this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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The best car for the environment is the one you have.
That's the thing though, no it isn't.
If you continue driving a gas car it continues to generate emissions, if you switch to an electric car it offsets it's emissions (compared to switching to another gas car or keeping the same gas car) after max 80k km and after that it's a better car for the environment than whatever gas car you would have been driving instead and that you keep driving and that keeps increasing its carbon footprint.
You're taking a useful piece of equipment, a perfectly running car, and doing what with it? Scrapping it? Reselling it? Just letting it sit? None of those make sense from a "save the planet" perspective.
You can scrap the internal combustion car. Sure, it won't make any more emissions itself, but it does cause demand for another EV to be manufactured RIGHT NOW, which has opportunity cost - manufacturing is expensive, monetarily and environmentally. Would this eventually even out, yeah, probably but it'd cause a lot of stress in the short term.
Reselling it is probably the MOST environmentally friendly option, but that car is still making emissions. If the buyer of your internal combustion car already had a car, it's the same problem as scrapping it, kicked down 1 more chain link. the emissions necessarily increase. If they didn't already have a car, well now there's the same combustion engine car on the road, and we made a new EV to fit demand.
Letting the car sit is a bit of a sunk cost fallacy, I admit. The manufacturing cost of the car has already been paid, and it has useful life left in it. This is where we have to actually make a cost-benefit decision. If the car is older, yeah probably don't drive it anymore. If it's less than 20 years old, it probably has enough life left in it to offset the benefits of producing a new EV right now. This just feels like scrapping it, with even more junkyard requirements.
Obviously this isn't all on the individual level, one person doing any of these things isn't causing any shift in demand, but if everyone suddenly started having that mentality, I don't think it'd end well at all. Use what you have, don't buy until you have to or comfortably can. Reuse is as important as reduce and recycle.
It makes sense to resell it only if it replaces another car that pollutes more than it does, otherwise your logic only works if you ignore the fact that the gas car has a carbon footprint they keeps increasing when the electric car doesn't (or it increases slowly enough depending on what's used to generate electricity that it still eventually becomes carbon negative compared to continuing to use the gas car).
There's a sunk cost already spent for an ICE car that's already been produced. There's an opportunity cost to swapping to an EV immediately. My point is simply that the situations are complicated enough that the only reasonable "one size" approach for a heuristic to balance those costs is one along the lines of "replace your ICE car when it's reached the end of its useful life, and replace it with an EV".
No, this probably won't be the best overall. That requires individualization. Someone still clinging to a 40 year old gas guzzling truck would be better off scrapping it. Someone who bought a sedan in, like, 2017, it still has a few years of well performing life in it would do best to keep it til it dies and then replace with an EV.
Hence what I'm saying.
From a purely environmental perspective the person who bought a car in 2017 that has the financial means to get a new EV car would be better off getting one, selling their 2017 to someone who drives a 2005 that would sell to someone that drives a 2000 that would send their car to the scrap yard or keep the chain going. Your analysis implies that the 2017 car gets replaced and doesn't get sold to someone else, either the owner keeps it and doesn't drive it or it gets sent to a scrap yard, which isn't what happens in reality.
The point is, it's better to intentionally introduce a new car on the road that emits zero pollution (or close to) and that allows us to get rid of an old car that emits tons of CO2 every year even if it's still drivable than to just wait for the old car to die to get the process going from the bottom up.
I could make a complete mathematical breakdown to show it but I've basically already done it in another comment just with two cars instead of a long chain of cars.
Funny you should mention sunk cost because it's a sunk cost fallacy to say we shouldn't get these cars off the road just because they've been produced already (as long as the total number of cars stays the same in either scenarios, just to be clear).
I specifically mentioned sunk cost because it can be fallacious. I was aiming to get ahead of that. Not every sunk cost is fallacious, and that's why I went into depth about sunk costs vs opportunity costs.
And again, on an INDIVIDUAL level I agree with you. Individuals don't have that kind of impact on demand as something like a ban of ICE engines, or broad adoption of them to the point of masses of people looking to buy at the same time does.
Individually, buy one as soon as it makes financial sense for you, ideally when you'd be buying a car anyway.
Systemically, buy one when your car dies, keep your running machine for as long as possible.
Specifically the opportunity costs I'm referring to are manufacturing related. Right now, producing EVs is more costly than producing ICE cars, in terms of carbon footprint. If too many people adopt too quickly, it results in more being produced while the manufacturing process is still shitty.
There's a problem with the "pass down the cars" thing too. At the end of that chain is still a car being decommissioned. If it's still usable, that's a higher net carbon footprint. A new EV still had to be produced for that chain of used car sales to go through.
You'll really have me show you with maths that it doesn't work the way you think, will you?
Go for it, or link me to where you did before. All I'm seeing is the math working in certain individual cases, not broadly at least not yet, and at best moving the emissions 2 or 3 steps down a chain of emissions.
There will be a time when, broadly speaking, it's best to just nuke your car and get an EV. That time is not there yet. It's probably when the manufacturing emissions are roughly equal to those of ICE cars, and/or when there's more renewable energy than coal. Please, though, show me math.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/sustainability/358628/car-pollution-production-disposal-what-impact-do-our-cars-have-planet
5.6 tons of CO2 to produce a gas car, 8.8 tons of CO2 to produce an electric car.
We'll use 10k km/year as a baseline (with is way less than average)
Three Toyota Corolla, 2010, 2015, 2020
They release 1.8, 1.7, 1.6 tons of CO2 a year respectively driving 10k km (fueleconomy.gov)
The EV is a 2024 Toyota bZ4X (what a stupid name) and it releases zero CO2 a year to drive 10k km
So we're in 2024, the emissions from the gas cars so far are:
2010 > 5.6 + (1.8 x 14) = 30.8 tons
2015 > 5.6 + (1.7 x 9) = 20.9 tons
2020 > 5.6 + (1.6 x 4) = 12 tons
Total: 63.7 tons
So we can already see that the 2020 has released enough CO2 in 4 years to beat an EV.
Let's say we add another 5 years to each cars... We're now at 39.8, 29.4, 20 tons respectively for a total of 89.2 tons
Now, what's the impact in 5 years if we take the 2010 off the road and introduce a 2024 EV instead? Scraping the 2010 releases CO2, it's evaluated at half the production so 2.8 tons. So our new numbers are:
33.6, 29.4, 20 and 8.8 for the EV for a total of 91.8
After five years with the 2010 off the road we're at 91.8 - 89.2 = 2.6 tons extra so two years from being carbon negative compared to never changing the 2010 for an EV.
Two more years of gas car: 89.2 + (2 x 1.8) + (2 x 1.7) + (2 x 1.6) = 99.4 tons
What's the portrait in two more years if we had scraped the 2010 in 2029 instead?
89.2 + (2x1.7) + (2x1.6) + 8.8 = 104.6 tons
By switching in 2024?
91.8 + (2x1.7) + (2x1.6) = 98.4 tons
By scraping the 2010 in 2024 we saved 6.2 tons of CO2 in 2031(equivalent to 3.4 years of driving the 2010) compared to doing it in 2029.
If we didn't scrap it at all and didn't introduce an EV to replace it, we would be at + 1 ton in 2031 and it would keep increasing the longer we keep the 2010 on the road.
Keep in mind that that's with less than half the annual average mileage in the USA (14k miles/22.4k km) AND it doesn't take maintenance into consideration and gas cars need more of it and it pollutes more (lots of oil) so the real difference is even greater!
Cool, some numbers. First off, looking over your math, it looks correct, so that's good. The article seems to be a bit confusing, however, or you're taking a best case scenario they don't approach in the article. It states that an EV takes 8.8 tons of co2 to produce. It later states, however, "However, a BEV (battery electric vehicle) produces less harmful emissions over its entire life. The study found that a medium-sized petrol or diesel car produces around 24 tonnes of CO2 versus a BEV’s 18 tonnes" this seems to imply to me that we shouldn't keep emissions at 0 throughout the EV's lifetime? I would assume this additional tonnage is from less-clean electrical generation methods and overall maintenance requirements.
If this is the case, it paints a bit different of a picture, more in line with what I said - that you should buy one if you're going to buy a car anyway, and drive yours. What the numbers provided does give us now, though, is a point at which the sunk cost DOES become too large, and that seems to be a car in the age range of 10-15 years at present.
Please, if I've misunderstood something with the article, correct me, and thank you for the write up with sources.
I added a "disclaimer" after the fact to mention that it's based on mileage way under what people actually drive and it doesn't take maintenance into consideration, with "real" mileage we're better off switching to an EV now because the switch makes you carbon negative after 5 years or so. The numbers used are appropriate in the sense that in both cases we don't count the CO2 coming from the production of the energy source used by either of them. If the vehicle life is the same, the 24 and 18 tons numbers (which seem to be under what would be expected based on the math I've done, that's a 10 years life expectancy for the gas car???) also show that the quicker we get rid of the gas cars, the quicker we reach a point where we're carbon negative compared to continuing to drive the gas cars until they're not drivable anymore.
If we go with a number much closer to the actual average (20k km/year) you can buy a new Corolla, replace it the next year with an EV, park the Corolla and never drive it again and the math goes like this:
5.6 (prod )+ 2.8 (scrap) + 3.2 (driving) + 8.8 (EV) = 20.4 tons
Years to reach 20.4 tons if we drive just the Corolla > 5.6 + (3.2 * X) >= 20.4? X = 5 years of ownership = 21.6 tons
After 4 years of owning the EV you're carbon negative in comparison.
Do you want me to explain why marginal analysis is flawed or do you already understand?