Burning gas is so extremely bad that even throwing away your old ICE car and buying a new electric car is better than driving the ICE car until it „falls apart“. This was the research finding in Switzerland, but this result was so unwelcome that the research got hidden away. https://www.republik.ch/2025/06/11/amtliche-selbstzensur
oh wow I didn't know that!
would make sense to give more a lot incentives for EV buying if so!
I wish they weren’t so expensive though.
IMO the biggest incentive of all is that the battery exists for the life of the vehicle and can be recycled at the end (the lithium inside does not disappear!), vs the gas which is literally burning money away.
They are getting a lot cheaper overall. The EV Bolt is less than $4k more than a Camry. In expensive places like California, or with gas as high as it is, you can quickly make back that additional cost and get ahead over time, especially if you are able to charge from home. And TBH the Bolt isn't that bad of a car, and get's great distance per charge.
That and there's only so much gas, once we burn it all up it'll take millions of years to replenish. Yea, you could say the same about battery materials, but those get reused for what a decade before they start to degrade? And the actual energy is free once we have the means to harvest it (wind, solar etc are all "free" infinite energy so long as we have the panels and turbines)
That and there’s only so much gas, once we burn it all up it’ll take millions of years to replenish.
Umm, AFAIK, we actually can't make more oil, so there isn't going to be any more gas, just work harder to find what's left. We absolutely should be moving to alternative energies to power civilization.
Socialize losses, privatize gains. I don't want my tax money incentivizing some rich asshole to buy an EV. Nobody that needs help buying a car can even consider an EV, their too expensive. The cheapest ev u can buy in USA is 30k, the cheapest ICE is 22k. And people that need help buying cars can't afford either. Only middle class + people are buying these things, and they don't need poor people's tax money to subsidize their purchase from a private corp. I'm all for evs but let's be honest the people buying them DONT need help buying them. Id rather see my tax money go toward renewable infrastructure or research on batteries and such! We can't keep relying on the private industry to fund research, in technology or in medicine or any science imo. But that's just my angry fist wagging opinion as somebody who refuses to spend more than 3k on a car because I'm not made of money. I'm not exactly poor, I'm a home owner under 30 and make around 60-70k a year depending on OT and bonuses. But if I went and got a loan on a Chevy bolt for 30k I would not be able to make my mortgage payments even with subsidies, so why should somebody who makes more get help buying a new car? Horseshit
There’s more reason to incentives than to “help people who can’t afford new”
EVs are inevitable, but we need to be encouraging a faster transition for environmental reasons. But the incentives were at least as much about trying to save legacy manufacturers as they were about encouraging consumers down that path.
Note that as soon as the US stopped incentives, legacy manufacturers withdrew from the EV market. Some were just reaching price parity, such as Chevy Equinox, but the few remaining choices will never have the volume to be profitable. Now they’re heavily protected, at the cost of less choice and much higher prices for all Americans, but that can’t last forever and they appear to be digging their own graves
Everytime you bring it up, you get a whole lot of people with gasoline powered cars getting very angry. Sure batteries are not 'perfect', but they are a whole lot better in almost every way compared to gasoline powered vehicles.
The anger is less about how bad EV's are and more about being expected to buy a hilariously expensive EV when someone has a perfectly functional car. Make them cheaper and people will buy them, because other than the environmental aspect EV's just require less maintenance overall, making them cheaper to run.
I’d rather spend $100k converting an old ICE car to electric than give the auto industry another dime. The surveillance crap is literally a life or death decision for me. I have a 20y/o ice car I’ll likely have to convert, so no one try your dumb “new car math” with me.
If any fuckers want to make what I’m doing illegal, people will die.
Yes THERE is the issue that everyone seems to forget about new cars. I have a project car that I'm thinking will become an EV when it needs an engine because it will be so much easier to deal with. And it won't call home to the feds every day.
Old muscle cars converted to EV I think are so cool. There was a show that converted an old K10 truck and hid the batteries in the bed tool box.
A 80s station wagon, a Country Squire, or 70s luxury cruiser like a Cadillac or Lincoln would be awesome.
EVs, or just newer cars in general, are just so boring and cramped. Not to mention all the connection and surveillance concerns.
Energy grid wouldn't survive quick mass EV adoption most likely. Heck, how would you even charge a car if you don't own a house - ideally parking places would have a slow charger where you could recharge car during night for cheap.
Litte remarks regarding EV and not having a point of charge at home.
I have an EV but don't own a house to charge it. Neither have a charging point on my appartement parking or my office (too complex/expensive to install). So I delayed buying an EV during few years. But I did the switch last year and don't regret it at all.
The solution?
I found a charging station with good price at 7km of my place.
When I come back from office and I'm starting to be below 30% battery remaining, I go there and charge up to 90% during ~30 min.
I read a book on my tablet while waiting in the car with the music and air conditioning (as it quite hot currently) while charging at approx ~~80/90~~ 45 kW/h... A nice break before going home to be honest ^^
I really handle the EV like a classic combustion engine car but with a small tank. Instead of having 800km of autonomy, i have 400~450km.
The key is to have a reliable and cheap charging station near your daily travel. Best being having it at home but it's definitely not mandatory.
I'm currently at an average of 4.02€ for 100km driven and my charging station doesn't require monthly fee. Just register an account, associate your car once and now it's plug and charge.
I share your view regarding the grid, you need to prepare it properly and good charging station is the first step.
Edit: Fixed the amount I usually charge: it's more around 45kW per charge.
It's cool that charging works for you that good. However, now imagine~~g~~ a rush of new EVs storming your charging point at the same time of the day. And also imagine people driving a lot more than you, charging each day for half an hour - that's quite some time spent as charging point. While I agree that having a charging point at home is not mandatory, it's much much friendlier, specially in case of mass EV adoption where chargers would lag behind demand.
While I agree that having a charging point at home is not mandatory, it's much much friendlier,
Even a normal outlet can handle slow charging an EV if you drive less than 100km a day.
Typical EV usage : 18kWh per 100km
Typical "granny" charger : 1800 watts (240v,7 amps)
10 hours at 1800 watts = 18kWh = 100km.
Get home at 6pm, plug in car, car is charged at 4am , leave for work at 7am. Enough spare time there to shift to charging outside peak evening usage at 9pm instead.
Not to be "um actually", but I owned a Nissan Leaf 1st gen over a decade ago, and the pain points you worry about weren't really pain points back then, and there was a loooooooooooot less EV infrastructure in place back then. Less reliable, too.
A couple of years ago I rented an EV with a friend who had zero experience with them. I explained everything, we had no evse at the hotel so needed to use public points, still was no issue at all. Each point we used was about 20% to capacity, they all had places to stretch, eat, etc at. No points were damaged or giving less than maximum output. It was extremely pleasant, and we used about $25 in fuel costs, vs $100+ for gasoline in a comparable vehicle.
I also didn't have an evse installed at home - I used the 110V, 'level 1' charger that plugs into an outlet for my Leaf. I drove a ton - 10k miles in 4 months, so 2.5x the national average. Even with heavy reliance on public points on a network that was in its infancy and prone to downtime, I still got by just fine.
And that was 12 years ago.
Idk they're making it work for data centers and those need way more energy
EV adoption can't happen in a second. If more EVs are sold, countries can just expand grids and charging networks with it.
We’re blessed that it can survive the datacenters though
The quick mass adoption is happening in Scandinavia now, and we're ok
Heck, how would you even charge a car if you don't own a house
How would you even fill a tank if you don't own a gas station?
Oh wow, another EV thread with a bunch of oil industry mouthpieces telling us how the studies are wrong and what we didn't think of. Thank you Mr. Shell, I almost forgot not everyone has a charging point at their house and it takes time to charge an EV.
Color me surprised.
It's fun to imagine an opposite world where everybody has EVs and other more efficient forms of transit, and then industry wants to introduce ICE vehicles to the market.
You fill it with flammable liquid poison and it shoots gaseous poison out the back while it's running, and nobody can refuel at home, and it's immensely more mechanically complex, but at least it's quick to fill with fuel at the fuel store! Just try not to inhale the poisonous explosive fumes or spill the poisonous volatile liquid on yourself while you do it.
Bro, didn't you know solar panels get hot when in the sun? Global warming!!
Clearly everyone should run a diesel generator in their living room just to be safe.
Dude, it's the opposite problem. Where do you think the sunlight goes when it hits a solar panel? It sucks it all up! If we set up too many solar panels, they're going to use up all the sunshine and cool the globe until we have another ice age. Big brother petroleum has been saving us!
Most issues require nuance, and the internet does not have the concept of nuance at all. I did my research and bought my EV, no regrets at all. Not only do I know it's better because I haven't consumed gas now in over 2 years, it's also simply the best and easiest car I've ever owned. It's a no brainer to get one. Anyone who says otherwise I think firmly needs to think about their connection with propaganda.
My EV is easily and by far the best and most fun to drive (and cheapest to run) car I've ever owned.
Absolutely my favourite vehicle to drive ever, easily more fun to drive than a lovely automatic petrol BMW I borrowed a couple of times.
I'm sure we'll eventually get to the point where they invent rapid charging batteries that can fully charge in 5 minutes. But realistically we don't need it, you just change the way you think about fuelling up.
"We decided to let the earth and all living things on it die, as it would be too hard on the economy if we tried to save it". /s
UMich research cited in the article estimates a carbon dioxide emissions per year (using constant mileage typical per year) break even time between EV and ICE SUVs to be 1.6-1.9 years.
Promising. But, is carbon dioxide emissions the only environmental impact? Humanitarian impact (e.g. rare metal extraction labor conditions)? I’m not an environmentalist researcher/academic. I wonder how accurately just one emissions prediction portrays the full picture.
It's not like oil extraction and processing doesn't have it's issues, and you have to do that for every trip.
Once your battery is made, the materials are there and can (probably, needs some work) be recycled forever.
As long as both use tires that contribute 45% of the world's microplastics, this is focusing on the wrong issue
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05002
So I say, let's not get distracted
For personal transportation do you have an alternative to tires? I mean shit even bicycles contribute to this. I know the answer is better public transport, but for PERSONAL transport it's pretty hard to avoid tires!
In a properly urbanized environment owning a car would be both unnecessary and inconvenient. We should strive to properly urbanize our living areas.
Bringing back true suburbs would be good, too. People living a half hour train journey from the city by high speed rail would mean small walkable islands could form in small towns the way they used to.
To the bike tire point, let's face it, if we replaced every car with a bicycle we would probably reduce the amount of microplastics by a massive amount because a bike tire could never contain the amount of plastic a car tire does, cars have four and weigh a lot more. It's incomparable, but you compared it so I had to point that out.
The contribution from bicycle tires is peanuts by comparison. The weight of the vehicle is a fraction, the forces starting and braking are a fraction. It's not zero, but compared to that from a 2000kg EV: that from a +-28kg EV bicycle or <15kg non-electric bicycle is pretty dang close to zero, especially when adding to the equation a regular speed of 50-120kmh <> 10-25kmh...
I don't see what this has to do with climate change. It's bad yes, but irrelevant for this debate.
If you want to be better than that, look for cars with LFP battery. They tend to be used in the less expensive cars and in lower capacity configurations. Their carbon footprint is roughly half of the regular NMC batteries and the only mined metal they need is iron and no zink, mangan or cobalt are needed in their chemistry.
That and try to use renewable energy, eg with home owned photovoltaic. If you do all of that, the break even is way before even 2 years and life cycle CO2 footprint is only a fraction of an ICE vehicle.
Burning petroleum is one of the most destructive things you can do and it is absolutely common to do it. Everyday a single vehicles emits enough pollution to kill countless people. It gives them cancer and when combined with lead has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths. It is absolutely insane people continue supporting this technology.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
