How effective are electric cars and the industry producing them at reducing carbon?

19 comments

1. To what do you compare them? Those old diesels or those new benzines or hybrids

   Anyway, those evs are just perfect for our electricity shortage … and many cities don’t have the capabilities to even place one single supercharger

2. LOL, electic cars are financing a lot of oligarchs private jets. Take from that what you will.

   Electric cars arent doing anything but moving money around.

3. Somewhat; but mostly just per the current infrastructure. They charge thru the grid and the grid is mostly nat’l gas and other hydrocarbons atm

   But grid supply is already more efficient than the collective of individual gas engines. And as we continue move towards green energy they will only get better

4. EDIT: Revoking my misinformed statement. Others brought citations that weren’t “something I heard at some point,” and I’ve changed my mind!

   Go Internet.

5. some EVs are pretty cool but it’s all green-washing. Hybrid cars are the real deal and Toyota knew it 25 years ago with the Prius.

6. Well, considering the materials in the batteries are strip mined, and at best last 10 years before having to be replaced, at a cost of over half the car’s purchase price, and no one has figured out how to recycle them yet so the old batteries are just being stored, and they are charged from an already failing electric grid that can’t support them, an the supposed range is with only a driver not a family in them, an they can turn a 9 hour trip in a regular car into a 14 hour trip w/ all the stops to charge them…….

   They doing great!! LoL

7. It takes several years for them to offset their cost in terms of production for carbon output. I think I’ve heard about 3-5.

   There is a lot of pollution that goes into making these vehicles, like the mining and refinement of the rare earths

   Ultimately I don’t think we are ever going to fully get off oil. As a chemist we use a lot of the by products in everyday life. Right now I’m using hexane which comes from oil

8. It still takes burning fossil fuels to power an electric car, but large sources are more efficient and easily filtered than small sources. PLUS it can significantly reduce smog in urban areas.

9. The effects of EVs will grow as we shift to non-fossil fuel means of generating electricity. Until then, we are still using fossil fuels to generate the electricity to fabricate and charge the EVs.

   Better still would be to change land development patterns to make living and working more compact so that we can shift from automobiles to public transportation.

10. A Google search will bring up better hard data than we can provide

11. Why do you think *askmen* is the place to get a good answer to this question? You’ll get tons of uninformed opinions (mine included) but I’d suspect you’d want one of the science subreddits if you actually want an informed answer.

12. Not at all. But the tech is still pretty cool.

13. Curious why you think this is the appropriate forum for that question.

14. Tesla are very good as they have solar panels on alot of their factorys.

15. I dunno, the batteries are pretty nasty.

    But obviously we need to get off fossil fuels so the EV market is definitely an emerging technology that should be invested in and refined.

    My current car has a lot of life left but by the time it needs to be replaced I’ll go EV and hopefully the tech improves/stabilizes by then.

    Nice thing is that tech tends to evolve very quickly so I think this whole EV thing will be sorted out pretty well in relative short time. I am rooting for it!

16. Electric cars: broke

    Overhead line electrified trolley bus, tram and heavy rail systems and other transit: woke

17. Compared to gas cars, electric cars [roughly halve their lifecycle carbon emissions](https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf) compared to gas cars. And that’s after accounting for resource extraction, material processing, vehicle assembly, materials shipping, operations, and everything else that goes into a vehicle’s life.

18. Horrible. Their batteries alone have so many types of metals that are being sourced from third world countries, but in order to source them they destroy the land and environment in the process. If they wanna reduce carbon they need to go after private jet owners which emits the same amount of carbon in one trip that a house hold produces in two years.

19. It depends but generally an EV will have a smaller lifetime footprint then a comparable gas powered car regardless of the source of electricity used to charge it. How much depends on many factors. With a gas car the operation of it is the vast majority of the carbon released over it’s lifetime. It will of course vary but a gas can can easily be 10% for manufacturing and 90% for operation or even more. A BEV is harder to pin down because of the source of electricity. So the operational footprint of a BEV can either be tiny if you charge it from something like wind, nuclear, solar, hydro etc or it can be much larger if you charge them from coal. And an EV will have a larger manufacturing footprint then a gas car because of the battery. But again this can vary heavily depending on where the battery is built. A battery built in Chine will have a larger footprint then where the energy is cleaner.

    So what all this means is how much it is better depends on where you live, the amount you drive, the current gas car you have, and how the electricity you use is generated. So where I live (Ontario, Canada) a BEV has a lifetime footprint that is 80-85% lower then a comparable gas car because our grid has low carbon emissions. So my BEV here will emit less carbon in operation a year then I breath out. But If you charged that car in the USA where the grid is dirty then the savings will be less. It depends on wher but that might end up being 30-40% less.

    There is a benefit here immediately and long term. Immediately we will see less carbon emissions from BEVs even where the grids aren’t that clean. But long term as grid decarbonize having EVs already in use means those cars get cleaner as the grid does. An ICE car bought today will emit the same for it’s entire life that could be 20 years or more. Or a person with an EV and a home could choose to put up solar and make their own cleaner electricity which again is benefit to all.

    There are many lifecycle studies that say this but here is one for Europe that includes a calculator where you can change the location of things, cars, etc to see how those changes increase or decrease carbon emission from that manufacturing and operation of these cars.

    https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/how-clean-are-electric-cars/