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Overlanding / Adventuring / Camping - R1T vs Bronco

Trandall

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Because it can’t. Time for my dissertation.

But it’s just using electricity from burning coal/natural gas!
Doesn’t matter.

But producing an electric car produces more emissions than a gas car!
True! But again, it doesn’t matter.

But the batteries just end up in a landfill!
Nah. There are plans to reuse them for street lights, PowerWall-type uses

But, let’s pretend for a minute that this were true. The problem at hand right now is carbon emissions.
I believe BEV are debatably "greener" than the equivalent ICE, however missing from this list is the fact that strip mining rare earth metals used in BEV is exceptionally destructive to the environment. Debatably much more destructive than drilling for oil, as is coal mining for that fact. Just for the record I dislike ICE cars and am a huge fan of BEV, I just lean to the performance and technological superiority of BEV more so than the environmental angle.
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SANZC02

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Because it can’t. Time for my dissertation.

But it’s just using electricity from burning coal/natural gas!

Doesn’t matter. Power plants are more efficient overall than even the best car engines. Even taking generation, transmission, and charging losses into account, electric vehicles still win (on average) because once that power is in the battery, nearly 100% of it ends up pushing the car down the road. Mercedes-Benz had an F1 engine that was able to break 50% thermal efficiency, most cars barely break 35%.

Furthermore, window sticker calculations already take this into account when they show emissions numbers, and, on average, electric vehicles are much lower. See:


But producing an electric car produces more emissions than a gas car!

True! But again, it doesn’t matter. The difference in production emissions will be easily offset within the vehicles lifetime, probably within the first 5 years of use, depending on the size of the battery. In coal-heavy areas, this is less true, but power plants are lots easier to transition to “greener” fuels than tens of thousands of little tiny power plants under hoods. We need to get started on this sooner, rather than later.

The vast majority of emissions are still the result of car use, not manufacture. Electric still wins. See:


But the batteries just end up in a landfill!

Nah. There are plans to reuse them for street lights, PowerWall-type uses (whole-home backup), smart grids, and others. Once they’re totally dead, though, they can still be recycled. The recycling industry is figuring this out. It’s not a technical limitation, there are processes to extract the cobalt, lithium, and nickel from battery cells and turn it back into elements usable for new cell manufacture. These processes just aren’t economically feasible today, mostly because cells are so varied in size, shape, and application. As demand for electric cars increases, so will the profitability of recycling operations, as the industry will see a rush of identically sized cells they can tool to recycle easily. See:


But, let’s pretend for a minute that this were true. The problem at hand right now is carbon emissions. Humans are pulling carbon out of the ground that has been there for thousands if not millions of years, and expelling it directly into the atmosphere. This is bad. A bunch of lithium batteries in a landfill will not worsen this. With proper control over the waste stream and proper management of a landfill, this isn’t a concern for the problem at hand. This is a can that we could safely kick down the road a few more decades if we needed to. (We don’t.)
Just to add one more thought here.

They often talk about the emissions to generate the electricity when comparing the ICE to EV carbon footprint. I have yet to see any study add to the ICE calculations the additional load for oil exploration, processing, and delivery to the stations. All of this happens before the car even starts burning the fuel.

If we want to do a comparison, we really should do soup to nuts on both sides of the equation.
 

timesinks

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They often talk about the emissions to generate the electricity when comparing the ICE to EV carbon footprint. I have yet to see any study add to the ICE calculations the additional load for oil exploration, processing, and delivery to the stations. All of this happens before the car even starts burning the fuel.
Most analyses do take that into account. It's called "well-to-wheel emissions": https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html.
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