Direct, operating CO2 only. In terms of embodied CO2 from manufacturing, and indirect impacts from increased demand for parking, demand for larger parking spaces, demand for charging infrastructure, and induced travel leading to sprawling urban forms, electric SUVs are a regression.
Cradle to grave analysis of most EVs puts them ahead on emissions, even including manufacturing, even with poor grid mixes of mostly coal power. Battery materials are also recyclable, so those manufacturing impacts should decrease over time on a per-vehicle basis.
Smaller, more efficient vehicles with smaller batteries are definitely better and should be incentivized.
If you want to compare them yourself, don't forget to include all of the externalities from drilling, transporting, and refining petroleum before it reaches the pump. Tailpipe vs tailpipe certainly doesn't tell the whole story.
You’re right assuming preferences don’t change but I think it is worth highlighting the research suggesting that large EVs will never break even compared to normal sized ICE vehicles. We can’t afford to allow greenwashing where someone pretends a large SUV is anything but polluting.
It doesn't really have much to do with the mining. The embodied carbon of the battery comes mostly from the fact that it has to be baked to dehydrate the materials. Carbon, because there is not enough renewable energy in the places where these batteries are made. As time goes on the carbon embodiment will decrease.
The overwhelming problem with giant electric SUVs is the opportunity cost. Given limited capacity for battery making, and considering that we are using the last bit of our emissions budget to make them, it is obviously better to make them as small as possible. Slapping a 180kWh battery pack in a Rivian is ridiculous. With the same materials you could make 500 electric bicycles.
Bicycles are not a replacement for cars in all situations, uses, or weather. You could make lighter vehicles, but that’s equally true for combustion vehicles.
you mine for battery materials once. with an ICE engine you mine for oil over and over and over again, and you burn more fossil fuels to refine it, and burn more to transport it to you, over and over and over again.
Obviously you can park an electric SUV in a parking space without a charger, just like you can park an ICE SUV in a parking space without a gasoline/diesel pump.
I know of zero parking lots/structures, however new or trendy, which feature fuel pumps.
But - at least around me - EV chargers seem to be mandated (for at least for some of the spots) when any large or image-conscious organization builds or renovates parking infrastructure. For the purpose at hand, it doesn't matter whether the mandate is legal, or just "or what will they say about us on social media???".
Mazda CX-5 looks to be smaller than Model Y, so more fair comparison would be to CX-60 which seems to be similar size, where the difference between these two is under 20 kg according to carsized. See:
I'm pro-EV and happily daily-drive one, but I think it's fair to conclude that the need for 1-hour to 8-hour+ charging means that the "space needed for parking while energy is being dispensed" is higher fleet-wide for EVs than for ICE vehicles.
We don't think of nor call it "parking" at the gas pump, but we do at a charging station. There's a reason that's the case.
Many people will have a dedicated charging space at home (taking up only epsilon extra space for the charger), but all the Tesla super-charger, Chargepoints, EVGo, ElectrifyAmerica, etc en route chargers will require more parking space per EV than the equivalent petrol station per ICE.
Fast chargers are basically only needed along highways, where they take the place of gas stations. You only need those for long-distance driving, but most driving is short-distance.
On the other hand, a lot of slow/midspeed chargers are basically just regular destination parking spots equipped with a charger. They take up zero additional space. As EVs become more and more common, we'll see an increasing number of parking spots being equipped with chargers. Because this allows EVs to charge where they are parked anyways this means you can essentially get rid of gas stations inside cities - which ends up saving space.
Right now we just happen to be in a bit of an awkward in-between phase. When the majority of cars are EVs, the ecosystem will change to fit them better.
I'm not convinced that those factors would lead to a net increase. Every day I see cars parked at gas stations for 5 minute fillups. Then they go home or to work to normal parking spaces.
EVs eliminate that middle parking spot most of the time. And, tbh, even on road trips, gas cars spend a significant amount of time stopped. They just spend less of that stopped time getting fuel.
if you drive 14,000 miles a year (US average -- twice that of EU average), you need to pull in 4,500 kWh a year.
At a 150kW charger that would be 30 hours of charging, or an average 5 minutes a day.
One charger would thus serve 200 cars in the US, 400 in the EU.
In the UK 2-in-3 cars have private parking space and thus potential for home charging. I expect the US to be a fair higher number as there's more space, but lets stay that figure.
That would make one charger serve 600 cars in the US, 1200 in the EU.
The largest chargers I've seen are half a parking space for two spaces.
Thus to serve 280 million cars you need to provide charging for 100 million, which at 600:1 car:charger ratio would be 160,000 chargers.
There are about 115,000 gas sations in the US. 2 chargers per gas station, using a total of 2.5 parking spaces, would be enough.
Thus moving to 100% EV would save massive amounts of space across the country.
In the city I live EV ownership is at 37%. Very few charge at public charging spots daily. What happens is places that lack the ability gain the ability pretty quick.
For the manufacturing part, are we including the environmental impact of oil extraction in the comparison? That isn’t part of “building” an ICE car, unlike with EV batteries, but it is still required on an ongoing basis for operation and it is the direct equivalent of the EV batteries.
I find it a little hard to believe that e.g. lithium extraction is fundamentally worse than oil extraction and processing.
Nope. Electric SUVs don't induce more demand for parking nor require larger parking spaces than ICE SUVs, and the charging infrastructure doesn't induce more emissions than equivalent ICE infrastructure, nor do they induce more travel than ICE SUVs.
The only correct bit here is that they do require more CO2 to manufacture, but this is made up for by the dramatically reduced operating emissions in the first few thousand miles or so of driving (depending on the source of the energy used to charge it). Further, the grid is getting greener all the time, so operating emissions and the manufacturing emissions are both falling quickly while the operating emissions of fossil fuels remains extremely high (literally and figuratively).
Compared to efficient cars, this crossover point is as late as 50,000km. It does not pay off as rapidly as you are implying. Something like a Kia Niro with a normal-sized battery starts with an embodied CO2 deficit of ~5t. Something absurd like a Rivian is 20t in the hole from the jump and will never be CO2-positive except when compared to something equally wasteful like an ICE Hummer.
The core problem with the modern environmental movement is the refusal to take a W when one is staring them in the face.
EVs are happening. It's a huge win for the environment and all the environmental orgs that pushed for it. Stop trying to rewrite this revolutionary change as a hidden nefarious L. You're just making yourself sad and the youth jaded.
The point of progressivism is to be seen always push progress. If you stop after a win, you're now a conservative, which for many is the worst thing possible.
W=Win, L=Loss? Why would you randomly abbreviate single 3-4 character words?
EVs are, at best, stagnation. At worst they simply go even further to hide the enormous external costs of everyone using giant, heavy wheelchairs to move around anywhere.
EVs emit about half of the co2 per mile (including manufacturing emissions) as ICE cars today, and that figure is falling rapidly as we decarbonize electricity production. In what world is a 50% reduction in emissions "stagnation"?
If it perpetuates an inefficient form of urban settlement, then it is at best a local optimization. Look at all the people in this subthread who are demanding a cradle-to-grave lifecycle analysis but are for some reason unwilling to expand the scope of that analysis to ponder the question of why the car should exist at all.
In a world with more than one single dimension. Have you considered there are other factors in addition to CO2 per mile?
A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish, but of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric.
> A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Yes, it seems unlikely that we would double our number of miles driven because this is a factor of time spent driving, population, and speed. There's no indication that speed limits will increase or that people are interested in longer commutes, and population growth is stagnating.
> Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Climate change is a much more significant problem than these. I can live with wide roads and parking lots; it's much harder to live with our global breadbaskets succumbing to increasingly severe droughts and the geopolitical destabilization that entails.
And there's no way we're going to pivot away from ICE cars to public transit quickly enough to meet climate goals even if there was the political will to do so (and there isn't, because lots of people get a lot of value out of cars, and even places with lots of public transit options are seeing a rise in car ownership and usage). There's just no way it's going to happen over the next century.
Moreover, there's tons we could do about pedestrian safety, tire pollution, road noise, etc without eliminating cars, but we lack the political will even to do these things so there's certainly no way we're going to abolish cars and transition to public transit / cycling lifestyles.
> Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish
It's foolish to treat all metrics as equally important. You can't live without food; you can live with car noise.
> of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric
Yeah, car manufacturers love paying Tesla so they can keep making ICE cars /s. Cars are wildly popular in the west (car adoption is increasing across the board, even among the Dutch); the auto industry doesn't need to do a psyop to convince people to drive--it's just much more convenient than the alternatives even where the alternatives are very well developed/supported.
