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
don’t forget the gigantic inefficiency of digging petroleum out of the ground, loading it on to and off of a boat, shipping it around the world, refining it into gasoline, pumping that into trucks, driving those trucks to a gas station, then pumping it all into the tanks to sit around and degrade until someone pumps it into their tank so they can drive it around for a couple weeks, only for SIXTY FUCKING PERCENT TO BE WASTED AS HEAT.
instead, my power company gets photons from the sun, turns those into zippyzappy, and that travels down the wire into my fucking battery where it’s used by an electric motor. far, far fewer steps, far fewer points of conversion, and every erg goes to pushing the wheels round and round, not heating up a fucking engine block or providing yet another resource chokepoint for the assholes to fight over.
I’ll never understand the neglect these kind of calculations give to the energy storage and distribution required, conversion and losses inherent to combustion engines, it’s heinously inefficient and only survives because of nostalgia and legacy idiocy.