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by rfeather 2771 days ago
The article doesn't talk about greenhouse gas emissions, so the power grid and fuel source isn't really relevant to the point, especially since oil is an extremely small part of the energy mixture in most places.[1]

If they were talking about greenhouse gases, then the answer seems to be that it depends on where you live and how/what you drive, but an electric vehicle almost always produces less emissions than an equivalent gas powered one. [2] does a decent job explaining though I feel he leaves a few parts out for the sake of clarity. For example, driving a P100D isn't the equivalent of driving the average car. It's more like driving a sports sedan (like a BMW M5), so those sorts of vehicles would probably be a more fair comparison. In the same vane, the whole US car fleet includes lots of SUVs and other trucks, which if there were equivalent electric models, would obviously not go as far as a Leaf. It would be great if there was a US calculator that worked like [3] does for the UK so that we could do the same sort of comparison based on the mix where we live.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Product... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM [3]https://www.nextgreencar.com/tools/emissions-calculator/