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Related is Tesla's recycling program of batteries: https://www.teslamotors.com/nl_NL/blog/teslas-closed-loop-ba...

Some people are skeptical about electric cars because the estimate life span of a battery is around eight years. But reading the article above (and others) you can see the batteries are not an issue anymore.

I was also a little skeptical about electric cars but I think the absolute pros are:

  * Electricity can come from any source (coal, nuclear, sun, water, waste, aliens).
  * No emission (in cities).
  * No noise pollution.

But I still got one issue with a lot of those environment friendly solutions. Because why would you use a lot of energy for sensors, insane mode, automatic doors, displays, computers, and so on? I know you need some of them but in the end environment friendly means: using less energy (in any form).

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> Because why would you use a lot of energy for sensors, insane mode, automatic doors, displays, computers, and so on?

Signals electronics (displays, sensors, etc) use so little energy compared to power electronics (the drivetrain system) that it doesn't really matter.

It does matter.

1 W * 1,000,000 cars is still 1 MW.

It's like saying a javascript file of 1MB is ok because there are images of 10MB on the same page.

No, it's like saying everyone should cut down their JavaScript files by 1kb to reduce emissions.

I don't think you got my point, but yes, cutting down your JavaScript files will reduce emission.

The idea is that you should prioritize based on impact-for-effort and not sweat the small stuff.

It's more like saying that if you somehow turned off all the fancy electronics, you'd add maybe half a mile to the car's 200+ mile range.

An entry level model S has a ~360hp engine, so 0.2 MW

A million of those cars is 200,000 MW

Amdahl's law: when optimizing performance, target the largest consumer first. And in this case the engine is the largest, by at least 5 orders of magnitude

It would save much more electricity educating people to drive less aggressively and use less braking than to remove the sensors

> but in the end environment friendly means: using less energy (in any form).

Is it? I thought it meant no harm to the environment. If the charging station is powered by solar energy, I don't see how using the otherwise wasted energy wrong.

We also thought that using oil wouldn't harm the world.

It's all about scale.

Of course some solar panels are not going to harm the world. But what if we need, lets say, 1% of the earth covered with solar panels?

If it's hard to predict the effects it might be dangerous.

>No noise pollution.

EVs will still generate a fair amount of noise pollution. There will be important improvements for city quality of life, mostly in reductions in the sub 35kmh acceleration/deceleration moments. But for highway speeds the reductions will not be that big.

Check this interesting wikipedia article for reference. Linking to the part that lists the basic variables that affect Roadway Noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadway_noise#Description_of_b...

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