New research suggest that swapping your internal combustion engine for an EV is almost always the greener choice.

The new research finds that in order to repay the carbon debt of making a new EV, it must be driven 4,400 miles if it’s a car and 6,700 miles each year if it’s a truck. That’s already well below the 12,500 miles the average driver travels in a year, and the benefits to making the switch are likely to grow.

As the United States increasingly relies on renewables, for example, charging an EV becomes even more environmentally appealing. Campbell and his co-author also point to improvements in battery recycling as a way of reducing the emissions involved with making an electric car.

One hole in this latest study is that it doesn’t consider the cost of going electric. While previous research has shown that EVs come with higher upfront costs but lower operating expenses, it’s a thread that Campbell hopes economists pull on. He would also like to see someone better account for the emissions generated while extracting oil and getting gasoline to the pump, rather than simply the burning. But, for now, he believes the study sends a clear message.

  • sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip
    4·
    8 days ago

    I don’t think that actually would be more efficient than mass producing new cars. Much of the resources consumed prototyping and testing and tooling and actually assembling the vehicle are made much more efficient when you have a full assembly line putting together many identical vehicles from interchangeable parts.

    With smaller production runs for some kind of retrofit, the labor will need to be much higher skill, there will need to be a lot more labor per vehicle, the parts will not be as efficiently produced, etc.

    It’s expensive and labor intensive because it’s so inefficient, which is fun as a hobby but can’t scale the same way that just lining up an assembly line of all new vehicles would.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
      3·
      8 days ago

      Two things here I think we should hold seperate.

      1. Combustion cars are everywhere on earth, the amount of creative uses people will find to repurpose them in a more electric transporation context will be bewildering, I am sure whole cottage industries will prop up around specific models of used cars that just have decent platforms and interiors to throw an electric motor into… but yeah none of it is going to be simple which leads me to 2.
      2. At the end of the day if what you want is a simple, small hatchback sized EV to do daily driving type tasks (i.e. long distance travel isn’t prioritized necessarily in the design) while the resources needed to produce such a vehicle are non-trivial… the end result isn’t something that is waste and an EV hooked up to the grid sitting in your garage is still very much doing something if we design grids intelligently. At some later point someone can use that frame to put new batteries in, replace the controls on the dashboard that broke, get a new breaking system and tires on… whatever and when you look at EVs from that perspective it just gets harder and harder to justify retrofitting combustion used cars at mass scale as a “mass transit” solution that can be applied generally.