How green are electric cars? | It's Complicated

Electric cars will still be fine.

Can you please share the sources you have referred, will only be use for academic purposes.

do they use solar or wind when refining crude oil?

why does everyone ignore the source of their fuel? asif diesel comes from a well in the ground

Oh no,,another hype and unnecessary graphics show,,

Just imagine where battery technology would be today if the electric cars from the late 1800’s/early 1900’s had kept being produced and improved upon and kept selling throughout the entire 20th century instead of disappearing for 80 years. Just imagine where nuclear reactor technology would be if we had kept building and improving nuclear reactor technology instead of fearing it and protesting against it for the last 50 years. Now imagine where computers and smart phones would be today if we applied the principal of lack of innovation and lack of development that we applied to battery and reactor technology decades ago……computers and smart phones wouldn’t be what they are today!

It seams that electric cars are made for the city folks so that they can keep cleaner air in their neighborhoods and pollute more in the areas where power plants are located :)

There are so many half truths and omissions in this report, one wonders if it was funded by the fossil fuel industry. Very poor from the Guardian I must say! Where to start: The CO2 emissions from the production, refining (using cobalt for example) & shipping of oil & gas have not been mentioned. The possibility of recycling batteries (well over 90 percent) at the end of their (very long) life has not been mentioned. The majority of car batteries today are LFP chemistry, so no Nickel & Cobalt used any more - not mentioned. And obviously, we would all love better (and cheaper) public transport, but as long as we keep living in the real world, the personal car is not going to go away.

No

1.If you unplug charger from an EV and none windmils nor photovoltaics power has to be reduce it means it wasn't been charged with renewables.
2. Would France had to start coal plant yearly each November if there weren't 1.5 millions EVs on French roads?
3. If there weren't EVs in France could more nuclear power be exported to Germany to close lignite power plants?
4. The same with Norway. If there wouldn't be EVs in Norway could more hydro energy be exported to Germany to close lignite power plants?

I believe yours believe of EVs ecology is based on magical thinking. It is nothing more than creative accounting of CO2 emissions.

Very old and very easily refuted arguments.

This sucks

No mention of fire risks.

Electric cars are definitely not convenient over IC Engine vehicles like Long drives are an examples . They could have found a new fuel that reduces carbon emissions instead they stict to century old tech called EVs . This is more of a political move than controlling pollution . To control pollution you must reduce population that is the only thing that can reduce pollution. These EVs are just pure Scam.

I really wish Biofuels like RNG get more love, the production literally has microbes take in emissions like GHG's and make a fuel that doesnt need any electricity to produce and you get a fuel that has less byproducts burnt than what was taken to make it.

We don't hate Elon fk ya all

If public transport wasn't awful, people would use it.

Wow. What blatant lies. EVs are more efficient than ICE cars. Period. More damage is done to the environment by cars burning gas than the power plant burning gas to make electricity. This video is a blatant lie, likely funded by the Oil industry to hold back the sale of EVs.

What drives people and communities to change. Money.
When cars became affordable the suburbs were born.
The suburbs and their dependence on car is held up by huge government subsidies that keep prices artificially low.
Europeans pay what gas really costs and each community has all the goods and services they need within walking distance.
People follow their pocket book.

Typical liberal arts way of looking at things. Never bother to actually do the numbers.

With the Polestar 4 (a fairly big SUV type)for example, actually life time (manufacturing + running) emission is 35 tone after 200 k miles. It’s less than the running emission alone (without manufacturing) of a small Kia ice.

It takes 3 kWh of fossil energy to get 1 kWh of electricity from your socket.
Between your socket and driving on electricity, there are the following steps:
Charger, battery, inverter, motor. Take 95% efficiency for each step mentioned.
100kW of gas means 100/3 -5%, -5%, -5%, -5% = 27% efficiency. Even an old ICE does better... a hybrid is +50% more efficient....

The numbers just don’t add up, you complain about lithium use but only 8kg of lithium is used in a electric car, leading to around 80kg of co2, around 2% of co2 in manufacturing the car, it’s a small amount. (Assume 4 tons Co2 in manufacturing)

Why mention a car ran on natural gas, we’re talking about cars for the future, where cheap renewable energy will be the vas majority of a grid. It’s absolutely irrelevant when talking about solutions.

50% of co2 emitted in creating batteries is from electricity, when electricity becomes renewable, the Co2 produced making batteries will almost half

I just don’t think whoever made this has much of an understanding about the topic, or is too focused on words instead of numbers and they’ve got lost

Nice presentation, but a little short 😊

You forget that recycling batteries is the most polluting industry ever

0:97 I thought it was because we don’t have infinite petroleum to burn on our cars

we need electric trams trains and high speed rails car centric infrastructure is bad for the environment even if we all went to EV's we need to reduce total number of cars period and the leftover we will make electric and focus road infrastructure for utility vehicles and cargo and not passengers

Cars are not green. They alll pollute. Walk or take your bike. The sinister thing is with industrialization/capitalism , our economy is based on mass production and sales. We need to sell cars to keep the jobs going in the mass production system the fuels ⛽️ the economy . So we are basically not looking at the real problems.

Not once in this video is the infrastructure needed to produce diesel and gasoline mentioned! Typical Guardian reporting!

Breaking News: Human existence is bad for the environment.

Bru

Evs have a simpler drive system, but a much more complex energy storage. Batteries have from hundreds to thousands of parts. A gas tank in a regular car has 2 parts, tank and pump. All theyve done is move the complexity

That's the socialist solution - make everyone take the bus - take away individual freedoms and make everybody do the same stuff. Governments must manage people down to exactly where they travel - that sounds like the Guardian. Need to think harder, boys. There's a better solution out there that doesn't involve destroying the car.

EVs are killing people, Animals and the Environment. Use gasoline cars or finally give us the engine where we only need water and still use gasoline engines.

This is a funny assessment of costs and emissions. Any vehicle manufacturer can attest to the difficulty of sourcing and manufacturing raw materials and parts. All cars require foreign parts for manufacturing a vehicle assembly. Less parts equals less sourcing and material allocation. A more thorough investigation should be conducted with better data delivery to come to a consensus conclusion.

Cons about Ecars
Cold/ snow
Fires
charging time
Expensive batteries
the grid
Pollution
no balls

Pros about Ecars
no gas usage

As I was scrolling through the comments ,what catches my attention is the lack of Public transportation in rural areas of Western countries .I was a student in Cardiff University, Wales, UK 20 years back. I would have loved to do an assignment based out of a rural outskirt in Wales. I fixed everything but later discovered that there is no public transport anywhere near. Using private transport was not affordable to me and so I dropped it. For Chevening scholars they provided only public transport reimbursements. Coming from India, it was a surprise that there was no public transport in rural UK as we have far better public transport in rural India, even 20 years before. Of-course the quality of it varies, but we a lower income nation can manage with it and that keeps moving us. As of now even in the remote corners , especially in flat Indo-Gangetic terrains though many other things are to be improved, you have Electric powered basic public transport, though rudimentary. This may be the scenario in most of Africa , Latin America and Asia in general.

Do ont worry. I wont ever be switching

How green? Worse than fuel. They get produced or delivered without fuel. So your causing more pollution. You wanna go green get back on a horse or get up and use your feet to take you places.

The last suggestion applies only to smaller European countries... But, for highly populated and larger countries of Asia and Africa, your suggestions are non relevant... EV manufacturing carbon emissions can be localized and control much easily than wide spread carbon emissions from fossil fuel vehicles and difficult to control... EV option has pros and cons but pros weighs more...

Don't forget about Congo😢😢😢😢😢

You are not taking my freedom!!!!

Anyways, the s15 silvia is a great car