Volvo released a study [1] which states that an electric Volvo C40 needs to be driven for 68,300 miles before it reaches a CO2 break-even compared to an ICE XC40. This assumes no replacement of any battery cells before reaching the ~68k miles.
Can someone explain to me why there is so little public discussion to what extent electric and hybrid vehicles actually help to reduce our global carbon footprint?
Pretty silly issue no?
What’s the carbon break even point of an ICE car?
If our energy generation and manufacturing technology matures for 50 years, how long would it take to break even then?
Do you have any idea how far ICE cars have come over the past 50 years on efficiency and pollution?
If we give up at the start of any new technology because it doesn’t instantly solve problems we wouldn’t have anything to show for ourselves.
Progress starts with making things somewhat worse first, then iterating.
If it’s between 70k miles to break even or and infinite amount for an ICE I’d still take the electric Volvo.
Most non-japanese cars turn into crap-boxes post 100k miles. Assuming 10k miles/yr, that's expecting a 20-35 yr lifespan for a car. That is incredibly impractical.
> Consumer Reports estimates the average EV battery pack's lifespan to be at around 200,000 miles
This means that an owner's experience will begin to substantially deteriorate at the 100k+ mile mark.
The whole electric cars as a solution for climate change thing is smoke-and-mirrors. The real problem is cars as a whole. If climate change is indeed an existential threat, then funding for public transport, bikes and dense neighborhoods must go up.
Electric cars being heavier, lead to (mass squared) faster road wear and road costs. Their quietness, greater acceleration, greater momentum and worse braking distances will only lead to increased accidents. Their range obsession means that EV hatchbacks are simply infeasible, and the move towards trucks and giant cars is proceeding undeterred.
I would have loved to see a more tiny-car / ebike driven electric revolution. Hell, we already had electrified transportation : it was called streetcars and trains. I do not particularly like the Ford F150 lightning and Model X version of electric car revolution that we're seeing today.
Electric cars are great on paper, but their 2nd order effects will cause more damage than good. That being said, we might see some great moonshot 3rd order effects such as sufficient battery storage technology to counter grid instability due to renewables or the complete removal of domestic gas pipelines in public infrastructure. But, I think the harmful 2nd order effects are more likely to cause issues than the good brought in by electric vehicles and possible moonshot events.
> Most non-japanese cars turn into crap-boxes post 100k miles.
Citation needed.
>This means that an owner's experience will begin to substantially deteriorate at the 100k+ mile mark.
So no different than an ICE, supposedly. However, where the engine might need to be replaced at 100k miles for an ICE, the motor of an electric car is expected to go to at least a million miles before needing replacement.
>Electric cars being heavier, lead to (mass squared) faster road wear and road costs.
Heavier than what exactly? An average SUV weighs more than an average BEV.
>Their quietness, greater acceleration, greater momentum and worse braking distances will only lead to increased accidents.
Citation needed. Not everyone floors it all the time just because they can, and with regenerative braking, more people are probably going to be driving slower and coasting to a stop instead of the 'floor it and slam it' of ICE, but we're both just making stuff up at this point.
>Their range obsession means that EV hatchbacks are simply infeasible
Whose range obsession exactly? many people already own BEV and or hybrids, and they're fine with the range. They're already "feasible".
>I do not particularly like the Ford F150 lightning and Model X version of electric car revolution that we're seeing today.
Me either, but they're better than those 10/20mpg or less vehicles of the past, it would be nice if people didn't have to haul or tow things, but life is what it is.
>2nd order effects will cause more damage than good.
There are a lot of second-order effects. It is hard to predict all of them, or how large the impact of each will be. In particular, harder work than you probably did.
Grid-scale storage will be built out after there is enough renewable generation capacity to charge it from. (Charging storage from NG would be... silly.) In the meantime, any capital available for that should be directed to building out the renewable generation capacity. By the time we need grid storage, it will be radically cheaper than today, same as putting up PV panels is radically cheaper than just a few years ago.
Yup. Volvo is pointing out that the car breaks even within roughly the first lease period of 2-3 years.
The average age of a car on the roads in the US is currently four times that. Electric vehicles tend to be more reliable, because of their dramatically simpler powertrains.
Plus, every year, more and more energy comes from lower carbon sources.
It's really frustrating that dialog on improvements in drivetrain systems is still regularly hampered by the same arguments we saw back when the first generation prius came out.
Same with solar. There's always someone shouting about how they "take forever to pay back." Reality: one to three years, and their "lifetime" is 20-30. And "lifetime" means "time until they are producing less than 80% of their nameplate rating", not "time until they are useless."
> Reality: one to three years, and their "lifetime" is 20-30.
No, that’s a fantasy. My 13 kW system will probably take 10 years, maybe more. A good friend of mine, with a similar system as mine but a few years older has already had three (quality, name brand) panels fail (the regulators). Most of my neighbors with the ~4 kW systems they were leasing to people years ago say it was a complete waste of time.
Also, have you seen what power companies are doing with rates? Peak electricity is up to $0.65 per kWh. Good luck breaking even if you install solar under these conditions. When I did my system rates were less than half what they are today.
I love solar, or I would not have made the investment. However, there’s the reality of solar and the fantasy or dream of solar. Most people don’t understand the realities of the technology and think of it as magical free power. That, it is not. Not even close. I can show you horrible looking power output graphs of what happens when a cloud flies by…which happens a lot. You can easily lose 50% of your output for an hour. And, like my neighbors, if you have a small system, you are getting screwed at $0.65 per kWh.
Most people are paying a lot more than they need to.
In particular, Home Depot or Lowes, or typical solar installers, will charge 4x wholesale for a panel. You can get a pallet-load of 400W panels for well under $200 each, now, so 45 for well under $9000, generating up to 18 kW, but rarely less than 5 kW on a winter day. Putting up brackets has become quite cheap.
The above does not count electrical work, and (optional) batteries.
Well... Wait, I have a small (5kWp) system, in a region where is reasonable to have it (French south Alps), it pay back at actual (high, artificially IMO, but far lower than non-nuclear neighbor countries) energy prices but with a new home (insulation and equipment) it pay back in around 11.5 years ad current rate. That's because hot water can be entirely made with it ONLY (not all days but most) since I can get hot water normally heating it only once a day or once in two days (big reservoir, heat-pump + classic resistence, Daikin EKHHP to be more precise, cited because it's not on sale anymore substituted with a very similar unit), I can irrigate my garden only on solar, aircon thanks to local climate (fresh at nigh, hot during the day) run almost only on solar etc. Yearly self-consumption is around 50%, this month is around 72%.
Surely it's not something universal:
- you need to live in an area where solar is interesting, there are many in the world, but normally people do not migrate for that;
- you need a new(-ish) home, well insulated, airtight, designed to consume the minimum possible with actual tech etc and that DO have a (far bigger) cost (than p.v. alone);
- to maximize self-consumption you need automation, so far NOT that nice&easy since most commercial appliance are hard to integrate and limited, and/or WFH to being able to concentrate energy usage when the Sun shine;
- perhaps you need an EV to recharge from the p.v. instead of the grid.
Long story short: if you can't satisfy the above requirement p.v. is not that convenient BUT if you can it is, not so exceptionally but still interesting and if coupled with a bit of lithium storage (very HARD to pay back in monetary terms) it might offer protection good enough against blackouts. A thing to be considered these days. The EV for me have the similar purpose NOT for environmental or monetary terms but to ensure the ability to move by car if there are gas shortages around. It's hard to evaluate such guarantee in monetary terms, but it's still a thing to be considered...
Your article states 68,300 figure is using average global energy supply at the time. As grid decarbonization happens that break even point can be reduced to as little as 30,000 according to the article(pure renewable scenario). It's not an overnight fix, but it's a clear improvement.
Not only that, but Volvo is procuring their batteries in China and the footprint for battery production is deeply impacted by the carbon intensity of the grid where it is produced. So using a Volvo is already close to a worst case for the battery production.
Any reduction in this can have a big effect. The EV here is 10.7tons more intensive to build, and the battery counts for 7 tons.
The idea is that if you can get all vehicles onto the electrical grid, then you can transition these vehicles almost instantly to use better and better sources of energy as technology evolves. This is because you can change the composition of the electrical grid (it can be powered by wind, water, solar, nuclear, etc). It makes the energy source fungible as the grid becomes the delivery mechanism.
Once vehicles are hooked up to this electrical infrastructure, we gain a lot of leverage as a society to move collectively in a better direction.
With ICE, there is only 1 viable fuel source - gasoline. Once an ICE car is built, you cannot transition it to be powered by anything else.
Squabbling about carbon break-even points of individual car purchases is missing the forest for the trees IMO.
Not much convinced: we have different kind of nearly-identical ICEs vehicles burning a certain range of chemicals like: petrol, diesel, alcohol, gazogene, synfuel of various kind (from ammonia derivates to modern biodisel) to liquefied petroleum gases and methane.
For EVs we have just variation of lithium battery tech on board and few classic ways to produce electricity to recharge them. It's not different. The different part is in performance terms and in scalability terms.
Oh, BTW we always talk about personal vehicles and homes, nothing about industry, transports etc... What the vision for them? New sailing tall vessels like [2] are no less dreams with little practical usage, H₂ propelled airplanes etc are on the same level. That part is CONSTANTLY omitted in Green discussions like the new geothermal heat pump can born in the house backyard. Sure additive manufacturing is a promising revolution but so far is not much more than a promise. Sure the dream of fusion reactors, perhaps small enough to be embedded in homes, cars etc would be a game-changer but so far what's on the table?
That's a big distortion of the article. You left out the first line of the paragraph "When using the average global energy supply...". That is calculating the CO2 from coal and gas plants to generate the electricity.
The very next paragraph says that when recharging on renewables, "the breakeven is just over 30,000 miles (48,280 km)". That's under three years for most people. We are not there yet, but great progress is being made.
As a resident of any modern city, the reduction in _tailpipe_ emissions alone would make it worth it in terms of a cleaner local environment, even if there were no reduction in absolute emissions which - as many commenters have pointed out - depends in large part on your generation mix.
Okay, but clearly ICE vehicles do those things too. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to eschew electrification of vehicle drivetrains just because you can’t yet solve tire wear pollution.
I’m very much in the “let’s design our cities for people and bicycles” camp, but if people have to drive, I’d certainly prefer not to have my kids breathing the by-products of combusting hydrocarbons all day every day.
Your kids will be breathing in non-exhaust emissions all day every day:
> "Non-exhaust emissions (NEE) are particles released into the air from brake wear, tyre wear, road surface wear and resuspension of road dust during on-road vehicle usage. No legislation is in place to limit or reduce NEE, but they cause a great deal of concern for air quality.
> "NEEs are currently believed to constitute the majority of primary particulate matter from road transport, 60 percent of PM2.5 and 73 percent of PM10 – and in its 2019 report ‘Non-Exhaust Emissions from Road Traffic’ by the UK Government’s Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG), it recommended that NEE are immediately recognised as a source of ambient concentrations of airborne particulate matter, even for vehicles with zero exhaust emissions of particles – such as EVs."
As ever, there are no easy answers. Everything costs.
The more renewable generation capacity gets built, the smaller the CO2 footprint of things made in factories served by it. At some point, almost everything will have no carbon footprint.
So, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint, invest in building out renewables. Everything downstream of it will automatically contribute less to the terrifyingly fast approaching climate catastrophe.
It seems just barely possible that the catastrophe can be averted before global civilization collapses. Humans would survive that, but not solar panel, chip, or car factories.
Global civilization is intimately interconnected. Any serious upset would wipe out the industries most dependent upon it. The first to go would be everything high-tech -- chips, aircraft, cars. New car manufacturies like in the 20th century might be got up from the scraps. But mass starvation would ensue, leading to huge wars that probably would quickly turn nuclear.
The most likely proximate causes of collapse would be ocean ecosystem collapse caused by acidification, eliminating the current protein source billions of people depend on, or mass migration from newly uninhabitable areas. We see hints of both already.
Presumably the calculation would be similar for Teslas. In which case my 2015 Model S reached break-even three years ago. It has done 108 thousand miles and the battery seems to have as much capacity as when it was new.
What discussion does there need to be? Your own example demonstrates that the EV version is better than the ICE version as far as total CO2 emissions are concerned. Or are you implying that the average life span of modern cars is less than 68k miles?
> Your own example demonstrates that the EV version is better than the ICE version
Better doesn't make it worth it.
There are all sorts of tradeoffs involved . Governments are asking their citizens a lot in terms of sacrifice. If it doesn't move the needle significantly it means tons of quality of life lost given the scale of this experiment.
Exactly like COVID lockdowns. Were they worth it? It's still contentious. Given the scale of the costs of lockdowns "contentious" won't cut it. It should be more like "thank God we did it". The feeling should be at the equivalent of when the Cuban Missile Crisis ended. I don't know about you but I most certanely don't feel that.
I feel the contentious nature of lockdowns but endured the certain and ample consequences of all of that.
Civilization not collapsing would be a big benefit, but one hard to count. It would be worth a very great deal of present inconvenience and discomfort. That would only be perceptible much later.
But like "Y2K", all the work that went into averting catastrophe looks wasted afterward. With plenty of people available to insist no catastrophe looms, it is hard to get people to do anything. About the only lever we have access to, pre-catastrophe, is that renewables are vastly cheaper than everything else we are using to generate power. We can only pray it will prove enough.
So, things that make influential people more sensitive to electricity prices and less sensitive to gasoline prices help.
You'll find no official explanation because "the public" mostly act as Gustave Le Bon (psychology of the crowd) and Eduard Bernays (propaganda) have observed in the recent past.
Neoliberal economy have cyclic crisis solved with wars, big wars, whose target is stealing someone else richness and justify the mess with the ongoing war situation. We are at the beginning of such cycle.
EVs probably serve a purpose: if you buy it and you have followed the new deal so far, you'll suffer less: living in an insulated, airtight modern home, with perhaps p.v. and lithium storage, and EV etc you can surpass frequent electricity and gas supply disruptions, you have enough space to store water, food in freezer etc to cope with irregular wartime-alike supply deficit, you'll be less touched by stagflation etc if you are also wealthy enough at the right time you might be able to buy for very little price valuable assets than in a sooner future became far more valued on the market.
The "carbon footprint" is that. A way to justify social score, covid pass was the first general-public test, it have durability issues, people do not accept them longer, while they are trained to scan Qr codes for anything, like Chinese ones, so the next will be carbon score: if you have followed the new deal your score will be good, so you'll live well, others will not.
It's just a kind of common misunderstanding: Green New Deal for many means spring-grass-green new deal, for the Earth, actually it means dollar-green-new-deal and the climate target is the neoliberals chiefs climate, economical and social one. Global carbon footprint is the same: a tool to classify people by census and obeisance.
Because that would make people not feel as good about "doing their part". No one likes to think about where all that Lithium came from and the not so great humanitarian practices surrounding those mines.
Many people just like to think they are "being green" and "battling climate change" with a purchase of a Tesla or Rivian...when really it takes a LOT more than that.
There is little individuals can do, short of adopting better habits and investing in funds that finance renewable build-out. The amount they can invest is typically very limited. We are at the mercy of the people who influence investment of multi-billion-dollar funds, in industry and in government.
Supporting candidates who can direct subsidies to actually useful renewable build out could have outsized impact.
Each dollar diverted from building out renewables to almost anything else, nukes particularly included, brings climate catastrophe nearer.
The problem is we need to listen to people who understand how to make things actually happen. Politicians push electric cars without understanding the strain that will put on the grid as it currently sits. They push banning coal and NG power plans without making sure there are alternatives available (just wind and/or solar is not sufficient by themselves). All we hear is "we need electric cars to avoid climate change"...without addressing the huge amounts of other changes that are needed.
You can't just ramp up hydro though...and sure it's 75% hydro right now, but if you are adding another 20% to the grid to deal with electric car charging where is that coming from? Across the US there has been no hydro or nuclear investment for the past 30 years...wind and solar aren't currently being added quick enough to deal with the increased need (not to mention the push for converting all NG appliances and heating to electric).
Increased demand for power to charge cars will drive demand for build-out of clean generating capacity.
Decreased use of petrol-powered cars makes voters less sensitive to gas prices, thus desperately needed carbon taxes, and more interested in cheaper, thus renewable, electrical generation.
The current US president is lately hustling eliminating tax on gasoline, instead, in an almost certainly doomed bid to fend off loss of majority in the upcoming congressional election. A big gas tax with monthly cash payouts to people with average and below incomes (i.e. most voters) would go over better.
>Increased demand for power to charge cars will drive demand for build-out of clean generating capacity
This doesn't happen overnight and we already can forecast the need. Power generation projects (transmission on top of generation) has to be planned for many years in advance.
