EVs are worse for the environment (and other EV related myths)

re: Cheap electricity at night, very good point and yes, you're right, this is skipped over all the time.

True, I guess the point about electrolysis costs are that a lot of advocates point to it as a method to use renewable energy which would otherwise be lost

The main issue is that you can't count on that electricity always being cheap, and it's unlikely to cover the required amount of hydrogen to completely switch all vehicle transportation over

That's part of the reason why hydrogen has now been largely relegated to aviation and shipping, and even those sectors are showing promise using batteries

The other issue as you pointed out is that the best way to use excess renewables in the grid is to make electricity really cheap so people are encouraged to shift their usage to use the maximum amount of renewables.

Octopus energy in the UK are already doing this with their agile tariff which changes every 30 mins to follow the wholesale price of electricity.

Combined with some level of automation and you can shift a lot of your electricity consumption to those cheaper times when renewables are abundant

I totally disagree. How could you possibly save money if your initial capital outlay is double what it could be ? Why pay €40,000 or €50,000 on a brand new EV (or indeed an ICE) when you have a vast choice of low mileage used petrol & diesel cars for well under €18,000. €20,000 would buy a lot of pizza, beer and indeed petrol, diesel and car maintenance. Buying new is a mugs game, the instant deprication is the killer - any car dealer will tell you ''off the record'' Perhaps in 8 to 10 years time when EV's are more mainstream and a better selection of used ones become available then one could consider buying one.....but a low mileage used one !

At the moment EV's have nothing to offer but high initial cost, range anxiety, susceptibel battery life and replacement cost and are not really tried & tested over a long period - the whole thing is at embroynic/ 'baby steps' stage in comparsion to ICE......not to mention the charging infrastructure (or lack thereof)

How ignorant can one be indeed. I respectfully suggest that you deeply research the different components that make up a battery for an EV Consider the environmental damage & pollution caused by the extraction, refining etc. etc. not to mention the transportation of these different elements from the 'four corners' of the world + it's relative short life span. You may be surprised to learn that there's a lot more to the pollution caused by cars than what comes out the exhaust pipe. Why scrap a good ICE car and replace it with a shiny EV considering the amount of the earths finite resources it took to manufacture both.

I am suggesting that the pollution/damage to the environment caused by all cars, EV & ICE, is a little more complex than just what comes out the tailpipe. Take petrol/diesel for example the oil has to be extracted from the ground be that on dry land, undersea or fracked, then transported across our planet, then it has to be refined, then delivered to garage forecourt.

Raw materials of EV batteries consist of aluminium, copper, iron + rare and precious metals such as cobalt, nickle, manganese, graphite, lithium etc. Many of these rare and expensive metals are only found in selected areas of the world like China and South America.

Lithium for example uses copious amount of water when being mined which is currently causing huge problems for farmers and others in South America. Thousands of farmers, in Chile for example, have lost everything thru crop failure caused by soil & air contamination, lack of access to water for irrigation etc. and are daily abandoning their holdings and heading for the cities. The current annual demand for lithium for EV batteries alone is 240,000 tons and rising....and lithium is just the tip of a huge iceberg.

I suggest you give this video a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oVrIHcdxjA

It does a deep dive into the research and cites all of its sources in the video description.

Really? Where do you see that? Any data on it?

I doubt very much that that is happening on a large scale. ICE cars will naturally dwindle as the shift to EV's happen. We, unfortunately, cannot get away entirely from personal transport so its a case of picking the lesser of two evils here... ICE or EV.

@monseiur - "there are millions of used ICE cars worldwide with 5 to 15 years of life left in them being scrapped and replaced with EV's"

Even if that was true, there were millions of used ICE cars worldwide with 5 to 15 years of life left in them being scrapped and replaced with other ICE (in Ireland:diesels) in the last few decades. Much better that is will now be EVs, no?

The whole thing is rather complex, but to simplify it a little. Re. The millions of used cars worldwide destined for the scrap heap (thanks partly to the green agenda pushing EV's) It took a considerable amount of the earths finite resources to manufacture these vehicles, no doubt causing a certain amount of damage to the environment etc etc in the process. Why not encourage people to use, re use and recycle these cars to the very end of their 'life' instead of discarding them and going back to mother earth demanding more and more of these finite resources to manufacture shiny EV's causing more and more damage to an already fragile environment. An EV would have to last 25 to 30 years to justify this and the battery life is 8 to 10 years max. ...and the battery is a major pollutant.

I'm all for keeping existing cars on the road, as long as they don't cause people to die. Diesels should have been banned from populated areas long time ago.

People will continue to buy new cars for the foreseeable future. Hopefully the choice will be EV rather than ICE. Fossil fuels are use once only and they poison our villages, towns and cities. Cost and hassle is the reason many cars are scrapped. Once a car is 10 years old, the insurance premium goes up. Maintenance costs are higher. NCT fails are higher. Tax is higher and running efficiency is lower.

Your ignorance of EVs shines best with the battery life of 8-10 years max comment. Plenty of 12 year old Leafs still on the road with the worst battery chemistry. I sold a 10 year old Leaf a month ago to my fil. Still has 75% capacity. I have an 8 year old Leaf with about 80% battery (100km range). Would you consider these batteries to be end of life? Even when the range is too low for use in the cars, the batteries can have a second life as storage for solar or cheaper night rate and renewable wind energy. The usable life is far beyond 10 years and can then be recycled.

It's a great old marketing achievement all the same, ensuring that buyers of a product that requires huge emissions to produce, will eventually require substantial emissions to dispose of, produces tyre particle and brake pad emissions every time it moves, that they're saving the environment, and they don't have to let unpalatable alternatives like public transport or an eBike or a cargo bike enter their little heads.

Yes, agreed, cradle to grave, an EV is less bad for the environment than ICE, but it is rarely a cradle to grave comparison in real life. Often, the question is, should I get rid of this ICE now and buy a new EV, so the comparison would be 'cradle to grave' for the ICE vs later years of running cost and disposal for the ICE, which makes the question less clear.

We're not going to drive our way out of a climate crisis of course, so letting people kid themselves that they're being great climate advocates by buying a Tesla instead of switching to public transport or sustainable transport is a bit of a con.

Presumably Musk is keen to distract attention for such discussions.

Yes, indeed, I'm aware of that - which doesn't change anything about the importance of comparing the actual emissions impact of the actual decisions people make. Very often, the most environmentally friendly car is the one you already own, rather than incurring the manufacturing emissions of an additional vehicle.