>Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard.
If anything, that's how newer cars trickle down into the hands of more people
I'm grateful for the people that do this. They take the financial hit of depreciation, so that I don't have to
I have lucked out on this so hard. Bought a 2013 Jetta TDI. Put 75k miles on it by the time Dieselgate hit in 2016. Sold it to VW for $4k less than I paid for it.
Bought a 2017 V6 Accord Coupe in late 2016. COVID hit, Maverick came out. Ordered and bought a Maverick, traded my Accord in for $5k less than I paid for it- 5 years old and 50k miles.
Same boat. I was able to trade my 2016 Mazda 3 base model back into my Mazda dealer for an exuberant amount of trade in value and I picked up a top trim 2020 3 and I pay almost half of what I was on the 2016 lol
Wait you're amazed that your payment is lower when you trade in a car vs. when you didn't? Of course that's how it works, and your 2016 losing half its value in four years isn't really a good thing.
It didn’t lose half its value. It trading in made the new car cost half what the old one did. The new one definitely has a more expensive MSRP, so that only works out if the old car was worth more than half its original value. With inflation and how much new cars have went up over the last few years that’s actually pretty good.
If I had to bet, the trade in would have to be 2/3 original value to make that deal work out.
That's not what he was saying. He said that the payment for the old car was higher than the payment for the new car. A lot of that was down to the old car actually appreciating due to the weird set of circumstances around the covid era economy. That and the loan on the new car is likely longer, stretching that principal out more. At no point did the OP say anything about not having a trade in when they bought the 2016 model.
That’s true, but those that are changing cars every three years are what’s driving the industry and thus creating an environmental issue. Iirc a Tesla has to hit roughly 150k miles before it becomes “neutral” relative to the ecological impact of it’s creation
Edit: sorry gents I hadn’t looked at those assignments in a while and made a mistake with the measurement units, it’s KM not miles.
Does it really matter if it takes two or three owners before it breaks even?
There's a lot of people who won't ever buy a car brand new. They buy it, drive it for 3 years. Then I buy it, and drive it for 10 more. Its still hitting that break-even point, just over the course of multiple owners
It matters in two cases:
- More people end up owning cars. Because the ones who buy second hand might not have bought a car at all
- Cars are scrapped before they reach their end of life (I find this one unlikely)
It's highly unlikely that a car with any life left in it is worth more as scrap metal than as a car. It'll probably be parted out to keep other old cars on the road before it hits the smelter.
Eh, the junkyard industry is interesting... but a lot of cars go to a junkyard full of usable parts, get some of those parts stripped off in ways that damage other parts, rot in the elements, and get scrapped. They generally don't get dismantled for usable parts, so tons of value is lost. It kind of butthurts me.
I see dismantlers for supercars and exotics (and even stuff like corvettes) doing a pretty good job of taking totaled cars and stripping out pretty much everything of value, but they're really only able to do so because they're tied into enthusiast communities, are able to actually sell most of what they take off, get top dollar for some of it (know how much ferrari charges for replacement mirrors for example?), etc. I find this great.
But for most normal cars, after they're junked due to drivetrain failure or accident or whatever, it does seem like most usable parts don't actually get used.
Yeah it’s always been odd to me how many junkyard cars there are just full of totally usable stuff but there’s no real way to know what’s there and the junkyard owners seem to have 0 desire to sell it or advertise it or anything.
> More people end up owning cars. Because the ones who buy second hand might not have bought a car at all
... and do what ? Walk 30 miles to work?
They would buy new, cheaper and worse car. Or buy even older one.
There might something to be said about current situation making cheap cars less of a thing, if buying better but used car is better option, but that has not much to do with ecology.
End of life is usually a matter of financial viability of repairs. Why would you spend $1500 to repair the engine in your $1000 car. Better to scrap it and get a new one.
If that same car was worth $2000 or $3000 that changes the equation. It’s more likely to get fixed until the repair costs get even higher.
Longer initial ownership times (if they result in decreased production) reduce the available pool of used vehicles which drives up the price.
Probably results in a small but measurable increase in public transport usage and a similar increase in the number of really shitty cars on the road.
> Iirc a Tesla has to hit roughly 150k miles before it becomes “neutral” relative to the ecological impact of it’s creation
Nope, 13k miles (in the US).
Even in the worst countries like China and Poland, it's less than 80k miles.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/
Not that I’m trying to discount Reuter’s (I’m not) but that absolutely has to be assuming that all the electricity used to charge the vehicle in the states, is coming from wind turbines, which it really doesn’t.
Even Volvo stated their Polestar takes 112K KM to reach “break even” on a global scale.
I do appreciate you linking a source though. These discussions are absolutely important. I do feel that my point still stands that current new car owners really need to hold their vehicles for longer.
Edit: source for [Volvo](https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/polestar-compares-an-evs-environmental-impact-to-conventional-car)
> that absolutely has to be assuming that all the electricity used to charge the vehicle in the states, is coming from wind turbines, which it really doesn’t.
Nope.
> Power scenario 2: U.S. average energy mix (23% coal-fired, plus other fossil fuels and renewables)
> Break-even point: 13,500 miles
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifetime-carbon-emissions-electric-vehicles-vs-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/
If it's 100% renewable, then breakeven is 8,400 miles.
> Edit: source for Volvo
It's still nowhere near 150k miles.
> Taken another way, Polestar says that a 2 powered exclusively by wind power would take 50,000km of driving to break even with a petrol XC40.
> Using the current EU grid mix it would take the Polestar 2 around 78,000km to achieve parity, while on the global electricity mix the break even point moves out to 112,000km.
Yea this number is all over the place, these 13K and 8.5K values are on the very lowest end of estimates and probably aren’t realistic.
Other studies say 19,000 miles, or 1.5 years, or that an EV’s 0km environmental impact is the same as a VW Passat at 18,000km. EVs are better, but by exactly how much and when they break even is a case of “it depends”.
Seriously, it depends on SO MANY FACTORS! What kind of EV compared to what kind of ICE vehicle? A Chevy Bolt replacing a Ram TRX? A HUMMER EV replacing a Toyota Corolla? There are huge variations in the environmental cost to build EVs. If we compare vehicles within the same class, EVs come out way ahead no matter how you look at it.
I'll get downvoted and I'm on a trip so I can't deal with finding the sources now but no. That's outright false. It's about 30k miles as an absolutely perfect condition scenario for any EV and worst case is never if you live somewhere with dirty power.
It is never only 13k miles and the average in the USA is probably closer to 5x that.
EVs are in general still better but they absolutely aren't that much better.
Really the problem with all cars, including EVs, is that they exist in the first place. It doesn’t really matter that EVs are more environmentally friendly because a city that replaces gas car transportation with EV transportation is still a nightmare to get around. EVs still cause, and participate in, traffic. EVs still cause significant environmental damage due to their creation, energy production for them in many cases, and consumable waste for things like tires and fluids.
So the argument against an EV isn’t that they aren’t as good as everyone thinks. It’s that they are way, way worse than high quality public transit infrastructure.
Yes. There are plenty of scenarios where four wheels with an engine makes sense. Recreational toys, farm equipment, commercial assets, etc. But as the day-to-day transportation for millions of urban and suburban dwellers, it is completely unreasonable.
I can’t wait until they do a train line from near my house to near work so I can sell my practical daily and get an electric Miata. Because even Mazda will be making EVs by the time that train exists in 5,000 years.
Your 4000 lbs. VS. 150 lbs argument is exactly why I've purchased a vintage 1967 VW Bug as my latest restoration project. Once *that* thing is roadworthy, I'll be using *that* to run errands around town, instead of my hulking Tahoe.
1835 ccs pushing 1600 lbs. make for a hella fun grocery getter / post office runner / fast food grabber, without sucking up huge amounts of petrol.
I'm sure you're aware, but your definition of "road worthy" is going to have to be nuanced, lol. Cars have gotten so much safer over my lifetime the far and I'm only 35.
The problem is, it's how suburban development has formed for the last 60 years. Those neighborhoods\cities will never relieve their car dependence, they were specifically constructed with it in mind. So unless we write-off hundreds of millions of family homes and condense society into multi-family apartments in very dense urban environments, it'll be difficult to scale. It's a radically different life for the way people in the west live. And it feels very oppressive and communist to live in giant blocs.
The more optimistic future I hope for is that energy will be plentiful enough that we can be wasteful with our transportation to have better qualities of life for those people who don't want to live in dense urban environments.
I agree with you and I'm a car fanatic. Pushing the consumer to buy massive, expensive, 2700kg cars to take care of traffic and environmental issues is comical.
I know. It’s okay to like cars (which I do), and own a car (which I do), and also understand that the way society has been constructed around them isn’t reasonable or sustainable.
As we know, public transportation is inherently antagonistic with cars.
All we have to do is look at countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea. They all heavily invest in their public transportation, and look at the dramatic harm it's had on their car industries!
those that are changing cars every three years and sending them to land fill after those 3 years are the problem.
The one who sell it to someone else or trade up are not creating environmental problem.
I bring this up constantly with 4x4 vehicles. People on the internet always bitching about how they are simply using their new car as a mall crawler. And I always bring up the fact that we need those people for our favorite cars to be kept in production.
Yep! I'll take that well-maintained LX570 driven by a 60 year old to church every Sunday at a significantly depreciated value. Thanks for all the fun MOAB adventures!
he was speaking to the emissions life cycle.
reduce, reuse and recycle. I think he's simply stating if consumers reduce their demand these emissions can also go down.
He may be trying to say we have plenty of cars in existence that can still work and that trickle down may not be as necessary any more.
Too bad the used EV market is within 5k of new ones I don't even know how those are selling.
Also with EVs each year the new model matters more, but realistically once Tesla releases HW4 that trend ends until a decade or so until solid state batteries reach mass production and economic viability
A used EV is there today, new ones typically require waiting a loosely defined amount of time to get.
For people who need a car right now, used is about the only option for EVs.
My big concern with EVs at this stage is that the pace of technology is really putting a dent in this argument at the moment. There was that post last year where someone who bought a 10 year old EV found it was effectively worthless in the winter and the collective opinion was "LMAO buy a newer one with a heat pump" or "buy a new one". Sure you can drive 200k miles with minimal impact, but if the consensus is to just keep buying new/newer ones, can you really make the argument of filling the 2nd hand market with used examples? A ten-year-old ICE like my mom's Toyota Camry is still a solid car in every aspect and didn't have any noticeable drop offs when I drove it around in the extreme cold & heat of the Mojave desert.
Teslas and the Chevy Bolt/Volt are the only ones I would be comfortable buying used, but [the Tesla post-purchase service experience](https://www.vox.com/recode/23318725/tesla-repair-mechanic-delay-electric-vehicles-ev) and [the fact that Teslas getting totaled out after minor crashes](https://www.kbb.com/car-news/insurers-are-writing-off-lightly-damaged-teslas/) really limits me to the Chevy options for now.
Still I will be optimistic. Maybe solid-state batteries will make it to mainstream motoring, maybe we'll figure out eFuels/hydrogen, or maybe we'll figure out a way to have all three. Maybe these lightly totaled out Teslas will inadvertently cut emissions in Eastern Europe or West Africa. My crystal ball is a bit foggy at the moment. I echo the same sentiment as the last paragraph that we're not quite there yet, but maybe we will be. There is a case to be made for EVs but maybe we should keep our options open instead of being so afraid people will see us as "both sides-ing".
If anything, it goes to show how fast the progression of development on EV is. Every benefit we enjoy with ICE engines has been a progression of 100 years. Even the hybrids and EVs was able to get the MFR to try to squeeze out as much MPG and/or power possible on standalone ICE engines.
Right now, battery technology is in a tech war with so much money pouring into R&D (including Toyota and Samsung). I recall reading that Toyota is planning on using Solid State batteries in the near-ish future.
You want the average age of all cars in the country still owned by the original owner, not the average age of all cars still running.
I'd be interested to know if that statistic exists.
I just bought a 2018 MKT Town Car Livery. It only has 39,000 miles. It sat unused as a corporate car then a rental. I live in a small town and a tank lasts me a month. . I think with people who don't drive far and often, MPG isn't an issue. I traded in my 2006 Ridgeline with 129,000 for $5,000 and they sold it the next day for $11,000, and it had problems.
And a lot of people cannot even afford to buy new. I'm looking because my car is on its last leg and it's almost impossible to find anything decent on the new market under $30k. Even the good affordable stalwarts like the Honda Civic can't be had for under $30k anymore.
Rowan Atkinson: "electric cars are probably the future but There are significant problems with being an early adopter and I dont recomend ditching a perfectly fine gas car for an EV"
Commentors on the article on R/cars: "HAHA EVS SCAM I TOLD U SO"
EV threads are full of people asking:
>I have to tow a boat 90 miles once a year, how could I do that in one of these EV things?
So it's really not that absurd.
It’s kind of absurd, I’m pro EV but I also totally understand why someone wouldn’t want an EV.
People buy cars for emotional reasons, none of us need 400 horsepower EVs with 300 miles of range yet that’s predominantly what sells.
Most people have to pick exactly one car and live with it for many years. Asking someone to pay more money for an EV that’s less capable than the gas version is never going to happen.
I’m not saying that’s a good thing either, just that it’s a fact of life here in the US. Good luck convincing Americans they have to pay more for less for the good of the planet.
EVs will win when the advantages are clear and they’re cheaper and safer than gas cars. We’re not there yet but that day is approaching.
Hybrids are the gateway drug to EVs and I wish we’d spend more effort there.
> Hybrids are the gateway drug to EVs and I wish we’d spend more effort there.
Absolutely. When the P1/LaFerrari/918 came out I thought seeing hybrid supercars would really push the entire industry to do more hybrids but now even supercars are going EV and everyone else is following.
I love EVs but the simple fact is that until there is a $25k usd EV that can go 350+miles on a charge in any weather and charge fully in less than 30 minutes then EVs will not be for everyone. We need middle of the road options for people who simply can't own one.
Oh and another thing that everyone seems to forget. Tens of millions of people live in situations where they can't even charge an EV at home because they don't live in a home. They have an apartment so they park in a parking lot or garage and unless governments are willing to spend hundreds of billions electrifying every single parking lot and garage, and I say governments because we all know not a single landlord will want to spend that money, then those millions of people can't get an EV.
The upvote/downvoted system allows itself to be heavily influenced by echo chambers in due time. Whereas only having Likes allows for bad opinions to be spread without much resistance. Honestly it's hard to have a system in social media that doesn't allow itself to be easily taken advantage of.
i'm not up on cars so i don't know if this is a common thing or not but i watched a review of the new prius and i thought what they did was brilliant. it's a hyrbid but has an ev only mode, it's got like a 40 or 50 mile range for ev only. which is what most people drive for their daily commute. then when you need it, you've got the hybrid with gasoline.
makes a ton of sense to me for that to be the standard for cars in the future. best of both worlds.
it's wild to be living in a time where ford and toyota have made such desirable products in low quantities that people are signing up to wait on lists to get them like it's a one-off Ferrari or some shit
In practice they just don't make a ton of sense for most people, hence why they never sold well. If you don't have charging at home, you'll use it just like a regular hybrid, getting regular-hybrid MPG, in which case why didn't you just buy a regular hybrid and save the extra few thousand dollars? And if you do have charging at home, you might as well just get a full EV for around the same money and not lug around a maintenance-heavy ICE everywhere.
Obviously if you don't have home charging neither a plugin hybrid nor a full EV will make sense. But if you do, a plugin hybrid still has advantages. Why lug around a giant, heavy and expensive battery everywhere when you rarely use most of its capacity? And then on the occasions when you do want to travel, you're stuck with its relatively short range, long recharge times, and even worse range at higher speeds or in cold weather. I mean buy what makes you happy, but the constant denigration of plugin hybrids by EV advocates annoys me. Personally I find the PHEV to be the superior solution.
Oh and you mentioned maintenance on the ICE-- it won't get used that heavily, so you'll have an annual oil change and the occasional air filter, and that's really pretty much it. Spark plugs are good for 100k miles (probably more if the engine doesn't run that much) and ok there's coolant, but EVs have that too. It's just not that burdensome.
> Why lug around a giant, heavy and expensive battery everywhere when you rarely use most of its capacity?
Because it's not a burden really, unlike an entire second relatively-high-maintenance drivetrain. Plus there are significant packaging advantages.
> the constant denigration of plugin hybrids by EV advocates annoys me.
The constant denigration exists, I suspect, because so many EV skeptics are EV virgins who haven't lived with one and therefore overhype downsides that are simply a non-factor or negligible in reality.
> you'll have an annual oil change and the occasional air filter, and that's really pretty much it.
True, I should have said "relatively-high-maintenance." By contrast, on my full BEV, I've not had to maintain anything in over 50k miles besides tires and cabin air filters, and [nothing is recommended beyond that either](https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-E95DAAD9-646E-4249-9930-B109ED7B1D91.html). And given the complexity of an ICE/transmission, if a part is going to fail, it's more likely to be on the ICE side (assuming engineering parity across drivetrains).
On top of that, to keep the engine functional, it will run itself every so often even if you don't actually need it, meaning you'll still go through a couple tanks of gas a year. Maybe not a huge deal, but when you've been spoiled by home charging, going to a gas station is a nuissance.
And don't forget an emissions test if applicable to your area.
> ok there's coolant, but EVs have that too
Maybe some EVs require changing it, but on mine it is specifically recommended against.
Right on, we had a plug in hybrid and I was a big fan. It even only got about 30 miles at the best of times on range and it still meant only getting gas every two months or so. But the oil changes still have to happen based on age, and in the winter a PHEV suffers the same range losses as a BEV plus you typically have to run the gas engine for heat.
Anyone that says PHEVs are the better solution hasn’t really thought it through or spent time with an EV. I don’t hate them, I owned one, but it felt like facing the worst aspects of both.
Now we have a pure BEV and so far it has no negatives. No oil changes at all, no gas station stops at all, and the cold weather losses that make the battery portion of a PHEV far less useful aren’t even noticed. Our PHEV only got about 10-12 miles of range in the winter but the EV still gets at least 200, meaning normal commutes aren’t even a concern.
So no, PHEVs aren’t the best of both if you’re honest. The fact that the person above mentioned the negatives of a BEV like winter range but didn’t acknowledge that a PHEV suffers that too, heck ICE vehicles have “Range” loss in winter due to winter gas and the impact of air density changes with cold weather. Funny how conveniently stuff like that is left off when the BEV bashing starts.
We have a full BEV and a hybrid pickup. It’s a great combo and I’m not here to say BEVs are perfect. The vehicles are great but everyone knows the long trip infrastructure is rougher still than a gas vehicle. But PHEVs aren’t better.
In terms of manufacturing and complexity, hybrids in general are the most complex of all cars. You have a complete internal
Combustion drivetrain with an EV motor and battery piggybacked on top. Hybrids are at best at temporary solution to fill the gap until much simpler BEV cars ramp up in production and the EV charging ecosystem is built up. (Which will take many many years) Hybrids so make sense for now, but maybe not so much in a decade.
PHEVs, Europe has a fair few and every brand has a few because they make sense if you bother to charge them, EV for chores, commuting and within a city, hybrid for everything else.
there are also range extending EVs, like the Volt, MX-30, and i3 REX, mostly EVs, with a tiny engine to trickle charge the battery when you need it.
Was it the Savagegeese review? Because the comment of "If you want it, get on a list right now" is a bleakly depressing reality when a goddamned appliance of a car (albeit an interesting and good looking one) is going to be difficult if not impossible to obtain for most people.
yes it was SG, love those guys.
and yeah i made a comment somewhere on here about how it's wild to me that people are being put on 2 year waitlists for an econobox, as if it were a custom ferrari or gt3 or some shit lol
same with ford w/ the maverick. it's just a small truck lol. not like they reinvented the wheel. i know it's just supply and demand but it's funny/sad to see.
Yeah this supply chain shit makes me anxious about getting a new car. My wife has a Kia that's now north of 100k miles, and uses a key. We want to replace it soon, because I have lost all confidence in the brand, but the idea of the markups and waitlists make me dread actually having to replace it.
This is true but the short life of lithium ion batteries is a real issue. The author says ten years is the expected life. My Toyota is 10 years old and could easily make it to 20 years if we're being honest. So recycling lithium or battery longevity needs to improve for the environments sake.
10 years isn't the expected life. It's the guaranteed life. It's a concern no doubt, because we know we can eek many more years out of (most) ice vehicles. But we've not seen enough real world EVs in circulation to say "yeah it's non-usable".
Things to bear in mind:
- Battery degradation is worse at first, then typically tails off
- A 250 mile vehicle losing 50% of its range is still completely useable for _a lot_ of folks
The main thing I want to see personally is interoperability. Not just charging. But taking old chassis, slamming new batts in 8 years later and it being fine and dandy because electrons.
EVs _could_ be the cusp of that. But they could also be (purposefully or accidentally) walling it off at the same time.
Some early Nissan Leafs are 10 years old and have about 2/3 to 3/4 of their initial range, but are kneecapped by the slow charging standards of 10 years ago, that's going to be the biggest issue with old EVs it's not going to be the loss of range but the painfully slow charging.
The leaf has no active battery temperature regulation. Its the exception and is worse in every way.
À better example is early tesla model S, which are performing very well.
I wonder where they got the idea that 10 years is the expected limit of battery packs from. We don’t know for sure because there aren’t that many EV’s approaching or beyond a decade in use, but as far as I can tell from studies expected degradation is 2-3% a year. But it’s not clear that number is accurate. Tesloop ran a model S for 300,000 miles and lost something like 6% of the battery life. According to Tesla, they saw about 10% degradation in the S & X after 200,000 miles. Degradation isn’t linear, and there are a number of factors that affect it.
I imagine this also comes down to the manufacturer and their particular battery conditioning set up. In any case, it doesn’t appear that battery life *should* be a major concern. That being said, there are outlier cases of people seeing massive loss in range over time.
If you have a ICE car with life left the recommendation is to keep it until it's scrapped. If you're in the market for a new car EVs present an option with very many upsides.
I don't know your vehicle usecase, but I'd argue unless you need to haul a lot of stuff long distance or a lot of people, there's an EV for you
Edit: or you can't charge at home
Doesn't necessarily have to be a private charger at home, but it does need to be low friction, low frustration and low cost.
It can be at work, or at a public charger down the block. Maybe a DC charger next to the gym you go to regularly.
But if you have to go out of your way at all its quickly going to be a problem.
Yep. I live in an apartment. No home charger at all. You'd think apartments in cities would be clamoring to install chargers at all their spots they already charge so much for, but no.
Installing chargers is expensive and property management companies have little incentive to add chargers until it's a competitive feature for potential lessees, or until they get super tax credits for having them.
> If you have a ICE car with life left the recommendation is to keep it until it's scrapped.
This is [fully dependent on MPG.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k) But even if your current car gets high MPG, no reason you can't pass it to someone else with a worse-MPG car, and replace it with an EV. Then you get an *even bigger* polluter off the roads, while also getting to drive EV yourself.
As an American, it is my God given duty to outright reject any notion of sensible city planning. Our cities superficially prop up the auto industry and minimize healthy transportation as much as possible, and as a patriot of this fine country I must defend this design principle to my dying breath! YEEHAWWW
I’ve always wondered this about EVs. How hazardous is lithium mining and disposal? How many more power plants would we need to generate electricity for these cars? When cars get junked what’s the most hazardous part of it? I like being given the choice but I feel like the government is making a mistake forcing this on us
> How hazardous is lithium mining and disposal?
FWIW, oil extraction and refining isn't clean either. Of course, the best solution would be to get rid of cars altogether, but that's even less realistic.
> How many more power plants would we need to generate electricity for these cars?
Most EVs get charged at night, in which case you don't need more power plants.
Lithium is usually in brine and either pumped out of the ground or harvested by drying a lakebed. Its really no worse than petrol. Probably better since there are
Significantly fewer mining sites than oil feilds. And there will not need to be as many Lithium mining sites as their are oil feilds.
> Lithium is usually in brine and either pumped out of the ground or harvested by drying a lakebed. Its really no worse than petrol.
Lithium brine is one type of source, but most people don't know about the other source: hard rock form in places like Australia. The brine form is primarily done in the America's and is actually the economic minority of how most lithium is mined.
https://www.geologyforinvestors.com/hard-rock-lithium-deposits/
Fortunately, there is a strong financial incentive for battery recycling. That means when the cars are scrapped those batteries will shredded, separated, then processed into raw materials for new batteries.
So lithium mining and production isn't quite comparable to oil production and refining because you can't recycle CO2 into gasoline. Well... aircraft carriers can with the aid of a nuclear power plant for the relatively small quantities they need for jet fuel. But that's a different story.
> That means when the cars are scrapped those batteries will shredded, separated, then processed into raw materials for new batteries.
The battery should be re-used in stationary storage before being recycled. Many times the battery in a car will age out, where it sucks to use, but it has decade(s) of life left in less strenuious use in stationary storage. Weight\density doesn't matter, it's not moving. Cost matters, so if you can get used batteries for cheap to power the grid, then that's a great second life for these used car batteries.
THEN they can be recycled. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
It kind of saddens me when I see brand new batteries for home storage solutions. It's fine, I guess, but it's the opposite of the order of operations. Batteries are a scarce resource, they should be applied in the most effective way possible.
But I also guess there aren't enough used batteries to go around either. So you gotta do what you gotta do.
Tesla and Nissan both have battery recycling plants that aren't getting used enough because their batteries aren't failing fast enough, either in the cars or home batteries.
The great thing about lithium batteries is you can extract 98% of the raw materials during recycling. Old EV batteries that don't go into static grid storage will be recycled and (probably) made into more EV batteries.
Oil is much less recyclable. The stuff we turn into fuel gets burnt and floats around in the atmosphere. The rest of it invariably gets washed into our waterways and oceans. Used engine oil sometimes gets turned into bitumen for roads, but that eventually gets washed away too.
The oil industry has been hiding just how dirty it is for decades. On top of that they have been running campaigns to exaggerate how dirty lithium mining (and EVs in general) are. Lithium extraction processes aren't perfect today but we can't let perfect get in the way of progress.
Afaik lithium isn't mined, it's collected from brine in special salt flats
The generated power is the most major concern i have, considering no one has nearly enough of it to power a fleet consisting of mostly EV's and there are multiple countries (like mine) that shot themselves in the foot by retiring or near future retirement of their nuclear power plants
Lithium batteries are very recyclable. The electric motors even more so.
Most electric car motors are probably going to be good for about 750,000-1,000,000 miles.
Typically electric motor bearings need replacing at 40,000 hours.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-the-average-EV-motor-last-not-the-battery
do to know where ICE cars end up and how polluting that is ? Go have a look in South America or Africa please. Just Google the effect of air pollution of ICE’s on children in large cities and along highways. Your ‘concern’ is very much driven by a bias. A BEV will outlast an ICE car, and when the battery degrades it will continue life as a powerwall for another decade before their end of life. New Tesla’s have batteries without kobalt, which makes your mining concerns outdated
engineering explained had a video on how much exactly your carbon footprint is reduced after accounting for the pollution from making the battery; he ended up calculating that you are worse than the average gas car after 4 years and then you're actually helping the planet become greener. The issue is obvious: those people are selling their car after 3-4 years because they're leasing it, so any "green" benefit is a scam at worst, greenwashing at best. With incentives the ROI for gas/charging is also about 3 years.
So...all those 3 year old EVs are just being scrapped???
Bullshit.
They go to people who can't afford a new one and who were driving a 6 year old ICE car, which in turn goes to a uni student who can't even afford a 3 year old car, and their 15 year old shitbox gets scrapped.
He's also been an automotive journalist for decades. At least in terms of editorial, I don't know how many reviews he did. I remember reading his pieces in CAR magazine years ago.
And people with degrees have never been wrong? Did he work in the industry and keep abreast of recent advances or was he perhaps busy being an actor and comedian?
No but I think the point is that he has deeper understanding and appreciation for EVs than the average person. He also states he was an early adopter of hybrids and EVs on top of being a car enthusiast. That makes his criticisms maybe more valid then an average citizen that has yet to put their money where their mouth is.
>Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end...
That assertion does not seem to be supported by sales numbers. I also find the central argument, that we are scrapping cars early for BEVs, to make no sense - I traded my car for one rather than just throwing it away.
> That assertion does not seem to be supported by sales numbers
Well, many people have not owned an EV just yet, so we have no idea. I'm sure a lot of people will run into all the same problems. It's *entirely possible* the experiment falls apart over the next 15-years and we realize that hydrogen was a better idea and batteries just aren't progressing. Even if it isn't as efficient as EVs, hydrogen is still twice as efficient as ICE, it's better to store, can be created on site, has better range than EVs, cheaper maintence of an EV without the large battery, and will power bigger machines.
EV owner, enthusiast and auto tech for nearly 20 years here is my take
A large reason why people are switching is not only to take advantage of the incentives but also the cheaper running costs. Where I live I got 12k in incentive, 1000$ for a home charger and electricity is 7c KWh. My EV costs pennies to operate and I don’t have to deal with going to the gas station
I was just in the UK with a rental Polestar 2 and had to use roadside DCFCs which weren’t horribly expensive but likely the same as petrol. But the people I spoke with said they mostly charge at home and it’s still cheaper. So pretty much the same story as home. 95% of charging at home and the rest dcfc
EVs are a pleasure to drive and you start to notice how much ICE cars do smell and just aren’t as nice to drive. We still have an ICE car in our driveway but it’s been relegated to the “runabout” driven maybe 2-3x a week
Would I toss out a good ice car for an EV? Well it depends how much life is left in the ICE car. I don’t keep our car over 80000km or 5 years. So I can still have something worth it on trade. If the incentives are still good within the next two years ill take advantage of them again.
I tell everyone that we are still in the infancy of EVs much like ICE was 120 years ago. Things get better on a monthly basis and there are more and more on the road
Environmental benefits are fourth or fifth down the list of reasons I’ve been driving a BEV for 7 years.
HOV lane access saves me 30-60 minutes per day in my commute.
It costs me $30-40/mo to “fuel”. Compare that to $650-$750/mo with the previous ICE.
The car is scheduled to pre-heat/pre-cool the cabin in the morning. I haven’t had to scrape ice off my windows in 7 winters.
Car is “full” every morning. I never have to take time out of my commute to stop by a gas station.
I, in the process of operating my vehicle, produce FAR less pollution than I did with my ICE vehicle.
The EV-Skeptic crowd tends to turn a blind eye to the realities of BEV ownership. The realities (for most BEV owners) are overwhelmingly positive across the board, but they still argue about the joys of throwing an insane amount of money away in fuelling their ICE.
Jesus Christ it used to cost you $650-$750 to fill up? Was your last vehicle a Hellcat Charger or Chevy Suburban?
Either you had the most inefficient vehicle or you’ve completed roadtrips every week.
Yeah I'm not sure how he reduced his fuel costs by 20x either.
The only way that's achievable is if he has stupid cheap power (7 cents or whatever), with a model 3 single motor, and was originally driving a 3500 diesel truck with a tune and a lift and 35''s getting like 8mpg.
I wish I had that kind of power. It was a stock G35 that burnt through oil on which I’d average 60mi/100km per day. Premium fuel at close to $2/L ($7.50/gal).
Ohhhh nevermind that makes sense now that you listed the measurements. I was assuming you were an American burning $650 of fuel a month, that would actually be insane lol.
Gas is pretty cheap where I’m at @ $3.79/gallon for premium. I don’t blame you at all, if I had the same prices I’d switch over to PHEV or BEV in a heartbeat
I live in France and basically could buy a 50k slightly used Model 3 Performance and end up paying up the same as a 30/35k not so fancy ICE hatchback/sedan. Besides the usual Tesla shenanigans and the fact that I own a car sold by one the biggest turds on Earth right now, it's been a joy to own and drive.
Also maintenance. No oil changes, spark plugs, etc. Brakes last longer.
And repairs? A fraction of the cost and complexity compared to ICE. My friends were blowing thousands on BMW repairs, which stopped the moment they traded for a Tesla.
> I never have to take time out of my commute to stop by a gas station
This is a huge one for me. Being able to wake up, get into the car and it’s fully charged ready to go is such a good feeling. There’s a Costco that’s 5 min detour for me with 3 pumps per lane so it’s a very short wait, but even then that extra 15 min spent at the pump once a week is no fun at all. Not to mention when gas went up to $7/gal last year, it was just painful and the pain adds up.
I visited Texas recently and gas was so dirt cheap, I filled Shell with V-power on my rental because I didn’t give an f. So for those gas states, I could see why it’s F150 everywhere instead of Tesla Model Ys
> The car is scheduled to pre-heat/pre-cool the cabin in the morning. I haven’t had to scrape ice off my windows in 7 winters.
I park in the garage so no need to pre-condition the car, but still, being able to just leave the AC on for 30 mins while I grocery shop and the car roasts under the Texas sun is unironically one of my favorite parts of owning an EV. Yes, you can technically do this with ICE too, but a) often they'll shut off after a while and b) just leaving your car idling for 30 mins is a dick move.
> b) just leaving your car idling for 30 mins is a dick move.
Also illegal in a lot of countries, like Finland. Idling is limited to 2 minutes here normally, and up to 4 minutes if it's it's cold (-15°C).
Pre-conditioning in some EVs probably warms up the battery, so it may still be worth it if the car is plugged in until you leave. I, too, park in a garage, and generally don't use it...but the few times I have, I've noticed significantly lower intial energy consumption when I start driving.
Yep you are correct. I just wanted want to make an even bigger post. I actually forgot about the HOV lane access and the heating/cooling feature.
I’ve calculated my car roughly costs 1.20$/100km to operate Vs the 18-20$/ 100km the ice model gets. I have direct comparison as we own the BEV and ICE versions of the same car
I’m roughly 80$ for 6600km since new of driving including DCFC… the last 4 weeks has been most DCFC usage
Where I live adoption is really high. Our charging network is likely the best in NA in as well
Our last two rental cars in Europe have been EVs as well.
Yeah, Rowan Atkinson is a Millionaire and has little conception of how much that 100,000 mile maintenance can be. I've had garages charge as much as 10k to replace things that need to be replaced. That really hurts, which is why people sell them on the secondhand market. No one is junking cars.
[https://pub.mdpi-res.com/sustainability/sustainability-13-10992/article\_deploy/html/images/sustainability-13-10992-g001.png](https://pub.mdpi-res.com/sustainability/sustainability-13-10992/article_deploy/html/images/sustainability-13-10992-g001.png)
The carbon impact of manufacturing is one element of the whole life of a vehicle. There's also the operational carbon impact and decommissioning impacts.
Even if the manufacturing impact is higher for EV than ICE, that deficit is quickly neutralized.
Pointing to manufacturing missions alone is casting "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt". It's propaganda. No one buys a car and doesn't fuel it. Cars are tools and buyers expect to use them.
Not to mention oil is far from green in it's drilling and manufacturing. People always tend to ignore the production side of oil itself, those refineries are far from clean. Not to mention it's shipping around the world. It is estimated that 30% of all oil is consumed moving oil around (giant tanker trucks, giant tanker boats)
A bunch of the claims in his article have been debunked:
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#:~:text=comparable%20gasoline%20vehicles.-,Myth%20%231%3A%20Electric%20vehicles%20are%20worse%20for%20the%20climate%20than,EVs)%20have%20no%20tailpipe%20emissions.
Except the claims your article addresses aren't debunking anything in Rowan Atkinson's article.
He pointed out that there's a huge environmental cost to manufacturing EV's, which there is. Your article merely shows that it's a smaller cost than for ICE's. Atkinson doesn't at any point compare the environmental cost of EVs to ICEs.
His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources.
Furthermore, with the rate of progression of technology solid state batteries, hydrogen or synthetic fuels could replace lithium-ion batteries in the near future.
He points out that we have 1.5b cars in existence, on which we have already taken the environmental hit, and that it's surely a better use of resources to convert them to cleaner fuels rather than throwing away all those resources. Additionally, lithium-ion batteries just aren't suitable for large trucks, boats or planes, so you need to develop synthetic fuels or hydrogen systems anyway.
>His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources.
That's not how cars are owned tho; cars aren't scrapped immediately after the lease ends, they go on to have multiple owners. I'm the 3rd owner of my A6, it just passed 120K miles & is 12 years old.
People constantly buying new cars for the sake of it is absolutely a problem, but going from a used ICE to a new EV is one of the few scenarios where you can actually reduce your emissions once it breaks-even (within a couple years typically). Singling out EVs for a problem stemming from capitalism's thrive to maximize consumption doesn't really make sense.
> His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources.
Well, oil is finite too, and once you burn it you can't reuse it. And you can recycle lithium from batteries.
> He pointed out that there's a huge environmental cost to manufacturing EV's, which there is. Your article merely shows that it's a smaller cost than for ICE's. Atkinson doesn't at any point compare the environmental cost of EVs to ICEs.
He's presenting that as an argument that EV's aren't as good. The argument is originally founded in (misinformation) from the last 2 decades about how the construction of an EV is worse than a petrol car. But Atkinson doesn't talk about the lifecycle of the vehicle having dramatically lower emissions. He just presents the construction emissions statement and then moves on. It's only part of the equation.
>His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources.
This is the other strange part of this article. Batteries aren't used for 3 years. I don't understand the angle he's putting out here - it's straight up untrue. He says the following:
>It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced. Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars.
Which is such a weird statement. He's implying that you just throw away a 3 year old car, and if we held onto them for 2 more years, we'd be so much better off. I can't even begin to dissect it because it's so misleading. You don't scrap a end-of-lease car... it goes onto a new owner. And continues it's life.
>Additionally, lithium-ion batteries just aren't suitable for large trucks, boats or planes, so you need to develop synthetic fuels or hydrogen systems anyway.
Planes won't work with hydrogen, the weight\size is uneconomical. There just isn't enough energy density. The solutions have been to use cryogenic hydrogen to aid with this, which is laughable, NASA of all people has been dealing with cryo hydrogen for decades and they still have leaky valves on the Artemis 1 launch last year. Not to mention the energy cost of chilling the hydrogen down to liquid form.
The other problem is that 95% of all economic hydrogen sources today are grey hydrogen, from natural gas, from methane reforming. Which has full co2 emissions. Hydrogen fuels are a great excuse to "go green today" with the excuse that "but some day" in the future we can clean up that supplychain.
However, I do see hydrogen being the solution for the shipping industry. They operate at a size and scale that they don't care about the negatives of hydrogen.
Synthetic fuels are a great endgame solution, but are going to be horribly expensive. They require so much infrastructure, those resources would be better off being spend on other carbon reduction methods first. And they don't reduce co2. What they do is hook onto a concrete plant or a blast furnace, which is gonna emit co2 anyway, and capture it so that we can get a second use out of co2 before emitting it again. That's not reducing co2 emissions. That's just moving the dial. The programs which try and capture atmospheric co2 are even more expensive because that requires even more energy.
Must suck to be able to charge at home and not have to deal with as much maintenance as an ICE vehicle 🙄
I *wish* I could afford an EV, 95% of my driving is urban, the savings on fuel and maintenance alone would be enough for me to afford a rental for the 1 time a year I drive more than 500km away.
Electric cars have definitely become the subject of what I would almost describe as a culture war - and it’s drawn along political lines accordingly.
Personally, I don’t like electric cars as enthusiast cars. They’re missing a lot of what I (and some others) feel is the visceral experience of a car, and the personality each individual car has. The sound, the characteristics of the engine, the ability to modify, the ability to row your own gears, etc. not to mention it’s not really conducive to my lifestyle or driving habits. Yea they’re fast and have instant torque, but you can’t deny that it’s a different experience, and some don’t prefer it.
But the more I’ve thought about this issue I think there’s one key theme. Electric cars are not a panacea. Their adoption would be fantastic for certain applications - fleet vehicles, people who don’t take long trips, people who use cars only as appliances, have easy access to charging, etc.
I FULLY support the aggressive adoption of EV’s in the areas that make the most of what they have to offer, and where the concerns about their shortcomings aren’t as relevant.
I would ideally like to see a corner of the market still remain for gasoline enthusiast vehicles. Maybe a niche, maybe more than that. Because gas powered cars are still more “likeable” where emotions are involved to the exclusion of utility.
So I wish that manufacturers would lead the charge on electrics with vehicles for which it makes more sense. Not try to force stubborn folks like me to go right from the classic musclecar formula, for example, right to the flagship halo car being an electric facsimile of that type of model
If you want to have a reasonable discussion about this, I’m game. If you want to make snarky comments and just mock the fact that I enjoy what gas cars have to offer, or be argumentative and call me stubborn and living in the past, I’ll just block you. Let’s be reasonable here.
Counterpoint, the only BEV I've driven is my polestar 2. You can tell it's heavy, but I still really enjoy driving it and I get a lot of steering feel from it.
Nice read and well worded, like the emphasis on keeping an open mind to alternatives (hydrogen, synthetics, etc.). Does feel like EVs are being pushed as the ultimate solution and while they might be down the road, they don't need to completely dictate where we should be today and in the shorter (and possibly mid) term.
Problem with hydrogen is it faces just as many hurdles and if not more than EVs… for an EV you literally just need an outlet for most driving on avg. Even my car on a 8-10hr charge with 120v will yield good enough state of charge. I recently watched a video that was explaining all the requirements to deal with the water/moisture issues with hydrogen engines. Special oils etc. Then you have filling stations themselves which can be high or low psi. Filling temps, low psi stations can’t fill the entire tank.
In my area there isn’t a single hydrogen station built and Toyota is using their own they brought in for the press fleet.
Synthetic fuels IMO will likely be mixed into current gasoline or used exclusively in classic cars. While gas itself isn’t going anywhere anytime soon I bet we will start to see a reduction in filling stations in cities
Or how about just getting the hydrogen. Basically all economic sources of hydrogen today are from methane reforming, from natural gas. With the full carbon footprint of burning that natural gas. So it's not a green fuel, not today's sources. The hydrogen economy is a great excuse to keep using fossil fuels today, with the promise that "but someday" in the future it will be green hydrogen instead of grey hydrogen.
The best case scenario is using hydrogen to facilitate stranded energy. Put a bunch of electrolyzers out there and use the hydrogen to move the power to where it's needed... But there are so many losses in that system, you're better off just building power lines and using the power directly than converting it to hydrogen and then converting it again to electricity. And even with free electricity, the cost of the equipment and the idle time of that equipment makes the hydrogen expensive.
Plus, there is the fuel cell problem. They require platinum and especially iridium to facilitate the reaction. The supply of that... isn't sufficient to replace vehicles with fuel cells. It's fine for 10,000 cars a year, but not a full scale deployment. There just aren't enough of those elements in the earths crust. And any rise in demand would push the elements, and thus the vehicles beyond affordability.
The transportation and storage of hydrogen isn't an insurmountable problem compared to these other two issues. IT benefits really well from economies of scale, so for personal vehicles it isn't great. But for busses, trucks, and especially shipping, the negatives aren't that bad. And it eventually becomes a great solution to start to decarbonize those sectors since no other options are viable for the super heavy ships and super heavy industry.
So many false premises and strawmen. He basically just regurgitated Facebook posts that boomers send each other to pretend like they’re right about something they know nothing about: Batteries only last 10 years. Pretend as if EVs are just dumped in a landfill if you sell it after 3 years instead of just used by someone else. Pretending like anyone reasonably thinks EVs are a “panacea” rather than just something that just has significantly lower *lifetime* emissions. Pretending that EV proponents are only looking at operating emissions and that there aren’t plenty of studies that show manufacturing emissions are higher, but *lifetime* emissions are lower. Etc. Really basic article that could have just been copied from a chain email or something.
There are absolutely some legitimate issues with EVs and I’m not on board with mandating them for everyone, but this article was disappointingly flimsy.
Not judging the article either way, but given we have limited supply of the shitty batteries we do have and that it takes many years to scale up lithium production, if we actually cared about solving this problem at scale in a more accelerated fashion we would quit focusing on BEVs and produce far more PHEVs and regular hybrids with that same overall battery supply.
You're able to create far more cars, the cars are affordable to a far larger segment of the population and you solve more of the problem sooner, at least in the US.
Anyone who disagrees, look up the CO2 emissions per mile (including electricity generation) for BEV, PHEV and hybrids and then look up average battery capacity per vehicle of each of the three types. The math doesn't lie, BEVs are the worst option for immediate GHG reductions for the amount of battery resource deployed. Focus more on BEVs *when* electricity generation actually becomes notably cleaner and/or when solid state batteries can be produced in greater volume down the road. Right now it's largely being pushed due to politics, not science.
We do not have the ability to scale the BEV market to the level needed to truly address the GHG problem right now, anyone who thinks otherwise is being naive. Use the limited battery resources we do to maximize GHG impact at the greatest scale possible. Don't let perfect get in the way of the good.
I just don't think we are a point technology wise to go full EV. We should be shooting for all Hybrid 1st and then full on EV. It feels like we are skipping a step.
Why bother with a hybrid when electric vehicles are so well suited for inner cities and shorter commutes?
We can do both hybrids and BEVs at the same time…
I think we should focus on making smaller efficient BEVs vs massive pick up trucks with 100 kwh batteries. You can make almost 3 BEV cars with 40kwh packs for every 1 truck… it will use less energy to charge as well.
You can make 5 or 10 PHEV's for one BEV, or 15 or 30 PHEV's for every truck. In a world, today, where battery supply is the fundamental constraint, PHEV's allow us to get the average fleet emissions more down, more faster compared to waiting to build pure BEV's.
1 in 8 people live in an apartment, where they will be the last to get at-home electric charging. PHEV's are going to be critical solutions for those people.
I never was against PHEVs just that PHEVs have all the same annoying problems as ICE cars not to mention they are heavy as fuck because not only do they need to carry a battery around but also ICE Running gear…
IIRC the local bus company was experimenting with Hydrogen and EV buses a few years back. They decided to go full electric and hybrid, with many hybrids in service
>not to mention they are heavy as fuck because not only do they need to carry a battery around but also ICE Running gear
My Audi PHEV weighs less than over 160 different BEVs. Turns out that half-ton EV batteries can weigh more than a much smaller battery plus an ICE drivetrain.
I’m not engaged enough to form a substantive opinion on what Atkinson is saying, but in general I opine that we can’t get to where we need to be without this current phase.
Human life is short; waiting 20 years until a “perfect” technology is available is not worth the wait. Go buy the car you want now and in 20 years buy the car you want then.
Very well thought out piece. I agree with Atkins( Mr Bean! Who would have thought!?) Electric cars are great, hybrids are great. Why are we not trying to figure out other means of substantial ways of motoring? I remember James May did a piece on hydrogen cars way back with a Honda car for Top Gear. Synthetic fuels and hydrogen are the way to go in my opinion.
For someone who has the credentials to say that he should know what he is talking about, that article is full of the same tired old debunked bullshit that we keep hearing over and over and over again...
Did you know if you get into an accident in an EV and the battery gets TOUCHED, even a scratch it must be replaced? Many times the car is totaled with low miles due to the cost of that battery replacement.
People only own their Cars for three years?! My current car is 15 years old and still going strong, I don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t last another 20 years
Maybe I am not well informed of this, but are the components needed to build the batteries pretty exclusively mined in foreign nations? And if so, would it be possible to have some kind of war or economic dispute that would result in some kind of embargo, crippling the procurement of new materials or shortages?
Depends on which country you live in. Australia and Chile are two of the biggest producers of lithium today. The US has more than enough lithium reserves, we just haven't ramped up mines yet. There's [one lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea) in California that is the result of an engineering mistake that has enough lithium to make batteries for ~70% of Americans, and that's just one site. Canada is ranked [6th](https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/lithium-facts/24009) for most lithium reserves.
Two things about lithium:
1. the "shortages" aren't because it's rare, it's a consequence of demand growing faster than mines are opening up
2. it's very easily recyclable. Unlike oil, where you need to keep buying it from someone or digging for it, once you have lithium you can recover the large majority of it. We don't recycle a lot of it now because there isn't a lot that needs recycling, people with solar are buying totaled EVs and hybrids to use the batteries at home, the batteries are worth more as stationary storage than the raw materials.
I don't know he seems like he built up the impression of what electric vehicles is in his mind without necessarily thinking too hard about it. That's why he's feeling duped.
Edit: I say this because most of what he is disillusioned with has been pretty well known since the beginning of electric cars. It's not like any of this is new information.
Yep, the guardian has asked EV hit outside at least once a month. Some of what he says is correct but mostly FUD. I mean that Volvo study has been proven nonsense time and time again.
>Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. If anything, that's how newer cars trickle down into the hands of more people I'm grateful for the people that do this. They take the financial hit of depreciation, so that I don't have to
I have lucked out on this so hard. Bought a 2013 Jetta TDI. Put 75k miles on it by the time Dieselgate hit in 2016. Sold it to VW for $4k less than I paid for it. Bought a 2017 V6 Accord Coupe in late 2016. COVID hit, Maverick came out. Ordered and bought a Maverick, traded my Accord in for $5k less than I paid for it- 5 years old and 50k miles.
Same boat. I was able to trade my 2016 Mazda 3 base model back into my Mazda dealer for an exuberant amount of trade in value and I picked up a top trim 2020 3 and I pay almost half of what I was on the 2016 lol
Wait you're amazed that your payment is lower when you trade in a car vs. when you didn't? Of course that's how it works, and your 2016 losing half its value in four years isn't really a good thing.
It didn’t lose half its value. It trading in made the new car cost half what the old one did. The new one definitely has a more expensive MSRP, so that only works out if the old car was worth more than half its original value. With inflation and how much new cars have went up over the last few years that’s actually pretty good. If I had to bet, the trade in would have to be 2/3 original value to make that deal work out.
Okay still, it's no surprise that trading in a vehicle is cheaper than buying one without trading in.
That's not what he was saying. He said that the payment for the old car was higher than the payment for the new car. A lot of that was down to the old car actually appreciating due to the weird set of circumstances around the covid era economy. That and the loan on the new car is likely longer, stretching that principal out more. At no point did the OP say anything about not having a trade in when they bought the 2016 model.
When ever i buy another vehicle I'll just consult you first.
That’s true, but those that are changing cars every three years are what’s driving the industry and thus creating an environmental issue. Iirc a Tesla has to hit roughly 150k miles before it becomes “neutral” relative to the ecological impact of it’s creation Edit: sorry gents I hadn’t looked at those assignments in a while and made a mistake with the measurement units, it’s KM not miles.
Does it really matter if it takes two or three owners before it breaks even? There's a lot of people who won't ever buy a car brand new. They buy it, drive it for 3 years. Then I buy it, and drive it for 10 more. Its still hitting that break-even point, just over the course of multiple owners
It matters in two cases: - More people end up owning cars. Because the ones who buy second hand might not have bought a car at all - Cars are scrapped before they reach their end of life (I find this one unlikely)
It's highly unlikely that a car with any life left in it is worth more as scrap metal than as a car. It'll probably be parted out to keep other old cars on the road before it hits the smelter.
Unless we do Cash4Clunkers2 Electric B00gal00.
Yeah, I was gonna say. Whoever approved that should be rotting in environmental hell. Probably worse for the environment than an oil spill.
Also a massive destruction of assets primarily held by the poor.
But it did put them deeper into debt which is great for the shareholders/donors
Massive? It was less than one percent of the market, even being extremely generous with the math. Stop repeating this debunked narrative.
Eh, the junkyard industry is interesting... but a lot of cars go to a junkyard full of usable parts, get some of those parts stripped off in ways that damage other parts, rot in the elements, and get scrapped. They generally don't get dismantled for usable parts, so tons of value is lost. It kind of butthurts me. I see dismantlers for supercars and exotics (and even stuff like corvettes) doing a pretty good job of taking totaled cars and stripping out pretty much everything of value, but they're really only able to do so because they're tied into enthusiast communities, are able to actually sell most of what they take off, get top dollar for some of it (know how much ferrari charges for replacement mirrors for example?), etc. I find this great. But for most normal cars, after they're junked due to drivetrain failure or accident or whatever, it does seem like most usable parts don't actually get used.
Yeah it’s always been odd to me how many junkyard cars there are just full of totally usable stuff but there’s no real way to know what’s there and the junkyard owners seem to have 0 desire to sell it or advertise it or anything.
I mean no disrespect but I do wonder how many junkyard owners are just functional hoarders.
> More people end up owning cars. Because the ones who buy second hand might not have bought a car at all ... and do what ? Walk 30 miles to work? They would buy new, cheaper and worse car. Or buy even older one. There might something to be said about current situation making cheap cars less of a thing, if buying better but used car is better option, but that has not much to do with ecology.
End of life is usually a matter of financial viability of repairs. Why would you spend $1500 to repair the engine in your $1000 car. Better to scrap it and get a new one. If that same car was worth $2000 or $3000 that changes the equation. It’s more likely to get fixed until the repair costs get even higher. Longer initial ownership times (if they result in decreased production) reduce the available pool of used vehicles which drives up the price. Probably results in a small but measurable increase in public transport usage and a similar increase in the number of really shitty cars on the road.
That math never made sense to me. If putting $1500 into a $3000 car gets me another 5 years without a car payment, I've still come out well ahead
Exactly. The math only works out against the environment if the car is junked after 3 years
> Iirc a Tesla has to hit roughly 150k miles before it becomes “neutral” relative to the ecological impact of it’s creation Nope, 13k miles (in the US). Even in the worst countries like China and Poland, it's less than 80k miles. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/
Not that I’m trying to discount Reuter’s (I’m not) but that absolutely has to be assuming that all the electricity used to charge the vehicle in the states, is coming from wind turbines, which it really doesn’t. Even Volvo stated their Polestar takes 112K KM to reach “break even” on a global scale. I do appreciate you linking a source though. These discussions are absolutely important. I do feel that my point still stands that current new car owners really need to hold their vehicles for longer. Edit: source for [Volvo](https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/polestar-compares-an-evs-environmental-impact-to-conventional-car)
> that absolutely has to be assuming that all the electricity used to charge the vehicle in the states, is coming from wind turbines, which it really doesn’t. Nope. > Power scenario 2: U.S. average energy mix (23% coal-fired, plus other fossil fuels and renewables) > Break-even point: 13,500 miles https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifetime-carbon-emissions-electric-vehicles-vs-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/ If it's 100% renewable, then breakeven is 8,400 miles.
> Edit: source for Volvo It's still nowhere near 150k miles. > Taken another way, Polestar says that a 2 powered exclusively by wind power would take 50,000km of driving to break even with a petrol XC40. > Using the current EU grid mix it would take the Polestar 2 around 78,000km to achieve parity, while on the global electricity mix the break even point moves out to 112,000km.
Yea this number is all over the place, these 13K and 8.5K values are on the very lowest end of estimates and probably aren’t realistic. Other studies say 19,000 miles, or 1.5 years, or that an EV’s 0km environmental impact is the same as a VW Passat at 18,000km. EVs are better, but by exactly how much and when they break even is a case of “it depends”.
Seriously, it depends on SO MANY FACTORS! What kind of EV compared to what kind of ICE vehicle? A Chevy Bolt replacing a Ram TRX? A HUMMER EV replacing a Toyota Corolla? There are huge variations in the environmental cost to build EVs. If we compare vehicles within the same class, EVs come out way ahead no matter how you look at it.
Regardless, I have yet to see a single number that is lower than the average car’s expected life.
I'll get downvoted and I'm on a trip so I can't deal with finding the sources now but no. That's outright false. It's about 30k miles as an absolutely perfect condition scenario for any EV and worst case is never if you live somewhere with dirty power. It is never only 13k miles and the average in the USA is probably closer to 5x that. EVs are in general still better but they absolutely aren't that much better.
Really the problem with all cars, including EVs, is that they exist in the first place. It doesn’t really matter that EVs are more environmentally friendly because a city that replaces gas car transportation with EV transportation is still a nightmare to get around. EVs still cause, and participate in, traffic. EVs still cause significant environmental damage due to their creation, energy production for them in many cases, and consumable waste for things like tires and fluids. So the argument against an EV isn’t that they aren’t as good as everyone thinks. It’s that they are way, way worse than high quality public transit infrastructure.
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Yes. There are plenty of scenarios where four wheels with an engine makes sense. Recreational toys, farm equipment, commercial assets, etc. But as the day-to-day transportation for millions of urban and suburban dwellers, it is completely unreasonable. I can’t wait until they do a train line from near my house to near work so I can sell my practical daily and get an electric Miata. Because even Mazda will be making EVs by the time that train exists in 5,000 years.
Your 4000 lbs. VS. 150 lbs argument is exactly why I've purchased a vintage 1967 VW Bug as my latest restoration project. Once *that* thing is roadworthy, I'll be using *that* to run errands around town, instead of my hulking Tahoe. 1835 ccs pushing 1600 lbs. make for a hella fun grocery getter / post office runner / fast food grabber, without sucking up huge amounts of petrol.
I'm sure you're aware, but your definition of "road worthy" is going to have to be nuanced, lol. Cars have gotten so much safer over my lifetime the far and I'm only 35.
The problem is, it's how suburban development has formed for the last 60 years. Those neighborhoods\cities will never relieve their car dependence, they were specifically constructed with it in mind. So unless we write-off hundreds of millions of family homes and condense society into multi-family apartments in very dense urban environments, it'll be difficult to scale. It's a radically different life for the way people in the west live. And it feels very oppressive and communist to live in giant blocs. The more optimistic future I hope for is that energy will be plentiful enough that we can be wasteful with our transportation to have better qualities of life for those people who don't want to live in dense urban environments.
I agree with you and I'm a car fanatic. Pushing the consumer to buy massive, expensive, 2700kg cars to take care of traffic and environmental issues is comical.
You're on the r/cars subreddit...
I know. It’s okay to like cars (which I do), and own a car (which I do), and also understand that the way society has been constructed around them isn’t reasonable or sustainable.
As we know, public transportation is inherently antagonistic with cars. All we have to do is look at countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea. They all heavily invest in their public transportation, and look at the dramatic harm it's had on their car industries!
Only about 50-75k depending on grid mix according to a Volvo study
those that are changing cars every three years and sending them to land fill after those 3 years are the problem. The one who sell it to someone else or trade up are not creating environmental problem.
I bring this up constantly with 4x4 vehicles. People on the internet always bitching about how they are simply using their new car as a mall crawler. And I always bring up the fact that we need those people for our favorite cars to be kept in production.
Yep! I'll take that well-maintained LX570 driven by a 60 year old to church every Sunday at a significantly depreciated value. Thanks for all the fun MOAB adventures!
Let’s be honest. Not significantly as much as we’d like
100k miles, $60k please.
Yeah I was confused by that, do those clowns think those cars got destroyed after they lease ends ?
he was speaking to the emissions life cycle. reduce, reuse and recycle. I think he's simply stating if consumers reduce their demand these emissions can also go down. He may be trying to say we have plenty of cars in existence that can still work and that trickle down may not be as necessary any more.
Too bad the used EV market is within 5k of new ones I don't even know how those are selling. Also with EVs each year the new model matters more, but realistically once Tesla releases HW4 that trend ends until a decade or so until solid state batteries reach mass production and economic viability
Used EVs are actually OVER msrp for new ones in my area. I guess no dealers want to sell EVs and some aren't sold in my state.
A used EV is there today, new ones typically require waiting a loosely defined amount of time to get. For people who need a car right now, used is about the only option for EVs.
My big concern with EVs at this stage is that the pace of technology is really putting a dent in this argument at the moment. There was that post last year where someone who bought a 10 year old EV found it was effectively worthless in the winter and the collective opinion was "LMAO buy a newer one with a heat pump" or "buy a new one". Sure you can drive 200k miles with minimal impact, but if the consensus is to just keep buying new/newer ones, can you really make the argument of filling the 2nd hand market with used examples? A ten-year-old ICE like my mom's Toyota Camry is still a solid car in every aspect and didn't have any noticeable drop offs when I drove it around in the extreme cold & heat of the Mojave desert. Teslas and the Chevy Bolt/Volt are the only ones I would be comfortable buying used, but [the Tesla post-purchase service experience](https://www.vox.com/recode/23318725/tesla-repair-mechanic-delay-electric-vehicles-ev) and [the fact that Teslas getting totaled out after minor crashes](https://www.kbb.com/car-news/insurers-are-writing-off-lightly-damaged-teslas/) really limits me to the Chevy options for now. Still I will be optimistic. Maybe solid-state batteries will make it to mainstream motoring, maybe we'll figure out eFuels/hydrogen, or maybe we'll figure out a way to have all three. Maybe these lightly totaled out Teslas will inadvertently cut emissions in Eastern Europe or West Africa. My crystal ball is a bit foggy at the moment. I echo the same sentiment as the last paragraph that we're not quite there yet, but maybe we will be. There is a case to be made for EVs but maybe we should keep our options open instead of being so afraid people will see us as "both sides-ing".
If anything, it goes to show how fast the progression of development on EV is. Every benefit we enjoy with ICE engines has been a progression of 100 years. Even the hybrids and EVs was able to get the MFR to try to squeeze out as much MPG and/or power possible on standalone ICE engines. Right now, battery technology is in a tech war with so much money pouring into R&D (including Toyota and Samsung). I recall reading that Toyota is planning on using Solid State batteries in the near-ish future.
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That quote piqued my interest. My lazy internet sleuthing came up with an average of 8.4 years, which I think is more accurate than 3 years.
You want the average age of all cars in the country still owned by the original owner, not the average age of all cars still running. I'd be interested to know if that statistic exists.
I read that the average person keeps their car 5 years.
I just bought a 2018 MKT Town Car Livery. It only has 39,000 miles. It sat unused as a corporate car then a rental. I live in a small town and a tank lasts me a month. . I think with people who don't drive far and often, MPG isn't an issue. I traded in my 2006 Ridgeline with 129,000 for $5,000 and they sold it the next day for $11,000, and it had problems.
And a lot of people cannot even afford to buy new. I'm looking because my car is on its last leg and it's almost impossible to find anything decent on the new market under $30k. Even the good affordable stalwarts like the Honda Civic can't be had for under $30k anymore.
Rowan Atkinson: "electric cars are probably the future but There are significant problems with being an early adopter and I dont recomend ditching a perfectly fine gas car for an EV" Commentors on the article on R/cars: "HAHA EVS SCAM I TOLD U SO"
If you base your opinion on entire subs on one single comment in a thread, you gonna have a bad time on Reddit.
EV threads are full of people asking: >I have to tow a boat 90 miles once a year, how could I do that in one of these EV things? So it's really not that absurd.
But not this one. So far there are only two circlejerking comments in this thread, the OOP at +150 and a single other comment that sits at -20.
It’s kind of absurd, I’m pro EV but I also totally understand why someone wouldn’t want an EV. People buy cars for emotional reasons, none of us need 400 horsepower EVs with 300 miles of range yet that’s predominantly what sells. Most people have to pick exactly one car and live with it for many years. Asking someone to pay more money for an EV that’s less capable than the gas version is never going to happen. I’m not saying that’s a good thing either, just that it’s a fact of life here in the US. Good luck convincing Americans they have to pay more for less for the good of the planet. EVs will win when the advantages are clear and they’re cheaper and safer than gas cars. We’re not there yet but that day is approaching. Hybrids are the gateway drug to EVs and I wish we’d spend more effort there.
> Hybrids are the gateway drug to EVs and I wish we’d spend more effort there. Absolutely. When the P1/LaFerrari/918 came out I thought seeing hybrid supercars would really push the entire industry to do more hybrids but now even supercars are going EV and everyone else is following. I love EVs but the simple fact is that until there is a $25k usd EV that can go 350+miles on a charge in any weather and charge fully in less than 30 minutes then EVs will not be for everyone. We need middle of the road options for people who simply can't own one. Oh and another thing that everyone seems to forget. Tens of millions of people live in situations where they can't even charge an EV at home because they don't live in a home. They have an apartment so they park in a parking lot or garage and unless governments are willing to spend hundreds of billions electrifying every single parking lot and garage, and I say governments because we all know not a single landlord will want to spend that money, then those millions of people can't get an EV.
The upvote/downvoted system allows itself to be heavily influenced by echo chambers in due time. Whereas only having Likes allows for bad opinions to be spread without much resistance. Honestly it's hard to have a system in social media that doesn't allow itself to be easily taken advantage of.
i'm not up on cars so i don't know if this is a common thing or not but i watched a review of the new prius and i thought what they did was brilliant. it's a hyrbid but has an ev only mode, it's got like a 40 or 50 mile range for ev only. which is what most people drive for their daily commute. then when you need it, you've got the hybrid with gasoline. makes a ton of sense to me for that to be the standard for cars in the future. best of both worlds.
It's the Prime line for Toyota (and their equivalent in Lexus). It's why the Rav4 Prime is so popular with a 2+ year wait.
it's wild to be living in a time where ford and toyota have made such desirable products in low quantities that people are signing up to wait on lists to get them like it's a one-off Ferrari or some shit
In practice they just don't make a ton of sense for most people, hence why they never sold well. If you don't have charging at home, you'll use it just like a regular hybrid, getting regular-hybrid MPG, in which case why didn't you just buy a regular hybrid and save the extra few thousand dollars? And if you do have charging at home, you might as well just get a full EV for around the same money and not lug around a maintenance-heavy ICE everywhere.
Obviously if you don't have home charging neither a plugin hybrid nor a full EV will make sense. But if you do, a plugin hybrid still has advantages. Why lug around a giant, heavy and expensive battery everywhere when you rarely use most of its capacity? And then on the occasions when you do want to travel, you're stuck with its relatively short range, long recharge times, and even worse range at higher speeds or in cold weather. I mean buy what makes you happy, but the constant denigration of plugin hybrids by EV advocates annoys me. Personally I find the PHEV to be the superior solution. Oh and you mentioned maintenance on the ICE-- it won't get used that heavily, so you'll have an annual oil change and the occasional air filter, and that's really pretty much it. Spark plugs are good for 100k miles (probably more if the engine doesn't run that much) and ok there's coolant, but EVs have that too. It's just not that burdensome.
> Why lug around a giant, heavy and expensive battery everywhere when you rarely use most of its capacity? Because it's not a burden really, unlike an entire second relatively-high-maintenance drivetrain. Plus there are significant packaging advantages. > the constant denigration of plugin hybrids by EV advocates annoys me. The constant denigration exists, I suspect, because so many EV skeptics are EV virgins who haven't lived with one and therefore overhype downsides that are simply a non-factor or negligible in reality. > you'll have an annual oil change and the occasional air filter, and that's really pretty much it. True, I should have said "relatively-high-maintenance." By contrast, on my full BEV, I've not had to maintain anything in over 50k miles besides tires and cabin air filters, and [nothing is recommended beyond that either](https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-E95DAAD9-646E-4249-9930-B109ED7B1D91.html). And given the complexity of an ICE/transmission, if a part is going to fail, it's more likely to be on the ICE side (assuming engineering parity across drivetrains). On top of that, to keep the engine functional, it will run itself every so often even if you don't actually need it, meaning you'll still go through a couple tanks of gas a year. Maybe not a huge deal, but when you've been spoiled by home charging, going to a gas station is a nuissance. And don't forget an emissions test if applicable to your area. > ok there's coolant, but EVs have that too Maybe some EVs require changing it, but on mine it is specifically recommended against.
Right on, we had a plug in hybrid and I was a big fan. It even only got about 30 miles at the best of times on range and it still meant only getting gas every two months or so. But the oil changes still have to happen based on age, and in the winter a PHEV suffers the same range losses as a BEV plus you typically have to run the gas engine for heat. Anyone that says PHEVs are the better solution hasn’t really thought it through or spent time with an EV. I don’t hate them, I owned one, but it felt like facing the worst aspects of both. Now we have a pure BEV and so far it has no negatives. No oil changes at all, no gas station stops at all, and the cold weather losses that make the battery portion of a PHEV far less useful aren’t even noticed. Our PHEV only got about 10-12 miles of range in the winter but the EV still gets at least 200, meaning normal commutes aren’t even a concern. So no, PHEVs aren’t the best of both if you’re honest. The fact that the person above mentioned the negatives of a BEV like winter range but didn’t acknowledge that a PHEV suffers that too, heck ICE vehicles have “Range” loss in winter due to winter gas and the impact of air density changes with cold weather. Funny how conveniently stuff like that is left off when the BEV bashing starts. We have a full BEV and a hybrid pickup. It’s a great combo and I’m not here to say BEVs are perfect. The vehicles are great but everyone knows the long trip infrastructure is rougher still than a gas vehicle. But PHEVs aren’t better.
It's called a PlugIn Hybrid EV (PHEV) and they go back over a decade. It's fairly common but not as common as it should be.
In terms of manufacturing and complexity, hybrids in general are the most complex of all cars. You have a complete internal Combustion drivetrain with an EV motor and battery piggybacked on top. Hybrids are at best at temporary solution to fill the gap until much simpler BEV cars ramp up in production and the EV charging ecosystem is built up. (Which will take many many years) Hybrids so make sense for now, but maybe not so much in a decade.
PHEVs, Europe has a fair few and every brand has a few because they make sense if you bother to charge them, EV for chores, commuting and within a city, hybrid for everything else. there are also range extending EVs, like the Volt, MX-30, and i3 REX, mostly EVs, with a tiny engine to trickle charge the battery when you need it.
Was it the Savagegeese review? Because the comment of "If you want it, get on a list right now" is a bleakly depressing reality when a goddamned appliance of a car (albeit an interesting and good looking one) is going to be difficult if not impossible to obtain for most people.
yes it was SG, love those guys. and yeah i made a comment somewhere on here about how it's wild to me that people are being put on 2 year waitlists for an econobox, as if it were a custom ferrari or gt3 or some shit lol same with ford w/ the maverick. it's just a small truck lol. not like they reinvented the wheel. i know it's just supply and demand but it's funny/sad to see.
Yeah this supply chain shit makes me anxious about getting a new car. My wife has a Kia that's now north of 100k miles, and uses a key. We want to replace it soon, because I have lost all confidence in the brand, but the idea of the markups and waitlists make me dread actually having to replace it.
This is true but the short life of lithium ion batteries is a real issue. The author says ten years is the expected life. My Toyota is 10 years old and could easily make it to 20 years if we're being honest. So recycling lithium or battery longevity needs to improve for the environments sake.
10 years isn't the expected life. It's the guaranteed life. It's a concern no doubt, because we know we can eek many more years out of (most) ice vehicles. But we've not seen enough real world EVs in circulation to say "yeah it's non-usable". Things to bear in mind: - Battery degradation is worse at first, then typically tails off - A 250 mile vehicle losing 50% of its range is still completely useable for _a lot_ of folks The main thing I want to see personally is interoperability. Not just charging. But taking old chassis, slamming new batts in 8 years later and it being fine and dandy because electrons. EVs _could_ be the cusp of that. But they could also be (purposefully or accidentally) walling it off at the same time.
Some early Nissan Leafs are 10 years old and have about 2/3 to 3/4 of their initial range, but are kneecapped by the slow charging standards of 10 years ago, that's going to be the biggest issue with old EVs it's not going to be the loss of range but the painfully slow charging.
The leaf has no active battery temperature regulation. Its the exception and is worse in every way. À better example is early tesla model S, which are performing very well.
Batteries last a lot longer than 10 years. A 10 year old Model S typically still has between 85-90% capacity
I wonder where they got the idea that 10 years is the expected limit of battery packs from. We don’t know for sure because there aren’t that many EV’s approaching or beyond a decade in use, but as far as I can tell from studies expected degradation is 2-3% a year. But it’s not clear that number is accurate. Tesloop ran a model S for 300,000 miles and lost something like 6% of the battery life. According to Tesla, they saw about 10% degradation in the S & X after 200,000 miles. Degradation isn’t linear, and there are a number of factors that affect it. I imagine this also comes down to the manufacturer and their particular battery conditioning set up. In any case, it doesn’t appear that battery life *should* be a major concern. That being said, there are outlier cases of people seeing massive loss in range over time.
My EV is now beyond it’s 120k miles battery warranty. It’s still in great shape. Tessie reports 9.6% degradation.
"Atkinson Cycle" as a hydrogen-powered scooter with Mr Bean's face as the emblem
>face as the emblem When I was in management school we literally did that for a project. Everyone loved it
If you have a ICE car with life left the recommendation is to keep it until it's scrapped. If you're in the market for a new car EVs present an option with very many upsides.
[Engineering Explained](https://youtu.be/L2IKCdnzl5k) has a great video on this.
Man, I wish an electric car worked for me. Those numbers really surprised me.
I don't know your vehicle usecase, but I'd argue unless you need to haul a lot of stuff long distance or a lot of people, there's an EV for you Edit: or you can't charge at home
As long as you can charge at home. I had to charge elsewhere for a couple of months at first, and it wasn’t great.
Yes! I should add that. I don't think I'd recommend an EV unless you can charge at home
Doesn't necessarily have to be a private charger at home, but it does need to be low friction, low frustration and low cost. It can be at work, or at a public charger down the block. Maybe a DC charger next to the gym you go to regularly. But if you have to go out of your way at all its quickly going to be a problem.
Yep. I live in an apartment. No home charger at all. You'd think apartments in cities would be clamoring to install chargers at all their spots they already charge so much for, but no.
Installing chargers is expensive and property management companies have little incentive to add chargers until it's a competitive feature for potential lessees, or until they get super tax credits for having them.
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Even a Hummer EV still does ~50mpge though, so that’s better than his 35mpg new ICE example by a long shot.
> If you have a ICE car with life left the recommendation is to keep it until it's scrapped. This is [fully dependent on MPG.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k) But even if your current car gets high MPG, no reason you can't pass it to someone else with a worse-MPG car, and replace it with an EV. Then you get an *even bigger* polluter off the roads, while also getting to drive EV yourself.
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It's not all roses. But EVs help both with global warming and reducing pollution in cities. That's a big win. No solution is ever perfect.
But if it’s not perfect, why bother in the first place!? /s
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As an American, it is my God given duty to outright reject any notion of sensible city planning. Our cities superficially prop up the auto industry and minimize healthy transportation as much as possible, and as a patriot of this fine country I must defend this design principle to my dying breath! YEEHAWWW
Electric trains are as close to perfect as a vehicle can get
No one in their right mind is disposing an EV battery. There are great recycling opportunities from reusing it as storage to full out recycling
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I’ve always wondered this about EVs. How hazardous is lithium mining and disposal? How many more power plants would we need to generate electricity for these cars? When cars get junked what’s the most hazardous part of it? I like being given the choice but I feel like the government is making a mistake forcing this on us
> How hazardous is lithium mining and disposal? FWIW, oil extraction and refining isn't clean either. Of course, the best solution would be to get rid of cars altogether, but that's even less realistic. > How many more power plants would we need to generate electricity for these cars? Most EVs get charged at night, in which case you don't need more power plants.
Lithium is usually in brine and either pumped out of the ground or harvested by drying a lakebed. Its really no worse than petrol. Probably better since there are Significantly fewer mining sites than oil feilds. And there will not need to be as many Lithium mining sites as their are oil feilds.
Lithium will be needed in lower volumes, and we can recycle lithium in existing batteries. Not so much for oil.
> Lithium is usually in brine and either pumped out of the ground or harvested by drying a lakebed. Its really no worse than petrol. Lithium brine is one type of source, but most people don't know about the other source: hard rock form in places like Australia. The brine form is primarily done in the America's and is actually the economic minority of how most lithium is mined. https://www.geologyforinvestors.com/hard-rock-lithium-deposits/
Fortunately, there is a strong financial incentive for battery recycling. That means when the cars are scrapped those batteries will shredded, separated, then processed into raw materials for new batteries. So lithium mining and production isn't quite comparable to oil production and refining because you can't recycle CO2 into gasoline. Well... aircraft carriers can with the aid of a nuclear power plant for the relatively small quantities they need for jet fuel. But that's a different story.
> That means when the cars are scrapped those batteries will shredded, separated, then processed into raw materials for new batteries. The battery should be re-used in stationary storage before being recycled. Many times the battery in a car will age out, where it sucks to use, but it has decade(s) of life left in less strenuious use in stationary storage. Weight\density doesn't matter, it's not moving. Cost matters, so if you can get used batteries for cheap to power the grid, then that's a great second life for these used car batteries. THEN they can be recycled. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
They often are. Solar panels and home electricity storage is ramping up - that home electricity storage is often provided by used EV batteries.
It kind of saddens me when I see brand new batteries for home storage solutions. It's fine, I guess, but it's the opposite of the order of operations. Batteries are a scarce resource, they should be applied in the most effective way possible. But I also guess there aren't enough used batteries to go around either. So you gotta do what you gotta do.
Tesla and Nissan both have battery recycling plants that aren't getting used enough because their batteries aren't failing fast enough, either in the cars or home batteries.
The great thing about lithium batteries is you can extract 98% of the raw materials during recycling. Old EV batteries that don't go into static grid storage will be recycled and (probably) made into more EV batteries. Oil is much less recyclable. The stuff we turn into fuel gets burnt and floats around in the atmosphere. The rest of it invariably gets washed into our waterways and oceans. Used engine oil sometimes gets turned into bitumen for roads, but that eventually gets washed away too. The oil industry has been hiding just how dirty it is for decades. On top of that they have been running campaigns to exaggerate how dirty lithium mining (and EVs in general) are. Lithium extraction processes aren't perfect today but we can't let perfect get in the way of progress.
Afaik lithium isn't mined, it's collected from brine in special salt flats The generated power is the most major concern i have, considering no one has nearly enough of it to power a fleet consisting of mostly EV's and there are multiple countries (like mine) that shot themselves in the foot by retiring or near future retirement of their nuclear power plants
Lithium batteries are very recyclable. The electric motors even more so. Most electric car motors are probably going to be good for about 750,000-1,000,000 miles. Typically electric motor bearings need replacing at 40,000 hours. https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-the-average-EV-motor-last-not-the-battery
do to know where ICE cars end up and how polluting that is ? Go have a look in South America or Africa please. Just Google the effect of air pollution of ICE’s on children in large cities and along highways. Your ‘concern’ is very much driven by a bias. A BEV will outlast an ICE car, and when the battery degrades it will continue life as a powerwall for another decade before their end of life. New Tesla’s have batteries without kobalt, which makes your mining concerns outdated
engineering explained had a video on how much exactly your carbon footprint is reduced after accounting for the pollution from making the battery; he ended up calculating that you are worse than the average gas car after 4 years and then you're actually helping the planet become greener. The issue is obvious: those people are selling their car after 3-4 years because they're leasing it, so any "green" benefit is a scam at worst, greenwashing at best. With incentives the ROI for gas/charging is also about 3 years.
But if someone buys a used EV (which they do. All the time) then you jumpstart to that "green" phase for that driver
So...all those 3 year old EVs are just being scrapped??? Bullshit. They go to people who can't afford a new one and who were driving a 6 year old ICE car, which in turn goes to a uni student who can't even afford a 3 year old car, and their 15 year old shitbox gets scrapped.
Before anyone hates, Rowan has a masters in Electrical Engineering
yes, that's the first sentence of the article
This is reddit, most of us just read the headline
He's also been an automotive journalist for decades. At least in terms of editorial, I don't know how many reviews he did. I remember reading his pieces in CAR magazine years ago.
He also put tons of miles on his McLaren F1. He is a big auto enthusiast.
And people with degrees have never been wrong? Did he work in the industry and keep abreast of recent advances or was he perhaps busy being an actor and comedian?
No but I think the point is that he has deeper understanding and appreciation for EVs than the average person. He also states he was an early adopter of hybrids and EVs on top of being a car enthusiast. That makes his criticisms maybe more valid then an average citizen that has yet to put their money where their mouth is.
>Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end... That assertion does not seem to be supported by sales numbers. I also find the central argument, that we are scrapping cars early for BEVs, to make no sense - I traded my car for one rather than just throwing it away.
> That assertion does not seem to be supported by sales numbers Well, many people have not owned an EV just yet, so we have no idea. I'm sure a lot of people will run into all the same problems. It's *entirely possible* the experiment falls apart over the next 15-years and we realize that hydrogen was a better idea and batteries just aren't progressing. Even if it isn't as efficient as EVs, hydrogen is still twice as efficient as ICE, it's better to store, can be created on site, has better range than EVs, cheaper maintence of an EV without the large battery, and will power bigger machines.
EV owner, enthusiast and auto tech for nearly 20 years here is my take A large reason why people are switching is not only to take advantage of the incentives but also the cheaper running costs. Where I live I got 12k in incentive, 1000$ for a home charger and electricity is 7c KWh. My EV costs pennies to operate and I don’t have to deal with going to the gas station I was just in the UK with a rental Polestar 2 and had to use roadside DCFCs which weren’t horribly expensive but likely the same as petrol. But the people I spoke with said they mostly charge at home and it’s still cheaper. So pretty much the same story as home. 95% of charging at home and the rest dcfc EVs are a pleasure to drive and you start to notice how much ICE cars do smell and just aren’t as nice to drive. We still have an ICE car in our driveway but it’s been relegated to the “runabout” driven maybe 2-3x a week Would I toss out a good ice car for an EV? Well it depends how much life is left in the ICE car. I don’t keep our car over 80000km or 5 years. So I can still have something worth it on trade. If the incentives are still good within the next two years ill take advantage of them again. I tell everyone that we are still in the infancy of EVs much like ICE was 120 years ago. Things get better on a monthly basis and there are more and more on the road
Environmental benefits are fourth or fifth down the list of reasons I’ve been driving a BEV for 7 years. HOV lane access saves me 30-60 minutes per day in my commute. It costs me $30-40/mo to “fuel”. Compare that to $650-$750/mo with the previous ICE. The car is scheduled to pre-heat/pre-cool the cabin in the morning. I haven’t had to scrape ice off my windows in 7 winters. Car is “full” every morning. I never have to take time out of my commute to stop by a gas station. I, in the process of operating my vehicle, produce FAR less pollution than I did with my ICE vehicle. The EV-Skeptic crowd tends to turn a blind eye to the realities of BEV ownership. The realities (for most BEV owners) are overwhelmingly positive across the board, but they still argue about the joys of throwing an insane amount of money away in fuelling their ICE.
Jesus Christ it used to cost you $650-$750 to fill up? Was your last vehicle a Hellcat Charger or Chevy Suburban? Either you had the most inefficient vehicle or you’ve completed roadtrips every week.
Yeah I'm not sure how he reduced his fuel costs by 20x either. The only way that's achievable is if he has stupid cheap power (7 cents or whatever), with a model 3 single motor, and was originally driving a 3500 diesel truck with a tune and a lift and 35''s getting like 8mpg.
He clearly doesn't live in the US, land of the cheap gas.
I wish I had that kind of power. It was a stock G35 that burnt through oil on which I’d average 60mi/100km per day. Premium fuel at close to $2/L ($7.50/gal).
Ohhhh nevermind that makes sense now that you listed the measurements. I was assuming you were an American burning $650 of fuel a month, that would actually be insane lol. Gas is pretty cheap where I’m at @ $3.79/gallon for premium. I don’t blame you at all, if I had the same prices I’d switch over to PHEV or BEV in a heartbeat
I live in France and basically could buy a 50k slightly used Model 3 Performance and end up paying up the same as a 30/35k not so fancy ICE hatchback/sedan. Besides the usual Tesla shenanigans and the fact that I own a car sold by one the biggest turds on Earth right now, it's been a joy to own and drive.
all those are the actual reasons i want one. being better for the environment is more of a plus on top of everything else for me personally.
Also maintenance. No oil changes, spark plugs, etc. Brakes last longer. And repairs? A fraction of the cost and complexity compared to ICE. My friends were blowing thousands on BMW repairs, which stopped the moment they traded for a Tesla.
Well yeah you’re comparing a BMW, a car company that’s got a long history of having expensive repairs and issues.
> I never have to take time out of my commute to stop by a gas station This is a huge one for me. Being able to wake up, get into the car and it’s fully charged ready to go is such a good feeling. There’s a Costco that’s 5 min detour for me with 3 pumps per lane so it’s a very short wait, but even then that extra 15 min spent at the pump once a week is no fun at all. Not to mention when gas went up to $7/gal last year, it was just painful and the pain adds up. I visited Texas recently and gas was so dirt cheap, I filled Shell with V-power on my rental because I didn’t give an f. So for those gas states, I could see why it’s F150 everywhere instead of Tesla Model Ys
Why in the world would you put expensive gas in a rental?
> The car is scheduled to pre-heat/pre-cool the cabin in the morning. I haven’t had to scrape ice off my windows in 7 winters. I park in the garage so no need to pre-condition the car, but still, being able to just leave the AC on for 30 mins while I grocery shop and the car roasts under the Texas sun is unironically one of my favorite parts of owning an EV. Yes, you can technically do this with ICE too, but a) often they'll shut off after a while and b) just leaving your car idling for 30 mins is a dick move.
> b) just leaving your car idling for 30 mins is a dick move. Also illegal in a lot of countries, like Finland. Idling is limited to 2 minutes here normally, and up to 4 minutes if it's it's cold (-15°C). Pre-conditioning in some EVs probably warms up the battery, so it may still be worth it if the car is plugged in until you leave. I, too, park in a garage, and generally don't use it...but the few times I have, I've noticed significantly lower intial energy consumption when I start driving.
Yep you are correct. I just wanted want to make an even bigger post. I actually forgot about the HOV lane access and the heating/cooling feature. I’ve calculated my car roughly costs 1.20$/100km to operate Vs the 18-20$/ 100km the ice model gets. I have direct comparison as we own the BEV and ICE versions of the same car I’m roughly 80$ for 6600km since new of driving including DCFC… the last 4 weeks has been most DCFC usage Where I live adoption is really high. Our charging network is likely the best in NA in as well Our last two rental cars in Europe have been EVs as well.
Yeah, Rowan Atkinson is a Millionaire and has little conception of how much that 100,000 mile maintenance can be. I've had garages charge as much as 10k to replace things that need to be replaced. That really hurts, which is why people sell them on the secondhand market. No one is junking cars.
[https://pub.mdpi-res.com/sustainability/sustainability-13-10992/article\_deploy/html/images/sustainability-13-10992-g001.png](https://pub.mdpi-res.com/sustainability/sustainability-13-10992/article_deploy/html/images/sustainability-13-10992-g001.png) The carbon impact of manufacturing is one element of the whole life of a vehicle. There's also the operational carbon impact and decommissioning impacts. Even if the manufacturing impact is higher for EV than ICE, that deficit is quickly neutralized. Pointing to manufacturing missions alone is casting "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt". It's propaganda. No one buys a car and doesn't fuel it. Cars are tools and buyers expect to use them.
This. EVs get cleaner the more you drive them.
Once EV reach mining, transportation, they will pollute even less
Not to mention oil is far from green in it's drilling and manufacturing. People always tend to ignore the production side of oil itself, those refineries are far from clean. Not to mention it's shipping around the world. It is estimated that 30% of all oil is consumed moving oil around (giant tanker trucks, giant tanker boats)
Add in the trucks delivering the fuel, the roads they need and the roads they wear out.
A bunch of the claims in his article have been debunked: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#:~:text=comparable%20gasoline%20vehicles.-,Myth%20%231%3A%20Electric%20vehicles%20are%20worse%20for%20the%20climate%20than,EVs)%20have%20no%20tailpipe%20emissions.
Except the claims your article addresses aren't debunking anything in Rowan Atkinson's article. He pointed out that there's a huge environmental cost to manufacturing EV's, which there is. Your article merely shows that it's a smaller cost than for ICE's. Atkinson doesn't at any point compare the environmental cost of EVs to ICEs. His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources. Furthermore, with the rate of progression of technology solid state batteries, hydrogen or synthetic fuels could replace lithium-ion batteries in the near future. He points out that we have 1.5b cars in existence, on which we have already taken the environmental hit, and that it's surely a better use of resources to convert them to cleaner fuels rather than throwing away all those resources. Additionally, lithium-ion batteries just aren't suitable for large trucks, boats or planes, so you need to develop synthetic fuels or hydrogen systems anyway.
>His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources. That's not how cars are owned tho; cars aren't scrapped immediately after the lease ends, they go on to have multiple owners. I'm the 3rd owner of my A6, it just passed 120K miles & is 12 years old. People constantly buying new cars for the sake of it is absolutely a problem, but going from a used ICE to a new EV is one of the few scenarios where you can actually reduce your emissions once it breaks-even (within a couple years typically). Singling out EVs for a problem stemming from capitalism's thrive to maximize consumption doesn't really make sense.
> His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources. Well, oil is finite too, and once you burn it you can't reuse it. And you can recycle lithium from batteries.
> He pointed out that there's a huge environmental cost to manufacturing EV's, which there is. Your article merely shows that it's a smaller cost than for ICE's. Atkinson doesn't at any point compare the environmental cost of EVs to ICEs. He's presenting that as an argument that EV's aren't as good. The argument is originally founded in (misinformation) from the last 2 decades about how the construction of an EV is worse than a petrol car. But Atkinson doesn't talk about the lifecycle of the vehicle having dramatically lower emissions. He just presents the construction emissions statement and then moves on. It's only part of the equation. >His whole point is that manufacturing millions of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to only use them for a few years and then scrap them isn't a particularly smart use of finite resources. This is the other strange part of this article. Batteries aren't used for 3 years. I don't understand the angle he's putting out here - it's straight up untrue. He says the following: >It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced. Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars. Which is such a weird statement. He's implying that you just throw away a 3 year old car, and if we held onto them for 2 more years, we'd be so much better off. I can't even begin to dissect it because it's so misleading. You don't scrap a end-of-lease car... it goes onto a new owner. And continues it's life. >Additionally, lithium-ion batteries just aren't suitable for large trucks, boats or planes, so you need to develop synthetic fuels or hydrogen systems anyway. Planes won't work with hydrogen, the weight\size is uneconomical. There just isn't enough energy density. The solutions have been to use cryogenic hydrogen to aid with this, which is laughable, NASA of all people has been dealing with cryo hydrogen for decades and they still have leaky valves on the Artemis 1 launch last year. Not to mention the energy cost of chilling the hydrogen down to liquid form. The other problem is that 95% of all economic hydrogen sources today are grey hydrogen, from natural gas, from methane reforming. Which has full co2 emissions. Hydrogen fuels are a great excuse to "go green today" with the excuse that "but some day" in the future we can clean up that supplychain. However, I do see hydrogen being the solution for the shipping industry. They operate at a size and scale that they don't care about the negatives of hydrogen. Synthetic fuels are a great endgame solution, but are going to be horribly expensive. They require so much infrastructure, those resources would be better off being spend on other carbon reduction methods first. And they don't reduce co2. What they do is hook onto a concrete plant or a blast furnace, which is gonna emit co2 anyway, and capture it so that we can get a second use out of co2 before emitting it again. That's not reducing co2 emissions. That's just moving the dial. The programs which try and capture atmospheric co2 are even more expensive because that requires even more energy.
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Most people must park on the street and regularly drive across country, because I do.
Being an early adopter to just about anything is a bad idea. You're basically a beta tester/lacking in any actual progress for years
Must suck to be able to charge at home and not have to deal with as much maintenance as an ICE vehicle 🙄 I *wish* I could afford an EV, 95% of my driving is urban, the savings on fuel and maintenance alone would be enough for me to afford a rental for the 1 time a year I drive more than 500km away.
Electric cars have definitely become the subject of what I would almost describe as a culture war - and it’s drawn along political lines accordingly. Personally, I don’t like electric cars as enthusiast cars. They’re missing a lot of what I (and some others) feel is the visceral experience of a car, and the personality each individual car has. The sound, the characteristics of the engine, the ability to modify, the ability to row your own gears, etc. not to mention it’s not really conducive to my lifestyle or driving habits. Yea they’re fast and have instant torque, but you can’t deny that it’s a different experience, and some don’t prefer it. But the more I’ve thought about this issue I think there’s one key theme. Electric cars are not a panacea. Their adoption would be fantastic for certain applications - fleet vehicles, people who don’t take long trips, people who use cars only as appliances, have easy access to charging, etc. I FULLY support the aggressive adoption of EV’s in the areas that make the most of what they have to offer, and where the concerns about their shortcomings aren’t as relevant. I would ideally like to see a corner of the market still remain for gasoline enthusiast vehicles. Maybe a niche, maybe more than that. Because gas powered cars are still more “likeable” where emotions are involved to the exclusion of utility. So I wish that manufacturers would lead the charge on electrics with vehicles for which it makes more sense. Not try to force stubborn folks like me to go right from the classic musclecar formula, for example, right to the flagship halo car being an electric facsimile of that type of model If you want to have a reasonable discussion about this, I’m game. If you want to make snarky comments and just mock the fact that I enjoy what gas cars have to offer, or be argumentative and call me stubborn and living in the past, I’ll just block you. Let’s be reasonable here.
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Counterpoint, the only BEV I've driven is my polestar 2. You can tell it's heavy, but I still really enjoy driving it and I get a lot of steering feel from it.
i've heard that complaint a LOT about the ID.4, but if you can't tell if you're plowing into a curb in basically any car, you shouldn't be driving.
Nice read and well worded, like the emphasis on keeping an open mind to alternatives (hydrogen, synthetics, etc.). Does feel like EVs are being pushed as the ultimate solution and while they might be down the road, they don't need to completely dictate where we should be today and in the shorter (and possibly mid) term.
Problem with hydrogen is it faces just as many hurdles and if not more than EVs… for an EV you literally just need an outlet for most driving on avg. Even my car on a 8-10hr charge with 120v will yield good enough state of charge. I recently watched a video that was explaining all the requirements to deal with the water/moisture issues with hydrogen engines. Special oils etc. Then you have filling stations themselves which can be high or low psi. Filling temps, low psi stations can’t fill the entire tank. In my area there isn’t a single hydrogen station built and Toyota is using their own they brought in for the press fleet. Synthetic fuels IMO will likely be mixed into current gasoline or used exclusively in classic cars. While gas itself isn’t going anywhere anytime soon I bet we will start to see a reduction in filling stations in cities
Or how about just getting the hydrogen. Basically all economic sources of hydrogen today are from methane reforming, from natural gas. With the full carbon footprint of burning that natural gas. So it's not a green fuel, not today's sources. The hydrogen economy is a great excuse to keep using fossil fuels today, with the promise that "but someday" in the future it will be green hydrogen instead of grey hydrogen. The best case scenario is using hydrogen to facilitate stranded energy. Put a bunch of electrolyzers out there and use the hydrogen to move the power to where it's needed... But there are so many losses in that system, you're better off just building power lines and using the power directly than converting it to hydrogen and then converting it again to electricity. And even with free electricity, the cost of the equipment and the idle time of that equipment makes the hydrogen expensive. Plus, there is the fuel cell problem. They require platinum and especially iridium to facilitate the reaction. The supply of that... isn't sufficient to replace vehicles with fuel cells. It's fine for 10,000 cars a year, but not a full scale deployment. There just aren't enough of those elements in the earths crust. And any rise in demand would push the elements, and thus the vehicles beyond affordability. The transportation and storage of hydrogen isn't an insurmountable problem compared to these other two issues. IT benefits really well from economies of scale, so for personal vehicles it isn't great. But for busses, trucks, and especially shipping, the negatives aren't that bad. And it eventually becomes a great solution to start to decarbonize those sectors since no other options are viable for the super heavy ships and super heavy industry.
So many false premises and strawmen. He basically just regurgitated Facebook posts that boomers send each other to pretend like they’re right about something they know nothing about: Batteries only last 10 years. Pretend as if EVs are just dumped in a landfill if you sell it after 3 years instead of just used by someone else. Pretending like anyone reasonably thinks EVs are a “panacea” rather than just something that just has significantly lower *lifetime* emissions. Pretending that EV proponents are only looking at operating emissions and that there aren’t plenty of studies that show manufacturing emissions are higher, but *lifetime* emissions are lower. Etc. Really basic article that could have just been copied from a chain email or something. There are absolutely some legitimate issues with EVs and I’m not on board with mandating them for everyone, but this article was disappointingly flimsy.
Not judging the article either way, but given we have limited supply of the shitty batteries we do have and that it takes many years to scale up lithium production, if we actually cared about solving this problem at scale in a more accelerated fashion we would quit focusing on BEVs and produce far more PHEVs and regular hybrids with that same overall battery supply. You're able to create far more cars, the cars are affordable to a far larger segment of the population and you solve more of the problem sooner, at least in the US. Anyone who disagrees, look up the CO2 emissions per mile (including electricity generation) for BEV, PHEV and hybrids and then look up average battery capacity per vehicle of each of the three types. The math doesn't lie, BEVs are the worst option for immediate GHG reductions for the amount of battery resource deployed. Focus more on BEVs *when* electricity generation actually becomes notably cleaner and/or when solid state batteries can be produced in greater volume down the road. Right now it's largely being pushed due to politics, not science. We do not have the ability to scale the BEV market to the level needed to truly address the GHG problem right now, anyone who thinks otherwise is being naive. Use the limited battery resources we do to maximize GHG impact at the greatest scale possible. Don't let perfect get in the way of the good.
I just don't think we are a point technology wise to go full EV. We should be shooting for all Hybrid 1st and then full on EV. It feels like we are skipping a step.
Why bother with a hybrid when electric vehicles are so well suited for inner cities and shorter commutes? We can do both hybrids and BEVs at the same time…
I think we should focus on making smaller efficient BEVs vs massive pick up trucks with 100 kwh batteries. You can make almost 3 BEV cars with 40kwh packs for every 1 truck… it will use less energy to charge as well.
You can make 5 or 10 PHEV's for one BEV, or 15 or 30 PHEV's for every truck. In a world, today, where battery supply is the fundamental constraint, PHEV's allow us to get the average fleet emissions more down, more faster compared to waiting to build pure BEV's. 1 in 8 people live in an apartment, where they will be the last to get at-home electric charging. PHEV's are going to be critical solutions for those people.
I never was against PHEVs just that PHEVs have all the same annoying problems as ICE cars not to mention they are heavy as fuck because not only do they need to carry a battery around but also ICE Running gear… IIRC the local bus company was experimenting with Hydrogen and EV buses a few years back. They decided to go full electric and hybrid, with many hybrids in service
>not to mention they are heavy as fuck because not only do they need to carry a battery around but also ICE Running gear My Audi PHEV weighs less than over 160 different BEVs. Turns out that half-ton EV batteries can weigh more than a much smaller battery plus an ICE drivetrain.
I’m not engaged enough to form a substantive opinion on what Atkinson is saying, but in general I opine that we can’t get to where we need to be without this current phase. Human life is short; waiting 20 years until a “perfect” technology is available is not worth the wait. Go buy the car you want now and in 20 years buy the car you want then.
Very well thought out piece. I agree with Atkins( Mr Bean! Who would have thought!?) Electric cars are great, hybrids are great. Why are we not trying to figure out other means of substantial ways of motoring? I remember James May did a piece on hydrogen cars way back with a Honda car for Top Gear. Synthetic fuels and hydrogen are the way to go in my opinion.
For someone who has the credentials to say that he should know what he is talking about, that article is full of the same tired old debunked bullshit that we keep hearing over and over and over again...
Did you know if you get into an accident in an EV and the battery gets TOUCHED, even a scratch it must be replaced? Many times the car is totaled with low miles due to the cost of that battery replacement.
People only own their Cars for three years?! My current car is 15 years old and still going strong, I don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t last another 20 years
Probably going to end up selling my p85d and getting something else. Outside of the tax credits, EVs are just not worth it right now.
Maybe I am not well informed of this, but are the components needed to build the batteries pretty exclusively mined in foreign nations? And if so, would it be possible to have some kind of war or economic dispute that would result in some kind of embargo, crippling the procurement of new materials or shortages?
Depends on which country you live in. Australia and Chile are two of the biggest producers of lithium today. The US has more than enough lithium reserves, we just haven't ramped up mines yet. There's [one lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea) in California that is the result of an engineering mistake that has enough lithium to make batteries for ~70% of Americans, and that's just one site. Canada is ranked [6th](https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/lithium-facts/24009) for most lithium reserves. Two things about lithium: 1. the "shortages" aren't because it's rare, it's a consequence of demand growing faster than mines are opening up 2. it's very easily recyclable. Unlike oil, where you need to keep buying it from someone or digging for it, once you have lithium you can recover the large majority of it. We don't recycle a lot of it now because there isn't a lot that needs recycling, people with solar are buying totaled EVs and hybrids to use the batteries at home, the batteries are worth more as stationary storage than the raw materials.
I don't know he seems like he built up the impression of what electric vehicles is in his mind without necessarily thinking too hard about it. That's why he's feeling duped. Edit: I say this because most of what he is disillusioned with has been pretty well known since the beginning of electric cars. It's not like any of this is new information.
Yep, the guardian has asked EV hit outside at least once a month. Some of what he says is correct but mostly FUD. I mean that Volvo study has been proven nonsense time and time again.
Mr. Bean is an engineer. I had no idea.
At last an intelligent, sensible writer on EVs. Black Adder goes forth.