The greenest car in America isn't an EV | Hacker News Reader

The greenest car in America isn't an EV

washingtonpost.com

The less you drive an EV the harder it is to offset the embodied carbon involved in manufacturing it. There will be a point where, if you don't drive much, an EV emits more carbon than a internal combustion engine car. If you drive a bit more, the EV is more efficient than an ICE but less efficient than a hybrid with a smaller battery. If you drive a bit more the EV will be more efficient than either. The article picks one usage level and uses this single data point to claim the hybrid is more efficient than the EV which is both interesting and misleading.

Good points.

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think the CO2 emissions associated with EVs matter at all. Is our goal for to cut emissions by 10%? No. It’s to cut emissions by 100%. To reach that goal, we need all vehicles to be pure BEVs (approximately.. some ICE on biofuels/e-fuel could work, but it’s not sustainable on a large scale), materials must be near 100% recycled, and whatever mining is done most be done with electric equipment. To get there, the hard requirement is that we need to mine a certain amount of battery materials and build a certain amount of EV infrastructure. Hybrids contribution to this is mainly that they have some batteries, so they drive battery development and material production. Plug-in hybrids help drive EV infrastructure to a small degree. But nothing is better than just going pure BEV. The small short term CO2 emission gains that might be had with hybrids could easily be outweighed by the long term increased emissions associated with delaying the progression to a 100% renewable 100% carbon neutral ecosystem. But I won’t fault anyone from buying hybrids. Pushing for a more aggressive transition needs to be a policy decision. If hybrid makes more sense than EV from economic or practical point for you then that’s what you should go for.

> Is our goal for to cut emissions by 10%? No. It’s to cut emissions by 100%.

I don't think most people would want to live in the world where you've cut emissions by 100%.

Even making a bicycle emits some amount of emissions. Making a PV panel emits GHG emissions. Having a pet emits GHG emissions.

As the parent says, the goal is to have NET 0 emissions. Certainly some emissions will still occur but they need to be small enough to be offset by CO2 removal. Because it is almost always much easier to prevent emissions rather than remove CO2, preventing 100% emission from cars and their production is likely to be best path to NET 0.

Cutting emissions by 100% and being net zero are two different things. Emitting a bunch of GHG and then buying carbon offsets is radically different from never actually emitting GHG. And the parent never says "net", it says cut emissions 100%. You're reading words that aren't there.

If you wanted to cut emissions 100%, you would stop making cars. You would stop making busses. You would stop building roads. You would stop building trains. You would ground every plane. You would stop every boat. You would no longer have AC, you would no longer have refrigerators.

why? if you have power from other than fossil fuels, that power can be used to do anything that you would use fossil fuels for.

Fossil fuels aren't 100% of GHG emissions. It's a large percentage, yes, but not 100%. So sure, you've cut 90% or whatever, but not 100%. You're still probably using virgin plastics somewhere, still making concrete, still making asphalt, still making steel, still need refrigerants, etc.

Isn't the real goal negative emissions? We're well past safe levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Keep in mind the embodied carbon also goes down as the rest of the supply chain switches to low carbon or carbon free alternatives.

I have unresolved questions surrounding this concept. I agree with you that for the X number of years that you own the vehicle, the less you drive the harder it is to offset the manufacturing-related carbon emitted.

Once you are done with ownership, that vehicle is going to be owned by someone else, and probably at least one or two people after that. How do we account for that? Do we assume that all vehicles will be driven the same distance over their lifetime? Should we even bother to consider this factor? Does it matter if the distance driven is front-loaded or back-loaded (the original owner drives a lot or a little)? Are we overcomplicating things?

For a vehicle which has multiple owners it's easy - it's the average usage over all owners which will matter.

My first comment was about emissions over a fixed amount of time. You could instead assume all vehicles lasted for a fixed number of miles instead of a fixed amount of time. If you do that (and you assume the vehicle lasts say 100k miles) then I suspect the EV would always be the greenest over its life. However, since we know that both the age of a car as well as it's mileage influence how usable it is I think my main point still stands. There's a range of levels of greenness which will depend on how you use and maintain your car.

Buy a used EV with 50k miles on it, problem solved

we need a different word.

EV is more efficient than ICE and hybrids, that seems clear. but the context is day to day driving, not "Total Carbon Footprint" (TCF?).

During this energy transition phase more emphasis should be on PHEVs since

1. We have the infrastructure to build PHEVs faster than EVs. Since they are mostly modifications of current vehicles.

2. With the same amount of battery material to make 1 EV we can make ~10 PHEVs and adding that to the fact that most people drive less than 40 miles per day, the effective electric range of a typical PHEV, you are utilizing the battery supply at a much higher level.

I think the current incentives and tax breaks that favor high end luxury EVs have been a mistake. If you can afford a Tesla Model S or a Rivian you don't need a tax incentive to buy it!

Yeah I think the main issue with PHEVs is essentially that people don’t charge them / do the majority of their kilometers / miles on the ICE engine :). See https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/real-world-ph...

Anecdotally, I recently rented a Jeep Wrangler PHEV. Didn’t choose that model specifically; was expecting a Prius but it’s what the rental counter gave me.

The battery was dead when I picked it up. It was dead when I returned it, despite me actually looking for a L2 charger just to see what it would be like to drive fully on battery. It did drive as a hybrid (I could feel the ICE stop and start) but it wasn’t nearly as efficient as it could have been, especially considering my entire rental was probably under 100 miles.

they also completely solve the range problem.

I'm not inclined to think that the battery material is really the largest constraint to building efficient PHEV/EVs though. I'm in VA and when I was looking for a 2023/2024 Prius Prime to test drive, not a single one was in stock within hours of me. To test drive one, I'd have to drive hours into Maryland or Pennsylvania and then if I wanted it, likely have to pay way over MSRP plus bs doc fees, "upgrades" and other nonsense. I eventually said F that shit and just bought a Tesla that is 100% battery. They're easily available, in inventory, despite each one perhaps having 10 times the amount of battery than the Prius Prime. Given the ease there is to buy a Tesla, and the easy availability of Mach-E and the Kia and Hyundai EVs, I can't believe that the whole 10 PHEV = 1 EV is an equation of any importance.

While that's true now, I think the incentives were still a good idea, because nothing is cheap when it's being manufactured at low volume. Somebody had to stump up the cash to build the battery factories, and the tax breaks helped get that process started.

The greenest car is keeping the car you have for as long as possible. Then replacing it with a used car. You could even get a bumper sticker that says "Rescue Driver" or "Who saved Who?" with a icon of a car if it would make you feel superior to the rest of the drivers on the road.

https://archive.is/9IlTT

Seems like a little bit of a switch-up to conflate “green” with “energy-efficient”. Obviously an efficient hybrid is better than a full ICE car, but what happens when (if?) the energy system is fully electrified?

That said, I understand not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The concerns about the extra weight, embodied carbon, etc in EVs is all too often swept under the rug. With that in mind, would it make more sense for an energy efficiency think-tank to lobby for alternative transport systems?

This is a big red flag:

> "The GreenerCars report analyzes 1,200 cars available in 2024, assessing both the carbon dioxide emissions of the vehicle while it’s on the road and the emissions of manufacturing the car and battery."

First, fossil fuel consumption, not carbon dioxide emissions, is the important metric if you're concerned about climate. Humans eat food and breath out carbon dioxide; it's not going to change atmospheric CO2 because photosynthesis. EVs do not consume fossil fuels; hybrids do.

Second, fossil fuel use during manufacturing depends entirely on the power sources used to run the whole manufacturing chain and in the real world may be all over the map, depending on whether coal, gas, nuclear, or solar/wind are the primary energy inputs to the process.

This is the kind of low-quality inaccurate and slanted reporting that I've come to expect from the big three US papers - NYT, WaPo, WSJ.

The “consumption” of fossil fuels is not the important metric from a climate change perspective. It is the CO2 emissions that result from that consumption. There is a direct relationship between the amount of consumption of fossil fuels and the amount of emission of CO2. The article is entirely correct in using CO2 as the measure.

Yes, CO2 is emitted by multiple processes and there are some counter processes that return that CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. The problem is that the rate of production has exceeded the rate of CO2 return resulting in increased concentrations in the atmosphere. It takes very little CO2 to capture more heat in the system.

Tracking fossil fuel production is more sensible as the ultimate goal is to keep all fossil fuel in the ground. Under a rational system, this would mean starting off with eliminating the global trade in fossil fuels as soon as possible, and the way to do that is to ensure all fossil fuel importers switch to renewable energy imports, which is cheaper in the long run for the importers.

I think the real oversight is not mentioning that the whole supply chain to provide the fossil fuel used to power the ICE or Hubrid. Its petroleum and fossil fuels all the way down. Even if those BEVs use fossil fuels to charge, there is no way that impact is as large as all the fossil fuels used in the delivering of fossil fuels to fill up your car with a gas tank (or the oil you regularly change).

Yeah - also: tailpipe emissions are a thing. Not emitting byproducts of hydrocarbon combustion around humans seems like it might be a good idea.

Strong smell of Toyota’s famously outsized lobbying dollars on this article.

I strongly suspect the most environmentally friendly car a person can drive nowadays is, ironically, the Volkswagen dieselgate scandal recall vehicles.

For example, a manual transmission 2015 VW Golf TDI gets an EPA rated 44mpg highway, and can run on renewable diesel (now available at most fuel stations in California) which has roughly only 1/4 the carbon footprint of petroleum diesel. With the VW post-recall fixes, it also has extremely low diesel soot and NOx emissions, like it was claiming to have before the scandal.

I suspect the total carbon footprint and emissions are much lower than EVs or plug-in hybrids. Now if only VW hadn't messed everything up, we'd probably have plug in hybrid diesels on the market that would beat everything else out.

That said, Aptera Motors is about to release a true practical solar car that requires neither power grid energy, or fuel... which will surely beat just about anything else.

I don't think there's any reason to think those VW cars are the most environmentally friendly. There are diesel vehicles which get more than 44mpg highway (for example Chevy Cruz gets more than 50). They certainly are above average though

I actually wasn't aware there were any other small economy diesel cars with modern emissions tech in the US market, not alone from a US company, but the same point would likely apply to the Cruz.

Other diesel cars I am aware of from BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar are much bigger and less fuel efficient vehicles, or much older models with very poor emissions.

IIRC, the diesel Chevy Cruze hasn't been made for a couple of years. I was somewhat interested in buying one for a while but I already have a 03 VW Jetta diesel which satisfies my desire for a manual diesel car.

Anyone know why they don't seem to have looked at Tesla at all? Weird to omit the largest EV seller in America by far.

They did. Have a look at the spreadsheet from the report. The Tesla Model 3 Long Range has a Green Score of 64. Not sure where they pulled the chart from in the NYT article, but it would still fall at 11; just off the list. The actual data if sorted by "Green Score" (tried to look up the scoring methodology but the website is down: https://greenercars.org/news/2024-methodology-update) looks like this before you hit the first Tesla (when removing duplicates and similar models).

TOYOTA PRIUS PRIME SE

Hyundai Ioniq Electric

Mini Cooper SE Hardtop 2 Door

Mercedes-Benz Smart Fortwo ed Coupe

BMW I3

Hyundai Ioniq Plug-in Hybrid

Kandi K23, (254Ah)

Nissan Leaf

LEXUS RZ 300e (18inch Wheels)

MAZDA MX-30

Tesla Model 3 Long Range

https://www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/files/LEED2024.xls...

Thanks! Interesting. Yeah, when I clicked to look into what was going on it seemed the website was down for me too. Whatever the methodology, it must not have to be efficiency, because "2021 Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus RWD" tops everything according to Fueleconomy.gov. Makes me wonder how something like the BZ4X scored higher.

Thanks for the sheet this was super enlightening. I was comparing my pacifica phev with my polestar, and the pacfica has a green score of 57, vs 53 for the polestar. This really seems like a methodology issue likely related to hours of operation vs miles driven.

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