Smaller, more efficient vehicles with smaller batteries are definitely better and should be incentivized.
If you want to compare them yourself, don't forget to include all of the externalities from drilling, transporting, and refining petroleum before it reaches the pump. Tailpipe vs tailpipe certainly doesn't tell the whole story.
Why would electric cars be any worse than combustion cars for these?
The overwhelming problem with giant electric SUVs is the opportunity cost. Given limited capacity for battery making, and considering that we are using the last bit of our emissions budget to make them, it is obviously better to make them as small as possible. Slapping a 180kWh battery pack in a Rivian is ridiculous. With the same materials you could make 500 electric bicycles.
But - at least around me - EV chargers seem to be mandated (for at least for some of the spots) when any large or image-conscious organization builds or renovates parking infrastructure. For the purpose at hand, it doesn't matter whether the mandate is legal, or just "or what will they say about us on social media???".
How much bigger and heavier is an electric SUV vs a regular one? How does a ModelY compare to a Mazda CX-5 for instance?
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/tesla-model-y-2021-...
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/mazda-cx-5-2012-suv... https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/tesla-model-y-2021-...
We don't think of nor call it "parking" at the gas pump, but we do at a charging station. There's a reason that's the case.
Many people will have a dedicated charging space at home (taking up only epsilon extra space for the charger), but all the Tesla super-charger, Chargepoints, EVGo, ElectrifyAmerica, etc en route chargers will require more parking space per EV than the equivalent petrol station per ICE.
In Berkeley, California the share of EVs on the road is only about 5% today.
At a 150kW charger that would be 30 hours of charging, or an average 5 minutes a day.
One charger would thus serve 200 cars in the US, 400 in the EU.
In the UK 2-in-3 cars have private parking space and thus potential for home charging. I expect the US to be a fair higher number as there's more space, but lets stay that figure.
That would make one charger serve 600 cars in the US, 1200 in the EU.
The largest chargers I've seen are half a parking space for two spaces.
Thus to serve 280 million cars you need to provide charging for 100 million, which at 600:1 car:charger ratio would be 160,000 chargers.
There are about 115,000 gas sations in the US. 2 chargers per gas station, using a total of 2.5 parking spaces, would be enough.
Thus moving to 100% EV would save massive amounts of space across the country.
EVs eliminate that middle parking spot most of the time. And, tbh, even on road trips, gas cars spend a significant amount of time stopped. They just spend less of that stopped time getting fuel.
Fast chargers are basically only needed along highways, where they take the place of gas stations. You only need those for long-distance driving, but most driving is short-distance.
On the other hand, a lot of slow/midspeed chargers are basically just regular destination parking spots equipped with a charger. They take up zero additional space. As EVs become more and more common, we'll see an increasing number of parking spots being equipped with chargers. Because this allows EVs to charge where they are parked anyways this means you can essentially get rid of gas stations inside cities - which ends up saving space.
Right now we just happen to be in a bit of an awkward in-between phase. When the majority of cars are EVs, the ecosystem will change to fit them better.
I find it a little hard to believe that e.g. lithium extraction is fundamentally worse than oil extraction and processing.
The only correct bit here is that they do require more CO2 to manufacture, but this is made up for by the dramatically reduced operating emissions in the first few thousand miles or so of driving (depending on the source of the energy used to charge it). Further, the grid is getting greener all the time, so operating emissions and the manufacturing emissions are both falling quickly while the operating emissions of fossil fuels remains extremely high (literally and figuratively).
Compared to efficient cars, this crossover point is as late as 50,000km. It does not pay off as rapidly as you are implying. Something like a Kia Niro with a normal-sized battery starts with an embodied CO2 deficit of ~5t. Something absurd like a Rivian is 20t in the hole from the jump and will never be CO2-positive except when compared to something equally wasteful like an ICE Hummer.
EVs are happening. It's a huge win for the environment and all the environmental orgs that pushed for it. Stop trying to rewrite this revolutionary change as a hidden nefarious L. You're just making yourself sad and the youth jaded.
It’s like people will not be satisfied until we eliminate cars and all other modern inventions.
EVs are, at best, stagnation. At worst they simply go even further to hide the enormous external costs of everyone using giant, heavy wheelchairs to move around anywhere.
A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish, but of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric.
Yes, it seems unlikely that we would double our number of miles driven because this is a factor of time spent driving, population, and speed. There's no indication that speed limits will increase or that people are interested in longer commutes, and population growth is stagnating.
> Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Climate change is a much more significant problem than these. I can live with wide roads and parking lots; it's much harder to live with our global breadbaskets succumbing to increasingly severe droughts and the geopolitical destabilization that entails.
And there's no way we're going to pivot away from ICE cars to public transit quickly enough to meet climate goals even if there was the political will to do so (and there isn't, because lots of people get a lot of value out of cars, and even places with lots of public transit options are seeing a rise in car ownership and usage). There's just no way it's going to happen over the next century.
Moreover, there's tons we could do about pedestrian safety, tire pollution, road noise, etc without eliminating cars, but we lack the political will even to do these things so there's certainly no way we're going to abolish cars and transition to public transit / cycling lifestyles.
> Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish
It's foolish to treat all metrics as equally important. You can't live without food; you can live with car noise.
> of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric
Yeah, car manufacturers love paying Tesla so they can keep making ICE cars /s. Cars are wildly popular in the west (car adoption is increasing across the board, even among the Dutch); the auto industry doesn't need to do a psyop to convince people to drive--it's just much more convenient than the alternatives even where the alternatives are very well developed/supported.