[ardit33]

Nice analysis.

The point that many people make: "* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly."

It is not just overall pollution, but where and how it is done that it is important. There is a huge difference between controlled pollution, from a factory away from large cities, and thousands of cars spewing emissions right into the core of urban centers. The second would cause more direct health issues and potentially deaths and overall unpleasantness.

[vkou]

> The point that many people make: "* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly."

You're completely wrong. This may be the case for a weekend vehicle that is sent to the junkyard before you put 30,000 km on it, but is 100% wrong for a taxi, that drives >300,000 miles over its life.

It takes 6-12 tonnes of CO2e to produce a car. [1]

Taking 35 mpg, every 10,000 miles driven is 285 gallons of gasoline. 1 gallon of gasoline produces ~8.9 kg of CO2e. That's 2.5 tonnes per 10,000 miles driven.

After 50,000 miles driven, the typical car breaks even with its manufacturing emissions.

The average taxi (in NYC) puts on 70,000 miles. Per YEAR. [2] In a single year, it's fuel emissions exceed manufacturing emissions.

If you want good return-on-investment, taxis are the first vehicles we should be regulating. They drive a lot more than the average car.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-i...

[ShirsenduK]

Electric cars produce more CO2 during manufacturing.

Indian taxis/cars on Indian roads do worse.

India's electric market is 60% coal.

"If you want good return-on-investment, taxis are the first vehicles we should be regulating. They drive a lot more than the average car." - Who is the you here? The car driver who is trying to make ends meet?

[vkou]

> Electric cars produce more CO2 during manufacturing.

How much more? Sources, please. The internet tells me that adding an 85 KWH battery in a Tesla adds ~1 tonne of CO2e. [1]

Tesla, as a whole (Which includes non-manufacturing, but does not include the carbon cost, of say, smelting the steel that went into their cars, or Panasonic manufacturing their batteries), produced ~300,000 tonnes of CO2e in 2018. They shipped ~250,000 vehicles in 2018.[2]

Bloomberg claims something completely different, but doesn't provide any concrete numbers. [3] The study it seems to cite is [4], which claims that a Tesla's battery is ~15 tonnes of CO2e, if manufactured in a factory powered by 50% coal power. There seem to be no other studies on the subject.

Panasonic, which manufactures Tesla batteries, is doing some work to make their batteries carbon neutral [5][6]. It's unclear how much volume this factory produces, and what the emissions of their other factories are.

> Indian taxis/cars on Indian roads do worse.

This also means that the existing ICE taxis don't have a long prospective life, and at least 40% of them are due to be replaced by 2026. It's why this legislature is coming into play in 2026, and not in 2020.

> India's electric market is 60% coal.

Thanks to Carnot efficiency, even if your electric car is powered by a coal plant, it is still more carbon efficient than powering it with gasoline. Your V6 engine doesn't reach the temperature differential that utility coal plants do. Electric vehicles also have near-zero-cost regenerative breaking, which increases waste energy, that would otherwise go into heating brakes in a non-hybrid ICE.

> Who is the you here?

Someone who is comparing the environmental benefit to the monetary cost of switching from ICE to electric. You get a lot more reductions, for the same dollar spent, from electrifying taxis, then from electrifying heavily-used personal vehicles. You get more reductions from electrifying heavily-used personal vehicles, then lightly-used weekend vehicles.

Pick the lowest-hanging fruit first.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ska839...

[2] https://www.environmentalleader.com/2019/04/tesla-emissions-...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/the-dirt-...

[4] https://www.thegwpf.com/new-study-large-co2-emissions-from-b...

[5] https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/battery/primary_ba...

[6] https://www.panasonic-batteries.com/en/news/panasonic-enviro...

[ShirsenduK]

Indian cars/manufacturing/importing has different economics and pollution impacts. You are free do your own research and make up your mind.

I am not against electric cars, I want them. I am against the idea to replace cars which have already contributed to significant pollution being removed from road.

The lowest hanging fruit for me is to get US and other top polluters to reduce pollution. India and China are doing good already as they are increasing more green cover. The reality is the India car drivers cannot afford the cheaper electric cars, forget about Tesla.

[vkou]

> Indian cars/manufacturing/importing has different economics and pollution impacts. You are free do your own research and make up your mind.

No, you don't get to go ahead and do that. The burden is on you to provide evidence for your claim, not on the person you are talking to.

> I am against the idea to replace cars which have already contributed to significant pollution being removed from road.

Didn't you say that taxis in India don't last as long as they do in the West? If so, won't it be possible to electrify 40% of them by 2026, through natural attrition? The whole point of this law is to give a heads-up on a multi-year process.

> The lowest hanging fruit for me is to get US and other top polluters to reduce pollution.

Agreed. The West has had modest per-capita pollution reductions, but needs to go much further then that. As does China. (It's overall per-capita pollution has matched that of the European Union. If you look at its urban areas, alone, they pollute just as much, per-capita, as the US.)

China is no longer a developing country. It's a 350-million person developed country, with all the same carbon footprint as any western economy, sitting on top of a 1-billion person developing country.

> India and China are doing good already as they are increasing more green cover

Increasing green cover isn't anywhere close to enough. If we tore down every city, uprooted every field, and covered the entire planet with trees, we'd offset only a few years of global emissions.

[ShirsenduK]

Semi-rural India should not suffer too!

Please lookup charts of air pollution in the world, there are multiple smaller cities of India which are manufacturing hubs and on the list.

There is nothing called controlled pollution. And even if there is a technical feasibility like Carbon Capture and Storage it is not enforced.

[eigenvector]

Pollution in large facilities like coal-fired power plants can feasibly be controlled using technology that cannot be miniaturized and fitted to the tailpipe of every car.

Coal is not good for the climate, but coal-fired electricity using best available emissions control technology is far, far better for public health and air quality than internal combustion vehicles.

[usrusr]

Overall pollution is a real hard problem. Computer top that, local pollution is more like a temporal inconvenience, it will pass (except for its share in overall pollution)