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Comment by lakomen | Hacker News Reader

I don't know...

on one hand I welcome a more quiet street and without the gas smell.

on the other hand I can't tell if it's really better for our habitat and actually less CO2 producing, because you need to produce those batteries and you have to "load" them, transport them, and what is more efficient than direct conversion vs remotely generated power that needs to be transported to a vehicle. I think it's mostly a lie, a feel good lie that don't help anyone except those wanting to wrestle power from established companies. A paranoid guy might even say it's a plot to destroy Germany's car industry.

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First and foremost, the german car industry already shifted towards producing EVs, and really don't want to see those investments dwindle now, the plan is set and clear, execution and changing production lines just takes a while to execute and they're in the midst of it. No conspiracy needed here, its simply false to assume that a "plot".

Secondly, the _real_ solution is to get people to use public transport and build up those capabilities (depends on demand to verify investments). In most places of europe, you can get to nearly any destination you want without a car at all, and we need only carsharing pools in case you really need it.

So the optimal transition is public transport/scaling that up, and only have EVs as a fallback for edge cases or special circumstances. Replacing every single individual ICE with an EV is still harmful for the planet, even though its at least not CO2.

The reduction in localised air- position is huge, yes - real world studies show impressive improvements even with a small displacement of internal combustion cars [1].

As for the other but, no, it’s not worse overall. With a somewhat clean grid, it does take something like 20,000km before you’ve paid back the carbon cost of building the car, but after that, it’s far better. This should improve, too, as things like green steelmaking start to come online.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

Even on grid using a ton of coal, ev more than compensate extra co2 generated during battery production. On the not so green us grid (average of us), ev save 50% co2 over their lifetime. But the grid is greening and so they are saving more and more. In france it's a factor 5.

ICE as the dominant form of locomotion is dead. People don't know it yet.

Of course some will be used for specialty work, but they will become a rarity in our lifetime.

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