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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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There around 1000 life cycle cost analyses that disprove this idea by now. It takes only a few years of driving electric to pay off the carbon debt from manufacturing, assuming average driving behavior.
Of course, this is complicated because we should be dramatically reducing driving. But for most people it does not make sense to keep a gas car as a daily driver.
I'd love to see one of these analyses, this is new information to me.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-023-30999-3
It does depend somewhat on the specifics but for the vast majority of cases EVs are just better.
They’re still bad mind you, it’s just that ICE vehicles are so much worse.
Edit: This one might be a bit more directly applicable: https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-21-misleading-myths-about-electric-vehicles/
I'm not paying $40 to read the first, but the numbers in the second match my napkin estimations, so I assume it's pretty reasonable in its conclusions.
However, there are other considerations. For instance, if you don't drive much and have a reasonably efficient ICE, continuing to use your existing vehicle may give you the opportunity to wait for EV manufacturing and operation emissions to drop significantly.
I spent some time outlining some formulas to determine the ideal break even points when accounting for multiple factors like vehicle lifespan and rate of efficiency increase but the math got... complicated pretty quickly. And that's before taking into account the non GHG impacts of EV manufacturing.
Suffice to say, it's certainly not as simple as "always drive your ICE into the ground", but it's also not as simple as "everyone should switch ASAP". For many people with relatively efficient ICEs it can very well be worth it to wait maybe 5-10 years for the next generation of batteries to become widespread.
Your study is locked behind a paywall :(
For a fun comparison, I usually run the numbers for our 2004 Audi A2 with biodiesel (HVO100) against the most efficient electric vehicles, based on Swedish grid emissions and then US emissions.
The Audi runs at 4L/100km (real world numbers) x 256g/L (compensated emissions according to Neste) = 1024g/100km
Versus the Hyundai Ioniq 6 (current most efficient EV according to mestmotor in real world testing) with a consumption of 15.5kWh/100km * 41g/kWh (Sweden according to ourworldindata) * 1.15 (charging losses) = 730.8g/100km.
For the US that's 15.5kWh/100km * 369g/kWh *1.15 = 6577.4g/100km.
So compared to a US EV our car runs with a whopping 6th of the real emissions. Assuming the same production impact that your article linked it would take 11tons*10000000grams/(1024-730.8)grams/km = 37517 kilometers
Interesting analysis but I don’t think biodiesel is very comparable for most people. Also, very hard to account for emissions with biofuels, so I’d be curious how accurate your numbers are.
Yeah, this is something many climate advocates say - that it is better to keep the car you have - but I don't think this is backed up by data at all. It's very clear that that EVs are able to save more carbon emissions than in a fairly short period than you would save by not continuing to drive an ICE vehicle, with manufacturing included.
If we were going to have a simple rule, replacing all ICE vehicles today with EVs will be far better for the climate than keeping them.
There are so many factors that play into that, including the energy mix of the country you live in and so on.
The studies I have seen are a bit suspicious as they seem to employ figures that just so happen to support the idea that buying new cars (EVs in this case) is good. This is not to say that these figures are false, but they fit a bit too well into what the likely funders of these studies want to hear.
The real answer is probably: drive less, and only if you absolutely can not do that, maybe consider getting an EV instead of continuing to use your current ICE car.
Okay and why would a single variable be the way to look at this?