"Reduce" for the sake of reduction is just poor behavioral economics & hence hasn't actually demonstrably made much of a difference to this world.
Reduce as a side effect of a true benefit/efficiency (think how much lesser power is consumed per unit compute today vs. even 5 years ago) makes a lot of sense.
America conciously builds sprawling suburbs that require private cars to get around.
We can choose to build a society that does not need as much car use.
But Singapore also air conditions everything which is a fairly heavy energy use in tropical climate much like how heating is a massive energy use in northern climates and spends a lot of effort/energy on keeping sidewalks, grounds and pavements manicured, watered & in good repair.
As the founder of Singapore argued, the lifestyle gain - though at the cost of consuming more energy is a massive competitive advantage in productivity and in attracting, developing & retaining talent. https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
"The real green decision" is whatever is more environmentally-friendly than what you would have done otherwise.
While luxury cars are often heavier, and perhaps built without as much presumption that the owners will be concerned about fuel mileage/costs, there are many anomalies where apparently smallish cars are surprisingly heavy. And even 'economy' cars have become quite portly. Just look at the Honda civic hatch, from 1990-now going from 2165 Lbs to 2763 Lbs -- that extra 600Lbs is over 27% heavier -- a lot more mass to accelerate. Or, check out the Nissan Maxima sedan at 3676 Lbs! That's most of the way to my old BMW X5's 4100Lbs. Meanwhile a friend's C6 Corvette weighed in at ~3140 Lbs and got over 32mpg on the highway between the low CD and lighter weight. Look beyond the luxury to the design & build.
Drivetrain type is completely orthogonal to weight as a performance factor for a vehicle.
Weight will affect the efficiency of every drivetrain (unless you have a drivetrain that can zero out the inertial properties of nearby mass).
I was only suggesting that luxury is a less important factor than weight to consider for efficiency.
Moreover, if we could have lighter batteries, the lighter hybrid or all electric would be even more efficient.
How many hybrids/electics do you see being made with lead-acid batteries (extremely reliable, proven, safe), vs Li-Ion? Basically none. Because the weight is so much of an issue that it makes them impractical.
Just because one factor (hybrid or electric drive train) can compensate for another factor (weight), does not make that factor irrelevant.
You just need to look at the dance the price of oil and the health of the economy go through to realise money and energy are deeply intertwined. It’s not obvious to me that we can completely decouple them.
The price of oil itself has no correlation with carbon output. (Total production numbers might tell you something, but that is only vaguely related to price in market economics, given the competing forces of supply and demand. Total usage numbers would tell you a lot more, but isn't a statistic even tracked by economics and if it has any correlation on price depends on the type of demand [elastic versus static] whether it is following/lagging or pushing the price.)
Sure money and energy can be considered intertwined, but not all energy is carbon, don't forget that as much as business tries to underprice it, a lot of the energy reflected in a supply chain is labor (which admittedly people do also produce carbon, but exhalation effort is not something I've ever seen properly reflected in someone's wages).
So again: higher prices in EVs and EV supply chains absolutely does not correlate with carbon costs. EVs generally have less material because a) weight matters a lot more, and b) fewer moving parts / simpler drive trains.
Price differences likely reflect other market realities such as supply/demand and things like perceived luxury.
All in, over their lifetimes, those non-fashionable solar panels will save far more carbon than the tesla. So unless you have already maxed your solar options, the tesla is more fashion statement than "green" decision.
Personally, I've lived in many cities, suburbs, and rural areas in the northeast US (population-dense, relatively friendly toward ecological initiatives) and tried to use public transit whenever possible. My experience is that public transport outside cities is practically nonexistent. In cities, there are only buses and they're annoying/slow/don't go where you need them.
Only now that I live in the immediate vicinity of Boston do I have useful public transit options, yet still, owning a car is a necessity to get to anything outside the city.
A typical suburb in the US will have no public transportation, and be so sprawled out that bicycling or walking between places would be impossible for a working adult.
In America, most suburbs are bad for walking, actively hostile to biking, and have either no public transit or nearly unusable public transit.
The cities are usually not much better, either. Only a handful in the US have public transit that can even be called decent, let alone good.
In the US only.
I wonder if 30 to 40 years from now, we'll be having the same convo about electric cars that we are having about recycling plastic? Something that seemed good on the surface, but masked all kinds of externalities.
I mean, at least electric should be a bit better than ICE in daily use. But will making these things at scale in the first place cost too much in the way of carbon production? Or other forms of pollution that we as consumers don't even know about yet? You may say, "well it was your job as a consumer to know the impact your purchases were having." But I'm just not that knowledgeable about that stuff. I don't know if a billion electric cars are bad or good? And it might not even be the cars, just the fact that we have to make the roads may be polluting somehow? Or whatever? It's just too much for a consumer to know. Should I be buying electric? Or supporting mass public transit? Which is better? Or is it just a question of which is worse? There's a lot to think about there.
Or maybe it's just me?
If a car is needed it depends how you're planning to power it.
This answer[0] does a great job of looking at the energy inputs of building a car. I thought the up-front cost would be higher but the emissions from producing a car are comparable to the emissions of using the car for a few years.
So if the choice is between a used ICE car and a new EV and charging it with renewable energy, it's (surprisingly) probably worth buying the new EV.
If you're planning to charge it with power from a coal plant though you should probably get the used ICE car.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-is-required-to-build-a... [1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycli...
That depends. There are streets in the UK so polluted that jogging on them, breathing in lots more bad air, is actually worse for you than not jogging. Similarly, the violent accident rate for bicycle commuters is scary. I don't know of any regular commuter who hasn't been to hospital at least once.
Having said that I have had a hospital visit.
There are certainly parts of the US where a car is necessary, but 90% is pushing it. It may well be that 90% of people think that they need a car, though.
Being car-less in America is hard, I lived in a the suburb of a main city and if I was to use transit options to get to work I would have spent 3 hours a day on commute alone. That's simply not feasible. Similarly I used to work a job from midnight to noon (and a year later noon to midnight) and there simply was no feasible transit option for such a schedule, and with the sprawling nature of the suburb carpooling wasn't much of an option either.
My year old Model S is already surpassed by the new Raven powertrain architecture, providing another 40 miles of range per full charge versus the “old” version (330 miles->370 miles).