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.
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.
I’d be so sad though because we’d never get a glorious movie scene like this
Bro, didn’t you know solar panels get hot when in the sun? Global warming!!
Clearly everyone should run a diesel generator in their living room just to be safe.
Dude, it’s the opposite problem. Where do you think the sunlight goes when it hits a solar panel? It sucks it all up! If we set up too many solar panels, they’re going to use up all the sunshine and cool the globe until we have another ice age. Big brother petroleum has been saving us!
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.
My EV is easily and by far the best and most fun to drive (and cheapest to run) car I’ve ever owned.
Absolutely my favourite vehicle to drive ever, easily more fun to drive than a lovely automatic petrol BMW I borrowed a couple of times.
Fun for sure, even the cheapest EVs can push you back into the seat like a sports car
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.
The point is already here. BYD is installing 1.5MW chargers in Europe. Those things can charge your car in 5mn - provided it accepts it.
Plus you don’t need to invest in an expensive charging station. We put a big outlet in our garage like you use for large appliances - it was a fraction of the cost, and the car charges overnight.
You may not even need that. A regular 110V outlet can charge an EV, just takes longer. Of course it depends on how much you drive whether that’ll be enough. But many people have used that when they first get an EV, and planned on doing what you did and install a 220 outlet later, but then don’t bother with the 220 since 110 is enough.
Yes this! It’s like 2 hrs of charging equals 1hr of driving. If the car is parked more than driving then it’s enough. Maybe if you’re a taxi driver or delivery driver all day then you might need the level 2 but most cases you don’t.
I use the standard plug in charger at home. I get 12kw (45 miles) in my 7 hour off peak window. That coupled with free charging at work means I never needed to invest in the £1,000 7kw charger at home.
Everybody’s needs are different - my experience js just one of many. What I’m saying is if you’re reading this and think you need a big expensive charger at home, there are options!
“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
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.
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.
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.
I drive through Wyoming yesterday, and was struck by how much carbon one has to burn just to keep extracting oil, let alone refining it and shipping it.
The Chinese uptake of EVs has saved 280,000 lives due to reduced emissions/pollution.
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
Nowhere in that article does it state or even hint that ICE vehicles pollute less or are more efficient than EV’s or even PHEV’s. If I missed something, feel free to link directly to the line/paragraph, by selecting the text and clicking “Copy link to highlight”: Example:
Batteries can have their materials 99.9% reclaimed. No need to keep mining after a certain point.
I’m not trying to inject FUD, but don’t some recycled materials wear out? I believe paper products do
Paper is an organic material with structure. Recycling damages that structure when actually you want to preserve it as much as you can. At some point you need a tree to grow to put that organic structure in place.
Batteries have human made structures constructed from pure materials. Battery recycling completely shreds the batteries and then mechanically & chemically separates the materials giving you the pure copper, gold, aluminium, cobalt, zinc, etc back. You’re then back to step 1 of the manufacture except you didn’t mine your raw materials.
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.
That sounds great except the batteries don’t last forever, so new ones have to keep getting made, which is still ongoing pollution in a different form. If you really want to reduce pollution, ride a bicycle.
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That sounds great except human parts like shoes and food don’t last forever, so new ones have to keep getting made, which is still ongoing pollution in a different form. If you really want to reduce pollution, astral project.
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Still an order of magnitude less pollution.
I’ll just ride my bicycle 200km to the nearest city
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
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!
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.
Would be even easier these days when many jobs can be done remotely, don’t even need those train journies as much.
Absolutely. I have a friend who lives in a cabin all summer and works remotely the entire time.
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…
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?
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.
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
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Changing tires seams an easier upgrade than fuel and drive systems. Won’t need to change the whole car and infrastructure!
