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Comment by yonaguska | Hacker News Reader

The article points out that the Federal tax incentives played a large part in driving demand for EVs. I would like to take this opportunity to lambast those tax incentives as being really dumb. They are rebates, which means that only someone wealthy benefits, and they are pretty much all targeted at luxury vehicles. The lower/middle class driver being given incentive to purchase a much cheaper hybrid would have a much more pronounced effect on reducing emissions, than subsidizing EV sport cars does.

This article also fails to discuss the C02 emission cost that goes into producing the battery, which for an EV will probably never be recouped. At least for the lifetime of that vehicle.

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Those vehicles will trickle down through the market. In 5 years’ time there will be lots of second hand electrics, as their rich owners trade in for the latest and greatest.

Do you have any links about the CO2 footprint? I don’t see how the total lifetime footprint could be higher than a fuel burner

> This article also fails to discuss the C02 emission cost that goes into producing the battery, which for an EV will probably never be recouped. At least for the lifetime of that vehicle.

This is debunked:

FACT: The greenhouse gas emissions associated with an electric vehicle over its lifetime are typically lower than those from an average gasoline-powered vehicle, even when accounting for manufacturing.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt...

That's why you tax co2 incrementally every year so the market moves away from it

> This article also fails to discuss the C02 emission cost that goes into producing the battery, which for an EV will probably never be recouped

I don't think that's true, source: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt...

In order to avoid the really catastrophic scenarios, the goal is to get to zero CO2 emissions by 2050, not to reduce it as much as possible as quickly as possible. To do that, we need to be selling only pure EVs by ~2040 at the latest, hybrids will never get there unless we have a massive breakthrough in synthetic fuel.

The CO2 emission cost that goes into producing the battery is typically wildly overstated, it doesn't take very long to be recouped.

The goal is not to slightly reduce emissions, it’s to get to net-zero emissions by midcentury, while preserving our ability to have modern conveniences like personal cars. Hybrids don’t accomplish the latter.

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