But losing Hybrid and diminishing PHEV is dumb. Toyota Prius and Ford Maverick are very popular cars today, and calling those buyers anti-green and outlawing those vehicles over the next 10 years seems extreme to me.
This is definitely an overstep by the environmentalists IMO.
There’s nothing wrong IMO with making new standards. But outlawing even the Prius is… extreme. This won’t have traction in the long run.
Problem is that CO2 concentrations stay elevated basically forever once we dump it into the atmosphere.. This means that the temperature we hit is determined by the cumulative total emissions, not by the rate of emissions. So you can calculate how much we can afford to emit to have a 50% risk of crossing any given temperature threshold, such as 1.5°C or 2°C, between which we lose a lot of major ecosystems, and beyond which we end up outside the envelope where it’s clear that we can maintain civilization. This is a very limited emissions budget, so actually keeping temperatures under 2°C means cutting emissions roughly in half before 2030, and to zero by 2050. Since cars last on average about 20 years, deploying new fossil-fuel-burning-cars after 2030 is effectively a commitment to risk ending civilization.
Yes, it’s politically tough, but the alternative is to take on a really insane risk.
You’re throwing away the baby with the bathwater here. Hybrids, such as the Prius, reduce CO2 emissions by 30% to 50% compared to a normal vehicle by achieving 57mpg.
Switching all of our ICE vehicles to Prius (or other Atkinson Cycle hybrids, such as Ford Maverick) would instantly cut out 30% to 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And yet this is apparently not enough for yall. That’s insanity.
Secondly: Hummer EV (and other poorly designed EVs) will pollute more than some ICE cars (see ACEEE’s Greenest list of cars). 9000lb EVs use up so much electricity, that a typical ICE has fewer emissions (once we factor in the amount of coal / natural gas that turns into the electricity that’d power a Hummer EV).
Fortunately, these EPA rules are better written than the Advance Cars II standard (and really, that’s the one I’m pissed off about). But the extremist pro-EV groups have gone too far, to the point where EVs are more pollution causing than some other quite legitimate vehicles (ex: Prius).
As I said before: banning the Prius is a mistake. People will wake up to the madness as these kinds of regulations take effect, and we will miss out on our goals. At very minimum, the rules need to make sense and truly progress us as a people. Writing down bullshit because the extremist environmentalist faction is braindead is… well… counterproductive.
The alternative is go take a bet on the agricultural underpinnings of civilization being viable in a hotter world. That’s an utterly mad uncontrolled geoengineering experiment to try.
The alternative is to allow Prius, so that your political views don’t get laughed out of every discussion over the next decade and utterly ignored.
No one will seriously try to accomplish this goal if yall ban the Prius from the lineup of future cars for being “not environmentally friendly enough”.
You are literally banning the best car for our environment. Literally. There’s a lot of greenhouse-emissions and pollution from mining Lithium, Cobalt, and other rare-earth metals (magnets) needed to make an EV move ya know.
The ACEEE is a long-running pro-environmentalist groups that I’m citing as well. If that’s not “green enough” for you, you seriously won’t get any traction with this.
Filling your future economy with Hummer EVs will cook the earth faster my man.
9000lb EVs are worse for the environment than Prius. We need to have the correct regulations if you actually want to improve the world. All of that Hummer EV electricity is going to come from coal + natural gas, and with 3x the weight and like 4x the drag compared to a Prius, its going to literally burn more carbon and wreck the world faster.
If you can’t see that, then you’re an extremist EV fan who is beginning to literally hurt the environment with insane decisions.
Speak truth to power. And the truth is… some EVs are very, very, very bad for the environment. We need proper rules/regulations that truly improve our environment. Not just EV fanbois running the show.
I’m far from an EV fan. We’re better off with a lot fewer cars in addition to electrification of those which remain.
I’m just more of a fan of a civilization-supporting planet than burning fossil fuels. And that’s a physics-driven choice, not one constructed for ideological reasons
Hummer EV. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Hummer EV is worse for the environment than the typical ICE car, by huge margins.
If you don’t get this right, you’ll end up hurting USA (and the world) more than you think. That’s just physics. Sending 9000lb cars around with huge profiles with Coefficient-of-Drag in the 0.5+ range will eat up our energy and burn more coal/natural gas than any more reasonable car (even traditional ICE cars like Chevy TRAX).
That’s just physics. And organizations like ACEEE + Argonne National Labs are busy calculating / number crunching these statistics. Random assertions aside, pure EV is worse than many other possible regulations we could be doing. (In particular, encouraging the most efficient vehicles regardless of technology).
EVs in particular are going to be natural-gas powered for the near future. Fortunately Nat. Gas is 60% thermal efficiency rather than 30% (of typical ICE), but your margin for efficient vehicles is much smaller than you might expect. And there’s probably Coal-plants (~30%) that’d drag down the efficiency of our energy grid in practice anyway.
You have to look at this problem holistically. Randomly just white-knighting EVs all day every day is going to lead to more environmental problems.
There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds. Actually, pretty much literally every other non commercial EV is better. That said, even the Hummer EV is still about 50% better than its ICE equivalent.
There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds.
And all of them are less efficient than the 2024 Prius Prime for our environment. (See my ACEEE citation from above). Literally all of them.
You’re underestimating the efficiency of Prius, much like other EV fanbois. Prius is the most environmentally friendly vehicle today, even beyond small / efficient EVs like the Nissan Leaf or the GM Bolt.
The best vehicles for the environment is the Prius Prime PHEV, and #2 is Prius Hybrid. Other cars like Accord Hybrid, Camry Hybrid, and Corolla Hybrid are in the top 10.
EVs can win and seem to have significant advantages. But not enough to make the #1 slot. For EVs to win you need a relatively small battery pack (ex: 40kW-hr Leaf), and relatively lightweight. The Prius has a 800lb+ advantage over most EVs (most EVs, even small ones like Nissan Leaf, are 4000lb behemoths, far above the 3200lb Prius).
Yeah, EV Battery tech sucks today. Its still too heavy. Fortunately, 60% efficiency of large-scale Nat. Gas combination cycle plants magically gathers more energy than small ICE (like 40% Atkinson or 30% Otto Cycle engines), so EVs get some degree of advantage even when the grid remains highly Fossil Fuel based.
But you still have weight + mining + other dirty issues (rare-earth metals for significant magnets on those motors…) that add up to bad environmental effects.
Someone made a good point to me the other day on this though, the PHEV is the worst of both worlds because you lug around the wrought of the ICE engine, have to pay for a lifetime of maintenance with it and when electric, you have diminished range due to the weight of the ICE engine
PHEVs are lighter than every EV on the market of equivalent size.
Prius Prime is 3500lbs, while Nissan Leaf is 4000 and Model Y is like 4300.
EV batteries are the real waste when you actually measure how heavy the battery packs are. The engine + transmission system of ICE is far, far, far lighter.
you have diminished range due to the weight of the ICE engine
More like the 800lbs of extra batteries you carry (and rarely use) are a waste on the full size EV. Like, how often are you running your battery down and using all 1000lbs of Li-ion effectively?
Yes, an Ioniq 6 is over 1000lbs of battery. Most engines are just a hundred or so lbs. You seriously can’t make any kind of “weight” argument here, EVs are so heavy its not a reasonable comparison. Any weight argument immediately swings in favor of ICE, Hybrid, or PHEV.
The far lighter weight of the Prius (3200lbs) and Prius Prime (3500lbs) is one of the reasons why they have much better efficiency than their pure-EV competitors. And is likely a major influence on why they reached #1 on ACEEE’s greenest car of the market list.
have to pay for a lifetime of maintenance with it
$35 an oil change x 15 oil changes == $525 over ~10 years of a car’s usage. People are seriously overdramaticizing the costs of oil changes.
Tesla’s Model Y has a 100,000-mile maintenance cost estimate between $8,250 for base trims and $15,000 for the performance trim. This does not include repairs. By comparison, a Toyota Highlander in the Car Talk fleet had a 100,000-mile maintenance and repair cost of $14,029. A Honda Accord had a 100,000-mile maintenance and repair cost of $7,684. If there is a cost advantage to Tesla with regard to maintenance and repair, we cannot find it.
Meanwhile, a single Tesla 3 set of tires is like $1000, and because the weight of the vehicle, the tires wear out faster and spew microplastics everywhere.
And because Tesla vehicles have absurdly overpowered motors, people tend to wear out their tires faster.
You decided to zero in and fixate on weight alone? The conversation is weight along with range/efficiency, emissions and lifetime maintenance. Yes, some cars weigh less… which also means they have less electric range. You also think an American lobbying group is your shining example of integrity in their endorsement?
You focus in on tesla as your main example of EV maintenance - they are a known bad actor generally, in a walled garden that gouges cost for every single thing and lives near exclusively to cater to out-of-touch tech bro class and their families on corporate expense accounts.
“It’s impossible to cook at home! Wagyu streak costs $4000 a pound!!!”
You decided to zero in and fixate on weight alone? The conversation is weight along with range/efficiency, emissions and lifetime maintenance. Yes, some cars weigh less… which also means they have less electric range. You also think an American lobbying group is your shining example of integrity in their endorsement?
No. I use ACEEE’s numbers because they factor into:
Many factors determine the environmental impact of a car or light truck. Tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency are clearly important, but impacts also depend on the type of fuel used and the materials that go into manufacturing the vehicle. A scientific approach for estimating the environmental impacts of a product is known as lifecycle assessment, since it traces the impacts of a product from “cradle to grave”: materials production and product manufacturing; emissions and other effects when the product is in use; through end-of-life effects of disposal and recycling. We developed the green scores and class rankings according to the principles of lifecycle assessment, using available data that are sufficiently standardized to be applicable to all makes and models.
Four types of vehicle-specific data form the basis of the ACEEE’s ratings: tailpipe emissions, given by the emissions standard to which a vehicle is certified; fuel economy, based on EPA test cycles; vehicle mass (curb weight); and battery mass and composition (for hybrids and plug-in vehicles).
And #1 vehicle after their analysis is the Prius Prime and Prius respectively. Weight is one factor, but there’s other factors (such as Tesla’s use of NCA chemistry for their Li-ion) that drops Tesla down severely compared to cleaner chemistries from other companies. But even when we look at the best EVs on the market for environmentalism (such as Nissan Leaf or Ioniq 5 or whatever…), the Prius reigns supreme from above.
You focus in on tesla as your main example of EV maintenance - they are a known bad actor generally, in a walled garden that gouges cost for every single thing and lives near exclusively to cater to out-of-touch tech bro class and their families on corporate expense accounts.
Prius beats even well recognized brands and environmental cars like Nissan Leaf on ACEEE’s study.
There are also cheap economy-cars / hybrids, such as the Toyota Corolla Hybrid and Accord Hybrid (not in the top 10, but still a score of >60) that are popular and green choices despite using gasoline as their primary transportation, because tailpipe emissions aren’t the only environmental effect at play here. When Hybrid / ICE cars reach 50mpg (or high 40s, like the Accord Hybrid), tailpipe emissions start to matter less-and-less, and yes… weight of the car starts to matter more and more (particulates from tires wear becomes the #1 pollution factor on EVs). There’s also significant issues with how dirty the mining industries are to make EVs (Lithium, Nickle, Cobalt, etc. etc.) And a lack of recycling today. Meanwhile, Steel is 90%+ recycled in the auto-industry, making for some of the most environmentally friendly manufacturing in practice.
There’s a lot of little things that add up. EVs are not the silver-bullet that EV fans think they are, but I’m glad that EVs have brought efficiency to the forefront of the minds of people. But we need to think holistically: what is the best path forward that overall reduces pollution (including CO2) from our system?
The answer may surprise you, especially if you’re one of the people tricked into the EV-only mindset. There’s many other technologies that are competitive.
Those ACEEE numbers are predicated on placing an economic cost on pollution. If you assign a larger price to the pollution, even the PHEV’s fall right off the chart. The E in their name stands for “Economy”. They’re focus is framing clean as a function of the economy. In their model, you can kill a bunch more people and the price of pollution only goes up a little. They even say they’ve left that number constant since 1998. If you value pollution in a logarithmic scale that gets way worse as time goes on, it becomes obvious that the only acceptable vehicles are the ones that have negative pollution costs. Since we dont have vehicles that can remove pollution from the air, getting one that gets as close to zero is the best bet. Right now, EV’s get the closest to zero.
Say we proceed with the premise that the lobbying group you link is valid, you still share it there, black and white on your cited chart - 4 of the top 5 vehicles on their list, the vast majority, are EVs. You just have tunnel vision for the one outlier PHEV. I’m sure the Prius is fine AND I’d need to pay for maintenance on BOTH an ICE engine, related non-EV components and a full electric infrastructure for the life of that vehicle if I purchased it over an EV.
Electrical engineer degree but I’m doing software now.
I’m not against EVs. I’m against y’all bad-mouthing PHEVs and Hybrids when they still constitute the top of the green lists with our current level of technology.
I recognize that better batteries are coming next year and soon Silicon or Sodium batteries will be even better after that. But tomorrow is not today. People making decisions need to make decisions based on today’s level of technology.
If all the cars available today, the Prius Prime does the best job. And anyone who doesn’t have enough money for Prius or a Leaf or other EV can go buy a Honda Accord Hybrid or Corolla Hybrid and feel good that they still got a top15 vehicle on the green lists.
weight doesn’t really matter. Trains weigh a FUCKLOAD but are the most efficient means of travel simply because they don’t stop once they start rolling, and are shaped such that they’re not affected much by wind resistance.
Cars go fast enough that air resistance is a much greater contributing factor to their efficiency than weight is. In general cars are the problem regardless of their efficiency, because they’re always going to be the worst choice for moving anything: they’re useful because of their convenience.
So, since we can’t get rid of cars, the best choice is to make their impact on our carbon problem as lessened as possible, and the best way to do that is to stop burning things to make them move.
So, since we can’t get rid of cars, the best choice is to make their impact on our carbon problem as lessened as possible, and the best way to do that is to stop burning things to make them move.
No. The best way possible is to calculate the various effects of differentt fuel sources and make sure we choose the best one. ACEEE’s calculations suggest that burning things (ie: Toyota Prius) remains the #2 best vehicle, only beaten by Prius Prime PHEV (partially plug-in electric + burning things).
Lighter weight, lower-polluting PHEVs can beat EVs (!!!) once we add up all the pollution events.
Therein lies your hubris. You think EVs are the best, but the math suggests otherwise. EVs can be pretty good, as long as you get a small battery pack (like Nissan Leaf) that minimizes the effects of dirty Li-ion mining, and avoid the dirtiest chemistries like NCA (Tesla has a score of 55 on ACEEE’s green-list, meaning even a full ICE/Hybrid like 2024 Accord Hybrid’s 62 rating is better than a Tesla).
A PHEV still has a battery. We’re going to be doing that mining anyway. And we’re definitely going to be using every single battery we can make. So, what’s the point of burning fuels if you can do it all with batteries, which should continue to get better over time? It doesn’t matter if EV’s are slightly less efficient than a handful of PHEVS if they’re using clean energy to charge. Once the lithium and rare earth minerals are mined they’re recyclable, and their value over time will actually make it important to do so.
And, yet again, burning fuels has to stop. We need to stop putting sequestered carbon in the air. And no, switching the globe to “renewable carbon” via biomass isn’t going to work.
Proof is in the pudding. Prius Prime, after accounting for “lifetime” emissions (which include the incredibly dirty mining process behind mining 80kW-hr worth of batteries instead of 13.6kW-hr), is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than a large number of EVs. Even EVs with small battery packs like the 40kW-hr Nissan Leaf
The issue with say, larger Tesla-like vehicles is that their battery packs are too big, too heavy, too redundant, and cause too much pollution during manufacturing. A Prius Prime has ~70% electrification in practice / 30% ICE, and the 30% ICE part is at over 50mpg. Once all the math / weight / costs / environmental effects are added up, the 800+lbs of extra Li-ion batteries from Tesla (and even smaller say ~500lb battery packs from Nissan Leaf) will easily out-pollute the miniscule amount of gasoline the Prius prime uses.
We need to re-evaluate EVs as different battery packs come out. LFP is much less pollution, but its also much less kw-hr and thus heavier per energy.
Their formula for calculating greenness drastically underestimates the impact of carbon emissions. That’s the only reason there’s a PHEV at the top of the list.
I wanted a non ICE car but was priced out. Car companies are making it tough to buy electric. Ended up with a hybrid while I wait for more choice in the electric arena that are not stupid expensive.
Honda Accord Hybrid and Corolla Hybrids are so efficient they still are top 15 cars on the Greenest list of ACEEE.
Depending on the Hybrid you bought, you can still feel very good about reduced emissions and saving the planet (etc. Etc). Don’t let the extremist faction make you feel bad for missing out on the more expensive vehicles in the top10 or top5
I’m fine getting rid of classic ICE.
But losing Hybrid and diminishing PHEV is dumb. Toyota Prius and Ford Maverick are very popular cars today, and calling those buyers anti-green and outlawing those vehicles over the next 10 years seems extreme to me.
This is definitely an overstep by the environmentalists IMO.
There’s nothing wrong IMO with making new standards. But outlawing even the Prius is… extreme. This won’t have traction in the long run.
Problem is that CO2 concentrations stay elevated basically forever once we dump it into the atmosphere.. This means that the temperature we hit is determined by the cumulative total emissions, not by the rate of emissions. So you can calculate how much we can afford to emit to have a 50% risk of crossing any given temperature threshold, such as 1.5°C or 2°C, between which we lose a lot of major ecosystems, and beyond which we end up outside the envelope where it’s clear that we can maintain civilization. This is a very limited emissions budget, so actually keeping temperatures under 2°C means cutting emissions roughly in half before 2030, and to zero by 2050. Since cars last on average about 20 years, deploying new fossil-fuel-burning-cars after 2030 is effectively a commitment to risk ending civilization.
Yes, it’s politically tough, but the alternative is to take on a really insane risk.
You’re throwing away the baby with the bathwater here. Hybrids, such as the Prius, reduce CO2 emissions by 30% to 50% compared to a normal vehicle by achieving 57mpg.
Switching all of our ICE vehicles to Prius (or other Atkinson Cycle hybrids, such as Ford Maverick) would instantly cut out 30% to 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And yet this is apparently not enough for yall. That’s insanity.
Secondly: Hummer EV (and other poorly designed EVs) will pollute more than some ICE cars (see ACEEE’s Greenest list of cars). 9000lb EVs use up so much electricity, that a typical ICE has fewer emissions (once we factor in the amount of coal / natural gas that turns into the electricity that’d power a Hummer EV).
Fortunately, these EPA rules are better written than the Advance Cars II standard (and really, that’s the one I’m pissed off about). But the extremist pro-EV groups have gone too far, to the point where EVs are more pollution causing than some other quite legitimate vehicles (ex: Prius).
As I said before: banning the Prius is a mistake. People will wake up to the madness as these kinds of regulations take effect, and we will miss out on our goals. At very minimum, the rules need to make sense and truly progress us as a people. Writing down bullshit because the extremist environmentalist faction is braindead is… well… counterproductive.
The alternative is go take a bet on the agricultural underpinnings of civilization being viable in a hotter world. That’s an utterly mad uncontrolled geoengineering experiment to try.
The alternative is to allow Prius, so that your political views don’t get laughed out of every discussion over the next decade and utterly ignored.
No one will seriously try to accomplish this goal if yall ban the Prius from the lineup of future cars for being “not environmentally friendly enough”.
Note: Prius is #1 vehicle on ACEEE’s most green cars of 2024. https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
You are literally banning the best car for our environment. Literally. There’s a lot of greenhouse-emissions and pollution from mining Lithium, Cobalt, and other rare-earth metals (magnets) needed to make an EV move ya know.
The ACEEE is a long-running pro-environmentalist groups that I’m citing as well. If that’s not “green enough” for you, you seriously won’t get any traction with this.
The alternatives to 100% EVs is no cars or a real chance of killing a few billion people.
Physics makes the final call.
Filling your future economy with Hummer EVs will cook the earth faster my man.
9000lb EVs are worse for the environment than Prius. We need to have the correct regulations if you actually want to improve the world. All of that Hummer EV electricity is going to come from coal + natural gas, and with 3x the weight and like 4x the drag compared to a Prius, its going to literally burn more carbon and wreck the world faster.
If you can’t see that, then you’re an extremist EV fan who is beginning to literally hurt the environment with insane decisions.
Speak truth to power. And the truth is… some EVs are very, very, very bad for the environment. We need proper rules/regulations that truly improve our environment. Not just EV fanbois running the show.
I’m far from an EV fan. We’re better off with a lot fewer cars in addition to electrification of those which remain.
I’m just more of a fan of a civilization-supporting planet than burning fossil fuels. And that’s a physics-driven choice, not one constructed for ideological reasons
Hummer EV. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Hummer EV is worse for the environment than the typical ICE car, by huge margins.
If you don’t get this right, you’ll end up hurting USA (and the world) more than you think. That’s just physics. Sending 9000lb cars around with huge profiles with Coefficient-of-Drag in the 0.5+ range will eat up our energy and burn more coal/natural gas than any more reasonable car (even traditional ICE cars like Chevy TRAX).
That’s just physics. And organizations like ACEEE + Argonne National Labs are busy calculating / number crunching these statistics. Random assertions aside, pure EV is worse than many other possible regulations we could be doing. (In particular, encouraging the most efficient vehicles regardless of technology).
EVs in particular are going to be natural-gas powered for the near future. Fortunately Nat. Gas is 60% thermal efficiency rather than 30% (of typical ICE), but your margin for efficient vehicles is much smaller than you might expect. And there’s probably Coal-plants (~30%) that’d drag down the efficiency of our energy grid in practice anyway.
You have to look at this problem holistically. Randomly just white-knighting EVs all day every day is going to lead to more environmental problems.
There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds. Actually, pretty much literally every other non commercial EV is better. That said, even the Hummer EV is still about 50% better than its ICE equivalent.
And all of them are less efficient than the 2024 Prius Prime for our environment. (See my ACEEE citation from above). Literally all of them.
You’re underestimating the efficiency of Prius, much like other EV fanbois. Prius is the most environmentally friendly vehicle today, even beyond small / efficient EVs like the Nissan Leaf or the GM Bolt.
The best vehicles for the environment is the Prius Prime PHEV, and #2 is Prius Hybrid. Other cars like Accord Hybrid, Camry Hybrid, and Corolla Hybrid are in the top 10.
EVs can win and seem to have significant advantages. But not enough to make the #1 slot. For EVs to win you need a relatively small battery pack (ex: 40kW-hr Leaf), and relatively lightweight. The Prius has a 800lb+ advantage over most EVs (most EVs, even small ones like Nissan Leaf, are 4000lb behemoths, far above the 3200lb Prius).
Yeah, EV Battery tech sucks today. Its still too heavy. Fortunately, 60% efficiency of large-scale Nat. Gas combination cycle plants magically gathers more energy than small ICE (like 40% Atkinson or 30% Otto Cycle engines), so EVs get some degree of advantage even when the grid remains highly Fossil Fuel based.
But you still have weight + mining + other dirty issues (rare-earth metals for significant magnets on those motors…) that add up to bad environmental effects.
Someone made a good point to me the other day on this though, the PHEV is the worst of both worlds because you lug around the wrought of the ICE engine, have to pay for a lifetime of maintenance with it and when electric, you have diminished range due to the weight of the ICE engine
PHEVs are lighter than every EV on the market of equivalent size.
Prius Prime is 3500lbs, while Nissan Leaf is 4000 and Model Y is like 4300.
EV batteries are the real waste when you actually measure how heavy the battery packs are. The engine + transmission system of ICE is far, far, far lighter.
More like the 800lbs of extra batteries you carry (and rarely use) are a waste on the full size EV. Like, how often are you running your battery down and using all 1000lbs of Li-ion effectively?
Yes, an Ioniq 6 is over 1000lbs of battery. Most engines are just a hundred or so lbs. You seriously can’t make any kind of “weight” argument here, EVs are so heavy its not a reasonable comparison. Any weight argument immediately swings in favor of ICE, Hybrid, or PHEV.
The far lighter weight of the Prius (3200lbs) and Prius Prime (3500lbs) is one of the reasons why they have much better efficiency than their pure-EV competitors. And is likely a major influence on why they reached #1 on ACEEE’s greenest car of the market list.
$35 an oil change x 15 oil changes == $525 over ~10 years of a car’s usage. People are seriously overdramaticizing the costs of oil changes.
https://www.cartalk.com/extended-warranties/tesla-maintenance-cost
Meanwhile, a single Tesla 3 set of tires is like $1000, and because the weight of the vehicle, the tires wear out faster and spew microplastics everywhere.
And because Tesla vehicles have absurdly overpowered motors, people tend to wear out their tires faster.
Your response is just overflowing with odd takes…
You decided to zero in and fixate on weight alone? The conversation is weight along with range/efficiency, emissions and lifetime maintenance. Yes, some cars weigh less… which also means they have less electric range. You also think an American lobbying group is your shining example of integrity in their endorsement?
You focus in on tesla as your main example of EV maintenance - they are a known bad actor generally, in a walled garden that gouges cost for every single thing and lives near exclusively to cater to out-of-touch tech bro class and their families on corporate expense accounts.
“It’s impossible to cook at home! Wagyu streak costs $4000 a pound!!!”
No. I use ACEEE’s numbers because they factor into:
https://greenercars.org/greenercars-ratings/how-we-determine-ratings/
https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
And #1 vehicle after their analysis is the Prius Prime and Prius respectively. Weight is one factor, but there’s other factors (such as Tesla’s use of NCA chemistry for their Li-ion) that drops Tesla down severely compared to cleaner chemistries from other companies. But even when we look at the best EVs on the market for environmentalism (such as Nissan Leaf or Ioniq 5 or whatever…), the Prius reigns supreme from above.
Prius beats even well recognized brands and environmental cars like Nissan Leaf on ACEEE’s study.
There are also cheap economy-cars / hybrids, such as the Toyota Corolla Hybrid and Accord Hybrid (not in the top 10, but still a score of >60) that are popular and green choices despite using gasoline as their primary transportation, because tailpipe emissions aren’t the only environmental effect at play here. When Hybrid / ICE cars reach 50mpg (or high 40s, like the Accord Hybrid), tailpipe emissions start to matter less-and-less, and yes… weight of the car starts to matter more and more (particulates from tires wear becomes the #1 pollution factor on EVs). There’s also significant issues with how dirty the mining industries are to make EVs (Lithium, Nickle, Cobalt, etc. etc.) And a lack of recycling today. Meanwhile, Steel is 90%+ recycled in the auto-industry, making for some of the most environmentally friendly manufacturing in practice.
There’s a lot of little things that add up. EVs are not the silver-bullet that EV fans think they are, but I’m glad that EVs have brought efficiency to the forefront of the minds of people. But we need to think holistically: what is the best path forward that overall reduces pollution (including CO2) from our system?
The answer may surprise you, especially if you’re one of the people tricked into the EV-only mindset. There’s many other technologies that are competitive.
Those ACEEE numbers are predicated on placing an economic cost on pollution. If you assign a larger price to the pollution, even the PHEV’s fall right off the chart. The E in their name stands for “Economy”. They’re focus is framing clean as a function of the economy. In their model, you can kill a bunch more people and the price of pollution only goes up a little. They even say they’ve left that number constant since 1998. If you value pollution in a logarithmic scale that gets way worse as time goes on, it becomes obvious that the only acceptable vehicles are the ones that have negative pollution costs. Since we dont have vehicles that can remove pollution from the air, getting one that gets as close to zero is the best bet. Right now, EV’s get the closest to zero.
Say we proceed with the premise that the lobbying group you link is valid, you still share it there, black and white on your cited chart - 4 of the top 5 vehicles on their list, the vast majority, are EVs. You just have tunnel vision for the one outlier PHEV. I’m sure the Prius is fine AND I’d need to pay for maintenance on BOTH an ICE engine, related non-EV components and a full electric infrastructure for the life of that vehicle if I purchased it over an EV.
What’s your line of work if I may ask?
Electrical engineer degree but I’m doing software now.
I’m not against EVs. I’m against y’all bad-mouthing PHEVs and Hybrids when they still constitute the top of the green lists with our current level of technology.
I recognize that better batteries are coming next year and soon Silicon or Sodium batteries will be even better after that. But tomorrow is not today. People making decisions need to make decisions based on today’s level of technology.
If all the cars available today, the Prius Prime does the best job. And anyone who doesn’t have enough money for Prius or a Leaf or other EV can go buy a Honda Accord Hybrid or Corolla Hybrid and feel good that they still got a top15 vehicle on the green lists.
weight doesn’t really matter. Trains weigh a FUCKLOAD but are the most efficient means of travel simply because they don’t stop once they start rolling, and are shaped such that they’re not affected much by wind resistance.
Cars go fast enough that air resistance is a much greater contributing factor to their efficiency than weight is. In general cars are the problem regardless of their efficiency, because they’re always going to be the worst choice for moving anything: they’re useful because of their convenience.
So, since we can’t get rid of cars, the best choice is to make their impact on our carbon problem as lessened as possible, and the best way to do that is to stop burning things to make them move.
No. The best way possible is to calculate the various effects of differentt fuel sources and make sure we choose the best one. ACEEE’s calculations suggest that burning things (ie: Toyota Prius) remains the #2 best vehicle, only beaten by Prius Prime PHEV (partially plug-in electric + burning things).
Don’t hate me, hate actual math and physics. https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
Lighter weight, lower-polluting PHEVs can beat EVs (!!!) once we add up all the pollution events.
Therein lies your hubris. You think EVs are the best, but the math suggests otherwise. EVs can be pretty good, as long as you get a small battery pack (like Nissan Leaf) that minimizes the effects of dirty Li-ion mining, and avoid the dirtiest chemistries like NCA (Tesla has a score of 55 on ACEEE’s green-list, meaning even a full ICE/Hybrid like 2024 Accord Hybrid’s 62 rating is better than a Tesla).
A PHEV still has a battery. We’re going to be doing that mining anyway. And we’re definitely going to be using every single battery we can make. So, what’s the point of burning fuels if you can do it all with batteries, which should continue to get better over time? It doesn’t matter if EV’s are slightly less efficient than a handful of PHEVS if they’re using clean energy to charge. Once the lithium and rare earth minerals are mined they’re recyclable, and their value over time will actually make it important to do so.
And, yet again, burning fuels has to stop. We need to stop putting sequestered carbon in the air. And no, switching the globe to “renewable carbon” via biomass isn’t going to work.
Yes. And a 13.6kW-hr battery (like in the Prius Prime) has 1/6th of the rare-earth metals found in the Tesla 80kW-hr batteries.
Because current battery technology is so dirty that it wipes out the gains you made from avoiding fossil fuels.
When the Silicon-Batteries and/or Sodium Batteries appear two years from now, I’ll re-evaluate. But today, PHEV is cleaner.
https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
Proof is in the pudding. Prius Prime, after accounting for “lifetime” emissions (which include the incredibly dirty mining process behind mining 80kW-hr worth of batteries instead of 13.6kW-hr), is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than a large number of EVs. Even EVs with small battery packs like the 40kW-hr Nissan Leaf
The issue with say, larger Tesla-like vehicles is that their battery packs are too big, too heavy, too redundant, and cause too much pollution during manufacturing. A Prius Prime has ~70% electrification in practice / 30% ICE, and the 30% ICE part is at over 50mpg. Once all the math / weight / costs / environmental effects are added up, the 800+lbs of extra Li-ion batteries from Tesla (and even smaller say ~500lb battery packs from Nissan Leaf) will easily out-pollute the miniscule amount of gasoline the Prius prime uses.
We need to re-evaluate EVs as different battery packs come out. LFP is much less pollution, but its also much less kw-hr and thus heavier per energy.
Their formula for calculating greenness drastically underestimates the impact of carbon emissions. That’s the only reason there’s a PHEV at the top of the list.
With all due respect, I think I’ll take ACEEE’s word over yours with regards to the environmental costs of NOx, CO2, PM, and other pollutants.
I wanted a non ICE car but was priced out. Car companies are making it tough to buy electric. Ended up with a hybrid while I wait for more choice in the electric arena that are not stupid expensive.
Honda Accord Hybrid and Corolla Hybrids are so efficient they still are top 15 cars on the Greenest list of ACEEE.
Depending on the Hybrid you bought, you can still feel very good about reduced emissions and saving the planet (etc. Etc). Don’t let the extremist faction make you feel bad for missing out on the more expensive vehicles in the top10 or top5