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Comment by 30gdan | Hacker News Reader

Much better at what ? Do you have decent data for what it takes (CO2, child labour , cost of supply chain, ...) to make your Lithium based battery VS melting an ICE ? Same question for recycling ? Comparing only the lifecycles of products doesn't make any sense if you don't put in perspective creation & destruction and this is where the massive lie is, no EV constructor has ever been transparent about this because it's overall just way dirtier by no way cleaner !

Extracting rare metals from Africa, sending to China for transformation into batteries and back to US/EU for putting into an EV (that we cannot properly recycle yet) just cannot be cleaner than melting an ICE with processes that are 100+ years old and that can be done locally without the use of ships to make 3 roundabouts on earth.

Yeah established on a truncated view of reality !

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Ships are actually much more fuel efficient than trucks, by weight/volume.

Saying it must be inefficient because it includes ship transit instead of trucking "locally" is innumerate.

I'm saying it's inefficient because of a combination of many things not only shipping. Also add to this the fact that your electricity in the US cames from fossil fuel and you'll see how clean your EV is !

From your own source:

> In countries that get most of their energy from burning dirty coal, the emissions numbers for EVs don’t look nearly as good—but they’re still on par with or better than burning gasoline.

Trump's own EPA calls your argument the #1 myth about EVs. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

Myth #2 numbers from graphical representation are totally off from the 80% initial C02 difference in the MIT study. IDK where these numebrs come from but I'd tend to trust the MIT more than some propaganda from your beloved president.

Same goes for myth#1 IMO numbers are Trump related propaganda and have nothing to do with reality. Furthermore on myth #1 they talk about efficiency of EV vs ICE but totally forget to mention the efficiency of generating that said energy : 33% efficiency for coal based electricity generation VS 90% for petroleum refinement .... In the end when you sum up overall efficiencies are identical so I call bullshit and propaganda ...

Ah, we've journeyed quite a ways from "I'm saying it's inefficient because of a combination of many things" to "when you sum up overall efficiencies are identical" in just one comment!

I also trust MIT more than Trump (I'll trust a poodle over him), especially on EVs. The point is even Trump's loony EPA clearly states they're better for the environment, inclusive of coal power. (Which MIT agrees with; I quoted your source!)

> Ships are actually much more fuel efficient than trucks, by weight/volume.

Ships are indeed more efficient if you look at it on per mile comparison but distances are much bigger. Shipping things from one side of the planet to the other is not something too efficient imo. It's just makes sense if you look at economics and differences in price of labor, regulations and so on but these do have externalities that eventually cancel out the benefits.

> Do you have decent data...?

> just cannot be cleaner...

Someone doesn't!

MIT : https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-defini...

Quote : This intensive battery manufacturing means that building a new EV can produce around 80% more emissions than building a comparable gas-powered car

Show me anything else if you have ; just don't troll dude...

The very first line of your article says "yes… they more than make up for it by driving much cleaner under nearly any conditions".

It seems you agree with the poster upthread, who stated "much better overall than ICE".

First of all don't forget the important 'Over the course of their driving lifetimes' before your quote; it changes everything. So yeah this MIT article says EV is 80% more CO2 expensive to build but makes up over it's lifetime not quite exatcly what you are saying.

Also this article does not take into account recycling of batteries which is way dirty that recycling ICEs.

And my initial remark was show me data, show me interesting stuff and you just dumbly troll (quoting truncated stuff) on what I have shown you. Nice man, u smart !!!

> it changes everything

It changes nothing. People buy cars to drive them.

> Also this article does not take into account recycling of batteries which is way dirty that recycling ICEs.

I'm sorry you can't be bothered to read your own link. This is in the footnotes as a source for it:

Erik Emilsson and Lisbeth Dahllöf. "Lithium-ion vehicle battery production: Status 2019 on energy use, CO2 emissions, use of metals, products environmental footprint, and recycling." IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, in cooperation with the Swedish Energy Agency, Report C444, November 2019.

'People buy cars to drive them' : how long did you own your last EV car ? enough to pass the limit for the EV to become interesting ? You think all Tesla & BYD owners do that ? Don't think so ! So in the end your ownership (and 95% of the other) of an EV was more CO2 intensive than equivalent ICE because you don't keep it enough to become efficient. And don't talk about second hand use because this is clearly not the way our society is going; it's all about buying new stuff and changing cars every couple of years; huge hyprocrisy when you say that EVs need time to become more efficient than ICE.

'I'm sorry you can't be bothered to read your own link. This is in the footnotes as a source for it:' just click on the damn link, use google trad, find the paper and READ (not just troll as if I didn't) the recycling chapter by yourself ! It does not include real-world data, it's theoretical/research data IF batteries were recycled in EU/US with up to date processes. As of today 2025 all batteries are 'recycled' (joke..) in China/India by underqualified people with a CO2 cost WAY higher and this is NOT taken into account in the study. So yeah I'll say again : real recycling, the one we do right now IS NOT ACCOUNTED FOR !

Useless discussion anyway, you don't add any argument or source, just trolling on my words, nice !

> how long did you own your last EV car ? enough to pass the limit for the EV to become interesting ? You think all Tesla & BYD owners do that ?

Again, I reference your source:

"Yet when the MIT study calculated a comparison in which EVs lasted only 90,000 miles on the road rather than 180,000 miles, they remained 15 percent better than a hybrid and far better than a gas car."

Both of my cars have 100k+ miles on them, with plenty of life left. Modern vehicles seem to do 200-300k miles regularly.

I am not an outlier: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/americ...

"The average age of U.S. cars and light trucks this year rose to a record 12.6 years, according to the report by S&P Global Mobility on Wednesday, up by two months from 2023."

The average American drives 12k miles a year.

I'm not sure why you zeroed in on a source that openly debunks all of your arguments, but I do appreciate the assist.

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