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Comment by doczoidberg | Hacker News Reader

Roughly estimated carbon production of manufacturing (I got these numbers from a german discussion, one source for battery carbon production is: http://www.focus.de/auto/experten/duennes/oekobilanz-von-ele... ):

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VW Polo GTI: 2 tons

BMW M5: 2,5 tons

BMW I3: 4 tons

Tesla Modell X 13 tons

Manufacturing + 100.000km:

--------------------------

BMW I3 -> 9,6 tons

VW Polo GTI -> 18,6 tons

Tesla Modell X -> 25,3 tons

BMW M5 -> 26,3 tons

Tesla isn't as green as many think. Building heavy cars isn't the solution.

Also the new infrastructure for superchargers does raise carbon production.

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It's not fair to compare the Model X to a Sedan. Do you have numbers for other SUVs? Remember the idea here is that it's assumed you'll be buying a car already.

Also, even if the total lifetime carbon was equal, it's still better to buy a vehicle that produces all that carbon in localized places where it could possibly be captured instead of all over crowded urban areas.

I just want to mention some facts. EVs are interesting and the future for sure but thinking EVs are the holy grail is just stupid.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/hold-smugness-tesla-might-...

How do you can capture carbon?

I think what jedberg meant was that if you are producing the electricity at a centralized place (like even a coal-fired power plant) you could theoretically capture carbon using massive scrubbers on the exhaust towers. Developing similar technology and installing it in all of the individual gas-burning cars would be near impossible.

My 2c: The real "secret plan" here is that converting us to electric vehicles paves the way to develop (and creates structural demand for) 0-emission ways to recharge them, like:

- resurgence of large nuclear plants

- self-contained micro-nuclear reactors that you could bury in your yard

- solar on your garage (paired with a Tesla Powerwall to recharge your car at night)

These 'scrubbers' and nuclear plants are already in my calculations of battery manufacturing C02 production. Base of the CO2 production calculation is the energy mix of germany. In the US it would be even higher(?).

Source is an independent german energy research institute btw.

EVs are the holy grail, at least for the next century. Thinking EVs are the holy grail, is incredibly smart.

You link them up to nuclear, wind, or solar and drastically reduce the total pollution output across the life of the vehicle, versus a gasoline or diesel vehicle.

EVs are as clean as their energy source. Gas and diesel cars are the exact opposite: extremely polluting no matter what you do to them. EVs win period. There's no scenario in which they don't, especially over the next few decades as they leap far ahead of traditional vehicles in every regard. At worst they're less polluting than gasoline vehicles over time, at best they're far less polluting.

Why isn't fair to compare Model X to a Sedan ? It IS basically a sedan.

It isn't a Landrover style SUV that you could legitimately take off road.

Because the people buying an X are not replacing a sedan. They are replacing another SUV like an X5 or ML.

Not only that, but the fuel source of an ICE must produce carbon output. However, there are many fuel sources for EVs that are carbon neutral (solar, wind, hydro, nuke).

Where I live, my power comes from mostly nuclear sources, so the production of my car has been the only major carbon impact that it's had.

As you can see by the numbers the manufacturing takes a big part of the whole carbon production of EV.

Nuclear power is a very bad power source. There is no final depot for nuclear waste on earth. We have to get rid of nuclear power. Hundreds of generations past us will have to deal with this shit of our generation.

nuclear energy is the cleanest energy. ALL you produce is a little nuclear waste that you can store underground somewhere.

The big part is the battery. That causes the high numbers. Not because it is a SUV.

In the long term electric vehicles are obviously the greener solution. We can't be carbon neutral if we need to burn carbon to propel our vehicles.

Fossil fuels need to be extracted, transported, refined, transported, stored at gas stations, and then transported with the vehicle before it's used. That's a lot of mass and energy before it even makes the car go forward.

Some other non-obvious benefits: electric cars last longer and require less maintenance, they're quieter, they don't put harmful chemicals in the air to breathe, and they reduce total milage by not requiring trips to a gas station.

And? If you drive a car for 100,000 miles and it gets 30mpg the whole time, that produces about 65 tons of CO2.

If the EV car gets its power somewhere clean, that ends up being about 13 tons total. For now we get some mix of dirty and clean energy, but that mix can at least be improved. Burning the gallon of gas will always produce 20 pounds of CO2[1].

[1]http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=307&t=11

building heavy cars is the only solution when battery tech doesn't allow for light weight batteries. We are at what, four to five pounds of battery for each mile driven? That isn't exactly a great number.

Source?

Sorry. I have only a german source:

http://www.focus.de/auto/experten/duennes/oekobilanz-von-ele...

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