Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

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And I think this analysis suffers from ignoring the increased environmental cost of creating a new electric vehicle. It takes 15,000 to 20,000 miles of driving for the average EV to "break even" with new ICE vehicles due to the much worse environmental impact of creation.

Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Vehicles should be reduced first (drive less), reused second (keep using existing one), repaired (keep using existing ones), and finally you can recycle as best as possible.

All of this should happen prior to replacement. If you replace an existing ICE with an EV, the EV not only has to catch up with a new ICE, it actually has to "catch up" with your existing already made working ICE that has no new cost for construction. That's much worse than 20k miles because the cost of building your existing car is sunk. It could take as many as 50,000 miles of driving to break even against your existing used car.

Consumerism and early replacement of working goods has always been the mortal enemy of environmentalism.

Good news: in the car market, almost everyone follows 'reuse' and 'repair'. Not many people take a car and crush it for recycled parts unless it's truly worthless or super old. They sell it to someone else. For the type of person who buys a new car every 3-4 years, you are selling that car to someone else who will continue using it, likely replacing their less efficient car with yours.

This is unlike most other consumer goods which tend to be scrapped much earlier. If you're scrapping a car before its ~10-15 years old, chances are there's either something quite wrong with it, or you just drove it way too much and its gonna fall apart (i.e., something wrong with it).

> All of this should happen prior to replacement... it actually has to "catch up" with your existing already made working ICE that has no new cost for construction

That is precisely the sunk cost fallacy though: the principle is that continuing an endeavor simply because it already has been a cost paid shouldn't be done, unless the total continuing cost (including the eventual replacement) is less than the cost of immediate replacement (plus all continuing costs after initial replacement, including the eventual replacements of those in turn). Otherwise the principle says it is a waste of resources.

The 4 R's assume that the replacement is no better than the original at the job, which is why I described that analysis as the sunk cost fallacy. We don't have to take this assumption (personally, I prefer to bike over driving my ICE, so this analysis doesn't apply), but if we take the assumption that the EV does less environmental damage over its lifetime, then this assumed "environmental damage" function is minimized by discarding the ICE immediately, as any further use simply increases the total "environmental damage" caused by the choice of which car to use.

This can be seen in computers too, as newer computers are sometimes so much more power efficient then their replacement that they can very quickly save on resources by throwing out a perfectly working computer to replace it with a newer one.

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