Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
It’s important to ask these questions about EVs’ hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered “exhaustively” — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas.
Do we actually have hard data to determine if coal power delivering your electricity is indeed cleaner than what an ICE emits?
It’s pretty simple really if you look at commuter traffic. Each stopped electric vehicle does nothing while stopped.
Aside from heating or cooling the occupants, that is.
Yeah, compare 500w heating to 30kw starts. But it does matter if you’re gonna be there eternally for 8 hours or something. Heating is inefficient when you’re not doing something else with the water before hand.
Somehow instead of having a GPS app tracking traffic to top off the batteries before you get there, I much rather have an app try to convince me to park my car, take a bus and try again tomorrow.
Yes the MIT link covers coal. At worst it’s on par with gas cars. They get better as the energy source mix does but they aren’t worse than gas powered cars.
Yes you can get the emissions per equivalent kilowatt hour of both. Especially since there are many electric generators that are just using a car engine. And it’s a known fact that at least in terms of energy generation larger motors a better conversion rate of fuel to electricity and power plant Motors are quite a bit larger than most cars. Unfortunately I only really have my phone available to me at the moment and I’m a little busy so I don’t have time for much more than these quick replies but over the next couple days if I get a moment I will come reply to this again after finding the actual figures if you haven’t already found them yourself which please do reply to this with them if you find them