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Comment by fogihujy | Hacker News Reader

Synthetic fuel and biofuels will probably be required for several decades until legacy equipment like farming machinery (not to mention military veichles) has been replaced/modernized. Regular cars, on the other hand, will probably be mostly electric within 15-20 years.

The main issues are power-grid development and EV range. I suspect those problems will be handled within 10 years.

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No one talks about the biggest disadvantage of EVs which is extraction of lithium which is a threat to environment and people who are involved in it. Plus a major disadvantage is where these dead batteries end up! land fills which again is biggest threat to environment. Even batteries are recyclable but up to what extent one day they will end up in landfills [https://www.res-ev.co.uk/problems-with-ev/#:~:text=One%20of%....] . There are some other options like hydrogen powered cars which do not harm environment any way, i think more research should be done to promote them or any other absolutely cleaner biofuel powered cars

Yeah, that's another hurdle that needs to be tackled. Going electric is going to take decades, and we'll probably never be completely rid of combustion engines.

Since synthetic fuels are zero emissions, why would they ever need to be replaced by EVs? A better question is why we need to bother with electrification at all if there are alternative paths to zero emissions?

They still pollute, even if they're carbon neutral. Particle emissions won't go away.

Particulate emissions can come from the tires. EVs aren't magic on this form of pollution. Plus, you can have particulate filters on the engine exhaust, reducing this greatly.

I wouldn't be surprised if ICE's powered by biofuel/synthetic fuel could be competitive with electic veichles given enough time to improve the technology. Most likely we are going to see some of that development as EV's simply cannot fill all the niches yet.

The most ironic result would be ICE powered vehicles outlasting EVs. They could be the vinyl records of transportation.

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