I find it hard to believe that pulling electricity from the grid would increase carbon emissions vs. a vehicle burning gas in its own engine. How is that possible?
But the real problem is that we move 2000+ kgs around to move a human of 80 kgs around. EVs don't fix that. EVs are mostly to save the car industry, the solution is to drive less by creating a society where people don't need to own a car and drive everywhere.
Why is that a problem? If I want to visit my friend who lives 200 miles away, I'm not going to hop on a bike, or walk, or find a horse and buggie to take me there. Vehicles are not inherently evil. In fact they're a great enabler. Even if we take your example at face value and assume nobody travels beyond their city. How is that person who needs a wheelchair to get from point A to point B going to go a mile or two to the grocery store and get their groceries home?
The problem with cars is their carbon footprint, and EVs go a long way to solving that.
Why do car enablers always use people needing a wheelchair to push their agenda? If you're so concerned with their well being, wouldn't it be better if they got the roads for themselves and didn't get stuck in traffic and could always find parking close?
Or if they didn't need a car to travel miles to a grocery store but it was next door instead?
And no, the problems with cars are much greater than their carbon footprint. What about their area footprint for parking? The insane land used for roads? All the deaths? The pollution and micro plastics from their wheels? How children can't play outside in streets? How the streets instead of a nice neighborhood is just traffic? The noise?
And no, EVs doesn't solve much about the carbon footprint, not unless the energy is all green. It just moves it around.
however, you are not going to connect with your audience when you say things like this:
> How often do you travel those 200 miles? Why can't you use a car share service for that one occasion? I'm not assuming people never travels beyond their city.
cars are not fungible. the driver's seat in my car is always in the right position for me, I'm familiar with all of its controls and weird quirks, and I don't need to reserve it. it's always ready for me in my garage at a moment's notice.
my point is: the only real advantage to your proposal is cost, and I would be willing to pay a lot more than I currently do to keep my car. it would take something more like Japan's train network for me to actually be enthusiastic about giving up my car.
I don't see a lot of people really pushing for others to fundamentally change their habits and lifestyle (even getting people to eat less red meat is incredibly hard) and I think that's just because it's fundamentally harder to convince a large number of people to change their habits vs. a small number of dedicated people working towards green energy.
We should strive for both of these things together and share the same goal.
Turning a wheelchair into a speedy electric vehicle is quite easy if not cheap. It's one wheel removed from an electric recumbent trike.
As can probably be gleaned from my posts here, I'm an activist working for better cycling and human transportation in how we do urban planning.
And one thing I often see, at least locally, is how those using a wheelchair or other amenities want better pedestrian infrastructure (or cycling infrastructure). Not car infrastructure. Many don't have the ability to drive, or the money for a special car. But a motorized tricycle, or an electric wheelchair using bicycle ramps works great.
The most popular EVs in the US are roughly 0-10% heavier than the comparable ICEV. Yes, some EVs are much heavier.
I suspect that if this is true, it's only because the most popular cars in the US are so large that the battery weight doesn't matter as much.
The energy grid is already lower carbon than gasoline powered ICE vehicles, especially with natural gas taking over a lot of the energy production. But it's only going to get even better as more and more renewables come online.
It's easier for your giant utility company to have the capital to build out a solar farm to power your car/house/etc than it is for you and I to have the capital to build personal solar production to do the same thing. Even more so, some things only make sense at scale, like large scale wind energy. Placing a giant turbine in my backyard, even if the HOA and city allowed it, would work for me, but not my neighbor, and if they built one too we'd be competing with each other. Better to do it on farms leased or ran by utilities.
Besides, how is the renter going to de carbonize their electric car unless the grid does it?
The article "Factcheck: How electric vehicles help to tackle climate change" <https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...> seems to make the same point (if that's a bad source let me know):
* "EVs are responsible for considerably lower emissions over their lifetime than conventional (internal combustion engine) vehicles across Europe as a whole.
* In countries with coal-intensive electricity generation, the benefits of EVs are smaller and they can have similar lifetime emissions to the most efficient conventional vehicles – such as hybrid-electric models."
Which is my point: we need to decarbonize the generators. The article even goes on to state this: "However, as countries decarbonise electricity generation to meet their climate targets, driving emissions will fall for existing EVs and manufacturing emissions will fall for new EVs." Note the requirement to decarbonize the generators. This is a real issue, for example, in 2021, coal-fired electric power plants accounted for 91% of West Virginia's total electricity net generation <https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WV>. There's an assumption by many that utilities' electricity generators will over time produce less carbon dioxide, but I'm not convinced that it will "just happen". Such a change will require continued emphasis over time.
If we focus instead on electricity production by source in the USA between 2011 and 2021: Electricity produced...
with oil: 42TWh => 35TW (-16%)
with coal: 1730TWh => 900TWh (-48%)
with gas: 1010TWh => 1580TWh (+55%)
with solar: 2TWh => 164TWh (+8900%)
with wind: 120TWh => 378TWh (+215%)
with nuclear: 790TWh => 780TWh (-2%)
with hydro: 310TWh => 250TWh (-20%)
So not only was 600TWh of dirty coal replaced by cleaner gas, the amount of electricity produced with fossil fuels dropped by more than 200TWh. Meanwhile, electricity production by renewables significantly increased.
Or in other words, if you had bought an EV in 2011 and driven it until now, it would have gotten cleaner every year, which is not going to happen with an ICE.
Source: our world in data, numbers slightly adjusted for readability.