Following is in video description by @MoneyShift
The most common argument against electric cars is that once you factor in battery manufacturing and lithium mining, they aren’t actually cleaner. MIT tested that directly, and the answer is no longer ambiguous.
Researchers Marco Miotti and Jessika Trancik built a lifecycle model covering thousands of US zip codes, drilling down to individual driver behavior rather than comparing broad regions. They accounted for battery and vehicle manufacturing, fuel extraction and refining, regional electricity mix, local meteorological data, traffic density, trip length and duration, acceleration patterns, gas and electricity prices, and state fees. The study appears in Environmental Research Letters.
The concession first: building a battery is dirtier than building a comparable gas car, and an EV starts life with a larger manufacturing footprint. MIT states that plainly rather than working around it.
The findings: in most US locations, a battery electric vehicle reduces lifetime greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 60 percent compared to a similar gas vehicle, with larger reductions in urban areas. On cold weather, MIT found that in a climate like North Dakota, efficiency can drop as much as 50 percent on a particularly frigid night, but the effect on annual emissions benefits is minimal. Miotti’s own conclusion was that even in the most unfavorable conditions, EVs still reduce emissions substantially.
On cost, EVs are competitive with comparable combustion vehicles in lifetime ownership cost across most of the country, even without clean vehicle tax credits. Where electricity is relatively affordable, battery electrics tend to cost less outright. The study also found that individual driving behavior matters roughly as much as regional electricity mix, with the biggest reductions going to people who drive more, drive larger vehicles, and spend more time in traffic.
MIT also updated their public tool at carboncounter.com, where you can compare lifecycle emissions and ownership costs for nearly any car on the market.
None of this means you have to like electric cars. Dislike the steering feel. Dislike the brake feel. Want a manual. Those are real objections. The emissions one is finished.
Car news the way Doug DeMuro, Jason Cammisa and Chris Harris cover cars, every day
Might be an unpopular statement on this community: But I was actually still on the fence if current EVs were a net benefit or not.
I’m also torn between waiting for newer makes/models to hit the Canadian market, and buying one now before they start putting AI in them.
What would AI do in a car? Lemmy paranoia is tedious.
My only issue is winter range. I have a long commute with no charger at the office and in the winter I did the math, and the range on even the newer EVs cuts it too close for comfort especially since the batteries degrade over time.
I also don’t have a good place to charge right now, I’d need to extend my driveway.
Otherwise I’d have one. At least I wfh most of the time so I don’t guzzle a huge amount of gas.
The problem with EVs isn’t that they’re better than ICE cars, it’s that they’re the least better alternative.
If you’re forced to own a car, they’re the superior option. But also, bikes and buses and carpooling are all even better. Hell, just owning a smaller car can be an enormous improvement.
I think we’ve crossed that bridge about ten years ago. Just about every car has a digital dashboard now. And all those dashboards update remotely. If your vehicle doesn’t have some AI bloat in it yet, you’re always a forced update away from getting it.
Really need an openwrt equivalent for cars soon
You can turn off data harvesting in some models. Kia is one example.
yeah, that’s the reasoning for why my “new” car is a 14yo rusty econobox.
I don’t drive much, and I already own a not-terrible-for-emissions vehicle that often gets used to haul and tow stuff. I carpool and bike when possible. I avoid things that require lots of driving.
my net impact for switching to a comparable EV is much smaller than somebody commuting with a Bronco, I’ve already taken steps
Get a used EV, you’ll save a lot and can get an older model with less AI.
less than zero. WTF are you even on about?
Definitely buy used. These things drop like rocks during the first year of ownership. I got 50% off MSRP for letting someone else own the car for the first 9000 miles.
It’s because consumers are lemmeducated and told the batteries will asplode in three years. Look at these comments.
Yeah, buying used lease cars is the most bang for your buck.
Those companies need to write off the next batch of cars anyway, and most of them don’t have much km on them.
This is the way to go. I bought the wife a 2023 VW id4 Pro with 14,000 miles on it. It was $24,000. New is up in the 40s. And to both of us, it’s still a new car. The other one we’ve got is a 16 year old ice car. I did the math, CO2 emissions using my state’s electricity mix worked out to be a quarter of the ICE’s.
I wish this was true where I live… It’s more like 30-40% drop for 4 years old car with 150k km (100k miles).
I guess it’s a silver lining of living in a country that is completely captured by oil companies. I catch a lot of flak for having an EV, but the truth is in the odometer readings. We had a 2 car household, and we put 24,000 miles on the EV in a year and a half, and went from 14,000 miles a year on our gas car down to less than 2000. We just sold the ICE because we stopped driving it, and couldn’t justify the 400 dollars or so a month to keep it.
And even the thing that wears the most (aside the wheels) on an EV lasts longer in real cars than initially expected.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/12/existing-ev-batteries-may-last-up-to-40-longer-than-expected