posted on Mar, 1 2024 @ 04:42 PM
originally posted by: GENERAL EYES
a reply to: belkide
Environment friendly my big white butt.
Show the greenies the what it takes to produce their precious "environmentally friendly" vehicles and watch heads explose like a Lithium Battery.
It's true that it takes about 10 tons of carbon to produce an electric car and only about 6 tons to produce an equivalent ICE car.
However, as soon as an ICE car drives off the lot, it is using fossil fuel continuously. The electric car uses only electricity.
It's true that some of the electricity used to charge up the electric car comes from burning fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, etc.).
However, a battery electric car travels much farther on the amount of fossil fuel energy it gets from the grid than an ICE car would travel on the
same amount of fossil fuel--especially because battery electric cars use regenerative braking. And, of course, an increasing fraction of the grid
electricity these days is being produced by renewable sources.
So an ICE car is going to burn fossil fuel at a relatively constant rate per mile travelled for its entire lifetime. The average fleet MPG standard
for new light vehicles in the US today is about 40MPG. A modern battery electric car will consume fossil fuel at a rate of around 100 to 120 miles
per gallon of gas equivalent if all of the energy in the gas was converted to electricity with 100% efficiency. But of course, it's not. The average
fossil fuel power plant conversion efficiency in the US is about 40%. But today, about 40% of grid electricity comes from renewables, on the average,
and right now, those two factors cancel each other out, so the average iCE car today consumes about 3 times the amount of fossil fuel per mile
traveled as an equivalent battery electric car. As the fraction of the electric energy produced by renewables on the grid goes up and the fraction
produced by fossil fuels goes down, the relative advantage that electric cars have over ICE cars will only get better.
Right now, the 4 ton difference in fossil fuel required to manufacture an electric car relative to an ICE car is paid off in about 2 years. If it
lasts more than 2 years, its lifetime use of fossil fuels will always be less than an equivalent ICE car.