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Comment by hunmernop | Hacker News Reader

Gas itself is poison. Just take a deep huff at the gas station. EVs are the only way to go. At least the pollution is localized, not down every inner city street with exhaust and other vapors.

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Maybe you can enlighten me.

My question that once you mined the materials for the car + battery, shipped that somewhere to be built, then shipped that to be sold.

Then you have the added waste battery once it not longer hold enough charge. Is it actually better for the environment?

If we add all this extra pull on the grid we need to generate the power for that too.

Is this a real question? ICE cars have a battery too.

Evs have a main battery and a car battery so they ice and ev are equivalent in that respect.

Sure Is! I’m largely uninformed on the topic. Asking questions even stupid ones means you get to not be stupid after.

Yeah it's actually better and it's not even close, provided that the cars make more than 50k km.

Petrol engines have terrible efficiency and that's also what makes the petrol numbers so bad.

If "it's not even close" at 50k km, then surely the break even is much lower and you could've just said that?

That's because 50k km is pretty much nothing for a brand new car and if it breaks before that, it was badly designed to start with.

Batteries fortunately do not destroy the raw materials they are made from. So eventually we can stop mining new raw materials once we have built enough batteries. In addition, batteries for cars live a surprising long time - and can be used to stabilize the grid once they diminish in oomf (technical term).

The fact that we're throwing them into the garbage in the form of disposable vapes doesn't give me hope for the future tho.

I'd be happy if people threw them in garbage, but I often see them tossed on the street. Sickens me to see

Sodium-ion batteries are now also finally coming to market (CATL Naxtra) [1]. This gives me a lot of hope for the future.

[1]: https://www.electrive.com/2026/06/26/catl-targets-up-to-2000...

This is a very stale set of talking points.

Uninformed maybe, I’ve not looked into it as Evs not high my list of things to read about hence the questions that came to mind.

Lithium batteries can be recycled really well. That's why there's so much effort going into tracking them. So they don't end up in a landfill.

That’s good to know. This was one of my thoughts.

If the evs end up generating a tonne of material that we can’t do anything with that would be a short term gain.

Yes and the good thing is, the lithium can be mostly recovered and that mean it doesn't have to be mined again for the next car. Lithium mining is a messy polluting process so that's really good.

It can be done, e.g.: https://batterycouncil.org/battery-facts-and-applications/ho...

That's about lead batteries, totally different game

Yes, electric cars are better for the environment over their entire lifespan. And yes clean energy will be needed to power them.

ICE's are actually shockingly bad at efficiently converting fossil fuel into movement. They mostly produce waste heat and exhaust gasses.

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