from what I undertstand the climate impact is less if you drive your petrol/deisel car into the ground than if you ditch a functioning car to buy a newly manufacruted EV.
That’s a rather old hypothesis that hasn’t been found to be true. The discussion on climate impact hadn’t been so easily measured, but recent studies have caught up.
It depends on the new EV you’re speaking about and how old and dirty your present diesel is. Some cars are produced as “carbon-neutral”, like the VWs ID.3 & ID.4 (and I think Kia maybe?).
Whereas recent diesels have been found out to be up to 3x more polluting4-times more polluting than originally thought, and older ICE cars have been found to increase their pollution output as they age.
Remember the Daily Mail’s repeated rage articles about EVs being dirtier if charged with coal-fired electric sources? That’s been disproven again and again.
If you’re looking at climate impact beyond production, especially over the long term, EVs quickly surpass ICE vehicles in clean operation (production and usage) in less than 2 years (some cars, just months).
Many EV also use battery packs that are recyclable and can be repaired; Ford, VW, NIssan, Kia/Hyundai and others use a pack in a pack approach, where a bad groups of cells can be swapped out while keeping the main battery. Some like Tesla tends to glue them together, which means the whole pack needs to be replaced, but it’s still rare to have cells fail unless there’s a manufacturing problem like GM had with Hyundai cells (again, old manufacturing methods - modern EVs do it differently now).
From cradle to grave, modern EVs are overall far less polluting than gas or diesel cars.
I was actually describing petrol car vs production divided by reduction in emissions in operation over time, so I shouldn’t have inculded deisel. I’ll have a look at your links, thanks
The problem with all of these analyses is nobody can agree where to draw the system boundaries. I prefer to draw very large system boundaries (societal level), e.g. your car will enter the secondary market when you sell it and someone else will typically drive it somewhere approaching the end of useful life. So to me, any ICE (or EV) has sort of a “fixed” carbon cost consisting of production, fueling, maintenance, etc. over its lifetime. At this point, what matters is that as many new new cars as posible are EV so that they can enter the secondary market and replace the fleet. Amortizing or sunk cost fallacying the use of ICE doesn’t make sense because reality doesn’t care about amortization, it just counts the carbon dioxide ppm in the atmosphere as it occurs. The secondary and tertiary markets are driven by economics, so we need a combination of (a) wealthy people eating the depreciation as soon as possible and (b) much cheaper new EVs. Our goal should be to eliminate the production of ICE. Applying to an individual level, if you sell your older ICE truck to someone that was about to buy a new gas F150, and you buy an EV, that’s a win and you shouldn’t do some weird math that results in you burning a bunch of gasoline to get to some amortized level for that vehicle before moving on.
I live in Ireland where the NCT (state inspection equivalent) is so fucking stringent that people talk to me about my car all the time and its just over 20 years old. cars get NCT’d off the road here all the time, and you cant sell it here without the NCT. Once it finally fails, someone who knows what they’re looking at will probably ship it to Hungary or something, so there’s the cost of that, but your market idea has to be global for that to make sense, but something tells me your idea of the system is everywhere the atmosphere is, so
That makes sense. My understanding is that it’s quite common for cars to end up in poorer countries as they age, so that all checks out. The point is on average, cars get used, so we want to prevent the worst ones from being made moving forward (ICE). And yes, to me the system is the atmosphere since I’m primarily concerned with an overabundance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
That’s one of the factors that keeps me from getting an EV. It’ll always be worse for the environment if I get a new car - EV or not - rather than continue keeping this old diesel in good working condition and driving it until it dies, because its manufacturing carbon cost is already spent. So the more I drive it, the more I dilute it.
But really, the real reason is because modern cars are friggin’ spying devices. And that too goes for EVs and not EVs. That’s really the biggest turnoff for me. I swear to God, when this car dies, I’m seriously considering going carless again, because I just don’t want a car that’s connected to the internet 24/7, spying on me and pulling software updates without my knowledge or my consent.
someone else posted a reply to my comment that shows it might not be true that its better to keep pushing your deisel car rather than replace it with an ev.
I’m in the EU, so data protection is better than elsewhere, but I agree. I’ve looked into how to essentially disconnect the gps device and cellular comms devices from new cars for when I need to finally get one.
honestly will 100％ look into conversion of my current petrol car to ev, although it would not be economically smart to do so
from what I undertstand the climate impact is less if you drive your petrol/deisel car into the ground than if you ditch a functioning car to buy a newly manufacruted EV.
That’s a rather old hypothesis that hasn’t been found to be true. The discussion on climate impact hadn’t been so easily measured, but recent studies have caught up.
It depends on the new EV you’re speaking about and how old and dirty your present diesel is. Some cars are produced as “carbon-neutral”, like the VWs ID.3 & ID.4 (and I think Kia maybe?).
Whereas recent diesels have been found out to be up to
3x more polluting4-times more polluting than originally thought, and older ICE cars have been found to increase their pollution output as they age.Remember the Daily Mail’s repeated rage articles about EVs being dirtier if charged with coal-fired electric sources? That’s been disproven again and again.
If you’re looking at climate impact beyond production, especially over the long term, EVs quickly surpass ICE vehicles in clean operation (production and usage) in less than 2 years (some cars, just months).
Many EV also use battery packs that are recyclable and can be repaired; Ford, VW, NIssan, Kia/Hyundai and others use a pack in a pack approach, where a bad groups of cells can be swapped out while keeping the main battery. Some like Tesla tends to glue them together, which means the whole pack needs to be replaced, but it’s still rare to have cells fail unless there’s a manufacturing problem like GM had with Hyundai cells (again, old manufacturing methods - modern EVs do it differently now).
From cradle to grave, modern EVs are overall far less polluting than gas or diesel cars.
Edit: Updated with links.
fair enough, thanks for that.
I was actually describing petrol car vs production divided by reduction in emissions in operation over time, so I shouldn’t have inculded deisel. I’ll have a look at your links, thanks
The problem with all of these analyses is nobody can agree where to draw the system boundaries. I prefer to draw very large system boundaries (societal level), e.g. your car will enter the secondary market when you sell it and someone else will typically drive it somewhere approaching the end of useful life. So to me, any ICE (or EV) has sort of a “fixed” carbon cost consisting of production, fueling, maintenance, etc. over its lifetime. At this point, what matters is that as many new new cars as posible are EV so that they can enter the secondary market and replace the fleet. Amortizing or sunk cost fallacying the use of ICE doesn’t make sense because reality doesn’t care about amortization, it just counts the carbon dioxide ppm in the atmosphere as it occurs. The secondary and tertiary markets are driven by economics, so we need a combination of (a) wealthy people eating the depreciation as soon as possible and (b) much cheaper new EVs. Our goal should be to eliminate the production of ICE. Applying to an individual level, if you sell your older ICE truck to someone that was about to buy a new gas F150, and you buy an EV, that’s a win and you shouldn’t do some weird math that results in you burning a bunch of gasoline to get to some amortized level for that vehicle before moving on.
thats all valid.
I live in Ireland where the NCT (state inspection equivalent) is so fucking stringent that people talk to me about my car all the time and its just over 20 years old. cars get NCT’d off the road here all the time, and you cant sell it here without the NCT. Once it finally fails, someone who knows what they’re looking at will probably ship it to Hungary or something, so there’s the cost of that, but your market idea has to be global for that to make sense, but something tells me your idea of the system is everywhere the atmosphere is, so
That makes sense. My understanding is that it’s quite common for cars to end up in poorer countries as they age, so that all checks out. The point is on average, cars get used, so we want to prevent the worst ones from being made moving forward (ICE). And yes, to me the system is the atmosphere since I’m primarily concerned with an overabundance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
That’s one of the factors that keeps me from getting an EV. It’ll always be worse for the environment if I get a new car - EV or not - rather than continue keeping this old diesel in good working condition and driving it until it dies, because its manufacturing carbon cost is already spent. So the more I drive it, the more I dilute it.
But really, the real reason is because modern cars are friggin’ spying devices. And that too goes for EVs and not EVs. That’s really the biggest turnoff for me. I swear to God, when this car dies, I’m seriously considering going carless again, because I just don’t want a car that’s connected to the internet 24/7, spying on me and pulling software updates without my knowledge or my consent.
thats all fair.
someone else posted a reply to my comment that shows it might not be true that its better to keep pushing your deisel car rather than replace it with an ev.
I’m in the EU, so data protection is better than elsewhere, but I agree. I’ve looked into how to essentially disconnect the gps device and cellular comms devices from new cars for when I need to finally get one.
honestly will 100％ look into conversion of my current petrol car to ev, although it would not be economically smart to do so