Thanks for the link Dean, I agree with your thought on our cars being a minuscule part of the problem. But the one thing I want to know, and Harris asked Graham, is about manufacture CO2 vs tail pipe emissions. Graham avoided the question, it doesn’t sit comfortably with EV users.
‘ The upshot is that – despite common claims to contrary – the embodied emissions of a car typically rival the exhaust pipe emissions over its entire lifetime.’ from the article here:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car
As far as I can understand, I cannot see how it can be perceived as eco-friendly to buy an EV. Surely buying a second hand car is the most eco-friendly thing we can do. Am I missing something?
I completely agree Dicky. I am not convinced by this arguement that a new EV reduces overall emissions from end to end over the life of the car. I haven't the numbers but I suspect the point at which the EV starts to win is many many years down the lines and hundreds of thousands of miles down the line and maybe never in real terms.
I like the idea of reusing old more innefficient existing vehicles to replace the ICE that is very old and innefficient with an EV power train. That makes a lot of sense.
My Outlander PHEV is no better than a new efficient petrol or diesel in the real world so in this sense....what is the point? It doesn't achieve what it was designed and manufactured to achieve.
The problem often is exacerbated with political and busines will biased to want to produce more new cars as the debt based economy we live in only works (actually doesn't but that another story!) if people keep buying more and more new cr4p they don't really need. It is impossible to do the right thing when huge swathes of the industry is biased in this way.
Of course EV's can help reduce emissions and be cleaner than an ICE equivalent in many cases. When an existing car is very old and innefficient mostly. To replace buses, taxis, vans and all commercial traffic when they are old and get many people doing school runs and using dailies in EV's to do most of their miles makes sense. However you can't throw away perfectly good already produced cars that are quite efficient already to achieve this. That makes very little sense.
I could do 100k miles per year in an old massive 6.0ltr V12 Merc S Class with lower car tax and massively polluting with little penalty over an alternative. This is an area with many others that need to be targeted for change. Doing 200 miles a year in a Maserati V8 leaves very little in room to improve. In fact you can't. It is better to keep the Maserati V8 on the road for 100 years in this extreme case than replace with an EV.
We all know that EV's make some very compelling arguements in some cases so they should be used for that of course. However you can't shoehorn them into everything when clearly it isn't the blanket answer.
We know mining is hugely inefficient so to mine more to be able to produce more raw materials to build another new car and battery set makes no sense. Imagine how many batteries even AA/AAA and the like are produced and disposed of every day? Crazy amounts. We need to start with being more effieicnt in our uses and reduce waste. Surely that makes an immediate larger impact at little or no real cost.
This pandemic is and will do lots of bad but is also achieving lots of good by opening some people's eyes and minds to think and live differently. That has the ability to invoke immediate and long lasting change which should be embraced to all our benefits.
As always a balanced blended approach seems like the best option. However this needs to be done without political, business or money biases which is highly unlikely it seems due to simple human greed.
