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Comment by 0daystock | Hacker News Reader

Cars have used 10% ethanol for decades and engine reliability has only gotten better.

Sure - and grandpa lived to be a hundred despite smoking a pack a day. Does that make cigarettes healthy?

That's entirely different. The reason why ethanol degradation is a non-issue on modern cars is that they've been engineered to resist ethanol. The reason why grandpa lived to 100 years is through dumb luck.

So it's purposely to destroy gasoline cars? Sounds pretty wasteful for the environment to take all of these existing cars out, replace them with EVs, and dump the requirements into the electric grid.

So what, we need 300m new EVs, and a place to tear down all the current gas cars in America? Perfect, I'll buy a Tesla so Elon gets richer.

>So it's purposely to destroy gasoline cars?

Obviously the intent isn't to destroy cars, not any more than the intent of driving gasoline cars is to heat the atmosphere.

>Sounds pretty wasteful for the environment to take all of these existing cars out, replace them with EVs, and dump the requirements into the electric grid.

Get your timelines straight. This all happened decades ago, before EVs were a thing. The cars on the road today aren't getting destroyed by ethanol.

As opposed to centuries of pushing oil and gas pollutants literally down our noses and into the public air? What's so bad about EVs?

> As opposed to centuries of pushing oil and gas pollutants literally down our noses and into the public air?

Frankly, that framing is deceptive. I really, really doubt people needed to be "pushed" to use oil and gas over the last "centuries."

Using public money for supporting oil companies, drilling and subsidies is definitely pushing. So is externalizing the costs of the pollution. Imagine every factory is allowed to pollute land and water around them and people have to pay for cleaning it up or having to give up use of them.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...

For one, the production of EV batteries is fraught with its own environmental harms and societal ills. But more simply, gasoline engines provide more freedom of movement and energy independence in the present day. Non-EV vehicles are also easier to work on and maintain, and older cars don't require specialized components just to turn on and run the engine, for example.

1. Some types of Lithium mining are dirty, but 30kg of Lithium is a lot cleaner than 50 tons of gasoline.

2. Electricity is the ultimate form of energy independence. There are literally billions of places you can trickle charge an EV in the US. You can turn gasoline into electricity a lot easier than you can turn electricity into gasoline.

3. I do all the maintenance on my EV, but I don't on my ICE. It's easier because there's almost no maintenance on the EV. Brakes, tires, wipers and cabin air filter.

> There are literally billions of places you can trickle charge an EV in the US.

And there's an infinite number of places I can bring a can of gasoline/diesel to. Check and mate.

Who does that? Anybody going to that ridiculous level of preparedness can just carry a generator. Every place I've seen that is off grid but has a fuel tank also has a generator. Electricity is everywhere that gasoline is.

> Electricity is everywhere that gasoline is.

That's due to gas and diesel power generators, not EV technology.

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