Vehicles will never be zero emissions:
* Emissions to extract the rare earth metals for the batteries and motors.
* Emissions created by burning fossil fuels to generate electricity.
The above emissions are still created. They are just polluting someone else rather than where the driver is using the car. But the next two will still be creating pollution as the car is driven:
* Brake dust.
* Rubber tyre particles.
EVs generate a lot less brake dust (I barely use my brakes unless someone does something stupid in front of me).
Rubber from tyres I agree with, they are a) pretty heavy and so increase wear and b) lots of torque, so spinning the wheels is far too easy!
The point being made is that a typical ICE car engine will last 10-20 years. As it starts to fail, it typically is fairly repairable as in it's design it is very modular. i.e. Head gasket goes. Starter motor fails. Water pump etc etc etc. With an EV car, the battery power source starts losing performance immediately from day 1 at a much faster rate which affects actual range.
All those little costs add up over the years. How much is a clutch replacement? Timing belt/chain? DMF? Oil and filters every year? Not only does an ICE require significant ongoing maintenance to keep it running efficiently, if you fail to do some of those things (e.g. the timing belt), the failure can be catastrophic.
An ICE car with an engine barely hanging on after 20 years will still do a lot closer to its original range.
Range isn't everything.
Then if the battery on an EV does start to go, it is not repairable. You can't replace parts of it as far as I am aware. It's an all or nothing job which can write cars off or massively devalue them a lot earlier into their life.
Please do some research before parroting the nonsense that other certain posters delight in spouting constantly - depending on the design of the battery you can repair/replace individual battery modules or cells, there are quite a few videos on Youtube of people doing it.
I'll concede it's not very commonly done at the moment, but then there isn't really the market for it right now - I doubt there was a garage on every industrial estate back in 1908 when the Model T came out either. Give it a few years and as EVs become more common & older, indy garages will start to pop up specialising in battery repairs.
There is a lot of fear in dropping typically a lot MORE money into an EV than an equivalent ICE car right now due to a range of issues. Infrastructure not being there. Energy costs. Potential poor value of older EV cars. Future of EV is not clear.
Oh absolutely, not disagreeing with you there. Problem is, lot of that fear is caused by people's misconceptions, either from unrealistically representing their own use case (everyone knows a guy who claims they wont buy an EV just in case he needs to tow his caravan non-stop from Lands End to John'O'Groats in the middle of winter
), misinformation spread by luddites or those with an agenda, or simply a fear of change.
Hmm. Last maybe. How usable will it be then though and what future waste will there be from all the people that have to scrap old cars. The second hand car market helped to eradicate wastage by re-use of old cars. It may not function as well with EV cars.
Really? I expect it's more. Let's say it's 2% anyway. So after 10 years you are now only getting 240 miles out of your 300 mile original range. I mean yeah it's not awful but meh.
240 miles is still at the upper end of brand new cars today
As above - you can replace the battery or individual cells if needed. How much will an equivalent ICE cost in maintenance over that time?
Reusable as in take it out and use for something else, or are you saying people would still buy the old EV car and use it? If the later, this is the very point, people are concerned of buying old EVs due to this. If the former, I can't think of many usage cases for that which would realistically work.
Both.
How many kWh do you think the average home battery is for a solar system?
How many kWh is a 10 year old Leaf battery?
Here's a hint, even if the Leaf battery was down to 50% capacity, it would still be big enough!
And there are plenty of old Leafs and Zoes on the road still, I doubt they are all still on the original owner.
I expect the labour alone to replace an entire battery deep in the chassis of some EVs would be huge. I'm not sure they even build them realistically to accommodate such work? The model seems to be more based around it being in the car for life.
Already responded to this point.
Engines are mostly metal, so they get melted down and recycled almost entirely. Metals can be reused over and over. Only something like 5% of dead battery contents are recycled currently, something they don't like to mention.
You realise the phrase is "
Reduce Reuse Recycle"? The order is important as it is by the increase in energy/resources required.
Reducing the amount of resources required in the first place is obviously the best option, but until viable alternatives are in place, people are always going to want/need cars.
Reusing an EV battery (either as a used car, or in a home battery), is a far more economical option than melting down an engine and remanufacturing it into something else.
I'm not trying to claim EVs are perfect - far from it, and for some people they may never be ideal, but some of the arguments put forward against them are either so convoluted it's laughable, or outright lies which can be disproven with little to no effort.
