Stay with me for a moment on this one.
I’m not convinced in the slightest that cars should have any place in climate solutions.
Not even electric ones.
Constructing and disposing of an electric car and its battery currently creates more CO2 emissions than constructing and disposing of a petrol/gas/diesel car. As for running it, the electric car wins unless the electricity it’s burning comes mostly from coal. (Also, electric means no nitrogen oxide and small particle emissions, it’s not just about the CO2.)
On average, in the EU, the CO2 emissions look like this:
In the best-case scenario—100% renewable electricity—the electric car will have around 1/3 the lifetime emissions of a petrol/gas/diesel car.
In today’s electricity mix, it’s closer to 3/4 the lifetime emissions, which is not life-changingly better.
And in Poland, they’re building electric car batteries using electricity generated 80% by coal. Which makes sense for jobs but not for the environment. Where have I heard this before…
I digress Australia, I digress.
But…
And there’s a bigger “but” than I expected.
Here’s the footnote of the graphic above I removed to turn this post into a B-grade thriller:
So these estimates suppose that after 220 000 km, you throw away the petrol/gas/diesel or electric car, and start again.
You build another one and set it free.
Every 220 000 km, you get the same bar plot.
But what if it turned out that well-built electric cars just keep going and going and going?
Cue this quite surprising article on Tesloop, a shuttle service in California with 7 Teslas:
“Few have driven a Tesla to the point at which the vehicle really starts to show its age. But Tesloop, a shuttle service in Southern California composed of Teslas, was ticking the odometers of its cars well past 300,000 miles with no signs of slowing”.
Some of their cars are now nearing 800 000 km.
I’m not saying: This Changes Everything, but it definitely changes Something.
When you have to replace a petrol/gas/diesel car, you have to build a new one. If you don’t have to replace the electric car, you don’t!
Imagine if we draw the same bar plot above but cumulatively after 220 000 km, 440 000 km, 660 000 km, and 880 000 km.
For 880 000 km, you will have to add four blue segments to the petrol/gas/diesel bar, because you have to build four cars.
But only one blue bar for the electric car, if it’s still going strong after 880 000 km.
The point is: if you only have to build one electric car in the place of four petrol/gas/diesel ones for the same number of kilometers travelled, over time electric cars becomes massively “less bad” relative to petrol/gas/diesel ones for the environment.
This was a surprise to me, but maybe not to everyone:
“When we first started our company, we predicted the drive train would practically last forever,” Tesloop founder Haydn Sonnad told Quartz. “That’s proven to be relatively true.” He notes that every car except one, a vehicle taken out of service after a collision with a drunk driver, is still running. “The cars have never died of old age,” he added.
Of course, various caveats as usual. Basic wear and tear (tyres, small problems) will be higher for an electric car that ends up driving so many more kilometers, meaning more CO2 emissions for repairs. Not all electric cars are built as well as Teslas. And then there is the question of the battery. Batteries still don’t last forever:
“One Tesloop Model X has seen its original battery’s range fall from 260 miles (23%) to 200 miles after covering 330,000 miles (for comparison, pooled data from Tesla owners shows batteries losing about 10% of their charge after 155,000 miles)”.
Once a battery becomes useless, you have to replace it, with all the CO2 emissions that come with that. Still, a small drop in range from 260 to 200 miles after covering 330 000 miles remains a rather spectacular achievement for a battery.
Overall though, batteries, the rare earth metals that go in to them, and the CO2 emissions from constructing them, definitely still seem to be a major weak point in the whole “Electric cars are awesome” narrative.
However, it’s hard not to marvel at the technological convergence we are witnessing: cars that don’t wear out, drive themselves, and run on energy from increasingly renewable sources.