The climate benefits of retiring an operational combustion engine vehicle | Hacker News Reader

The climate benefits of retiring an operational combustion engine vehicle

science.org

38 pointstoomuchtodo95 comments

We replaced our 2010 Ford Transit (diesel) with a 2022 Ssangyong (LDV) eDeliver 9 (battery electric), and one of the benefits I didn’t expect was just how much quieter it is in the cab - a conversation with my partner when we’re driving is much easier/more pleasant. (It’s not due to better insulation - both these vehicles are basically steel frames on wheels) - I don’t see this mentioned much in articles comparing EVs and ICEVs.

This is _very_ noticeable with buses. My local transport system uses a mixture of modern-ish (last 10 years) diesels, heavy/plugin serial-hybrid, BEV, and a small number of ancient (20 year old) diesels, all double decker. The BEVs are a shockingly different experience from the old diesels, noise and vibration-wise.

(The most disconcerting are the hybrids, which go from near-silent to very noisy and back periodically.)

The fact of the matter is that the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them. As for me, no way am I trading my 20 year old, fully paid for, cheap to insure, cheap to register ICE vehicle for a new EV with payments, higher insurance, and higher registration fees.

>higher insurance, and higher registration fees.

And higher propensity to beep and whine at you and higher propensity to pull a "I'm sorry dave" at any given time.

This is a big part of it for me. With 'driver assist' systems that intervene when you're driving now being mandatory for all new vehicles sold in my country, I don't want anything newer than 2024. Practically , probably nothing newer than around 2020. You can disable driver assist, but for most modern vehicles, you need to do so every time you start the car. Insurance will eventually be used as a hammer to force compliance on this. Removing safety equipment that came with the vehicle already makes a car unroadworthy, so that's not an option either.

I'll be driving my old cars to the bitter end.

The economy does not occur naturally. We can turn the knobs on this equation by just having some taxes. For example, carbon taxes. That should change your calculus pretty significantly.

How very tyrannical.

Yes, lets continue on with the $7 trillion subsidies/year (worldwide), 10M deaths from air pollution, almost all diseases/cancers linked to pollution. Its sacrilege to talk about fossil fuel subsidies.

“Almost all diseases/cancers linked to pollution” is such a bizarre claim.

I don't think it's an unreasonable claim for fossil fuels to account for the vast majority of air pollution deaths

But apparently it is: I certainly didn't peg desert dust to be top spot. Anakin was right

https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths

The comment I was replying to saying that almost all diseases and cancers are caused by it isn’t the same thing though. Disease and cancer has been around for a long long time before the use of fossil fuels.

I think "almost all diseases/cancers [that are] linked to pollution" is a much more likely read than "almost all diseases/cancers [are] linked to pollution"

Admittedly I did smush the two together so I'd have to rethink whether "all deaths [that are] linked to pollution" is as reasonable as "all deaths [that are] linked to air pollution" -- I suspect it probably still would be because of the sheer scale of fossil fuels, but regardless, desert sand still beats fossil fuels anyway

My interpretation of the statement was that it means all kinds of these diseases are linked to air pollution, not all cases.

I fully agree with you but you're leaving out two ongoing costs that are usually in an EV's favor, fuel and maintenance.

That probably wouldn't make the difference for a fully paid for vehicle but it can make a substantial difference depending on electricity (and access to solar) and fuel prices.

> The fact of the matter is that the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them.

This is what I used to think for decades, people are rational and they make purchases based on costs/efficiency. I learnt thats not how the world works. Humans don't work that way, they buy for emotional reasons, status, what they've bought before (the power of defaults, familiarity), signaling identity (I'm macho, I drive a F350), what other people buy (social validation -- you don't want to stand out by being the odd one out, or subject of ridicule). Most importantly, what people think of EVs is manipulated by Big Oil, there is a lot of scaremongering, you can't charge cars (range anxiety), EVs catch fire, they spy on you, they have more electronics(all new cars have electronics), battery needs to be replaced every few years, it won't work when its hot, when its cold, batteries pollute more than gasoline, and so on ...

Whats worse is the vast majority of people are innumerate and illiterate, regardless of degrees. They can't do the math of how much driving an EV costs, because doing the OpEx calculation over a lifetime of ownership requires doing multiplication.

The 2 dozen people who can do the arithmetic either walk to work, bought a Nissan Leaf back in 2012+, or buy a used EV.

What makes economic sense isn't necessarily the same as what is rational. All of what you said is factored into people's notion of "economic sense". My main takeaway from that is that we can induce people to do better things with arguments and nudges outside of "pure" economic incentives.

Looking at how Norway basically reached 100% EV for new cars, it is not that complicated to get people to make rational decision. The government subsidized new purchases by 50%, they removed bridge tolls and city taxes for EV users, reduced car taxes, and even reduced costs for people to use car ferries if they owned an EV. The only people who still bought an ICE car was those who had a hobby in owning ICE cars.

> the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them.

The other thing is the UX of figuring out how much an EV costs to charge is painful. It changes every few miles based on who your utility provider is, going through the various plans, figuring out the right plan. The vast majority of people are incapable of that.

It works out to be cheaper (a lot cheaper) for most people, but its hard to refute arguments by fossil fuel shills when they use Hawaii, CA or NY electricity prices. We can say, no its not true, but I can't refute the argument until you provide zip code and utility provider.

It would be awesome if we can state costs like, it costs $0.01/km for EV vs $0.08/km for gas. For eg: What Kind of EV Can a Low-Income Family Buy in China? ($0.01/KM) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4860RGi7IY

Is it really that painful? If you are charging from home, you just look at your local power rates. If you charge for one or two road trips a year, you don't even bother calculating that. If you don't have charging at home, then you add the charging costs of the superchargers you usually go to, actually I'd be surprised if your vehicle couldn't just tell you those numbers.

It makes sense in Hawaii, CA, and NY compared to local petrol prices. Heck, UK, France...it doesn't make sense in countries that heavily subsidize gasoline, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and maybe Venazuala.

Chinese gas prices being what they are, and electricity prices being fairly low, you don't even need to really bother doing the math. The bigger cost is going to be parking and plate costs.

The fact of the matter is that the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them.

Yes, and that's why we should have carbon taxes that better align what makes economic sense with what's environmentally beneficial.

If you were living in Nepal and your country was getting all of its refined gasoline from India, and therefore that was super expensive, while China was helping your country build a bunch of hydro plants, oh, and they were sending a bunch of EVs to buy over the pass from Tibet, I think your math might change (but then you would highly likely not have that ICE car to begin with).

Eh, for cars _in particular_, people are quite resistant to doing the maths. If they weren't, then low-mpg cars would be almost unsellable. But people make decisions on cars quite weirdly.

There is an element I haven't seen in this conversation: as the number of combustion engine cars goes down the number of gas stations also goes down. At some point, combustion engine drivers will start feeling range anxiety. So when you get rid of your fossil-fuel-burner vehicle, you are pushing others to do so.

The full calculus of CO2 emissions reduction should also include the reduction induced in others.

That process has likely already started, with the long term trend towards consolidation having accelerated over the past five years.

In the UK, for example, the number of petrol stations has fallen by around 75% in the past 50 years and drivers now have to travel twice as far on average to fill up.

I'd expect the remaining sites in city centres to have entirely vanished by 2035. Out of town, they'll last a little longer but the distribution component of petrol prices will rise as the fixed costs are born by dwindling numbers of ICE drivers.

By the mid 2040s, there'll only be a tiny market driven largely by enthusiasts who don't care much about price. Perhaps we'll see delivery services springing up, similar to those for home heating oil, but the traditional large petrol station will be all but dead.

Depends on country maybe? In Germany they make more by being small supermarkets, selling snacks, energy drinks, tobacco/vapes, alcohol, at insane prices, 24/7. In the USA similar, with even wider range of stuff, except alcohol, though that may depend on the state, or even county also.

Original title “The climate benefits of retiring a fully operational internal combustion engine vehicle” compressed to fit within title limits.

A new lifecycle study in the journal Science concludes there are substantial climate benefits to swapping an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle for an electric vehicle (EV) even if the ICE or hybrid vehicle is brand new, if driven more than ~7,054 km/year (4,384 miles/year).

I would like to get rid of it in the next few years but all new cars have only touch screen and phone home. Are there "stupid" e-cars too? I don't need much.

Pretty much all new cars incorporate touch screens - that's the wrong thing to look at. What's important is if they retain physical/tactile controls for the things that matter (or matter to you). There are a number of cars out there that still have old-fashioned controls - Hyundai Kona is on my list for that reason.

It looks like they have the BEV lasting just as long as ICE car without any battery replacement. Has it turned out that way? Seems like owning an electric car for 18 years really hasn’t been a thing since the model s was released in 2012, but is it projected to last that long.

Yes.

EV Batteries Last Way Longer Than Expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43001996 - February 2025 (2 comments)

New study shows: EV batteries last much longer than expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228901 - November 2024 (70 comments)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Certainly not the case for hybrids like Priuses. The battery system lasts 10-15 years and 150k-200k miles. Any ICE car on the market now should be expected to last a lot longer than that; I drive cars that are 25+ years old and really don't need much significant in the way of repairs.

Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance. They have their benefits and are key to fighting climate change, but mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides.

There is no way you are driving a 25 year old car without serious maintenance like exchanging the timing belt. Add the frequent oil changes and all other yearly maintenance and it does add up.

Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads, and you may or may not need to change the battery, and the batteries keep outperforming the expected lifespan. BEV are simply mechanically much simpler devices.

> Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance.

While this seems intuitively true, I have some pushback, and I think that the reliability record of e.g older generations of Prius backs me up.

While you do have effectively two cars (an EV and an ICE) crammed into one, you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear. Your ICE is almost never run under load before it warms up, and is kept running at its most efficient rpm most of the time, your transmission is running under less load since it has help from the electric motors, and is often simpler (the aforementioned Prius does not have a reverse gear for example).

No it’s not nearly as simple as a BEV, but a well implemented hybrid system is absolutely an upgrade from a full ICE vehicle.

Personal experience backs up. Had a 2009 Prius, let it go because I did a terrible job handling rust buildup. Was still running great on the original battery pack with nearly 200k miles when we sold it.

Only significant problem was pothole related damage.

>you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear.

In theory this should be true. In reality hybrids eat motors compared to the same engine in an ICE. That's just what happens you have two ways of making the vehicle go to potentially mask "something's funny" type issues and your customer base is people who are buying an appliance based on an MPG number and some math.

With competent ownership (fleet vehicles provide a lot of examples, lots of hyrbrid Fords from the 00s and early examples still around) they come out about the same as an ICE car so you essentially get the hybrid system "for free" from a maintenance perspective. But that's not the median consumer.

Unless it's -40F, modern cars don't need to "warm up".

> mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides

Not really. The transmission is an e-CVT in hybrids which has no torque converter, the main part that breaks first in an automatic transmission. Unlike a regular CVT, the e-CVT has no belt, either. The e-CVT basically never breaks, so you basically never have a transmission go bad in a hybrid. On top of that, because the traction battery is so small, it's replaceable for $1-2k instead of $10k+ for a BEV. If anything, hybrids are the best of both worlds. Had you specified plugin hybrids you would have been correct.

The joke is that you have to replace the traction battery twice in a Prius but you never have to replace the traction battery in a Tesla. But that's an indictment of the Tesla, not the Prius.

A Prius battery will last 150k km or so, but since the car can go 500k km +, that's a couple of battery replacements. A Tesla battery will last about 300k km, but that's longer than the rest of the car will typically last, so you never have to replace it.

Non-plugin hybrids are pointless in the context of the paper from the OP, since they don’t help with climate change.

False, hybrids reduce fuel consumption and therefore emissions substantially, Toyota Sienna went from 22 mpg combined to 35 mpg combined when they switched it from gas to hybrid. Several wild claims from you today.

I stand by my statement. We have passed the point where burning fossil fuels more efficiently helps. If you think that is wild, you should see the wild_fires_ going on.

Going to 100 mpg is still strictly worse than a battery powered by renewables.

So, having a less efficient vehicle helps?

The issue with ICEs is the fossil fuel part, not the engine part. Synthetic hydrocarbons and alcohols don't contribute to climate change at all. And alcohol fuels are both easy to make and about as good as hydrocarbons.

True. But we don’t have enough synthetic hydrocarbons for the current most important usage: jet fuel.

Might as well drive a quiet, renewable powered electric vehicle and let the jets use the synth.

Or take the train.

If we're talking synthetic fuels, you'd probably run cars on methanol rather than a hydrocarbon. Planes absolutely need kerosene, but cars can claw back most of the performance of petrol with alcohol fuels, and methanol is the simplest and cheapest to make. Certainly shipping seems to be going this way.

> Synthetic hydrocarbons and alcohols don't contribute to climate change at all.

If you are able to manufacture them in a completely emissionless way. That requires huge energy input though. Certainly has its uses, but too expensive for personal cars I'd think.

What I think would make sense is to use methanol as a seasonal energy store in temperate climates. Manufacture from PV in summer, burn in winter.

Methanol is the obvious choice, because there are so many ways to make it. Shipping certainly looks to be moving in that direction, though ammonia is also being trialled. Ethanol via fermentation is also doable at scale, but most effective pathways rely on using arable land.

To be fair, DIY natural gas production from kitchen waste is a thing some people have done. It’s surprisingly doable and produces surprisingly large amount of usable energy.

It can be scaled up.

A modern Toyota hybrid doesn't have a transmission -- it's "eCVT" is basically a differential with a couple of embedded motors. It doesn't have a serpentine belt. It runs its engine in a highly efficient, highly reliable Atkinson cycle.

A modern Toyota hybrid is far more complex than an electric car, but the fact they are more reliable than a gasoline car is by design, not just good manufacturing.

> Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads

If you are not replacing your tires after decades, you and those around you should be fearing for their lives.

I mean, you also need to top up the wiper fluid and clean the floor, but that and tire change is not even maintenance, it’s just part of „use“, no?

I didn’t feel the need to mention something that everyone should be easily doing at home for the cost of materials alone.

Are you talking about rotating your tires?

Most people do not purchase new tires and mount them onto their old rims, themselves, at home. Most people do not know how to set the bead on an automotive tire. Replacing worn out tires with new ones is no less difficult maintenance than replacing brake pads.

Both, I guess. But fine, rotating tires and changing seasonal tires at least is something every car owner should be able to do.

Either way, you need to do both on both ICE and BEV equally.

I'm not talking about a seasonal tire change. I'm talking about when your tires have 45k miles on them and you need to buy different ones. Surely you don't just throw out your rims when you get new tires?

You are aware that the lifespan of a tire is significantly less than the lifespan of the car, right? Have you owned a car and driven it for more than 50k miles?

It seems to me you are not aware you can use dish soap and pry bar, wrench or screwdrivers to mount tires on rims. Enjoy:

https://youtu.be/CbDCDOs3Vr8

That's fine.

It seems me you think that what you linked is both common knowledge, and common to do one one's own. And maybe it is among your peer group! But we're talking about the.population at large here. It belongs in the same bucket as brake pad replacement.

BEVs are going to have the same wear parts like tie rods, suspension parts, control arms, struts, and so on, in addition to brakes.

And then things like the AC system, electrical repairs (potentially very expensive), dealing with rust, brake lines..

Changing a timing belt is not serious maintenance. Just something that needs to be done at 100k. I just did the timing belt and water pump on my 300k tundra over the course of a weekend for 100 bucks.

It’s mechanical maintenance beyond the skill level of 99 out of a 100 car owners.

By the time you get to variable valve lift and timing, the complexity of hybrids is either a wash or in favor of the hybrid when compared to a traditional engine. Electronics have been integrated in vehicles for generations now, and going hybrid lets you get rid of components and reduce overall mechanical complexity. It's not "two separate systems", it's just the obvious endpoint for internal combustion engines (and a process that is both a century old at this point, and already mature in other industries), because you get a strictly better machine from both a performance standpoint, and a design and engineering standpoint.

Not to mention, much of the complexity in ICEs comes back to cooling and lubrication, both of which are also concerns in BEVs.

You are not comparing complexity to an ICE though. You are comparing to a BEV.

A plug-in hybrid is a much more complex machine than a BEV.

This is what the person that I was responding to wrote, and it's objectively wrong:

>Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance. They have their benefits and are key to fighting climate change, but mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides.

Also, much more complex is a value judgement. Complex in what way? High voltage electronics isn't exactly "not complex", and the coolant loops in BEVs are more complex than those in regular cars, because the tolerances are tighter.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you mean mechanical complexity, but even then, that's not a given for ICEs. Gas turbines can have as little as one moving part, and there are piston engines that can get away with as few as four (the piston-conrod-crankshaft assembly and a compressor wheel).

At the end of the day, a good design has the minimum amount of complexity necessary to perform a given task, and no more. Given that BEVs are fundamentally unable to replace ICEVs in several niches (e.g. those relying on on-street parking, off-roading), maybe a little more complexity is warranted? As is, they aren't a 1:1 replacement for a standard car, and that's okay, but they're being marketed as such which is a recipe for failure.

I don’t think that a single-moving-piece gas turbine powered cars are currently on the market? And how many are single piston? Go carts and motorcycles maybe, but cars?

And I was using complex as a shorthand for „more things to maintain“.

A few companies have tried small APU range extenders, but there wasn't really a market for it at the time. The point was more that complexity is relative and not necessarily a given, and it's not necessarily a bad thing if it's required. A door is simpler than a bed, but I'd still rather sleep on a bed.

Maintenance is a function of usage. BEVs still have coolant and lubricants, which means they also have pumps. They have a HVAC system which also means filters and refrigerant. Yes, you don't have to replace spark plugs and a timing belt, but both of those are infrequent and generally easy. You might have to replace brake pads less, but hybrids share that same feature. Hell, hybrids don't even have fan belts, alternators, ignition motors, and transmissions these days. They share nearly all of their underlying foundation with BEVs, for most of the same reasons you would want to go BEV in the first place.

The 25 year old vehicle I have has a timing chain, but yes, it has 100,000 mile internal maintenance items like spark plugs. Oil changes are a 5,000 mile item regardless of age.

Replacing a BEV set would cost more than the total amount I’ve spent on the truck, including buying it in the first place, fuel, insurance, registration, maintenance, and repairs.

The Prius up until about 2016 uses a NiMH battery that is different than Lithium ones.

Hybrid batteries get much more of a work-out than BEV batteries, particularly light hybrids; they're tiny, and get a lot more discharge cycles.

As a data point: I’m at year 8 of Model X 100kWh with basically 0% capacity loss. If it exists at all, it’s less than 1-2%, so less than what I can reasonably measure with just the odometer and battery indicator.

Nissan Leaf gave BEV a bad name because it had much worse battery tech. Battery longevity is not a problem for modern, or even decade old cars.

4% of Toyota engines need to be replaced before 250,000 miles; 3% of Tesla batteries need to be replaced before 250,000 miles. "More reliable than a Toyota engine" is pretty high praise.

The issue is less the wear and tear of the battery and motors and more the wear and tear of everything else -- suspension and brake components are going to need replacing, along with radar and ultrasonic modules, etc. These parts will be at least partially end-of-life and hard to get by the end of that 20 year period. Federal law requires some amount of parts availability for 10 years + some release of part designs to the aftermarket after that, but I have a hard time getting parts for 21 year old Ford designs that were less than popular, so I would be surprised if early Tesla models are having an easy time 20 years on. This gets much much worse as you start to look at the number of abandoned EV models from the Big 3, the abandoned/dead/dying companies (Fiskar, Lucid, Lordstown, etc). That doesn't hit the vast majority of all EVs, which are just Tesla, but it does put a dent/makes the buying decision harder. Now expand that to not just Tesla, but what does Tesla do with a Cybertruck? Like all things, the specific product decision matters a lot, and this is a new area (even at 14 years old) so there will be lots of people who optimized for cost and not maintainability.

The surprising thing is that parts availability is even worse for new cars. Sensors are built into every part now, so it's no longer just a windscreen or a bumper. If those sensors are critical to the driver assist systems, the car can be a write-off for trivial damage because of the difficulty of getting parts. And in many places, you can't just disable those systems and get on with things, even if the car is otherwise perfectly fine, because the law states that roadworthiness requires the original safety systems to be intact.

Even more alarmingly, the speed of revisions now is such that vehicles can have parts that were only used for a very short run before being updated and replaced. Your particular vehicle batch may not necessarily have identical parts to other batches even within the same generation. We're a long, long way from the way things used to be, when parts commonality stretched for decades.

Nissan Leaf went production-scale in 2010. There are still a surprising number of the very old ones around, even though the Leaf had a particularly _problematic_ battery by EV standards.

Why not sell a fully operational car as a used car and buy a new electric vehicle? Then, when looking into all cars, the fleet will get one more electric vehicle, but at the same time fully operational cars are still used until the end.

The US Post Office was slated to use EVs as replacements for worn out mail delivery vehicles. For many areas, especially urban areas, those would have been perfect and cheaper in the long run. I know because I knew a lot of Mail cCarriers and I know how these are used. As a kid I was driven around a route one day with a relative.

But Trump and the Postmaster General cancelled that and went to use gas guzzlers instead. I wonder how that is working out now.

Still happening.

https://news.usps.com/2025/12/01/usps-is-delivering-its-new-...

> The Postal Service’s $9.6 billion upgrade of its delivery fleet is proceeding apace.

The organization plans to roll out 106,000 new vehicles by 2028, including 45,000 battery-electric next-generation delivery vehicles and 21,000 commercial-off-the-shelf battery-electric vehicles.

> Additionally, USPS is upgrading infrastructure at its facilities with the addition of charging stations for the zero-emission electric vehicles, of which over 14,000 have already been purchased.

> So far, more than 35,000 new vehicles are on the road.

> “The new fleet rollout is proceeding well, aligned with our plan,” said Justin Glass, the Postal Service’s fleet management senior director.

(USPS spends ~$500M/year for fossil fuels, so it’s a no brainer to electrify)

Wow, a small glimmer of good news. I almost want to hide this comment over fear of drawing attention to this thing that got away from the powers that be.

The ICE version of the new vehicle uses a 2-liter turbo 4-cylinder engine and an 8-speed auto transmission, both straight out of the Ford parts catalog. Calling them gas guzzlers is a bit much. They will be significantly more fuel efficient and cleaner-burning than what they’re replacing. Not to mention cheap parts and service everywhere in the US.

(Yes, they would have been better as EVs)

"But Trump and the Postmaster General cancelled that and went to use gas guzzlers instead. I wonder how that is working out now."

What makes you say that? The biggest impediment to the rollout was that the company that was supposed to build them repeatedly failed to do so, and finally had their contract pulled in 2021 and it was given to a defence contractor who seems to be on track to actually deliver the things.

The admin fought quite hard to destroy the electric conversion, not just cancelling future orders but scrapping existing trucks and infrastructure despite that being a major expense. It's in line with the way it's fighting against renewables and environmental protections on many fronts.

I would say it's obviously in service of the fossil fuel industry but it's gotten to the point of being so absurdly senseless and against our interests that it seems primarily ideological/emotional.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/senate...

Can you explain how the postal service is trucking right along then with buying a big fleet of EVs?

If you read up on the sequence of events posted above you’ll see that the admin exhausted every avenue available to them but was ultimately defeated in their efforts here.

The new EV mail trucks are running routes in my area now. Not my route yet but I have seen them within a few miles of my house.

I'd love a BEV but where do I charge it?

If I use public chargers isn't that vastly more expensive?

Propaganda for "Scrap your old car now and buy new—now with AI driver spying features as mandated by Congress, and personal data sales to insurance companies!"

The "get rid of a working car" is particularly suspect, and reminds me of the "cash for clunkers" scheme which was basically a giant sop to the auto industry. Why not just have EVs replace ICE vehicles when they break down and aren't worth repairing?

The TLDR is “Replace your combustion vehicle with an EV if you’re a high mileage driver; a low mileage driver can then buy the combustion vehicle for low mileage use.” An EV sold to someone who drives 1k miles a year is somewhat inefficient at this point of the adoption curve, versus someone who drives 5k-15k miles a year. You want to maximize EV miles traveled to minimize CO2 emissions.

25% of total annual global vehicle sales are already EVs. We’re just arguing timeline to get to 100%. Peak combustion vehicle sales was 2017.

https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/09/chinese-ele...

https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-technology/evs-take-...

Dude, everything you post is borderline propaganda. There's probably a few people who'll keep their 2017 Mazda an little longer because of who the message is coming from.

>Peak combustion vehicle sales was 2017.

Peak oil was every year starting decades before I was born.

If you don’t like data and facts, I’m not for you. If you believe it’s propaganda, that’s firmly a you problem. My condolences. The data and facts stand regardless of your belief in them, like gravity. Comment as long as mods let you, doesn’t bother me in the sleightest. With all due respect, your thoughts and belief system are irrelevant to me. They are not data and facts, nor peer reviewed.

Facts: Climate change is real. Combustion vehicles contribute to climate change through their emissions. EV sales keep going up globally, combustion vehicle sales keep going down. This will continue. Comments here change nothing about these systems or trajectories, nor their rate of change.

Being partially (direction of trend vs magnitude) right doesn't make you not a flagrant propagandist. This sort of cherry picking links to support any position, no matter how obviously asinine (though this one doesn't really move the needle), has been your MO a loooooong time. It's a classic rhetorical trick of trolls. Gets people distracted arguing about sources (Louis Rossman has a good quote about this).

Thankfully AI renders it fairly obsolete. I'd be happy to come up with some competing facts if you'd like. Then I can look down my nose and say vaguely insulting things too.

Fossil fuels contribute to climate change. Methanol is likely to power global shipping in the coming decades, and there's zero reason it can't also run cars. The reality is that hybrid vehicles have all of the same advantages that BEVs have, but they can also be refueled quickly without heavy reliance on centralized infrastructure. Aside from being the reason that we're all driving ICEVs in the first place, it's a compelling enough advantage that such vehicles will continue to be with us for a long time.

If you would like bet how many methanol vs battery electric cars will be on the road in 2030, 2035, and 2040, I am happy to take the battery electric side of a Long Bet [1], with $10k to the winner's choice of 501c3 charity. Let me know. If battery electric vehicles are already 1/4th of global annual light vehicle sales, and there is ~20M-30M of battery electric vehicle manufacturing capacity globally, with no methanol vehicles on the road today, what does the future look like?

BYD intends to be the largest automaker in the world in five years, and makes EVs exclusively [2]. They have already surpassed Ford in international vehicle sales. Their flash charge charging system can charge the vehicle's battery from a 10% to 70% state of charge in five minutes, and from 10% to 97% in nine minutes. Fossil fuels for light vehicle use cases are dead, and the state of the art for EVs and charging will only continue to improve.

> Aside from being the reason that we're all driving ICEVs in the first place, it's a compelling enough advantage that such vehicles will continue to be with us for a long time.

Take a look how many refineries are left in the world. No new ones will be built, and the existing ones will only get enough investment to keep them operating. How quickly they are taken offline is how fast ICE vehicles are phased out, because you're not running your ICE vehicles without refined petroleum products [3] [4]. They are the weak link in the chain.

[1] https://longbets.org/

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/byd-wa...

[3] https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/global-refinery-closure...

[4] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/One-in-Five-Refin...

> WoodMackenzie: A total of 101 out of 410 refineries around the world are at risk of getting shut down over the next decade. This number represented 21% of global refining capacity. Inflated operating costs of refineries are an especially important risk factor for future profitability as well as their investments in decarbonization.

I must be hallucinating all of those hybrid BYDs I keep seeing on the roads, then. You say 'EV', but the distinction that matters is battery electric versus high voltage hybrid, and low voltage hybrid. And hybrids, which are uncontroversially ICEs, will be with us for decades. Yes, even the non-plugin kind.

The world is not running out of fuels any time soon. If petrol goes away, I'll convert my cars to LPG. If that goes away, I'll convert them to ethanol or methanol. The whole reason ICEVs became a thing in the first place is because they don't require centralized infrastructure to be useful. Incidentally, this is the same thing holding BEVs back: until you solve the street parking situation the way China has, the market will be reluctant to switch.

As for your bet, I'll make you a promise instead: I'll put a few extra miles on my car today just for you. And who knows? If this becomes a social movement, maybe we could see new refineries open to meet the demand.

> Why not just have EVs replace ICE vehicles when they break down and aren't worth repairing?

That’s exactly what the article you’re commenting on tries to answer. I recommend you read it

Exactly.

My daily driver turns 54 this year.

Never cared much about the climate scam, never will.

Can we not finally close all volcanos?

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