When you add up the damage from the wastage of scrapped combustion vehicles and pollution from lithium mining, and cobalt, both very toxic and unstable components indeed, CO2 is the very least of the problem Dachs…CO2 is a natural component of earths atmosphere and nothing that’s green would survive without it, I’m sure lithium and cobalt are best left where they are.
I worked in a factory that used cobalt in the production of Diamond tooling, two of my colleagues have since died, one from metal poisoning and the other from cancer, cobalt in large amounts was still detected in their bodies.Because I’m no longer in contact with the rest of the workforce, the toll could be higher. Fortunately I worked in the machining procedure at the end when the cobalt was safely encapsulated in the bonding material.
Thanks Dachs, some of your points are well made, and it’s sometimes hard for an old bloke like me, who was brought up driving around in combustion engined vehicles, to understand the young people who were born into a digital age and lured by all the propaganda and flashy sales pitches of modern day world. I would much prefer the older vehicle without the screen and computer which I find terribly distracting.
I’m surprised that there is no market for conventional vehicles, but I can understand the pressures on car manufacturers to produce EV’s and all the malarky that goes with them. Personally, I would much prefer a vehicle that gets me to the local supermarket, the occasional trip to the coast, and keeps the rain off my head. Rather than some unreliable copy of the bridge from the starship enterprise.
I understand that EV sales are not going as planned though, and the companies that seem to be doing well are the ones who have had no experience making conventional vehicles and started from scratch with EV production like Tesla and some Chinese companies.
I believe that one of the reasons for the introduction of EV’s has got nothing to do with the environment or reducing pollution, is to make it very expensive to purchase and run an EV thereby reducing traffic, which I think we can all agree, can’t continue at it’s present rate or else nobody will be going anywhere. In the UK we have a dire energy problem, so it seems odd that the establishment should encourage everyone to drive electric on the one hand, and cut down on your use of electricity…
I leave you with this little snippet…
While visiting the Ferrybridge Services for a lunchtime sandwich I noticed a row of brand new charging points for EV’s on further inspection I happened upon a running Aggreko diesel generator hidden behind some trees…it was supplying the charging points with power…
There are more than 1.3 billion motor vehicles in the world today, one billion of which are passenger cars. This figure is expected to rise to two billion by 2035. Adding almost another billion combustion cars to the present traffic doesn’t seem to be the right solution since it ignores transport-related emissions. E-mobility is the only available technology that can make a significant contribution to climate targets but it’s not a free lunch.
When weighing up the pros and cons, each argument needs to be evaluated and checked considering that there’re at least 21 common myths about EVs which can be misleading.The huge environmental costs of gasoline-powered vehicles doesn’t seem to matter.
The bottom line is that EVs contribute fewer emissions than combustion cars.
The change will never be a complete one but EVs shouldn’t be ignored either. It’s about raising the share of EVs in road traffic gradually.
Dach
Getting the raw materials for electric car batteries and disposal of creates more damage than any emmissions from conventional cars. you forgot to add that to your equation. Something you have ignored
Air is do much cleaner now than when I was a teenager. I remember the smog when it was so bad you could not see even a few feet infront of you. Drivin a car relied on following the car infront their rear lights. Maybe you wern’t around back then?
So I get fed up seeing all this crap about car emmissions when we had it far far worse years ago
A solar trickle charger proved good for the tired battery that we had on our previous car. No external power source needed. It gives the battery a bit more life for turning the starter motor on cold mornings.
I’m using it on our present car even though the battery seems OK. Good for if the car is as little used as ours is. It might remain unused for days but the battery is always lively when needed.
I agree that it’s an option, but not something that should be forced on everyone. Moving to mass production of electric vehicles is destructive to the planet in another way. We should modify and extend the life of existing vehicles. For example my car is acceptable under ULEZ because it has been manufactured to pollute less than older models and diesel. However, that is achieved without an electric motor.
When I was a child everyone used leaded petrol and that created a great deal of pollution. So leaded petrol was replaced with unleaded and over time cars using leaded were phased out. I’m not sure what the environmental cost of that change was, but the changes in the oil we used made a great deal of difference to air quality.
I don’t think they should be forcing EV on the whole population and manufacturing so many of these batteries. They should focus on cleaning up the big transportation issues, public transport etc rather than the billions of cars. For cars they should focus on making fossil fuel technologies cleaner and encouraging ways to make existing vehicles last long and run cleaner rather than pushing people to keep replacing with new builds. Until we have a viable alternative that does not create serious pollution problems to nature and communities in other parts of the world.
I understand hydrogen might be a solution, but not sure of the environmental cost of that either.
We have made a great deal of progress since the 70s in cleaning up air. There are just far more people in the world, using far more of everything and buying and selling and manufacturing goods that everyone will throw away in a few months or a year.
Spot on Annie…
Producing electric cars might not be producing the pollution of an Internal combustion engine while being driven, but the pollution comes in producing the parts that go to make up the EV, batteries and many more components to make it work efficiently. It’s a bit like wind turbines and solar panels, you don’t need fuel to generate electricity, but the amount of ground required to make any decent amount (good farm land on land based turbines and panels) and the amount of concrete and other materials needed for their construction. A good power station would take up one hundredth of the space required for greener methods. So the pollution and damage to the planet just happens in a different way.
Thanks for the links to those Dachs, but they might be biased sources…
It’s really all about pollution because the net zero and CO2 angle is just bad science meant to confuse the average person and put the fear of God up you making you think you are destroying the planet for your kids and grand kids, just like religion used to do threatening you with the wrath of God if you sinned, but that doesn’t work anymore because nobody believes it, so they use something else that can’t be proved, bad science.
the main problem with mass production of all such technology is that there is obsolescence after x number of years. So there will eventually be a mountain of solar panels/wind turbines. We should have been building more nuclear power stations years ago. France has so many and our successive governments have been conveniently ignoring this issue. Germany have been going crazy for renewables because they decommissioned so much nuclear as a knee-jerk after the Fukushima tragedy. Even though Germany has near zero seismic risk.
If governments focused on nuclear instead of demonising cars we would reach net zero far more efficiently and secure our long term energy needs. The issue of nuclear waste is something that can be addressed far more easily than the huge long term environmental impact of the alternatives.
If I felt so strongly about an issue that I called what other people post or say about the topic “crap”, I wouldn’t take part in the discussion in the first place. I’ll turn 70 shortly. So I was around when air quality used to be worse all over Western Europe but it was nowhere as bad as in the Bitterfeld region where I was forced to work for three years. It was so poor that white laundry would turn grey within hours when hung out in the open air. It was one of the most toxic places in Europe and it took West Germany tens of years and billions to decontaminate it. I got chronically ill as a result of being exposed to the toxins.
The other side of the equation you seem to forget is the cost of relying on fossil fuels and sourcing power from them. The hazards of metal extraction are not exclusive to EV manufacturing – all portable electronic devices contribute to this as does powering batteries.
A traditional car needs mining every day, needs mining every time it’s used. It needs the whole extraction complex of fossil fuels in order to power it. Other costs include oil spills, the illnesses and preventable deaths caused by pollution from fossil fuels. Last but not least, the costs incurred by an unbearable dependency on oil-producing regimes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Most battery suppliers are basically rip-off merchants. I’ve just fitted a new 4yr one into my wife’s Suzuki and it cost me £33.47 delivered from GSF Car Parts. It was delivered the next day by UPS and I cannot fault GSF’s service to its customers. The original lasted 9yrs before it started to lose charge over 3-4 days.
Nearly all main stream batteries are made by just a couple of manufactures and then labeled as to which brand name it is to be sold under. Over the year, I save a fortune by buying parts via GSF👍
What do you mean by saying EVs are forced on the population? Is that so in the UK?
I understand hydrogen might be a solution, but not sure of the environmental cost of that either.
As for fuel cell cars, they haven’t gained acceptance and aren’t likely to do so in the foreseeable future because they are hopelessly overpriced (80,000 quid on average) , there’s virtually no infrastructure for them, hydrogen is more costly than electricity and the cars need lots of it, and their efficiency is far too low. The big players are not interested in them. It’s the chicken and egg problem again like we’ve seen with EVs: no infrastructure without sufficient demand or no demand due to a lack of infrastructure .
Assuming you could recharge it somewhere, an EV would be ideal for you. It would take you quietly to those places since range would be no issue.
Have you actually ever driven an EV or been given a lift in them? You would never want to return to a traditional car.
Go for the bZ4X . I remember you like it.
The Australian government is offering loans to buy electric vehicles worth less than $55,000 at interest rates up to 5 percentage points lower than standard.
The government claims that could save EV buyers more than $8,000 on a $40,000 loan.
You can expect a lot of EVs to be offered at $54,999.95 now.
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is now offered with an 84KWh battery giving it a 570km range (still not as much as my 3lt turbo diesel which has a range of a touch under 700km). Mind you, it costs a lot more than $55,000
Thanks for your recommendation Dachs…but I think I’ll pass on that one. Being a long distance driver an Electric Vehicle would be no good to me. I’ve spent a life working on and understanding the internal combustion engine, even today’s more advanced engines still use the basic model and even though I have roadside assistance I could probably get myself out of a situation unless it was a major failure.
Also, my last diesel engine clocked up over 300,000 miles during my time as a courier. And my 2 litre diesel Qashqai lasted over 13 years with only a £60 battery replacement after 10 years…How many EV’s will perform to those standards, bearing in mind at 74 years old my latest vehicle, a 2022 Citroen 1.5 litre diesel Aircross will almost definitely be my last vehicle…
When we talk about pollution from industry I suspect there are lots more chemicals introduced into the atmosphere than just CO2 and CO4. We had a problem with coal fires and smog in the 50’s and 60’s but the main respiratory problems were asthma.
There is a problem with air quality in cities from the accumulation of too many vehicles, so perhaps the banning of polluting vehicles, or vehicles in general, cities were not designed to handle the volumes of traffic they now endure. This is a problem, that as cars continue to multiply, will even affect suburban areas.
The talk is about 2035 and it would mark the end of the production of new cars only. This means that these can still be bought as young used cars and will be around for another twenty years until 2055. We don’t know if the generations living then will consider EVs to be forced on them.
That’s the worst case scenario anyway. Right now there’s a trend to shift that deadline further into the future. I can’t see any real pressure.
It would take you quietly to those places since range would be no issue.
