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Comment by ElKrist | Hacker News Reader

"Cars will exist and it's way better to have them electric than gasoline."

If we're talking about direct air pollution in cities I agree.

For climate change, I mostly disagree:

With an electrical car you're starting with a CO2 debt for the production of the battery.

Then, if you want to offset this debt, you have to use the car frequently and be in an area where the electricity production does not generate much CO2. There are not many areas like this yet (France, Sweden being the famous examples).

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The only report I've read about that side issue assumed that producing an ICE/petrol engine and transmission caused no CO₂ emission, or the authors just forgot.

Do you know anything about that? What is the CO₂ cost of producing a typical battery+electric engine compared to that of producing a typical transmission, ICE engine and the minor ICE-related parts that electric cars don't need?

Citation needed. The literature I've seen suggests that an electric vehicle easily makes back any deficit quite early in its life.

An easily digestable version of this calculation is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM

No, it doesn't make up the deficit, it does end up slightly better than a ICE one after the projected life cycle of 12 years.

The problem is that unlike ICE cars Teslas are much less likely to be reused for 12 years, as far as other EVs go it's still an open question.

If the only two options are an ICE or an EV, it's likely better to have an EV despite the likelihood of PCO2E being underestimated in the supply chain especially when it comes to rare earths.

But if the option is to have an EV or no car and use public transportation or communal transport the latter is always better.

If anything, electric cars have the potential to last incredibly long. Combine with composite or aluminum body and the body won't rust away on an otherwise perfectly fine car.

Yeah, I'm confused as well. Generally in a 10+ year old car you're looking at possible transmissions issues(or engine depending on the brand, hello Subaru).

We're just about to crack 100k mi and 5 years on our EV with no sign of stopping. From a power train perspective swapping motors is dead simple and you have no transmission. I still see good capacity at ~91k. There are electronics/accessories that will fail but that's no different on an ICE.

Anecdata aside, the average car gets taken off the road around 11-12 years due to body rot, not drievtrain problems. EVs are unlikely to be immune to that.

Except Teslas which are aluminum.

The majority of Teslas are made primarily of steel, with some aluminum parts. Just like other cars.

There's still some decent physical shielding of the underside of the pack(which runs whole body). It'd be interesting to see the long term impacts that would have on the frame/etc.

Where can I learn more about this?

The ALH version of the Jetta TDI is a pretty good example. I personally owned two ICE vehicles that lasted well over 15 years and 250,000 miles. I have a 2017 Civic with 44,000 miles now. I average over 40 mpg even just driving around town. When we travel extended distances I can some times hit 45 mpg if traffic cooperates. The math behind the ICE vs electric isn't familiar to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're closer to right than most people want to admit. I do fully believe the math will slide greatly into the electric vehicle's favor eventually.

I drive a 2000 Civic with 205k miles (it was purchased used). It only gets about 25 mpg, likely because of a part failure in the fuel system that has been too expensive to fix.

I estimate 1000L (264gal) of fuel burned in it per year. That's about 755kg, and 35000 MJ (9800 kWh equivalent). The combustion produces about 2300 kg CO2. That's half the EPA estimate for "a typical passenger vehicle" [0]. An equivalent electric car likely uses less than 35 kWh/100 mi, so an all-electric power budget would be 2300 kWh, which at typical US power production is about 1400 kg CO2, about 60% my current footprint, on a strict operating basis. The battery represents about 5000 kg CO2, so it would be about 5.5 years until my "CO2 investment" pays itself off.

Given the current money-price differentials, and dearth of electrics in the used market where I always buy my cars, it doesn't make sense for me to replace my current car.

I'd also like to see a hybrid with a 20 kW I-2 free-piston linear alternator (probably from Toyota) before committing to battery-electric.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

Like I said previously, citations are needed for these assertions. You might be right, but at the moment it looks like opinion.

> If we're talking about direct air pollution in cities I agree.

What about PM2.5? Do EVs do not use breaks and tires?

Regenerative braking cuts these down a lot.

brakes ? rarely

I am sure that tires (in the city where is majority of cars electric) will not cause PM2.5 mayhem :)

Also VW prepares this technology : https://www.motor1.com/news/346653/brake-dust-particle-filte...

Tires generate a lot more particulate matter than brakes do, like 95% or so.

Tyres yes, brakes not so much. The brakes are needed only to come to a complete stop, most normal braking is handled by running the motor as a generator to dump the energy back into the battery.

I sometimes wish people who make this argument would go sit in a sealed room with a running electrical car and then a running petrol or diesel car and tell me which one was the better experience.

I would prefer sitting in a sealed room with my bike.. Always something to tinker with.

I think the argument here though is sit in the car with the vehicle's emissions from non-existent to end of life.

I do agree that point-source emissions of the electricity being generated is a big advantage. Nothing sucks more than being exposed to vehicle emissions in traffic/city/etc.

Well, to be fair, you need to be sitting in the room during the production of the battery, too ;-)

As long as you also sit beside the smelter that makes the metal for the engine, drive shaft and gearing.

Sure. I'd even allow that you could share that experience with all the steel being smelted for both cars.

The pollution from the production of the battery, the steel and the aluminium can occur well away from major population centres. They are centralised and immobile so there is a much better chance that in the future they can utilise more efficient methods or at least capture some of their emissions.

> With an electrical car you're starting with a CO2 debt for the production of the battery.

In what way is this bigger than the production of the many components needed in a gasoline car? Internal combustion engine (as an example) is not exactly CO2 natural to manufacture either.

>In what way is this bigger than the production of the many components needed in a gasoline car? Internal combustion engine (as an example) is not exactly CO2 natural to manufacture either.

He literally said "for the production of the battery". Don't build a strawman. It's pretty well accepted that batteries are environmentally dirty to make.

An ICE drivetrain and electric drivetrain sans motor are both big lumps of metal. I'm not sure what the difference is between the carbon footprint per pound of copper vs steel (both cars are gonna have a lot of aluminum but I'm assuming they're within an order of magnitude of even). In either case the manufacturing carbon footprint it pennies compared to the energy required to move the damn thing its whole life (except in the obvious case of the electric an in an area where electricity is low/zero cabon).

I suspect the EV is going to be just barely more carbon heavy to manufacture simply because tech is at a point where the EV needs to place a much higher priority on weight (because it has the heavy battery to compensate for by being light everywhere else and reducing weight increases range) and that priority will result in different part choices throughout the car and that is where the extra carbon will come from (e.g. forged aluminum control arms and rims vs stamped steel).

Obviously the EV is far superior to the ICE vehicle in operation so it would make that back quickly.

I also was talking about the _production_ of the component. Not sure what you mean.

In any case if there is some comparison made between CO2 footprint of _production_ of an EV vs gasoline car, I would love to read that.

There was some info in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_aspects_of_the_e...

So production CO2 impact is bigger (no only because of the battery) but total lifecycle is somewhat less than gasoline.

Best option is obviously no car produced.

Ok but the value used in the table is for a quite dirty electricity. The value used is 500gCO2/kWh when the OECD mean value in 2013 was already down to 430gCO2/kWh, and the value for my country (Switzerland) is at 24gCO2/kWh... Based on that you get completely different result based on where you leave.

The first column, which is about production, doesn’t use that value.

I'm not even talking about the first column as there is no such thing as a standard electric car, is it a Zoe or a Tesla model X?

Moreover, production needs energy and the carbon intensity should be mentioned (so we suppose that they used the same value). A battery produced at the Gigafactory is going to have a smaller carbon intensity as most of its power supply is solar... By the way this study is very pessimistic. For example if I take the efficiency of the Tesla Model 3 (16.4kWh/100km) for the whole 150'000km we get 12.3 metric tons of CO2 (500gCO2/kWh), far from the 19 tons of the figure.

Both are bad. Good is not buying a car when you have one in your driveway that does the trick. Better is never having a car in the first place and biking to a transit hub.

Also, what about disposing the battery when it reaches its end of life.

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