storage with minimal processing.
I’m curious to know what you’ve learned. Would you care to share?
If you’ve been looking at it, then perhaps you’ve seen this:
EV Batteries Can Outlast A Vehicle’s Lifetime With Minimal Degradation, Study Finds https://insideevs.com/news/733987/ev-batteries-outlast-vehicle-degradation-study/
““Batteries in the latest EV models will comfortably outlast the usable life of the vehicle and will likely not need to be replaced.” That’s what David Savage, Vice President for the UK and Ireland at Geotab said in the company’s latest study that looked at how EV batteries degrade over time.”
But if not, the article, and research it’s based on is worth a gander. EVs require a whole lot less maintenance, too, as it turns.
So far, the biggest problem with battery recycling is that not enough of it is done locally. Depleted batteries are being shipped to China for recycling.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/27/nx-s1-5019454/ev-battery-recycling-us
But things are improving here, so that’s good!
Ideally what I’d like to see are large, regional, recycling centers and that’s just not a thing yet. I’d say a minimum of 6, 2 in the West, 2 in the East and 2 in the center of the country.
That’s because there’s not yet enough EV installed base to drive demand for recycled batteries.
While I was poking around I found this, on Lithium Ion battery recycling:
Pathway decisions for reuse and recycling of retired lithium-ion batteries considering economic and environmental functions https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52030-0
Abstract Reuse and recycling of retired electric vehicle (EV) batteries offer a sustainable waste management approach but face decision-making challenges. Based on the process-based life cycle assessment method, we present a strategy to optimize pathways of retired battery treatments economically and environmentally. The strategy is applied to various reuse scenarios with capacity configurations, including energy storage systems, communication base stations, and low-speed vehicles. Hydrometallurgical, pyrometallurgical, and direct recycling considering battery residual values are evaluated at the end-of-life stage. For the optimized pathway, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries improve profits by 58% and reduce emissions by 18% compared to hydrometallurgical recycling without reuse. Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) batteries boost profit by 19% and reduce emissions by 18%. Despite NMC batteries exhibiting higher immediate recycling returns, LFP batteries provide superior long-term benefits through reuse before recycling. Our strategy features an accessible evaluation framework for pinpointing optimal pathways of retired EV batteries.
Is Redwood Materials shipping things overseas? They seem to be the big car battery recycler the automakers are signing up with.
They have a very good map on the production end, showing where metals are sourced and refined, then cathodes produced in Japan and sent over, but I’m not seeing anything similar on the recycling side.
Ideally what I’d like to see are large, regional, recycling centers and that’s just not a thing yet. I’d say a minimum of 6, 2 in the West, 2 in the East and 2 in the center of the country.
One of the challenges is, ironically, there aren’t enough dead batteries to economically support multiple large domestic battery recyclers. Batteries aren’t failing enough.
The problem with that model is that when they all start failing it will be a crisis without the infrastructure to solve for it.
What crisis are you foreseeing? It is unlikely its going to be an avalanche of millions of batteries failing at once needing processing. Wear and tear will spread final failure over a long time horizon.
Piles of spent batteries stacking up leaking heavy metals into the envirionment without a large scale plan to deal with them.
A single EV uses a 1,000 pound battery pack (on average):
https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-weight
That’s a LOT to properly dispose of. x 3.3 million EVs in use in the US?
https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/how-many-electric-cars-in-us.html
3.3 BILLION pounds of future battery waste. We need to plan for proper recycling now.
North American auto has lost it’s mind and handed over any chance at being top-tier in the future. Seems game over to me. Canada is joining in on the 100% tariff game and I’m furious that my government will, this late in the game, try and protect an industry that gambled with the oil and gas industry and lost (not to mention their compete fall into profiteering in five to six digit major life purchases) by passing costs of avoiding Elon and subpar selection onto consumers.
I hope the industry wakes up and goes hard for competitiveness in EVs and stops waiting for elections to decide if climate change is real or if the economy will be affected by their decisions. To stop waiting for elections to decide if people want EVs. To allow manufacturing to flourish regardless of who’s fighting for the rights to our money while we briefly have it.
And to your point yeah - just like Asimov said:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Be sure to call a few government reps and speak your mind. Try to do it by asking questions. If you can turn a few aides against the system it can have a snowball effect bc those are people who are young and passionate about politics
100 percent.
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I would agree that writing does nothing, they probably throw it away without even reading it, but talking to real people who actually want to improve things (like political assistants) can make a difference.
67% of GOP voters believe the Haitians (((n*****s))) are eating pets in Springfield, OH.
So, no surprise.
I was always under the impression that the source of the electricity to charge electric vehicles matters greatly. Some areas use coal burning to generate power while others use hydroelectric.
It does matter in terms of how much less polluting it would be. Even in case of coal plant bonansa it reaches a point where it becomes less poluting than gasoline car . Alghtough much slower. Its also not realy important since renewables became so cheap that there is practicly no country that dosent have a fairly significant renewable share ( and by that i mean > 10 % ).
https://www.iso-ne.com/ Looking at my own region of New England, renewables are only at about 8% right now. And that includes burning wood, refuse, and landfill gas as renewable sources.
Not the case, they still get 100mpge + so they’re always better
If you got the most ridiculous EV (the Hummer) and drove it primarily in West Virginia (86% coal generated electricity), it would have worse lifetime CO2 emissions than an ICE.
Literally any other combination, and it’s better.
And it would still be worlds better than the worst ICE cars, it would only be worse than average.
While true, it’s way better better for a power source to be inefficient than all consumers using inefficient/dirty appliances.
Once the aging coal plant is decommissioned in favor of a new nuclear reactor in a state like Wyoming, anyone using stuff like electric water heaters, heatpumps or electric bikes/buses/cars/scooters is instantly using 100% renewable power.
Even in screwed up states like Texas, there is so much load on the grid (and the fact they cannot buy power from other states) means that cheap solar panels, battery storage and wind are way faster to put up than expensive methane/natural gas generators.
I don’t consider nuclear as renewable, but they do reduce CO2 production.
Definitely better to charge an EV with clean energy. But it’s probably better to charge an EV with dirty electricity than it is to keep using a combustion vehicle.
IIRC a gas vehicle is something like 20% thermally efficient, whereas a coal/oil power plant can be up to 60%. So even if my EV is charging off oil or coal, I’m getting 3x the energy per unit of emissions compared to a gas vehicle (though who knows how that translates to miles of range).
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IMO, I still think there’s not enough infrastructure to support charging EVs. Don’t get me wrong I’ve seen some. Just… Not a lot. Until charging is as prevalent as gas its just not worth it. Or if you have a house I guess.
In some areas I hear it’s good. But in my area there’s only 1 set of charging stations at a Wawa that I know of. And that Wawa is an hour drive away. Plus I’m at a rental complex that mows the lawns regularly and having a cable run from my house to the car is not allowed.
My current gas operated vehicle has about 160000 miles on it. I’m hopeful that my vehicle will last a long time. And then when my vehicle dies, I’ll look at the infrastructure again and see if it’s beneficial for me to switch to an EV. I’m going to continue to wait until it’s beneficial for me to buy a new car.
We’ll see how it goes.
Well, gas stations don’t really want electric because it would cut into their main source of revenue so I think I may have spotted the bottleneck.
The only way charging stations will become prevalent is if municipalities start setting them up. Either that or grocery stores. Though Answers with Joe made an interesting case for Buccees adopting charging stations as a method of generating revenue through increased tourism at their locations.
Gas stations actually make almost all of their money on things other than gas that people buy while they are at the gas station. It’s true that people wouldn’t come to existing gas stations nearly as much if they weren’t buying gas but they could make as much or more from users charging.
The real problem from their perspective is how infrequently users may need such especially if they charge at home and the cost of charging infra which is always in addition to gas not instead of
An even larger portion of America can’t afford them, so it doesn’t even matter.
Thank you. I can’t even afford a base model Corolla and used cars prices are through the roof. I might have to buy a paraglider or something.
Check out auctions, feds and locals are always dumping cars. They can be a decent bit cheaper than dealerships with better maintenance and lower prices, talking SUV with sub 20,000 miles on it for $2,000 cheap.
Cleaner than gas cars =/= Clean.
This is the lowest possible bar to pass. The point isn’t that EVs are worse than gas. The point is that both are terrible for people, health, safety, climate, transit, sustainability, equity, freedom, etc.
So what’s your plan? Ban cars? Good luck.
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It’s not that public transportation is for the poors, it’s that it is inconvenient. I used to ride the metro every day to work when I lived in DC and it added an extra hour vs driving. I didn’t mind as I could chill and read a book or listen to music but it was extra time.
When I moved to Portland I could take the bus to work because my house and job were on the same route so it was only about 5 minutes more than driving. Now I’d have to take 2 buses, or walk a mile to the bus stop on the same route as my work. Either option would turn a 10 minute drive into an hour commute each way. I don’t have that kind of extra time when I work 12 hour shifts and come home on my lunch break to walk the dog. I assume people with kids have even more of a time crunch.
We have plenty of public transport here.
I’d still need a car because I do a lot of hiking and I carry a lot of stuff to and from work
Wut. Cars have legitimate uses.
EVs dont only not pollute wherever they drive, but overall are probably around 70% efficient if including the power generation, while gas is 40% or less.
The others, I think you are projecting US problems to the whole self-owned transportation sector.
“hurr de durr, it’s not fully clean, derp”
Ok Trumper
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EVs have a lot of advantages over ICEs. It’s good that things are evolving finally to make EVs more than a niche. It however doesn’t remove the problem that they are still a car with all of those negatives, even if they pollute much less. In some ways providing an individual solution could harm efforts to reduce the number of cars on the road. It’s not a final solution, only a step to fix a few of the most obvious problems while retaining others.
Most US metro areas are just too spread out to have mass transit be a worthwhile solution for most people. The only solution to significantly reducing cars in the US is telecommuting; unfortunately businesses generally don’t like it, so we need to find a way for this to be encouraged by the government with subsidies or something.
Even if you live in an area where busses are, they’re slow and limited routes. Times are often inconvenient to work schedules. 1h 30m by bus, 50m biking, 3h 10m walk. A drive to work takes me 15 mins on average.
If you can drive to work in 15 minutes. Properly funded and prioritized transit can get you there in 10. Hourly bus service is not good transit.
Absofuckinglutely not
Those 15 minutes usually are on low traffic roads, getting you straight from the point you depart to the point you need to go. A bus route on its own would be at least 20 minutes if it has almost no stops. And that is without counting the travelling beyond the bus stops, because it is impossible to have a stop at every single building.
Those buses aren’t going to be driving faster than cars are allowed either.
Absofuckinglutely not
Looooool.
A tram could go faster and have signal prioirty at intersectuons. Buses are the lowest tier and lowest quality of transit.
They all suck in their own unique ways. Automotive tires are a leading source of microplastics so EVs aren’t exactly a darling angel, but getting to work has become a 500 billion a year industry in America and framed in such a way that people are debating which car is better for the environment when they’re all horrible compared to mass transit. Because capitalism thrives on frivolity and consumption. That’s the real crux
it’s not just capitalism, the US is a very spread out place compared to most other countries. if you want everyone to use mass transit you’re asking them to either 1) move into the city for similar commute times, or 2) spend an inordinate amount of time riding busses around the suburbs for the same distance commute. Neither are good solutions.
And also we have solved the “getting to work” debate with teleconferencing. why should we need cars or an even bigger mass transit system when most people can simply work from home?
Someone has to see Not Just Bikes. Capitalism was the driver to the sub-urbanization process made after WW2 in the US, as a national economic policy to orient growth around building detached houses, private cars and suburban infrastructure (and secondary security considerations of reducing losses and damage in case of nuclear bombs in cities). The US was not a '‘very spread out’ place before WW2 (i.e. for the vast majority of its history), in fact cities like San Francisco were world leaders in mass transit, and trains were the axis of transportation of both people and goods (even existing suburbs were connected to trains, in whatever shape and size they come). The us cities spent and spend an enormous amount of money and debt to pay for all the road infrastructure, that even neoliberals say it’s not economically sustainable, and that money can also be better used paying for higher quality mass transit, not the tertiary thought they give it now (horrible buses that stay in traffic with the cars for the poor people that can not afford a car). Most people do not work remote all the time, even flexible / hybrid workers need to transport themselves some trips per week. Not to mention that full remote work may over time trickle to foreign countries that do the service cheaper, and the work remaining onshore is work that the owners need-want at least hybrid or on site workers.
The US was not a '‘very spread out’ place before WW2
no kidding, the population was also like a third of what it is now.
in fact cities like San Francisco were world leaders in mass transit, and trains were the axis of transportation of both people and goods (even existing suburbs were connected to trains, in whatever shape and size they come). The us cities spent and spend an enormous amount of money and debt to pay for all the road infrastructure,
yeah, mass transit within cities is a great idea and should be used as much as possible. I am not shitting on the general idea of mass transit. what I’m saying is, in the context of a practical daily commute, mass transit only works to a point, and a LOT of people live beyond that point.
Most people do not work remote all the time, even flexible / hybrid workers need to transport themselves some trips per week.
again, I’m not saying mass transit should never be used. what is the cost:benefit for the infrastructure to cover out to the suburbs? how much time is added to very long trips, and are people willing to deal with that?
if you want everyone to use mass transit
That’s the point, nobody wants to move people in the middle of nowhere to buses. Everyone wants these people to move to buses:
That’s like a half-full train’s worth of people if they single-seat, which they do, or 5-10 buses.
Imagine how cooler the place would be if that 16 lane road would be a 2 lane train track.
Eh there are plenty of places that have less population density than the US but they do just fine with transit. It might be true that most US cities are poorly designed for transit, but the density isn’t a the reason.
Automotive tires are a leading source of microplastics so EVs aren’t exactly a darling angel
Could we not just make tires out of a different material?
Yes and no.
Yes it’s possible. No it’s not scalable or affordable.
Synthetic plastics (all plastics for the purposes of this conversation) are byproducts of the petroleum industry. They’re making gas out of oil and are left over with plastic precursors so those get made into something and everyone wins* because the materials are basically free.
Last I looked we were creeping up on two billion tires a year.
By insisting on perfect, you are preventing incremental change.
Incremental change would have been fine in the 1970s when the world should have instituted it, including incrementally reducing industry to absolute necessities like medical products, and individual developed world quality of life, to find homesotasis with our only habitat.
Now it’s smash the factories today, and accept the hundreds of millions dead breaking those poisonous supply chains, including possibly ourselves, for humanity to have any non-nightmarish future on a planet we terraformed to be hostile towards Human life for the next couple million yers.
But having absolutely failed to institute incremental change half a century ago despite warning, and absolutely failing take drastic action now that we are just beginning to feel our irreversible fine work, our species clearly and resolutely chooses no future/nightmare susbsistance future, or at the very least there wouldn’t be a pop figure/pointless plastic crap factory left standing in the world. 🔥🤷♂️🔥
What I find the most ridiculous is what we’re doing: resolutely choosing death by actions, while still strangely preaching hope for a future. WuT a weird fucking species we were.
You can buy an EV and have a country invest in transit. These do not need to be exclusive things
Sure. Or I can drive my old car very little and be pissed my country subsidizes a clearly inferior solution just to save the car industry instead of subsidizing way more efficient and environmentally friendly mass transit.
Edit- I think we’re agreeing now that I look at your other comments but I’ll leave this.
Hybrids actually have the best longevity and repair scores, however.
The longevity of the vehicle actually does count towards its ecological impact, because if you have to replace it sooner, you’re creating a bigger ecological impact of creating a short-term use device before more energy has to be used to recycle parts of it.
So, at the moment hybrids win that battle. I think its simply because hybrids have been around longer, not because they’re special. Give it about 10-15 more years and I think you’ll see a flip to EVs taking over that spot from hybrids.
EDIT: Also, the bad build quality of Teslas and the early adopters of EVs mostly being Tesla owners also means that the sample of hybrids having better longevity and repair scores is impacted by Tesla specifically being so bad. If you cut out Teslas from the equation, I bet EVs and hybrids would probably have similar longevity and repair scores.
Where did you get that info about the hybrid longevity, an episode of Comedy Bang Bang? Could it be due to hybrids not running the gas engines full-time (less wear hours of usage per mile) ?
The only hybrid I’ve driven tends to run the engine more as a power generator than to drive the wheels, and often uses no gas engine. I could see how the engine would be less worn from that kind of usage vs driving the wheels all the time.
I’d like to see a source that says hybrids, with two separate engines plus the mechanical linkages between them plus the transmission, have better repair scores than a pure EV with no transmission, no mechanical engine, and a simpler drivetrain.
I’m skeptical that hybrids with ICEs and transmissions at their heart really do have more longevity than BEVs and electric motors. ICE and especially hybrids are inherently more complex than BEVs, and have many more moving mechanical parts to wear out over time. So while BEVs may technically be “harder to repair”, there’s actually much less to repair in the first place. not to mention less maintenance like dozens of oil changes over the life of the car.
Put them in a sealed room with a gas engine running and you’ll see how fast they realize that they’re cleaner
Isn’t the whole point that the gas engine equivalent is just in somebody else’s room though?
In any case, I’ll take whatever partial climate wins we can get.
Even if we assume all the electricity is coming from carbon sources (there’s no need for any of it to be carbon sources) it’s still more efficient because power plants are way better at turning that chemical energy into electricity. Even with the losses in the lines, charging, and in your motors, electric cars are still significantly more efficient on a mile per kg CO2 basis than gas cars. Throw some solar panels on your roof and they become essentially carbonless.
It’s really easy to understand why too. You completely waste most of the heat energy you produce in IC engines. They’re incredibly inefficient and always will be.
Yeah, what is it, 70% energy lost to heat in an ICE?
Solar, wind, and nuclear energy: are we a joke to you?
Fair, but the first rebuttal is going to be “go into a sealed room with a coal fire burning”
… how is that an argument?
The argument is that all you’re doing is moving the carbon emissions from the car directly in your vicinity to the coal-fired power plant a long distance away. Move that same coal-fired power plant into the sealed room, and suddenly it’s no longer far away, and the “unclean” nature of the electric car, so the thought process goes, becomes obvious.
That’s the thought process if you just stop thinking when you get to a point that reaffirms one’s biases. If you continue down that train of thought you’d realize it’s a lot easier to regulate and monitor the emissions of a coal power plant than it is every single car on the road. Plus you don’t need to use coal to make electricity.
I’d happily hang out in a sealed room with a nuclear reactor.
The only valid criticisms of EV’s are:
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They’re harder to extinguish than a gas car if they end up catching on fire.
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They don’t really solve any of the major issues with car based infrastructure.
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Tesla is a shit show because of that damn muskrat which pushes a lot of people away from EV’s in general.
They’re harder to extinguish than a gas car if they end up catching on fire.
Yeah that is gonna be a bigger problem than most people imagined.
To be fair, no consumer vehicles have 900 kWh batteries haha.
They don’t steal a lot of data too? Or this privacy nightmare affected gas car too?
It’s an issue in newer cars in general.
They are heavier and accelerate faster than an equivalent ICE vehicle on the same frame, and so result in more pedestrian fatalities.
I lump that in with part of the major problems of car based infrastructure but that’s still fair to point out.
They are heavier and accelerate faster than an equivalent ICE vehicle on the same frame, and so result in more pedestrian fatalities.
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