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I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped | Rowan Atkinson
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Environment
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The article contains a massive logical error. It assumes or implies that when people replace their cars after 3 years, they just throw them in the trash. Obviously not. They sell them to other people, and those cars percolate down the economic ladder as they age.
Cars largely only exit the market when you can't find anyone to sell it to our you can't fix it any longer. If we increased the average number of years someone owned a car before selling it, we wouldn't be changing the the production rate or the total number of cars on the road. In fact, I'm not sure anything else would change after we reestablished market equilibrium.
If the question is "should I throw away my perfectly good car in order to buy an electric one?" Well okay, fine, buying a new one is kinda sorta a bad idea. But that's never the question, you always sell your car if you can get any amount of money for it.
Not only that. It seems like the article completely ignores how batteries can be recycled and assumes that every new battery undergoes the same manufacturing process.