Environment

I'm a little disappointed this article doesn't seem to acknowledge that what's really better for the environment is not buying a car at all. Not only do we need greener cars, we need less cars overall.

Ebikes, public transit, walkable cities are all way more environmentally friendly than buying any type of car.

The main problem : we use a 1000kg car to transport our 80kg. i hope to see more self-driving electrical car we can share and used as an alternative. we must invent a new transport system other than old buses or individual car

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.

When he says "when I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard" is he referring to British cars? Some of the American cars from my childhood were quite solid (and no, I'm not an American-made chauvinist, this line just struck me as odd).

interesting article which reflects more on the realities of electric car ownership and the practicalities of switching and maintenance rather than just the theory and promises and hopes.

the automobile, as a technology, is about 150 years old. cars, about 120, and the "modern" car about 40 years old. Comparatively, electrics and hybrids are a pretty new technology and still have lots of kinks to work out, not the least of which is a support and service infrastructure that is both widespread and affordable. How environmentally-friendly it is also is largely a matter of the end-product, not at all how it was manufactured, especially when it comes to Li-ion batteries.

Sure, electric cars have higher emission in production, but that is not the main issue (in my opinion). The break even point compared to usual cars can be reached. The real issue is that electric vehicles are still too expensive for most people and infrastructure is lacking.

And synthetic fuels are a dangerous notion. They have a terrible efficiency (primary source to kinetic energy), so they will be way more expensive than gas. They are only an option for cars that for some (aesthetic or esoteric) reason must use combustion and for Porsche users, cost is not an issue, just as for Formula One. The problem is that not banning synthetic fuels opens a way for combustion engines to stay on the streets, and when the transition from normal to synthetic fuels is not made (because it will economically not be possible) we will still have gas and unchanged C02 emissions.