A pervasive story is that electric vehicles (EVs or BEVs) are actually dirtier than combustion vehicles if charged by a fossil fuel-based electricity grid. A new study reaffirms others that show, at least in the US, EVs have lower lifetime emissions than an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, regardless of the grid mix.
Comparing data on the mix of generation types by ZIP code using data from OpenGrid and eGRID, the researchers were able to create maps and comparisons of the efficiency of ICE, hybrid, plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and electric vehicles. If you want to compare some specific examples, there’s an interactive chart using the research data at carboncounter.com.
PHEVs can achieve 80-90% of the emissions reductions of a full EV in urban environments, but become less beneficial as distances increase or if drivers choose not to charge the battery. The researchers have extensive breakdowns of the comparisons including total cost to operate the vehicle compared with emissions if you want to look more in the paper. Emissions benefits are particularly noticeable in larger vehicle classes or with drivers who put more miles on their cars.
Although it’s unlikely to change anytime soon, they also note that if the industry trend toward larger and larger vehicles were to be reversed, emissions targets could be hit with much fewer hybrids and EVs at the current grid mix. The advantage of full EVs is that they get cleaner as the grid gets cleaner, unlike combustion vehicles that typically get worse as their emissions systems degrade.
If you’re not ready for an EV, maybe you’d like to reuse a pack for a house battery. If you’re feeling more adventurous, then maybe try out an EV conversion that still needs oil changes?
I’d like to see a study that includes the full lifecycle of the vehicles, from mining metals to manufacture the vehicle, to disposal of the vehicle once it reaches the end of its life. There’s a lot more to a carbon footprint than how much fuel is consumed during use
This exactly. I have always heard techniques to mine for and dispose of lithium/batteries are what put it over ICE vehicles. Especially since I for instance, still have a gas car running from 1976, while EV’s from 10 years ago are scrapped/rotting since the batteries are dead and cost nearly the price of a new one to replace.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth3
They look at power plants and assume they’re just as inefficient as the engine in their car (nope).
They then look at EV batteries and assume they’re just as ephemeral as the battery in their phone (also nope).
Engines in cars can be more efficient that power plant efficiencies. They’re just not, because people want performance out of ICE vehicles.
That’s literally the entire reason why ICE vehicles have been stuck typically around 20-30 mpg for 40 years and why hybrids do so well (they use the battery to provide the performance).
This is why it’s realistically not a good comparison. Of course you can have hybrid ICE vehicles that would actually provide emissions savings (I mean, jeez, Insights hit 70+ mpg years ago), people just don’t want them. And that’s the same problem with the pickup/SUV comparisons as well – if you have someone with an F150 who wants it for towing, they’re not going to replace it with a Lightning, because they don’t do the same thing. I mean, the whole paper is basically “we could save emissions if people changed the cars they drive.” Which is a giant freaking duh. You’d save way more if everyone just drove smaller and less performant cars, regardless of what the powertrain was.
The TCO estimate is also trash, which drives me crazy. Everyone always just does cost, maintenance, and fuel, which is insane, since financing and insurance costs escalate the MSRP way, way above maintenance and fuel.
No, Pat, they can’t.
It’s just thermodynamics.
Hot side vs cold side temperatures.
Carnot frowns on your shenanigans.
If a lunatic billionaire built a combined cycle car, you couldn’t afford it, much less afford to maintain it.
The heat recovery steam generator would be fun in a wreck.
Make a battery thermal runaway look like a party.
70 mpg was lean burn, the EPA banned that. IIRC too much nox.
There is also a point where a vehicle is dangerously underpowered.
IMHO anything less less than a pre-smog mouse!
300ish ponies, more if the car is a pig.
Dangerously underpowered can be fun as F, just dangerous.
Fond memories of a Honda 600N.
Taught you what a shifter is for.
It wasn’t more efficient than a power plant.
“It’s just thermodynamics.
Hot side vs cold side temperatures.
Carnot frowns on your shenanigans.”
Actual car engines can be more efficient than actual power plants. Theoretically, power plants should do better, although the difference isn’t that large. In actuality, they don’t.
This is actual reality: Prius engines hit 41% measured thermal efficiency in the third-gen design. There are power plants out there that beat that, but there are many that are below. Combined cycle natural gas plants hit 60%, but simple cycle, coal, and oil average in the 30s. They could be higher! They aren’t.
You want to bring up Carnot? The maximum efficiency for a typical gasoline engine is a bit over 50%, and manufacturers are trying to get there (in the F1 world, they have). At that point the difference between an automobile engine and a power plant is just not going to be that large.
“There is also a point where a vehicle is dangerously underpowered.”
Yes, because our culture has demanded larger and higher performance vehicles. This is culture, not physics. 0-60 times have dropped by nearly 50 percent since the late 70s, even as cars have increased in weight by 5-10%. Average horsepower for vehicles has basically doubled.
Focusing on the drivetrain and not the cultural issues misses the forest for the trees.
See also Technology Connection’s recent video on hybrid vehicles.
Single sources, massive conflation, certainly no bias, and right batteries never wear out…. eyeroll
I can go on a car site right now and find EV’s with battery issues. Lemme know when one can go 50 years (older than you no doubt) on the original drivetrain, and yes that includes the battery. One of those is literally in my garage.
The drivetrain of an EV is dead simple. It has less points of failure than your 50 year old car. its not the drivetrain thats the issue. Batteries lose their bang over time. When the bill comes due its a big one. That makes many people walk away.
But lets consider that 50 year old car.
A well-maintained 1976 Chevrolet 350 Small-Block V8 engine typically lasts between 100,000 and 150,000 miles before requiring a major rebuild.
Having a shop rebuild a 1976 Chevy 350 Small Block typically costs between $3,500 and $7,000.
A 1976 Turbo Hydra-Matic 350 (TH350) transmission typically lasts between 100,000 to 150,000 miles
Having a shop rebuild a Turbo Hydramatic 350 (TH350) transmission typically costs between $1,500 and $3,000 overall.
So you are looking at $5000-10K every 100-150K miles for your 50 year old car.
Comparatively, A Tesla Model Y battery is designed to last 300,000 to 500,000 miles (typically 15 to 25 years). You can expect a standard degradation of 5% to 10% in the first year or 10,000 miles, followed by a much slower drop of about 1% per year thereafter.
Replacing a Tesla Model Y high-voltage battery costs between $10,000 and $15,000 on average, including parts and labor
The Tesla Model Y gearbox (or drive unit) is designed to last the life of the vehicle, often exceeding 300,000 to 500,000 miles. Because it uses a simple single-speed reduction gear with no clutches or combustion heat, it does not wear out like a traditional internal combustion transmission
In the 80s you could open classifieds and find plenty of cars from the 70s with engine issues being sold for next to nothing. Theres no difference from that and the cheap EVs that had batteries go bad prematurely and wind up on “the sites”
@NaH your argument loses credibility when you make stuff up.
Who says a transmission only lasts 100,000 to 150,000 miles? Right now I have 3 manual cars that disprove that. Manuals literally last pretty much forever aside from a maybe $500 clutch replacement.
Also no idea where you are coming up with the arbitrary mileage for an engine rebuild either, 2 of my cars are over that with no rebuild and no issues.
My 50 year old car is on the original gearbox (while making more power) and was on the original unrebuilt engine until I bored/sleeved/cammed, etc etc.
Frankly you are talking out of your ass.
@sword
Im sorry you took such great offense to my post that you were unable to maintain civil discourse.
These figures were not pulled from my ass as you so elegantly put it but rather taken from any number of online discussions about the typical lifespan of the sbc and th350. These figures are not absolute requirements but rather the average expected lifespan between rebuilds.
Over time, piston rings and cylinder walls wear down, allowing combustion pressure to escape. Rebuilding re-establishes an airtight seal, giving you back the horsepower and torque your car had when it was new.
Worn valve guides and piston rings let oil slip into the combustion chamber. A rebuild replaces these seals, stopping the engine from burning oil and preventing dangerous running-dry situations.
Critical parts like timing chain tensioners and rod bearings are on borrowed time beyond 150K miles. Rebuilding catches metal fatigue before a part snaps or seizes, which could destroy the entire engine block.
Years of driving leave baked-on carbon deposits on valves and intake tracts that choke airflow. A tear-down allows for a thorough chemical and physical cleaning of all components.
Your experience being different does not define an average but merely presents an anecdotal outlier. Your attempt to dismiss my statement by moving the goalpost by pulling from your ass a manual transmission immortality claim doesnt negate the reality of MANY others experience with the TH350 automatic transmission.
You are welcome to fix this and that every few years, while enjoying decreased performance and increased risk of critical failure.
You seem to miss the point, that these engines and transmissions rack up an expense that is not that far different from replacing a battery in an EV over a not so different timeframe.
@Sword
You’ve lost all credibility with your post on this one. Common sense says your wrong.
Don’t dig your hole deeper. Give up while you can…
Wow @NaH regurgitating AI justification for made up numbers. Still no actual sources for the made up numbers. Big shock
ICE haters gonna hate
@Somehuman
Right, somehow my 3 different cars, from 3 different mfrs, 2007, 2011, and 1976 just all miraculously have intact original gearboxes, and all 3 had good compression and leakdown tests (1976 was fine before the rebuild)
“bUt ItS cOMmON sEnSe” right eyeroll
@sword Ive yet to see you post a single reference that counters my words. You just throw around dull barbs, and anecdotes while thumping your chest in victory. Flex your googlefu Did reddit ban you or something? if you want citations. I cant be bothered with you further. Enjoy your bliss!
It isn’t. The battery has a practical shelf-life less than 15 years regardless of mileage.
The antique in your garage is an exceptional survivor, probably restored at great cost. Has the engine and transmission been rebuilt or replaced? Did you have to replace body panels or repair the frame? How many were produced originally and how many are still on the road today? How many miles did your car do ?
The expected lifetime of a car in that decade was less than 10 years. In fact the first owner kept them 3 and sold them as a jalopy. Cars since the 2000s are much more durable, giving their original performance for 5 to 7 years with only regular maintenance, another 10 as a reliable second-hand with repairs and then some more as a jalopy. That’s why the average passenger car age is around 12 years nowadays.
EVs have been generally available for 15 years now and generally offer the same service life as their ICE counterparts. That includes the battery: There are some exceptional examples that made it to 300k miles with the original battery. Of course, nobody knows if keeping some of them functional for half a century is possible, but that is not the intended life of any car.
Note that for the average age of a car to be 12 years, a very significant portion of them must be much older.
Example:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-distribution-of-the-age-of-cars-to-be-recycled-in-The-Netherlands-in-the-years-1990_fig3_270393948
@Dude
EV batteries easily last 15 years. Chevy Volt owners aplenty running on original packs with over 3000 full charge cycles and now at 15 years in service with 80%+ capacity. Full EVs will last longer because of fewer full charge cycles for the same mileage.
FWIW I straddle the fence. Gas guzzlers and EV fan. We need them both.
“But lets consider that 50 year old car.”
Yes, because we were dumbasses 50 years ago and fuel was burned poorly, and no one cared because we didn’t travel that much. Cars didn’t even used to have 6 places on the odometer!
300k mile ICE vehicles are fairly common nowadays.
Calendar aging is an often-overlooked concern but it’s not guaranteed to be that bad.
There’s enough info from early Tesla Model S owners now to suggest that the vast majority of them are, in fact, approaching or passing the 15 year mark on their original battery packs. The results can’t separate out degradation from calendar age and from charge/discharge cycles, but the packs generally still retain at least 75-80% of their capacity.
Those batteries use panasonic NCR18650B cells, which are highly regarded, but they use nickel-cobalt-aluminum cathodes – one of the chemistries that is most susceptible to degradation over time. Other chemistries like NMC and LFP could potentially have an even longer “shelf life”, if EV and battery manufacturers are interested in improving.
(Not personally an EV owner or Tesla enthusiast, the Model S is just one of the only EVs that’s actually been around for 15 years).
“but the packs generally still retain at least 75-80% of their capacity.”
80% rated capacity is typically a larger actual degradation than that since the packs are overprovisioned at start.
But to be clear, saying “still at 75-80%” is, by industry standards, saying they’ve failed. 80% is the typical lifespan cutoff.
That’s true, but again, my point is just that calendar aging alone does not necessarily limit cells or batteries to something much less than a 15yr lifespan, like Dude asserted. These batteries are surviving that long when heavily used – when many of them have reached that 80% threshold and “failed” based on exceeding their rated charge/discharge cycles alone, not even considering age.
Chevy Volt batteries were massively over-provisioned from the factory. They were limited to use only 50% of the battery’s full capacity to start with, so if the battery has now degraded to 80% original range, the true SoH is basically at 40% and the battery is dying rapidly.
The wear-out mechanism is linear at first, but accelerates towards the end of life below 80% SoH. Example:
https://www.batteryblog.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/BAK_1-1600-Cycles.jpg
Except that’s not how “overprovisioning” on lithium batteries works, at least not for the Volt and other EVs I’m familiar with. It’s not excess capacity that’s consumed to mask the degradation of the battery, it’s a buffer to keep the battery away from the 0 and 100% charge extremes.
For example, the Volt uses its “excess” battery capacity to always keep its cells between 30% and 80% SoC, rather than ever letting them get fully charged or discharged. This dramatically increases cell longevity, and it comes with some other handy benefits, like avoiding the slow portion of lithium battery charging that’s required as you approach 100%.
So the battery is still proportionally just as “overprovisioned” when it’s down to 80% of original capacity, and it’s still doing the exact same thing with that excess capacity – keeping its cells in the same sweet spot between 30% and 80% SoC rather than 0-100%.
In other words, the main point of the overprovisioning is to actually increase battery lifespan and performance, not to fake it and hide failures. The idea that 80% range somehow equates to 40% SoH is simply not true.
The upper limit is fixed, but the lower charge limit is variable depending on “conditions” and up to the BMS. In other words, it can adjust to keep the same range despite an aging battery.
The article states :
“Unlike starter batteries used in gasoline vehicles, electric vehicle drivetrain batteries are designed to last the lifetime of the vehicle and recent data shows they have very low failure rates”
The important part he is “the lifetime of the vehicle” : what’s that ? Is it 30 years, or 10 years ? They even state the following :
“Batteries do tend to lose some of their initial range over time, but this study found that 97.5% of EVs are still using their original batteries (outside major recalls), and the replacement rate falls to under one percent for EVs made from 2016 onward. ”
The fact that the replacement rate is so low means that people are not bothering with changing the battery, which is exactly
Might be a good case for plug in hybrids vs full ev. You get a huge efficiency boost, can be full electric when you run arround town, and when the battery wears out it’s an order of magnitude smaller than a full ev battery.
And you can gas up quickly for long trips.
The drivetrain used by Toyota in their hybrids is also a huge reliability boost over an automatic transmission (I think it even beats a manual). They call it an eCVT, but it’s basically a differential and a second motor. Easily is life of the vehicle. No clutches to wear out.
I wonder if a Prius has lower lifetime / full lifecycle emissions than a Tesla for ex. Counting things like the battery, and that it’s more viable to keep the car on the road for longer (spreads manufacturing impact over more years).
Looks like they’re pretty close
https://www.carboncounter.com/#!/details?cars=47244;47502;99990
I do wonder what numbers they’re using for lifecycle age though. You cound definately run a Prius farther into old life than a Tesla, if only due to being more affordable to repair. Dito battery wearing out and cost of swapping it.
Looked some more; those numbers are with a common fixed ‘lifetime’ per those cars. 15 years in this case. They’re not amatorizing the manufacturing emissions over different time spans depending on average life of that specific car model.
This model is saying a Prius that lasts 20 years and a Tesla that lasts 15 years are about the same (co2 per mile). If you assume the same life, the Tesla wins by about 12%.
Hybrids as a good compromise for a big nation, till maybe aluminum-air batteries become rechargeable.
The majority of people in the US drive less than 100 miles / day. Unless you’re routinely over that an EV you charge at home (110, 220, doesn’t matter) is more than sufficient.
Fast chargers now exist and do pretty well and new tech / batteries are decreasing charge times for the times you’re on a long road trip. I think some of the 800V batteries and battery swap solutions are slower but in the same neighborhood as refilling a gas tank.
The US could also invest in mass transit and passenger rail which makes many ICE / EV debates irrelevant. If you can take a train between major cities it didn’t matter if “fast charging” isn’t fast.
Sigh. Best being the enemy of the better.
Think about it this way: the lithium production and recycling capability is fixed. You can’t scale up EV production to ICE levels immediately, because we don’t have the charging infrastructure (no, everyone cannot just start charging a vehicle at home, the grid can’t support that) or resources to handle it.
If you mandated all cars be hybrids within 5 years, we could handle that. You get something like 5-10 hybrids for every full EV, and there’s no infrastructure change at all.
It’d also help a freaking ton if we actually started limiting accelerations on vehicles (go look at vehicle acceleration measures over time – it’s insane). One of the reasons why the real-world estimates on EVs tends not to match up is because they’ve often got absurd acceleration capabilities, and if someone spends 80 grand on a vehicle they think they’ve bought the road.
@Pat: “The grid can’t support that” – This argument has lost all credibility the moment that we decided the grid can support a whole lot more than “that” if the purpose is for supporting the AI bubble instead of EVs. EVs don’t even have to increase the peak demand on the grid because they can easily be scheduled to charge during off-hours. These datacenters run 24/7 and we’re building massive quantities of electrical generation and making huge grid upgrades all of a sudden because we decided generating photos of a girl with three tits deserves more money than cars.
@spaceminion
A datacenter can be located along the mainlines from the powerplant. In some cases they are being built right alongside the new powerplant that is required to meet its demand.
The grids ability to handle millions of new elevated current draw points is an entirely different matter than the construction of a new datacenter. If multiple neighbors on a single aging residential transformer plug in Level 2 chargers at the same time, it can overload the local system. As the number of EVs in an area increase the need to upgrade transformers and lines increases proportionally.
I didn’t say the grid couldn’t support it. It just can’t support it now. Yes, it sucks that data centers are getting infrastructure boosts and consuming so much, but they’re also partly paying for it. I mean, they should be paying for all of it, but politicians are easily bought.
Hybrids get you almost all the way there with a lower demand on the resources needed to make and maintain them. Quibbling over a final 10% is silly.
@NaH: I say again, EVs don’t even have to increase the peak demand on the grid because they can easily be scheduled to charge during off-hours.
They don’t have to overload the transformer, they don’t have to overload anything. Just implement the same kinds of (often pretty voluntary and market-based) management practices that various countries and locales have been using for ages. If I had an EV, I’d be much more willing to save a couple bucks by letting my charging be automatically paused for a couple hours during peak rates at suppertime and resumed afterwards, instead of having my power bill double next month due to a datacenter driving up rates. Especially if I might not even have to let it pause, because I could also just choose to let other people participate in arbitrage and sell me power from their batteries during those hours. Heck, with longer and longer lasting batteries, I might join them.
@spaceminions
You dont seem to comprehend. The power lines and transformers of a neighborhood are not currently scaled to accommodate an EV in every home. This is what grid fragility is actually about. If every house on a block gets an EV and every one of them is charging at night, then its a new peak demand period, but its also a transformer thats likely to go out. Copy and paste this issue street by street neighborhood by neighborhood town by town and thats the issue at hand. An ENTIRE sprawling system ill equipped to meet a rising demand without significant and equally sprawling upgrade.
Datacenters are far easier to accommodate.
@NaH No, I just disagree, because you’re making a ludicrous assertion. When you’re talking about larger numbers of people, you can’t escape averages, which say that an EV will take less energy over a longer time period (in the realm of 10kWh if it’s a basic car and average driver) than what many many people use electricity to do in the evenings – cook, do laundry, bathe, heat and cool the house, etc. In a pretty normal house, an EV charging in the middle of the night is FAR from the peak demand for that house, unless it’s happening at the same time as a nasty ice storm and the house has only resistive electric heat – in which case the cars are not the problem there, and the homeowner would probably save a LOT of money using a heat pump, maybe even a mini split based system for cost and ease of install – or they could use a woodstove or gas on those nights when the electric is struggling. Their provider would probably incentivize this, too.
Let me guess, you think everybody has gas for everything and uses less electricity than a typical 1 bedroom apartment dweller, but EV’s are all humvees that are only ever charged from 0% to 100% at maximum speed every single night at the exact same time?
Junkyards are also full of scrapped/rotting ICE cars, as most cars in general are not built to last more than 10 years, especially today, despite your 1976 Survivorship Bias.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2022.112158
The higher CO2 effect because of the battery production is compensated after two to three years of driving an EV vehicle compared to an ICE vehicle, see: https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/EV-life-cycle-GHG_ICCT-Briefing_09022018_vF.pdf
Which causes a significant bias if not accounted for. Unless I missed something on my quick scroll-through, this paper seems to be focusing on direct energy use only.
Furthermore, the paper answers the question relative to the current fleet of cars in the US, and their sub types. That doesn’t answer the question about whether ICEVs could have lower overall emissions if the fleet they were studying had better overall fuel economy like in the EU.
While EVs are still likely to come up on top of the comparison, these biases in the studies are exaggerating the difference and the likely outcome is that the emissions savings are probably more like 20-30% instead of 50-80%. The point being: you’re not saving the world with EVs. Not even close.
We can summarise your argument as: “using fossil fuels for electricity is an argument for using more fossil fuels in a car”, but the correct analysis would be: “fossil fuels reduce EV potential emission savings, so switch to renewables ASAP.”
Not exactly, but close enough: as long as the infrastructure isn’t clean, EVs don’t actually make a great deal of difference. It’s still too early for EVs.
For those who remember when cities had smog, I’d say it would save quite a bit.
EVs didn’t make the smog go away – there’s not enough of them to matter. It was catalytic converters and better engines.
“That doesn’t answer the question about whether ICEVs could have lower overall emissions if the fleet they were studying had better overall fuel economy like in the EU.”
Yeah, this is kindof the “Hummer EV vs Malibu ICE” argument: if you look in the paper, you can see that the emissions ‘savings’ for the heavier segments are just flat out dwarfed by the fact that they’re inefficient to begin with. Switching pickup trucks and SUVs to electric is nothing in comparison to switching to smaller vehicles.
If we went with your plan, and if we somehow survived, then in another couple decades you’d be insisting that it was way too hard to switch to EVs all of a sudden after so many years of ICEV’s with the better fuel economy you yourself recommended. EVs are improving things both now AND later.
That’s excactly what a Life Cycle Assessment does. Mining and recycling is already included.
Yes, it’s called a life cycle analysis. Given the recyclability of the battery chemicals – only now becoming a commercial reality because they last so much longer than expected, including a second life as storage – I’d guess that even without that, no contest. BEVs would win hands down. Mining minerals vs mining oil? Transporting mineral’s vs oil etc – way cleaner, way safer.
Could that be because we are exporting the costs of mining to other countries? The source countries of minerals might think differently.
As opposed to the places we get oil, which have no geopolitical complications whatsoever.
Anyway, LFP batteries aren’t that hard to source materials for and sodium batteries are even better. Energy independence is big enough on its own but especially when even the raw materials are not rare.
Batteries can be recycled already – Munro Live did a tour of a huge battery recycling plant on their YT channel – and that situation is only going to improve with volume & technology.
Fuel you put in your ICE car is burned once and that’s it – gone forever.
That’s actually a good thing. Recycling batteries takes energy, money, infrastructure, and involves toxic chemicals that also have to be dealt with, so they don’t end up getting dumped in the environment. Recycling batteries is actually a bit more expensive than making new batteries, which is why the industry has been slow to pick it up.
If the fuel was carbon neutral, what’s the problem of a once-through cycle? Nothing. Modern engines have emissions so well under control that brake and tire dust has become the main issue for air quality.
and these guys ignore the massive pollution from the seagoing shipping fleet. Bunker fuel is some nasty stuff. Cars are literally a drop in the bucket.
Initially I couldn’t believe that someone could post anything so dumb, but you have managed it consistently. In fact, I’ve come to expect it, and you never fail to deliver.
I would like to hear your take on what’s so dumb about it.
It’s Andrew.
Don’t ask for too much from him.
There’s many upsides to combustible fuels. You can easily stockpile them, and they’re very efficient to transport, and we have to make them anyways: there’s much more demand for hydrocarbons than what cars use for fuel, so we have to build the infrastructure to synthesize them using our renewable energy anyways.
As we transition the rest of the economy away from using petroleum from the ground, there will be plenty of fuel for cars available.
LOL, you think it’s easier and more efficient to transport oil thru the strait of hormuz and around the world than it is to transport electricity from the local power plant to your house?
Batteries do not power EVs. Powerplants power EVs.
In the US only ~20% of the grids power comes from renewable sources.
Fuel you put in your EV is burned once and thats it–gone forever.
That’s an argument for switching to renewables in the US, because otherwise it’s a case of: “We use so much fossil fuels for electricity we should burn more fossil fuels by driving combustion cars”. In the EU, there’s so much renewables, EVs have lifecycle emissions of about 27g CO₂ /km (vs about 120g for a combustion car). This translates into around 250mpg (UK gallons).
EVs would be helped massively by nuclear energy, if only it hadn’t been made a taboo subject in the 70s…
A quick search suggests it’s been more like 25%, which when you add nuclear means 43% carbon-free in the past year despite the best efforts of the corrupt. When you look at new capacity, it’s majority renewable, because it’s so much cheaper not to have to keep buying fuel all the time. And most of the current fossil generation is gas, followed by the last of the coal plants, but almost no actual petroleum. And you can sometimes choose to purchase renewable power specifically, even though it all gets traded inside the grid. Which means EV’s are much more patriotic than ICE cars, being basically independent from foreign oil and the oil cartels. Also you don’t need to spend all that energy shipping and trucking fuel and oil around for an EV – instead the worst case is a pipeline or a coal train, which is another savings. Also when you brake in an EV you regain most of the energy you spent accelerating, so in addition to the fact that it’s silly to say they “burn” fuel, they also don’t even burn it “once”.
You do realize, by the way, that even if EV’s and the grid were so bad that they consumed the same amount of fuel as a regular car, at least the EV would get better over time instead of worse?
Still not good enough.
I’d want to see the environmental impact of educating the engineers who designed the vehicles, including the construction of the universities they attended. And if we’re really being rigorous, we should account for the environmental impact of the civilization required to produce the data needed for the analysis.
Until then, I remain unconvinced that anyone can know whether EVs are more efficient than a horse.
Don’t forget the /sarcasm tag. Poe’s law is real.
And considers sensible ICE cars like we have in Europe, not US cars.
Though I suppose it’s easier to get USAians to switch to EVs than smaller ICE cars, so maybe this is the correct comparison for the US.
This study seems to cover full lifecycle emissions. If you look at Table S6 in the paper’s supplementary materials, there are the figures they used for vehicle production, if I’m interpreting it correctly.
Batteries are recyclable and reusable in stationary loads before that, which increases their useful life by quite a lot beyond the typical vehicle lifespan. Batteries pushing EVs over ICE may have been true at some point since most myths are grounded in something, but it isn’t the case any more if it ever was.
This is an age-old debate that I learned about in industrial meteorology class 40 years ago — the cost/benefit ratios between dispersed source emissions and point source emissions. Back then, the consensus was that point source emissions were worse for the environment — but the electricity economy was largely a coal one and electric cars were few and far between.
That being said, I really doubt the assertions that one is better than the other “regardless of the grid mix.”
Point source emissions are easier/possible to regulate. Putting scrubbers on several million vehicles is a lot harder than a few thousand plants, not to mention making sure they’re all operating properly.
I dunno, historically it’s easier to force changes on cars than power plants owned by massive companies.
The reason you don’t hear about acid rain or the ozone hole anymore is because those things got regulated further upstream with NOx and SOx cap-and-trade and the Montreal Protocol for CFCs. There is an issue with regulatory capture in the energy sector, but the economics are also making coal unviable, and natural gas will soon get there. Renewables are cheaper and faster to deploy, and EVs get cleaner as the grid does as well.
Many jurisdictions don’t even test vehicle emissions, and there’s a lot more administrative burden for the government and individuals if you’re trying to do it that way.
Yes, but that’s economics doing it rather than regulations. California regulating emissions resulted in all cars becoming cleaner. Smog levels have dropped from cars to absurdly low levels (something like a 10-fold reduction since the 70s) with a much smaller change in fuel consumption. It took a lot more regulatory work to get the equivalent for coal plants.
“Many jurisdictions don’t even test vehicle emissions”
Yes, because states are required to do emissions testing based on their air quality. They’re not choosing to do it, it’s mandated by the CAA for states with cities that had crappy air. It’s even dicey whether or not emissions testing does much compared to the basic requirements cars need to meet anyway.
One of the reasons for OBD2
I have yet to see an EV that isn’t packed with “smart” bullshit that cannot be turned off without overhauling the whole electrical system. I love electric stuff, but I will never buy a car like that. Make me an EV that’s like a racing drone, where all the parts have standard interfaces and hole patterns. All interchangeable, modular, and replaceable (especially the batteries). I would buy one of those in a heartbeat.
Well the Slate pickup may fit most of that. It even comes standard with manual windows. And we find out tomorrow exactly how much it will cost and when deliveries start.
Going to assume that’s the one I saw a video of a few weeks ago with the guy driving around on basically an open chassis. I love that idea. I have no particular love of cars but I do care about owning what you buy, and about being environmentally conscious. If I ever need a 4×4 I’ll definitely be strongly considering that project.
It’s a 2WD modular pickup. Based out of Indianapolis and backed with Bezos money. Not sure what you saw, but it sounds interesting. If you see it again, send it to the tips line!
https://hackaday.com/submit-a-tip/
Thank you for the pointer!
I think power windows have finally become as reliable as the hand crank, but it took decades, and I suspect that we no longer remember how to make the hand rollers quite as well. I’m rooting for them (and Slate) in principle, though.
You should lobby EU to introduce regulation for modularity and compatibility of EVs. They´re not venturing past phones and mandatory USB-C and user-swappables batteries for phones. I´m sure that no only there is a market for simple, cheap, modular EVs, but also that it would create a competitive ecosystem for the modular parts. But it´s certainly not what EV manufacturers want. And they´ll always justify their logic with arguments like security, performance…
With ICE vehicles they could always claim it would allow people to bypass emissions controls or that forcing people to buy new cars was better for the environment, those arguments pretty much die with EV’s so we may well see a much stronger right-to-repair / right-to-modify argument when all it needs is a battery swap to keep a car going and the emissions go from zero to zero no matter what you do.
Renault open-sourced one called Mobilize.
https://insideevs.com/news/331709/renault-to-release-twizy-hardware-platform-as-an-open-source-ev/
Did that ever come to fruition? It seems more like a aspiration than reality, and from 2017 at that.
“You should lobby EU to introduce regulation for modularity and compatibility of EVs” I’m sure there would be no unexpected consequences. I mean look at USB-A. How to make a connector that everyone always tries to insert the wrong way, especially if it is on the back of something where you can not see.
Of course you have the benefit of standardization in that better ideas have no chance.
Yeah, but you only try to insert it the wrong way twice. It works on the third time, every time!
The electronics / invasive tracking BS is not just an EV thing, it is a new car thing.
Creeps like GM got caught surreptitiously selling detailed driving data to data brokers (collected via LTE modems in GM cars and trucks marketed as a safety and convenience feature to buyers “OnStar”). Creeps like Kia state they collect data to track your “sex life” in their privacy notice. Mozilla published a report analyzing the privacy notices of major auto makers, I called out two, but all the American, Japanese, Korean and European auto companies are terrible in their privacy violations.
Even if you are driving an older car without the spy tech and don’t carry an Apple/Android personal tracking device, your movements are being tracked by automated license plate scanners, that are pretty much everywhere now.
The Stasi could only dream of the dystopia we have created.
And now the EU is mandating a load of alleged “safety” features, like constant distracting warning bells for non-events, “lane-assist” steering that tries to wrestle you into oncoming traffic or potholes on country lanes, and eye tracking that chimes at you constantly if you are wearing sunglasses.
Sure buddy, it’s all the EU’s fault, we believe you. /s
Have you heard of the ISA?
https://road-safety-charter.ec.europa.eu/resources-knowledge/media-and-press/intelligent-speed-assistance-isa-set-become-mandatory-across
I had a displeasure to drive one of these new cars, and it was constant chiming and blinking dashboard messages. “Have a break now!”, “Keep hands on the steering wheel!”, bleep bleep bleep you’re going 1 kph over the limit!
Oh yeah, hate the smart bullshit. I’m no luddite, but physical controls and discrete indicators are infinitely superior to a touchscreen with a half-assed interface where somehow everything is more difficult to access than it should be. The only reason for that crap is because it’s cheaper to manufacture.
Amen. I want to reach over and turn on the defog and adjust the fan without having to look over at the touchscreen four times.
Also, I lack the imagination that allows me to believe that the this is acceptable for the car radio but illegal and dangerous for me to do the same with my phone.
i especially love simulations of knobs on a flat screen that you have to manipulate with an accurately-placed curving stroke of the fingers. it’s as if these people really think an interface is a better user experience if it’s just an image on a screen with nothing one can grab or feel
People have been hating on the Luce, but they really did a good job putting physical controls at the forefront. I hope it trickles down to the rest of the auto industry now that unobtainably expensive cars are bringing knobs and switches back.
Kia and Hyundai have done a good job of keeping physical controls for important functions in their offerings, and Subaru seems set to bring them back based on the new Outback. It’s totally bonkers to me that Volvo, the company known for safety, has embraced the touchscreen-only approach.
Unfortunately, “cheaper to manufacture” isn’t the only reason, or even always clearly true. The other reasons are even more depressing, because they rhyme with things like bureaucratic inertia and regulatory capture, but they do exist — so it will take more than a better and cheaper design to fix things.
More specifically it’s “free” since some kind of screen is legally required for a video backup monitor.
Many of the smarts are mandated by the European Union on any new car: Lane departure warning system, active braking and many others. The tracking and data brokering isn’t.
Also, the sound generator is necessary only for silent ((PH)EV and hydrogen) vehicles.
Many such features are then added on worldwide.
Hate that damned thing. I drive far to the right of my lane because the lanes are narrow around here. On top of that, many of the roads are narrow “shared one lane” roads – traffic in two directions on a road just barely wide enough for two cars to pass if the drivers cooperate, with no lane divider. The stupid lane system wants me to drive down the middle of such a road, and fights me when I try to stay on the right.
First thing before driving off is to dig through the menus and turn the idiot thing off.
That is, if the stupid “connect to Android” bullshit isn’t blocking the display. Have to click through that crap before getting into the menu.
Out of curiosity, what sort of ICE car do you recommend? I agree it is a problem with the EVs available in the US — but it has been a problem for essentially all new cars in the US for decades. It has been even worse for luxury and high-end cars, which is, for reasons unrelated to technology, where US electric vehicles are generally targeted.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but every ICE car I’ve ever seen will still work normally even if you disconnect all wireless communications, and refuse to install any apps or other nonsense. This does not seem to be true of EVs.
I just saw a video by JerryRigEverything yesterday about a new electric truck company called Telo. It uses as many off the shelf parts as it can so that it remains user repairable. Looks pretty promising.
Looks like minimum $41K. Same difference as any other profit-strip-mining kind of company.
That doesn’t seem crazy for a brand new vehicle, and if Will is right it actually is all off the shelf easy to repair the total cost of ownership is probably going to be insanely good. Might well be one of the first EV models to have a significant number of survivors still on the road in 30 odd years as the repairs are affordable and possible.
Here’s the thing for me: The current state of EV technology cannot deliver a vehicle that meets my needs.
It’s that simple.
Yup, this. Plus the above mentioned constant data collection, but that’s for every new car, so I’ll stick to my older ICE vehicle.
The one thing that the EV will struggle to accomplish (and ICE vehicles are nearly there, too) is repairability. I can fix most things on my ICE vehicle myself (note I’m not saying I want to; sometimes it’s worth the money to have someone else do it. But I have the skillset to do so, should I want to attempt it). But with an EV, it’s a whole new world designed to keep the DIY-er out.
Most things you would want or need to fix (or maintain) on a ICE don’t exist on an EV. There are exceptions, of course, but an EV is a mechanically simpler product. Not that I want EVs to be difficult to service. Regardless, both are getting more difficult to service because they are controlled by software and networks rather than gears and linkages (and soon, remotely by the government).
What – like brakes, shocks, air conditioning, air filters, etc? Those don’t exist on an EV?
There’s a lot in a car that requires regular service, to the point that most maintenance tasks have nothing to do with the engine. What you’re missing from the ICE is just the oil changes, and the occasional timing belt swap.
I wouldn’t want to drive in a 10+ year old EV that has had zero maintenance on the drive train. Over here, the statistics show that half the Teslas on the road fail at the mandatory 3rd-year MOT inspection, usually for problems and wear in the suspension system. For regular cars, only 5% fail the test at that age.
EVs fare worse than regular cars because they’re much heavier.
Really can’t accept such a blanket statement based on Tesla… As given Tesla’s many problems at just about everything and rather novitiate status as a car builder I don’t think you can really use them as the example that proves the rules…
Also far as I know all the EV from brands built on a quality product rather than purely a flashy product with futuristic toy tech vibes products are not having noticeably greater problems in such a short time. That EV are heavier on average is clearly a fact, and it certainly can have some knock on to the suspension lifespan if you don’t build well enough to handle it. However that is a rather solved problem as EV don’t weigh anything compared to the laden weight of many goods vehicles etc.
” it’s a whole new world designed to keep the DIY-er out.”
Whether the purpose is to keep out diyers or not, I cannot say, but I can say that this is very dependent on the diyer. What some consider to be diy others consider to be electrical engineering. What others consider to be diy, some consider to be arts-and-crafts.
If there’s a will, there’s a way. Might you have to learn something new? Sure, but no one around here should be shy about picking up new skills. If I ever own a car again, it will either be an ICE that I convert to electric, or an electric that I pull all the smart crap out of.
Smart gear is only smart if you start from a position of dumber than the device. Luckily, this can also be fixed with a little education.
The same goes for me, but opposite. ICE tech cannot deliver my needs.
Problem is the current state of IC vehicles cannot deliver a vehicle that meets my needs.
So I continue to drive a 20 year old car.
Every year new cars get worse.
By government mandate.
It’s always ICE vs EV
It’s never EV vs horses or EV vs human foot.
I get the positioning and then motivation behind it. Yes, EVs are cleaner than combustion engine vehicles. But they are not “clean”. They still require a lot of mining, processing, and manufacturing processes which are definitely not green and pollute the environment a lot
I have no idea how consuming more was sold as a “green” thing to do. “More green” does not mean “green”. And when the comparison is combustion engines, the bar is just extremely low, anything like green compared to combustion engines
Probably because the EV wins on range alone in those scenarios. They compare EV to ICE because they attempt to fill the same role. Sure, some people are walking to work, and a few are riding horses, but the VAST majority of the world needs to go more than a couple miles from home, so they turn to a conveyance that can travel at higher speeds.
EV vs. trains
They are working to make batteries more efficient including how they’re made.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/battery-technology-3d-printing-c319ca9a?mod=RSSMSN
Silicon Valley-based Sakuu’s dry process will eliminate a lot of ovens for example.
We already know the car beats the horse. The horse was a growing ecological disaster that the car came along just in time to saved us from. The piles of horse manure and horse bodies were growing in every economically developed city.
Horse meat on the menu. Dig in.
Mass transit and electric micromobility devices (e-bikes, scooters, boards, etc) are much more efficient ways to move people around, but require infrastructural investments that haven’t been made in most of the US. Most of the rest of the world is ahead of the US and Canada in this respect. Until then, if you live somewhere cars are required and have to get a new one, an EV will have lower GHG emissions than a similarly-sized ICE.
I did read once that the Hummer EV has higher emissions than the ICE Malibu, but I don’t think that’s really a pair most people are cross-shopping. LOL
“I did read once that the Hummer EV has higher emissions than the ICE Malibu, but I don’t think that’s really a pair most people are cross-shopping.”
I think you’re missing the point there. It’s actually really common for people with much older cars to say “I don’t understand, I was getting 40 mpg back in the 1980s, why is it so impressive now?” Or, in the case of European cars, it’s often times even higher than that.
The reason is because as vehicle engine efficiencies have improved, they haven’t gone to lowering the mileage! They’ve gone to improving the performance and size, because that’s what consumers wanted – bigger cars, and getting to destinations faster. The old Volkswagen Beetle’s engine in the 70s was under 40 kW. It’s just absurd to think of that as an engine size now.
This is why bringing up that comparison is important: because swapping to an EV to reduce emissions on a vehicle chassis that’s inherently inefficient to begin with doesn’t actually improve much (and if you’re the kind of person who buys a luxury EV, you’re probably not following the driving patterns that they’re testing it under).
You can also ask: which would give you more carbon reduction, pushing consumers to EVs or pushing them to smaller/less performant vehicles and changing speed regulations? Overall, given the trends (which haven’t even levelled off yet!) an EV switch will only buy a small amount of time in emissions.
My understanding of that particular study was that in the same class, an EV is cleaner, but even being an EV doesn’t make the gargantuan size of most American vehicles make any sense.
I agree with your assessment (and that of the researchers) that smaller EVs being swapped in for larger gas vehicles will accelerate things more quickly to a lower emissions state. Going back to a 55 mph speed limit would help immensely as well, but nobody has listened to me on that since I started saying it twenty years ago.
Especially in the US, CAFE regulations had the unintended consequence of incentivizing larger vehicles instead of putting everything not needing a CDL in the same bucket. There’s some serious rethinking that needs to happen in the industry as any EV will meet emissions targets, but range-focused consumers would greatly benefit from the return of cars since they have a lower frontal area which is a great benefit to efficiency.
I would certainly be a bit anxious trying to drive something with less than 100 hp on the roads (my current car has ~140 hp), but even a basic EV will out accelerate many ICE sports cars a decade ago. That probably contributes to why so many people won’t go back to ICE after driving an EV. Most people want something performant, but efficiency and performance were trade-offs for most of the automobile’s history.
We need to work on phasing out personal vehicles in urban settings if we’re going to make people grouchy about things anyway, but there’s a perception, at least in the US, that people have a right to drive. Automobiles are one of those hammer and nail situations. They’re good for a lot of things, but aren’t always the right tool for transportation, despite us conforming our society around that notion for the last hundred years.
Car culture turned it into a “right to drive”. When everything is physically and system-wise structured around that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
“but even a basic EV will out accelerate”
Sigh. This isn’t an “EV vs ICE” thing. This is because people got used to automatic transmissions which prevent them from reaching peak power rapidly and limit accelerations. EVs and ICE vehicles can accelerate out of the gate at exactly the same rate, because they’re both limited by tires. It’s hilarious when people say “but EVs have all torque available at 0 RPM!” and I’m like, yeah, so you can what, spin the tires faster?
Yes, plenty of EVs will blow the doors off of ICE vehicles. That’s just power (and high performance tires). The standard Model 3 is nearly 300 hp. That’s very high for a sedan, and the Performance models are absolute top-end. But a Leaf is like a 110 hp car. It’s not out accelerating anything.
It’s absurd how ‘fast’ a manual transmission vehicle feels nowadays. I’ve got two cars with identical engines, one manual and one automatic, and the manual just blows the doors off of the automatic.
“but efficiency and performance”
Nah, in the case of manuals vs automatics, it wasn’t an efficiency vs performance trade. Just laziness.
Having absurdly high performance engines in EVs so people will like them is also counterproductive from an efficiency standpoint, mind you. Those EPA ratings are not driving the car like a person who dumps 60 grand on a 550 HP vehicle.
Isn’t it a matter of perspective? I mean for the Siberian who dreams of growing mango’s and lychee CO2 can not increase fast enough.
Another degree or so and my date palms will stop loosing their fruit during cold spells.
Ironically, you misspelled “losing”.
Germans and their rules.
If you can only thing of one way to spel a word you hav know emadgeanation.
I’ve never owned a new car. Always, over 10 years old. Average 4-7 years, before a repair forces replacement. Won’t spend thousands, rather replace the whole car. Just transportation. Most of them went well over 200,000 miles on the odometer… Really depends on regular maintenance and driving habits. EVs are similar, in that the batteries need to be cared for. The computer prevents major abuse, but not neglect. They also want to squeeze a lot out of them for marketing. An owner might wait until the computer warns them to charge the battery. Which isn’t good practice. Might leave it on the charger. Don’t have one, could just shut down completely. Owner would need to restart charging manually. Still only using a small fraction of the charge, then charging again isn’t ideal either. Rapid charging is another issue… Temperature will also have some influence on how long the battery lasts. Not a huge market for a 10 year old EV. It’s still a growing field. 10 years is obsolete, and scrapyard bound.
Batteries are on a clock.
You can leave them in a climate controlled space with a steady maintained 80% charge and the cells will still be dead at about 12-15 years.
Um, no, not really. There’s not much a user can do as maintenance, and by far the dominant effect on a battery’s lifespan is cycle and calendar aging (and as the other poster mentioned, after about a decade or so, the battery’s going to be at 80% of its original capacity even if it was just sitting doing nothing).
But the other issue is that cell failures are mostly just random growth of structures in the cells, and we don’t really have good ways of checking that from a manufacturing or monitoring standpoint. They literally manufacture cells with windows and do x-ray inspections and other crazy things to understand failure rates. Meaning that buying a used BEV is a lottery ticket – that battery might have years left, or it might die in a week.
That’s a big difference compared to an engine on an ICE vehicle, because you can check things like compression, oil contents, etc. to understand how an engine is aging, but with a battery it’s always a crapshoot.
The nice thing about EVs is that if you do want to replace the batteries in the future (although probably longer than 10 years for newer models) the other drivetrain components will likely be fine and you’ll be getting a big boost in range with the newer cell chemistries.
Some of the early modern EVs (2010s, not 1890s) had problems with pack failures, etc as we hadn’t been building packs that big for very long. While there is the occasional cell failure still, they’re becoming increasingly uncommon as the bugs get worked out of the system. A 2012 Model S is a lot more likely to need a replacement than a 2023 Hyundai. The BMS in most of the cars can at least determine which module is throwing an error, and once we’re further along in the transition, we’ll have more people trained in replacing cells in a HV pack. Right now, they usually replace the whole pack and remanufacture it or reuse the modules in a stationary backup role.
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5706658/electric-vehicle-battery-lifespan
This would work if batteries, cells, or modules were standardized. Which they should be! But they’re not, and so it’s very likely that at the point of replacement it may not be possible to replace it (which is already an issue with Leafs, for instance).
“although probably longer than 10 years for newer models”
One of the reasons people think batteries in EVs are doing so well is that the pack is initially overprovisioned – it’s a pack spec’d to 100 kWh, but it’s actually like 120-130 kWh so that it’ll hit its warranty. Lithium ion batteries degrade over time, even with no charge cycling. Calendar lifetime is a well known thing, although poorly studied.
I don’t really share your opinion on things improving. For smaller packs like hybrids, it’s completely realistic, but for the full BEVs I think shops will end up being less likely to repair/replace them because of how individual they all are. Again, if they were standardized, sure, but they’re not – and the other issue is that it’s trivial for manufacturers to be evil and lockout third-party battery replacement, at which point there’s no incentive for them to keep prices low.
A cell swap is a band-aid.
The rest of the cells are as old as the failed one.
If they swap a cell, it’s standard practice to swap in a used one of similar wear.
To prevent imbalance in the pack.
There is no escaping that pack replacement is expensive and happens in less time than a good IC engine’s (e.g. Honda B 4 banger) life.
Jury is still out on comparing a pack to a shitty modern IC engine.
Electric cars only make sense if your using a good fraction of their range most days.
Otherwise the packs fail from age not miles and all the savings go away.
$, CO2 pick your beans to count, same answer.
Yup. There are a lot of videos/articles/stories about people doing a single module or cell replacement and everything being fine… except those are cases where a single cell has failed due to premature effects, not normal cycle/calendar aging.
“There is no escaping that pack replacement is expensive and happens in less time than a good IC engine’s”
It’s more than that, though – engine rebuilds are expensive due to labor, not parts, and while it definitely does require skill, it’s very much a learnable skill: and if you do learn it, ICE vehicles become so absurdly cheaper than EVs that it’s comical to talk about.
I mean, a 15 year old vehicle at this point is a 2011. And used 2011 vehicles can still fetch significant used value, but you’d have to be crazy to buy an EV with 80%-ish of its original battery capacity for a significant amount. It might not last a year.
There are only a handful of EV platforms out there, and within a family, most of those vehicles are using the same cells. (The new Bolt being LFP compared to the rest of the GM EVs is the main exception right now.) If you went to a GM or Hyundai shop, I can think of 5-6 different models for each brand that are going to have identical cells and modules inside, even if there are slight differences in the pack as a whole. Most packs are using either 2170s or prismatic LFPs, but you will need to make sure the chemistry is a match as they’ll have slightly different charging characteristics. I don’t really think it’s any more of a logistical headache than whether you can use a Subaru fuel pump in a Ford.
You definitely want to match the cell if possible (I used to build EV packs) since an imbalance isn’t great for the cells, but you have modules you can pull from cars that met their demise from non-battery related reasons to pull from. I’d argue that labor is also the expensive part for a cell or module replacement which is why we’re still mostly seeing a full pack swap when the vehicles are under warranty.
Since degradation is non-linear, most packs will be able to sit at that 80% of original capacity for a very long time when they finally get there. I’m not sure why people act like you need to throw the car away when it gets there. The data from Recurrent indicates most cars are at 80%+ of their capacity around 150,000 mi and most of the ten year old cars are still on their original packs. A lot of those with replacements were due to recalls/failures in the early years (Model S, Bolt, Kona/Niro). Some basic ICE cars will last to 200-300k mi, but I think that’s the exception, rather than the rule unless we’re talking a Honda or Toyota, as you said. Anything European or American isn’t going to do well past 150k either.
Meanwhile, your overall maintenance costs are going to be negligible for the rest of the vehicle compared to an ICE of the same vintage. Modern cars do have more things going on, so more of a failure surface, but the reduction in complexity of EVs gives them the edge here.
While Pat is correct that manufacturers could implement some kind of DRM for the battery systems, automotive is one of the few places where we already have a very robust set of Right-to-Repair laws, so I’m not as concerned there. I’m not saying there’s no issue or room for improvement, but I don’t think it’s a separate issue to ECMs or other systems for ICE engines.
“I don’t really think it’s any more of a logistical headache than whether you can use a Subaru fuel pump in a Ford.”
Of course it is. Because they don’t keep making them. That’s the entire problem with older Leafs at this point – Nissan literally won’t sell them because they don’t make them.
But the big problem with battery replacement is simple: things don’t become reasonable until you get non-OEM competition to pull prices down and maintain supply, and there are very few companies out there that do it.
I don’t really understand how anyone can be optimistic about EV battery replacement.
“but I think that’s the exception, rather than the rule unless we’re talking a Honda or Toyota”
It just depends. After 5-6 years it’s usually obvious what the design issues are with an engine, and then it’s just a question of how difficult it is to deal with. You buy an engine late in its design life cycle and there’s a good chance it’ll last freaking forever. (The stupidest thing in automotice design is that companies can basically say ‘yeah we screwed up, here’s how you fix it, but it only shows up past warranty expiration so it’s not our fault’).
I have no idea how in the world anyone can buy a car without talking to mechanics who’ve worked on them first.
FFS, another TCO estimate only using MSRP, maintenance, and fuel, and ignoring financing and insurance costs. Insurance costs for EVs tend to run at about a 30-40% premium, and insurance costs over a 15-year lifespan are a large fraction of the actual MSRP (which, I mean, you’d expect).
Your data is outdated. EVs current cost about 10–25% more to insure than equivalent gas vehicles in the U.S. The cost delta keeps going down as the insurers accrue more history, and battery repair (rather than replacement) has become more of a thing.
My data is from literally 3 weeks ago. It’s 42% averaged over all models. Comparing more recent models it’s about 20%. However, the gap isn’t going down, it’s fairly stable (12% in 24, 22% in 25, and 18% in 26).
I actually heard the polluting EV argument a long time ago when I kid watching cartoons. The cartoon was Captain Planet.
I think the episode started with a bunch of investor bros grilling a clean energy woman who was giving a presentation on EVs. The bros argued that electric vehicles still used coal power plants and therefore weren’t any better than gas vehicles. The woman threw a big bag of carbon at them which represented the carbon emissions of their gas cars, then she threw a tiny bag which represented the emissions a coal plant created to charge an equivalent EV. The point being that even though power plants burn dirty fuel they are far more efficient at the large scale they operate on.
Captain Planet.
I mean obviously a centralized, stationary power plant running at its constant optimal speed and temperature instead of running up and down the spectrum all the time and idling at stop lights would be more efficient.
Who the heck ever thought that a car engine would have a higher thermal efficiency than a stationary steam turbine? That’s absurd on its face.
Might seem absurd, but it’s true. Obviously not all car engines beat power plants (and CCNG ones are unreachable, but that’s not because of the operating regime – it’s because they can trade space for efficiency by having multiple heat engines).
But definitely some types of car engines beat some types of power plants. Because car manufacturers update their engines far more often than power plants do.
EV’s DON’T beat ICE in cold weather, winter. Try one in balmy -20C weather even.
Battery pack output/efficiency is terrible, even crippling in the case of Tesla’s in Chicago refusing charging of cold packs and you need a tow. Or leave the car only parked in a heated garage. You can’t do much driving with them before they cool off. It’s actually quite bad.
Cabin heat is a few kW that an ICE makes for free lol. Gotta have it, oh and they do work at -30C.
Looking forward to the chinese EV’s cratering in Canadian winters, that will be predicted and hilarious.
Tesla getting it wrong for cold weather doesn’t mean an EV can’t be made to deal with it. Part of it is probably selecting a different battery chemistry which will probably reduce maximum range or need a physically large pack in exchange for being that heap more resilient to temperature. But other solutions are available, like insulating the pack relatively well so a tiny tiny amount of self discharge can keep the battery in an acceptable temperature window – which does then increase the quality of the cooling system to handle the high current of actually using it and faster charging speeds.
If Chinese EV can get it right for cold weather or not is an open question – but if the car designers are intending to sell into markets that deep freeze often they will have considered and designed for it effectively most likely.They are not idiots, and it isn’t some mystic unknown problem that will need 20 years of R&D to solve, working solutions already exist.
Teslas work perfectly fine in cold climate. Just look at Norway, it’s the most sold car here. Try tell a Norwegian Tesla owner his car doesen’t work in the winter. He will have a good laugh while driving to his cabin in the mountains.