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Comment by donquichotte | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that this "article" is not going more in-depth.

What bugged me most was:

> [...] it matters where the electrons going into an EV come from; coal-fired power is [...] less than 40% efficient on average. [If ...] we lost 6% in transmission, it would still add up to only 10 million barrels a day in oil terms. The efficiency gain is overwhelming.

No! What about losses in the electric grid? What about losses in the battery? As far as efficiency is concerned, electric cars are just as bad as ICE cars, given their electricity comes from thermal power plants. Plus, a lot of rare earths are required to manufacture them, mainly for the permanent magnets in the synchronous motors and the batteries.

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Combustion engines are anywhere from 20% to 30% generally

Toyota's new Dynamic Force Engine is 40 percent efficient which very good .

But that's over half of the energy wasted .

Compared to EV it can go up to 98% and depending where you live it's from 8 to 15 percent . Regarding cobalt ,current batteries use much less of it and with newer tech we wouldn't need it anymore .

> What about losses in the electric grid? What about losses in the battery?

This is very small.

They're also very accurately quantified. Somehow the same losses in petrol full lifecycle tar sands to pump are not.

Sorry that's a myth. Internal combustion engines are MUCH less efficient than any combustion based power plant. Ever notice how your engine is hot? That's all lost energy. Cars are only 25% efficient or so and the rest is lost as heat. Natural gas plants are 43% efficient and Coal is 32% efficient.

Battery losses are extremely minimal and the rare earth thing is a red herring. There aren't any rare earths in batteries btw.

>There aren't any rare earths in batteries btw.

they're common in motor design, especially motor-in-hub designs.

To play devils' advocate : batteries are filled with so-called 'conflict materials', and the places that export things like lithium and cobalt have famously bad worker conditions.[0] The popularity of such materials is only going to make their conditions worse unless they're accommodated somehow.

[0]: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...

Some car manufacturers are working to reduce the use of rare earths in their motors. BMW's fifth generation motor doesn't use any rare earths:

https://www.bmwblog.com/2018/12/28/upcoming-electric-motors-...

Car manufacturers are also making an effort to reduce the amount of cobalt used in batteries and are trying to increase the transparency of the supply chain to avoid sourcing cobalt from conflict regions. Volkswagen and others are using IBM's Blockchain Platform to document the cobalt supply chain:

https://www.electrive.com/2019/04/23/volkswagen-joins-blockc...

The problems are real but car manufacturers are working on them.

So what's your solution?

Carry on with IC cars? I'm sure those same Africans will thank you when climate change destroys the lives, livelihoods, and nation in various ways.

Car manufacturing and battery production aren't fly by night operations. As such it will be relatively easy for western consumers to put pressure on these companies to do something about the situation. Also I believe Tesla at least are intending to remove all cobalt from their batteries at some point.

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