If oil starts ruining the financial picture on top of just the...global welfare of every living human picture, then maybe, just maybe people will actually give up their addiction.
I don't like it either but you have to pick your battles these days.
I used to be dead-set-against electric cars but I just bought one and am loving it. The maths is staggering. It's secondhand though as I don't believe new ones are worth it.
Now if OP's car is worn out and needs replacing anyway the economics are different.
No matter what you buy, energy was expended to make it! The car you own already has spent the energy. It's done.
So, assuming you're not spitting flames and smoke out wherever you go, your current car will be greener than quite literally anything you can buy, new or secondhand.
Note: I've done zero maths to verify this but it makes perfect sense to me :)
I did find a few eGolfs and leafs for $5k-8k, but in my experience if a car is that cheap there is a reason for that, so I assume they are unacceptable. There is a chance OP has a diesel truck because he needs a truck which in turn means they wouldn't work even new (the F150 lightning perhaps would)
The reason is: no one wants them. Three years ago we sold an OG Leaf my spouse’s coworker for $3500. Battery was about 80%, but otherwise the car was flawless. All the buyer needed was an around-town car, and the old Leaf fit the bill. Leafs didn’t go very far on a charge, ergo they won’t have a whole lot of miles in them, and they were otherwise reliable. If it’s all you need, I’d recommend one for cheap.
The main caveat is that available models are heavily weighted towards “compact” (RAV4 sized) SUVs and larger. There aren’t many little Prius/Fit/Soul type town car models around which is a bit paradoxical with that being the use case that EVs have been well suited to for the longest time.
EV batteries last longer than drivers feared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613527 - September 2026 (3 comments)
Retired EV Batteries Scored a New Gig: Bolstering Texas’ Grid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143967 - February 2026 (0 comments)
Most EV batteries outlast their cars, real-world data shows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083580 - February 2026 (0 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Your second link. Texas takes batteries no longer suitable for car and makes grid.
Neither of those is a decade old car running on its original battery. And I also said degrade which we know is true.
What’s your point?
EV Batteries Are Defying Expectations After Hundreds of Thousands of Miles - https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ev-batteries-are-defying-... | https://archive.today/2RFo3 - July 4th, 2026
> Industry experts think newfound knowledge of battery durability is a game-changer for consumer confidence in EVs
> Richard Symons recently took his five-year-old Tesla Model 3 on a 260-mile road trip across England without having to stop for a charge.
> A new electric vehicle could make the trip no-problem. But Symons’s car—which he has affectionately nicknamed “Miles”—has logged 247,000 miles and is still up for frequent long-distance drives. “They are proving themselves to be exceptionally reliable,” Symons said.
> After five years on the road, the average EV will still be able to drive up to 95% of its original range, according to Recurrent, a data-science company that provides a battery-monitoring tool for EVs—better than many in the auto industry expected.
> When early EVs hit the market, buyers’ concerns were well-founded. Roughly one in 12 EVs built from 2011 to 2016 have had to have battery replacements. But new data shows that more modern EVs are doing better so far. Among EVs built from 2022 on, 0.3% have had battery replacements, according to a 2025 study from Recurrent.
EV Battery Health after 250 Million Electric Car Miles - https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/lessons-in-electric-c... - May 17th, 2023
> 250 million is a lot. That’s how many miles Recurrent vehicles have driven since they connected to our services to monitor their EV performance and health. There are some optimistic, high level takeaways in all this data. For most EVs, the lithium ion batteries are in quite good shape and only 1.5% have been replaced in Recurrent's community of 15,000 cars. Battery replacements due to excessive degradation are very rare. Heat, high voltage, and extreme state of charge degrade batteries the fastest. We generally see 1-2% range degradation per year.
(my 2018 Model S with ~150k miles on it has ~7-8% degradation after 8 years of aggressive use, the majority of charing done at fast DC Superchargers across the US; the only maintenance it has needed has been tires, wiper blades, wiper fluid, and a replacement battery pack heater to condition the pack for fast DC charging, which has been obsoleted in newer revisions)
I said batteries are degraded at 10 years old. Your 8 year old car is 7% degraded. How is my point false?
And to quote you
> We generally see 1-2% range degradation per year.
10% degradation is material and noticeable.
My numbers may a bit out of date but for example, depending on the trim and mileage, the Nissan Ariya can be be had at between $15-$25k (with MSRP being over double that) and they only started selling those in 2023. Ariya’s thus far have shown great battery degradation too, with high mileage drivers (Uber etc) reporting 99% capacity.
And that’s just one model. There’s also Kia EV6/EV9, Hyundai Ioniq 5/9, VW ID.4, Mustang Mach-E, and several others of a similar vintage that are similarly deeply discounted despite low miles.
It’s thanks to the many lease deals, tax rebates, etc bringing down their market value.
Ariya builds buffer in to mask early degradation.
All but one Ariya in my area are $20k+. A well specced is $30k.
The math does not work if you own a functioning car unless you are willing to substantially downgrade.
Not seeing where the downgrade is, though. Even the cheaper trims of Ariya are nicer, better equipped, and more powerful than any new car in the low-mid 20s price range and the used ICE car market is entirely nonsensical, with some 1-3 year old used entry level models selling for almost as much as their new counterparts and popular 10 year old models that already have half their lifetime miles selling for north of $20-$25k.
A 250 mile round trip to the beach becomes unthinkable because the gas station mindset dictates that they will have to spend 30-40 minutes at a charger on the way home.
The reality of course, is that you charge on L2 while at the beach, or stop for a quick 5-10 minute buffer charge to get you home.
So everyone is all "I need 350-400 mile range or its totally a non-starter". Its just all around confused thinking.
EV charging sites are still much less ubiquitous than gas stations.
The ~200 mile round trip I did this Monday would have required a 30 minute detour to reach a charger on the way back. Certainly viable, but that's a lot more logistical overhead than just heading out with a full tank in the morning.
It's lost 60% of its value, has only done 57k miles and has a battery state of health of 97.4%. I paid £22k.
I still maintain that new cars, especially new electric cars, are not worth the money but secondhand ones are a bargain now... relatively speaking.
If one can make due with an ebike instead of an EV, certainly, that is of course an option that should be considered.
The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars - https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-280-million-electric-... - November 16th, 2026
If you drive a car then EVs should be your first choice, and they should be worth a premium over other types. However in the end used car buyers are limited to what is for sale now.
The climate doesn't care what is and isn't worth the money.
We have a staggering number of people that live in apartments so charging is out of the question except at public charging points and the cheapest I've seen is £0.40/kWh. Most of the fast chargers are £0.92/kWh.
When I get my home charger fitted I'll be paying 6.9p/kWh between midnight and 6am but I have a driveway.
Not everyone can give up ICE cars. The logistics don't add up for many people plus the entire world runs on diesel - every truck, earth-mover, factory etc. relies on diesel in some fashion.
Pivoting agriculture from feed grains supporting the livestock industry to crops that humans directly consume would also improve the fuel consumption picture, but people are reluctant to reduce or eliminate meats from their diets.
Cattle herds are at 75-90 year lows, and roughly half of US beef consumption is driven by 12% of folks. They'll be fine with alternate protein sources. US cattle trajectories are locked in due to climate change induced supply cost inflation, meat packing consolidation, and cattle ranchers aging out (there are more farmers over 75 than under 35, average age of a cattle rancher is 58).
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/29/nx-s1-5719511/beef-cattle-her...
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/21/nx-s1-5719815/how-rising-beef...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usd...
If gas prices go up, expensive public EV chargers will be more appealing. I hope you get better infrastructure re: charging soon; here in California (not known for low energy prices nor for infrastructure-building capacity) most fast chargers are between US$0.50 and US$0.70 (£0.37-£0.52) per kWh, so it is definitely possible. (You also need non-fossil-based electricity generation to truly decouple from oil/gas prices.)
I share your worries about industry, though — although trucks, earth-movers, etc could theoretically run on batteries or hydrogen or something, industrial processes using petroleum and natural gas may be around for a lot longer.
Sometimes you just _can't_ use less oil. My own situation is that I make 5 sub-100 mile round-trip journeys each week now. It's the poster-child for home charging an EV. It saves me at least £3k a year on petrol alone.
However, I had to pay an additional £7k over and above what I sold my petrol car for (just last week, in fact) in order to get a secondhand EV. I could have gotten a much older, higher mileage one for around the same as I sold my car but that was too big a gamble for me. So I was in a position that I _could_ use less oil by switching. Not everyone has a spare £7k lying around.
I was told by a friend of mine (he's been driving electric for 5 years I think!) that a few years ago, the 92p/kWh fast chargers used to be about 30p. We now have waaaay more of them available and the price has gone up by about a factor of 3x so I don't see the price coming down any time soon and more infrastructure isn't helping in our case.
The UK energy prices are really high too: £0.13/kWh is the global average and we pay £0.27/kWh [0]. So electric isn't always the answer either unless you can get a cheap tariff.
Plus if you need to have a car and you live in a flat, you're only real option is petrol/diesel and a great many people here live in flats.
In terms of industry, it will have some luck changing the last few miles of delivery over to electric. That may be fine though - leave the mega-miles to the diesel trucks and then city and town deliveries could be made by electric vehicles where they only need to do 200 miles of stop-start driving.
Energy isn't free... if we want to power things we need to expend energy somewhere in the chain in order to do so.
China has destroyed oil import demand the equivalent of annual UK oil imports in the last six months, for example. Push those oil and diesel prices up, hold them up as long as possible. Several countries have banned internal combustion vehicle imports to push the needle on the EV trajectory (Ethiopia, Laos) because they are fossil fuel poor. Global EV sales have spiked, and already exceed 25% of total annual vehicles sales (~90M units/year) [4] [5]. We're just discussing how long until we reach tipping points that further accelerate the transition.
How much fossil supply chain infra must be impaired to further move the needle? Hard to say, excited to find out. Electrify or get wrecked. To not to is a choice.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479229 (citations)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647405 (citations)
[3] Gas car sales fell 40% in August in China [Charts] - https://carnewschina.com/2026/09/08/gas-car-sales-fell-40-in... - September 8th, 2026
[4] Global sales of combustion engine cars peaked in 2017 - https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-sales-of-com... - May 21st, 2026
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
(as of this comment, China has enough EV manufacturing capacity to satisfy global demand; they are currently export constrained and cannot ship fast enough to meet demand)
> The International Energy Agency has cut its 2026 global oil supply forecast by 6% as the Iran war drags on.
> It now expects global oil demand to fall by 2.5 million barrels per day this year.
> The energy agency also warned that shrinking inventories and strained refineries could further tighten markets.
By draining aquifers, for one:
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06879-8
* https://unu.edu/inweh/news/world-enters-era-of-global-water-...
Certain desalination exists, but can get expensive and energy-intensive (and they it may be necessary to transport the fresh water great distances).