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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

Also, making a new car, even an electric one, takes a huge amount of resources.

"Producing a medium-sized new car costing £24,000 may generate more than 17 tonnes of CO2e – almost as much as three years' worth of gas and electricity in the typical UK home."[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

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Electric cars are even worse: they typically don't achieve carbon parity with same-class ICE until about 70,000km.

This was discussed recently here on HN, I'll try to find the conversation.

Edit: here's the conversation, with link to source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716921

It's about 50,000 to 112,00km depending on the source of electricity used to charge the electric car.

You say "even worse", I say "much better". Reaching carbon parity means any car driven more than that creates less carbon emissions. People I know run their cars until 300,000km and our power is >90% nuclear and hydro.

This is a pretty good article on ICE vs EV

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the...

> ... compared to most gasoline-powered cars, an electric car should become carbon neutral in less than 3 years of driving.

Us average car mileage for new cars is on the order of 15-20,000 a year. So 3 years would be 80,000km which checks out.

Can you explain what makes you say that figure is worse?

My reading of the comment is that the embodied carbon of a new EV is greater than that of a new ICE car. This is definitely true. Battery production uses a lot of energy.

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