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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a tool like this for comparing Internal Combustion Engines to Battery Electric Vehicles.

By some previous calculations of mine, it looked like BEVs had 10k miles worth of CO2 baked into the batteries, but I honestly have no idea if that is correct or not.

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That isn't improbable - half the emissions associated with an IC-engine car stem from its manufacture[1]. Of course, the battery should be recycled, so you'd hope that in the long run those numbers will come down.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

Lithium based rechargeables are unlikely to be recycled in the near-term. Doing so is hard, and there are a variety of chemistries used, so you don't have the economies of scale like with lead-acid, where recycling one lead-acid battery is much liker recycling another.

I always see comparisons for gas consumption vs construction of electric vehicles but they never include the CO2 emissions related to producing ICEs and transmissions.

Seems about right:

"Over the vehicle’s lifetime, however, the global warming emissions benefits of driving on electricity far outweigh the emissions costs of vehicle manufacturing; most EVs “pay back” their production emissions within one or two years of driving, a period that will shorten as electricity grids get cleaner.

Read more about manufacturing emissions in our in-depth analysis of life cycle EV emissions, "Cleaner from Cradle to Grave" (2015)."

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/ev-em...

(They also have an interactive tool, but it only does mileage based on your local grid and vehicle, not manufacturing)

That was always my argument. I think that to look at it holistically, you also have to consider people who are adding an EV instead of replacing a normal car with one. Rich people love tax breaks, and they're happy to drive a Tesla with $7k paid for by taxpayers. If you do replace a car, factoring in not just the EV but the effects of that otherwise-serviceable car being scrapped or whatever. Consider also that EVs becoming popular creates more demand in general for cars, so someone is likely to purchase a new EV when they could have just kept using their normal car.

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