I drive (and have driven) a fair number of rental cars due to travel, and I have to say I feel that way about many new vehicles in their entirety. So much vehicle tech is at best unimpressive and at worst positively in my way as a driver.
> It's wickedly expensive
We own two cars, 6 and 10 years old respectively, yet I've never felt less motivated to look at new cars than I do now.
Guess our part towards saving the planet may well turn out to be 'driving that existing ICE vehicle for just a little bit longer'...
In the book Heat Monboit argues the stats show that when someone "greens" their consumption they also increase it. For example switching to "green" energy meant people stopped thinking about conserving.
In the specific case of electric vehicles (and many plug in hybrids) luckily they're such an immense improvement that my guess is that they still have a net benefit. But far from the simple efficiency math, and more likely the user will increase their consumption by some meaningful percent.
I wonder though if the more significant limitation for most people is the value placed on their time currently, so they seek to minimize travel and commute times (rather than minimizing for fuel costs). And if so, does will the rise of self-driving + EV paradoxically increase the number of miles someone is willing to sit behind the wheel in the coming decade?
EVs have a way higher initial CO2 footprint. The crossover depends on car and where you get the energy from. I think it's often around the 100 000 km mark where an EV gets the smaller footprint. But like I said, many variables factor in.
Production of EVs and batteries generate more CO2 before the first wheel turns, however, the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving.
- It takes a typical EV about one year in operation to achieve "carbon parity" with an ICE vehicle.
- If the EV draws electricity from a coal/fired grid, however, the catchup period stretches to more than five years.
- If the grid is powered by carbon/free hydroelectricity, the catchup period is about six months.
> the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving
Shouldn't we be comparing an old ICE which was already built years ago but is still operating vs building a new EV to replace it?
The carbon footprint of building the ICE is almost irrelevant, it's just the ongoing damage it is doing. Compare that with footprint of building and operating the EV that could replace it.
That would be comparing apples to oranges, you want apples to apples.
Everyone replaces their car at some point. If you are comparing a new EV, its best to compare its impact compared to a new ICE. We all know its probably best in most cases to keep any vehicle, even one that is inefficient, on the road for its useful life.
> We all know its probably best in most cases to keep any vehicle, even one that is inefficient, on the road for its useful life.
I didn’t know this until this thread. And I feel like I’ve heard people say things like they are going to improve the environment by ditching their current car for an EV, not because they’re planning on getting rid of their car anyways.
> But what if your existing petrol or diesel car is perfectly satisfactory? Obviously if you cause one less vehicle – of any kind – to be manufactured, you’re saving CO2 in the short term. But if you drive a lot of miles or your car is thirsty, then sell it to someone who drives less. Getting an EV would after a very few years move you into credit. If it’s efficient and you drive little, probably hold on to it for a while.
> In most areas of life, the greenest thing is simply to buy less stuff and keep it for longer. But with ICE cars, because they emit so much CO2 in use, it’s not always so simple.
(Apologies for the snark but...) mythbusting articles without any experimental data or references to back up claims - or claims they say they've debunked - aren't really my thing. Hopefully not really a HN thing either :/
I agree that there are shades of gray though. My counterpoint is that I am not so sure the non-commercial vehicle market is that efficient that when you sell a vehicle that it is going to the best candidate best on the miles driven. Your vehicle is still in the fleet and being used. I think the simpler argument is that for any modern vehicle, there is not a significant enough gain and you are better holding on to the vehicle until it reaches your preferred EOL.
Well pretty much everybody at some point replaces their cars. There are not many still driving around their Ford T's. So latest at that point, you will have to compare production+cost vs production+cost.
Is battery manufacturing that bad for the environment? I mean, ICE cars still have wheels, drivetrains, chassis, doors, windows, chairs, electronics, paint and many other things, same as the EVs. The electric motor I can't imagine its worse to produce than a combustion motor. So that leaves batteries as the cause of this huge disparity on day one, that takes 100,000km of fuel consumption to overtake.
Is this with the battery tech of today, december 2024? So for EVs built in 2020 let's say, it was worse? I think there is some advancement in battery making, isn't there?
> The electric motor I can't imagine its worse to produce than a combustion motor
I assumed we're attempting to weigh up keeping an ICE vehicle that already exists - like my 10 year old diesel - vs building building a new EV vehicle and scrapping the old ICE.
Nobody is crushing their ICE and dumping it in the lake when they replace their existing and working ICE with an EV. They're selling/trading in their ICE which someone else will buy and use until it's not worth servicing anymore.
Current recycling tech is pretty terrific (IIRC ~98% recovery of lithium, misc metals). Enabling the long fabled "circular" economy.
At some point we'll hit a (near) equilibrium. IIRC, ~20 years out. (Assuming Li-ion battery tech continues to improve at current rate. Thereby balancing out the lithium lost during recycling.) So we'll hit something like "peak lithium", greatly reducing mining (extraction) of new lithium.
Recycling is much cheaper than mining (both $ and CO2).
(I believe, but obliviously can't prove, that sodium (et al) batteries will enable new use cases and markets, complimenting lithium rather than replacing it.)
My guess: Most of the CO2 emissions for making cars comes from the body of the car. It is basically identical between ICE and EV. I guess a modern car body is a combo of steel and aluminium. (Is that correct?)
It suggests that making an ICE car is roughly equal to the running in terms of carbon.
In reality manufacturing is about 10%, disposal 5% and the other 85% from running it e.g. fuel and maintenance.
It then suggests that keeping an old car is better because if you keep the car for twice as long then the emissions are half per mile, but you don't scrap functional cars you sell them onto someone else. This causes a cascade with the oldest and most polluting cars being scrapped.
> In reality manufacturing is about 10%, disposal 5% and the other 85% from running it e.g. fuel and maintenance
I imagine this depends hugely on the kind of vehicle?
Our small [petrol] car cost the equivalent of $10k on the road, including all taxes. It has a tiny engine, four seats, and limited luggage space. It's fairly fuel-efficient (at least when I'm driving).
I've also recently driven a BMW 5 series (booked the cheapest "compact manual" as an airport rental vehicle, got that instead - win!) List price around 10x that of our little car. Nicer ride, of course. Bigger luggage space. Five seats.
Presumably in terms of carbon the BMW's manufacturing costs vastly exceed that of small cars, but is the carbon manufacturing cost linear with either its fuel efficiency or with its price?
That seems like an overestimate. A quick search is showing up numbers more in the 15-20,000 km region, and that's comparing a large EV running off of a mostly fossil fuel grid against a much smaller ICE (i.e. quite a conservative estimate).
The upfront is about 50% higher for an EV, so if you catch that 50% up in 1 year then you'd pay back an entire new EV in 3 years if you scrapped the old ICE one. (figures for simplicity depending upon grid and how much you drive it could be 6 months or 18 months).
But generally we don't scrap old ones.
If you instead sell the old one to someone who drives an ICE car that gets worse mpg then that's a further benefit.
In particular, grid decarbonisation means that distance to break even moves after the car is manufactured.
If you live somewhere that mostly burns coal to make electricity, your break even is determined based on the higher efficiency of electric motors and of the (energy efficient but filthy) big stack coal generators compared to the relatively clean but inefficient gasoline ICE.
But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier - suddenly that distance shrinks rapidly (maybe half) even though for you as an end user nothing changed, because electricity is fungible so you charge a car from the solar farm just the same as from a coal power plant.
> If you live somewhere that mostly burns coal to make electricity,
Which is almost everywhere in the world. Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
> But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier -
If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
I love solar, but don't let anyone sell you on the fiction that your EV is avoiding fossil fuels at any time in the near future unless you have installed enough solar on your personal residence to charge your car every day.
And if you ask the people who have done that "hey, was it cheap and easy to move your car's energy consumption to renewables?" and they reply "Yes!", please bring their story back here and share with the class.
> don't let anyone sell you on the fiction that your EV is avoiding fossil fuels at any time in the near future unless you have installed enough solar on your personal residence to charge your car every day.
Let's say doing things one way uses 10 units of something, and doing something another way then uses 5 units of that same something. Didn't you then avoid using 5 units of that thing?
Yeah, no. If this was 1984 you'd be right on the money. In 2024 "We mostly burn coal to make electricity" either means you're subsidising coal or you have no infrastructure investment to move to a better generation.
> Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
Where are you still seeing 80%? Last I saw was closer to 60%. A lot of that isn't coal, and the gasoline is not electricity production†. Gasoline is what we're replacing in the discussion, so "Yeah, but what about gasoline?" is a total misfire. Which mostly leaves methane. And that's a very different comparison to coal. There are indeed new methane electricity plants in lots of places.
A methane power plant might emit half or even a third of the CO2 of the equivalent coal plant. It's still a fossil fuel, but in terms of the ratio we're talking about for break-even on an EV, that's a huge difference.
> If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
You're seeing huge investments because they're expensive and make money, that's what an investment is. They're not investing in coal plants because that's a money loser. Yes, it's often subsidised, in my country the renewable energy schemes are subsidised via "Contracts for Difference" which have the effect of insuring the price paid for energy, leaving the problem of delivering the energy very much in the hands of the bidders, the government is only the hook for the agreed price of energy when it's delivered, this has the effect of making investment less risky - if you can make 1000GWh of energy over the lifetime of the project and the subsidy says you're definitely getting £50 per MWh, that's £50M, without CfD you can't be sure if you get paid £80 per MWh (we're £30M richer) or £20 per MWh (we're bankrupt) until the power auctions years after you've constructed the plant.
† Yes there are a handful of power plants running on this fuel, but they're insignificant at a global scale.
By that logic, also the CO2 footprint of manufacturing and transporting the fuel for an equivalent ICE vehicle, which is always conveniently left out of such calculations.
And also the footprint of building more generation stations (big) or building “renewable energy” generation (even bigger), which also conveniently gets left out.
The greenest choice most of us can make is an old, used car with reasonable emissions and that’s fuel efficient. Like a 15 year old Civic or Corolla. Or do what a colleague of mine did - he revived a first generation Prius, flashed newer software onto it, and salvaged a battery pack from a newer, wrecked Prius.
As pointed out by other nearby comments, that is not the greenest choice (which is to not drive), nor even the second greenest choice (which is to replace your ICE with a refurbished Prius like your colleague), or even the third greenest choice (which is to buy a new EV), but only barely beats out the worst non-green choices (buying a new ICE) and then only if you pay to make sure the car emissions controls and engine aren't becoming rusty and inefficient. Here's an article explaining: https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/mythbusting-world-...
There are also the caveats you mentioned that the analysis does assume that an EV is actually the greener choice, which is itself a function of a lot of other choices being made green also, such as whether it was constructed and powered with the most environmentally favorable choices of mining and manufacturing, most of which isn't really in the consumers direct control.
The actual scientist doing the calculations in proper LCAs do include this and production of the fuel is a notable chunk of the CO2 running cost of an ICE car (about 25%).
Relevant phrases are "well-to-tank" and "tank-to-wheel" which combine to give "well-to-wheel" numbers.
I think that analysis might have the “sunk cost fallacy” assumption? Just because we already have the ICE doesn’t make it more efficient to keep using it, over immediately replacing it with something more efficient, as long as you then keep the more efficient thing operating until it becomes inefficient to keep that operational. The crossover point seems likely it would occur much sooner if you replace the ICE now than if you wait for its end of life, regardless of the age of the ICE now
And I think this analysis suffers from ignoring the increased environmental cost of creating a new electric vehicle. It takes 15,000 to 20,000 miles of driving for the average EV to "break even" with new ICE vehicles due to the much worse environmental impact of creation.
Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Vehicles should be reduced first (drive less), reused second (keep using existing one), repaired (keep using existing ones), and finally you can recycle as best as possible.
All of this should happen prior to replacement. If you replace an existing ICE with an EV, the EV not only has to catch up with a new ICE, it actually has to "catch up" with your existing already made working ICE that has no new cost for construction. That's much worse than 20k miles because the cost of building your existing car is sunk. It could take as many as 50,000 miles of driving to break even against your existing used car.
Consumerism and early replacement of working goods has always been the mortal enemy of environmentalism.
Good news: in the car market, almost everyone follows 'reuse' and 'repair'. Not many people take a car and crush it for recycled parts unless it's truly worthless or super old. They sell it to someone else. For the type of person who buys a new car every 3-4 years, you are selling that car to someone else who will continue using it, likely replacing their less efficient car with yours.
This is unlike most other consumer goods which tend to be scrapped much earlier. If you're scrapping a car before its ~10-15 years old, chances are there's either something quite wrong with it, or you just drove it way too much and its gonna fall apart (i.e., something wrong with it).
> All of this should happen prior to replacement... it actually has to "catch up" with your existing already made working ICE that has no new cost for construction
That is precisely the sunk cost fallacy though: the principle is that continuing an endeavor simply because it already has been a cost paid shouldn't be done, unless the total continuing cost (including the eventual replacement) is less than the cost of immediate replacement (plus all continuing costs after initial replacement, including the eventual replacements of those in turn). Otherwise the principle says it is a waste of resources.
The 4 R's assume that the replacement is no better than the original at the job, which is why I described that analysis as the sunk cost fallacy. We don't have to take this assumption (personally, I prefer to bike over driving my ICE, so this analysis doesn't apply), but if we take the assumption that the EV does less environmental damage over its lifetime, then this assumed "environmental damage" function is minimized by discarding the ICE immediately, as any further use simply increases the total "environmental damage" caused by the choice of which car to use.
This can be seen in computers too, as newer computers are sometimes so much more power efficient then their replacement that they can very quickly save on resources by throwing out a perfectly working computer to replace it with a newer one.
As long as your old cars are like Toyota corolla/camry’s and not like giant gas guzzling SUV’s or trucks keeping them on the road is better than buying a new EV IMO. I think the current EV gen is kind of doomed because of the fact the next EV gen is going to have massive QOL features the current one doesn’t and waiting for a more compelling car is worth doing IMO
Even vehicles with poor fuel efficiency are better to keep on the road until EOL. This is why cash for clunkers was such a terrible program.
I don't follow your take on the current EV gen either. A car at the end of the day derives most of its value from taking you one place to another. The current gen of EVs do this and do it well. "current EV gen is kind of doomed" that is just hyperbole, nothing is changing in the near future that would doom current EV vehicles on the road.
Define massively. I think a 2024 M3 has ~20% better range than a 2018 M3. 2018 was the second year of the M3. The 2018 LR version still had a ~300mile range. No doubt future generations will be better but again, I don't think we will have a case that "dooms" the current generation of EVs, they will serve their primary purpose well until EOL.
I think proper V2H/V2G (vehicle to home/grid) is a big one that is very rare at the moment but is probably making a lot of people who could buy an EV at the moment (i.e. have a garage/driveway in a city) hold off until it's more common, because it makes the economics a lot more attractive.
(In general, because of cratering manufacturing costs, improving tech, and a still low trust for battery health, being an EV early adopter is an expensive option at the moment because even if an early EV is still at 80% functionality compared to new, the resale value is terrible, and I think this plus the lack of charging infrastructure is a big impediment to adoption growing to become dominant in the mainstream)
I'm not super convinced about the V2H stuff, tbh. I only need backup power at home to keep the heat on when I'm not there. If I'm not there almost certainly my car isn't either. When I am there I can light a candle and run the wood stove to keep the pipes from freezing. So a stationary battery bank for my solar system makes a lot more sense than trying to use my car for that purpose.
And probably a backup generator with a big propane tank is a better solution.
I've thought about it over the years and if I was regularly away for long periods in the winter I'd probably have spent the money. As it is, I cross my fingers and generally try not to have long periods away from my house in the winter.
Ah. I think lots of other people would like to keep their refrigerator and freezer and appliances running in the event of multi-day power outages when they are at home, even when it is not freezing (like in Florida, for example).
Sure, but if you're already going to make the investment in the grid cutoff, inverter, etc then the fact the car could in principle act as a battery/generator is a little gimmicky. Might as well also get a generator (or battery if you've already got solar). Then it works automatically whether you're there or not.
The vehicle already has the inverter, using the same active rectifier hardware in the on-board charger. People want to have electricity when they are at home. And they are home a lot of the time. So I agree that it is a very niche case to want to have a backup system to provide electricity to your house during a natural disaster when you are not even there.
Whatever you call it based on exact details, my point is that using your car for power is not "gimmicky" like they said. Based on budget you can get a transfer switch or you can get an extension cord. Either way you're making effective use out of the car you already own, and the idea that you're wasting time and should really just get a generator or fixed battery is incorrect.
Fast recharge and high capacity long life batteries.
Reliably getting 300-400 mile range (even in cold), getting 250 miles range in 10-15 minutes of fast charging, and seeing batteries comfortably make it to 150k miles with small degradation.
Unfortunately people seems to really care about edge cases (What if I have to unexpectedly drive 400 miles on a frozen January evening?), so until EVs can easily cover those bases, people are really trigger shy.
The biggest one I can think of is really stupid actually which is a NACS port and proper supercharger network access for any non Tesla (and I personally would recommend against buying a Tesla for build quality and lack of repairability). Either way ICE cars are basically about as good as they can get while EV’s have a ton of room for improvement
> So much vehicle tech is at best unimpressive and at worst positively in my way as a driver.
Honestly, I'm not surprised that new cars aren't breathtakingly awesome. It's been a really rough 5 years for everybody and we're not seeing much genuine light at the end of the tunnel. Everyone's just trying to survive. Hard to do your best work under those circumstances.
Its not what the public think of 'self driving'. Its not like you can tell the autopilot where you want to go and then sit back, sleep, turn around, do something else. You have to monitor it.
So you are basically paying to take legal responsibility for the crashes of a not-quite-ready autopilot whilst still having to keep alert.
The moment there is a true self-driving capability, where you can sit back and let the car drive even if you're not sober etc, then it would be wildly popular.
Exactly. My car has adaptive cruise control. In slow traffic, if the car in front comes to a stop, it'll also stop. But what happens if it's turned off? I honestly don't know and don't have the balls to find out, because so far it just keeps getting closer to the car in front. So if I accidentally pause it then drive the same way I would with it enabled, I might(?) rear-end someone.
It'd be the height of stupidity if it does just keep rolling forward, but who knows...
When I bought my last car, I was sort of excited about adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. But maybe because most driving I do (which isn't a huge amount) is on pretty busy roads I've sort of avoided really using it.
IMO, it's largely because BlueCruise (and all of the similar services) is not sufficiently better than the non-subscription driver assists.
I have the option of BlueCruise on my vehicle and it's just not a compelling offer.
* It only works on major highways. Beyond actual coverage, major highways are places where the standard driver assists already work extremely well.
* It does nothing about traffic around you. You have to be prepared to react. Not much different than driver assist.
* It's wickedly expensive.
Right now, radar assisted cruise and camera based lane centering eases 95% of my driving fatigue.