Don’t get me wrong. I know the vehicle itself will have way lower emissions and than a regular gas or diesel vehicle, but what I’m confused on is that they will have to mine to get the raw materials to make these batteries and then once the battery is done it’s lifespan they will need to find a way to dispose or recycle these batteries. Imagine doing that capacity when the whole world has transitioned to EV.
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– Batteries can be reused multiple times before recycling. When batteries get down to 80% capacity, we can use them, *for decades*, in non-mobile applications where the weight to power ratio does not matter, like storing power from a household solar array, windmill, or heat-exchange system.
– There is also a couple of batteries in development which will never lose capacity; one has been charged & discharged 100,000 times with no measurable loss in capacity.
– EVs use way less energy to manufacture, maintain, and repair: 100 moving parts vs 2000 in a gas-powered car. This is usually ignored, preferring to focus on the energy required to mine, which is silly.
Cleaness makes the debate also pretty one sided imho.
A BEV simply drives superior to and ICE.
More power, more torque, basically silent, no vibrations, ac runs whenever you need it and instant warmth in winter.
ICE are the past… Period.
With an EV, you have to dig a hole once.
With a gas car you have to dig a hole every tank of gas.
Also all the materials in the EV are fully recyclable and will be in the material stream for a century or more. A tiny bit of your new car probably has hundred year old steel in it.
Engineering explained does a really good video on the carbon payback period of BEVs vs ICE cars on YouTube.
But something that’s important that a lot of people don’t think about is how recyclable batteries are, and those comparisons are only looking at ICE cars vs virgin BEVs. Once a BEV is using a recycled battery, then it’s better to buy a BEV than ICE from a carbon standpoint, regardless of if you drive it. Some studies even show recycled EV batteries have a higher purity and will last longer/perform better.
Two things: efficiency of the vehicle, and the limited supply of oil.
An internal combustion engine (ICE) car is massively inefficient; there is an entire system in the car that does nothing but help it get rid of waste heat fast enough to keep from melting itself. We have to make it less efficient just to cut down on the toxic gases it emits, and even so a running car engine is one of the most common too-hot things most of us ever deal with.
And we’re running out of oil. It isn’t imminent, but the day is coming when it will be many times more expensive than it is now just from scarcity. We have shown we can generate significant amounts of electricity other ways; let’s save our oil for other things we need and can’t replace as easily, and incidentally quit sending so much money to the Arab World and to Russia.
A key thing that is forgotten is that you also have to mine the resources for and build ICE cars. Additionally, you have to extract and refine the oil.
When the oil companies created this argument that EVs are bad for the environment they pretend that the gas and the ICE cars just exist without needing to be created. It’s a comparison.
They are so much cleaner when used, that even when there is a bit of extra pollution making them, it’s cleaner in the end.
The batteries are not garbage, but a source for new materials, meaning that the mining-part gets cleaner when enough batteries are at the end of their lives.
Even if a battery breaks, the same amount of materials that were used to make it are still there.
Several people here have already explained why they are better than ICE. So I’m just gonna add that a lot of the technological struggles we see today with electric vehicles likely can and will be solved in the near future. ICE vehicles had their struggles when they were first coming onto the scene. But EVs have the benefit of being able to build off of the technology of ICE cars.
It’s better to think of them as less bad rather than more good. Personal motor vehicles are awful regardless of how they are powered.
There is a large environmental cost to building them. There is a large environmental cost to building car infrastructure (roads, parking, etc). There are also large social costs to cars and car infrastructure which result in positive feedback loops that force more people to drive cars.
Several tonnes of steel and other refined materials results in a lot of environmental harm, in order to in most cases move one person twice 5 times a week. Roads and parking lots cause environmental harm both by simply existing, and in the production of their materials like asphalt and hydraulic cement.
Cars are also dangerous, which discourages people from walking and biking, and therefore more people drive. Car infrastructure is also expensive to build and maintain and takes up a lot of space, which leaves less money and space for other forms of transportation and forces everything to be more spread out, all of which forces more people to drive.
Electric cars do not fix any of that as it’s all inherent in what cars are. Walking, biking, or public transportation are all far more of an improvement.
As you point out, the power train on an electric car is more environmentally harmful to produce than that of a combustion car. Over a typical vehicle lifetime, the electric wins overall, but it’s still bad.
Widespread change to electric cars also means an increased demand for electricity which requires increasing generator and transmission capacity. This will make it more difficult to get rid of older, more polluting power plants and encourage building more combustion power plants. Powering an electric car with a combustion power plant is better for emissions than a combustion car but it’s still a case of ‘less bad’ rather than ‘good’.
Having what cars there are be electric is better than them being combustion, but reducing the number of cars of any sort would be far better.
I think its also important to note that batteries last longer than you think. I drive a nissan leaf with a 10 year old battery. Over thats life time the battery has created much less emissions than a petrol car over the same time, including the resources and energy to create them. Now my battery is at the end of its life. But just because a battery is no longer storing enough energy for driving. That Dosnt mean it can’t be used for other things. The company I work for replaces leaf batteries with larger new batteries and uses the old batteries as home storage for off grid solar projects. In this new environment, the battery is likely to last much longer as it will be treated better when it comes to charging and discharging.
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