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
It can last 20 years with no problems other than the expected gradual degradation, or it can fail suddenly at any point because a single cell going bad ruins the whole thing until you either get that cell replaced (do NOT attempt at home) or the battery replaced.
To be comparable to an actually maintained ICE not made by Americans, Koreans or the Fr*nch, it should be more like 300k miles. Which, to be fair, your EV may reach too and if it does you will have saved a ton of money in maintenance costs compared to having to do a ton of fluid changes over that span. But we have poor information on how 20+ year old EV batteries hold up because they don’t exist yet. Currently we know the earliest Teslas have had a worryingly high battery failure rate at ~13-14 years of age which is why most EVs still get sold for cheap after 5-6 years, before the battery warranty expires.
We have projected lifespans which shows new EV batteries lasting essentially forever, but how do we know it’s true?
But my personal issue is the cost more than anything. Mercedes wanted over 40k EUR for an battery, EVClinic repaired it for 4800€ so battery didn’t need to be replaced, but even for 4800€ I could buy 3-4 used engines for my car and get them installed by a decent mechanic, or even more engines and install them myself, meaning I essentially could run this car without oil changes for several years by just replacing the engines. Now why did Mercedes ask 41k EUR for a battery that’s clearly still in warranty since the model isn’t even as old as the battery warranty yet? Nobody knows, but in a forum thread someone said that Mercedes told them the battery warranty only covers up to the vehicle’s value, whereas the cars themselves cost much less now than the batteries do. This is probably just Mercedes being shady as fuck because they’ve realized they’d go bankrupt if they had to honor battery warranties on these.