So I did the calculations, and in USA, you release slightly less carbon emmisions riding a EV than you would a combustion car.
An internal combustion engine has around 25% to 30% efficiency. An average coal power plant has 33% efficiency. But then you have to account for the energy losses in transit, both on the wires and when ramping the voltage up and down (94% efficiency), battery charging efficiency(75%), and motor efficiency in the car itself (75%).
So in the end, the total efficiency when using an electric car is around 17.4%. That is to say, to ride a kilometer in an electric car, you cause 1.44 to 1.72 times more emmisions than if you used a gasoline powered car.
This would change if most or all power plants were based on renewable sources or nuclear power. In Norway, this is already the case, them being mostly powered by hydroelectric power plants.
In USA, 61% is still from fossil fuels. So the ratio is 0.88 to 1.05
EU is worse off, with 71% being from fossil fuels. The ratio there is 1.02 to 1.22
So in USA, it is preferable to use electric vehicles. In EU, it is still better to use gasoline cars. In Norway, it is much better to use EVs.
You're unintentionally making a best-case scenario for gasoline cars here, because you're using coal as the base for fossil plants. Most fossil plants don't use coal - only 21 percent of the US grid and
11% of the EU one use that fuel. The remainder is natural gas (34.8% and 34%) and oil burners (.5% and 31%). As McTraveller says, natural gas is way more efficient than coal, and even oil is a fair bit cleaner. This is before you factor in the nature of the exhaust - the shit coal spits out is way nastier than the byproducts of oil and NG even if efficinceis were equal- and quality of fuel - Earth is running out of the hard and relatively clean anthracite coal, with softer and dirtier coal starting to take a bigger fraction. This puts the formula way more in favor of EVs even in the high-fossil EU.
Manufacturing is, as you say, hard to get clean information on. But even the biased information you find is pretty instructive - every "EVs are bad for the environment" claim does exhaustive tracing of the materials for both, concluding that the battery (which uses materials that are often not processed in particularly green ways - this could be heavily improved, and probably will be) makes the environmental cost skyrocket. Fuel, on the other hand, is basically ignored except for point-of-use burning. Or, in other words, the massive ecological cost of extracting, refining, and distributing gasoline are ignored.
Cars are used for around 10 years (I reckon a bit less now, as they seem harder to repair and maintain) so the calculations need to be made across that timespan, which should clearly favor EVs.
You reckon wrongly. Cars are harder to repair for backyard mechanics nowadays, but garages have no trouble doing so, and the same design factors that lead to that difficulty have also lead to much better longevity. Even before Cash For Clunkers (which destroyed a huge portion of the older cars in circulation and thus massively skews the landscape in the US) cars were very clearly lasting much longer the newer they were made. Most of the "oh, they really built those old cars to last" thing is survivorship bias - all the ones you notice today are the ones that happened to survive.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14909147 times)