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Comment by jblok | Hacker News Reader

With electric cars drawing power from a grid you reap the benefit of centralisation. It's easier to upgrade a gas fired power station to increase efficiency/reduce pollutants than it is to upgrade every vehicle on the road.

You also have a better spread of options using the grid, e.g. renewables. Essentially with electric vehicles you are just moving the place where the power generation happens, but with countless benefits.

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Also, power stations tend to have large stacks that try and direct the pollution into the atmopshere where it can disperse over a wide area. In comparison fossil fuel vehicles tend to have small exhaust pipes that can lead to high levels of localised exposure to toxic/carcinogenic substances.

It's easier to upgrade a gas fired power station to increase efficiency/reduce pollutants than it is to upgrade every vehicle on the road.

In practice, I'm not sure that's true at all. For small incremental changes you may be right, but I suspect there's a limit as to how far you can take the existing generating system. The time and bureaucracy involved in building a NEW generating station is immense. I don't have figures handy, but I suspect that from conception to actual production, it takes more than couple of car replacement lifecycles.

So in that timespan, the large majority of cars will have aged themselves into replacement anyway.

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