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by cmutel 2097 days ago
Sorry for being late to the game, but we have an as-open-as-it-can-be tool to compare petrol, gas, battery, and fuel cell cars, both today and in the future, available here:

http://carculator.psi.ch/

The Python library which does the calculations is here:

https://pypi.org/project/carculator/

One nice thing about our tool is that it calculates life cycle emissions including projected changes in the electricity grid of the region you live in. Of course, these are uncertain, but most other academic analysis just use the current grid mix.

It's important to realize that, even with the advances in electric vehicles, while they are better than combustion cars, they are far from zero-emission. Lifetime emissions for an electric car could still be 200 g CO2/km, split almost evenly between the electricity supply and everything else. Depending on usage, which of course has wide spatial variation, just road construction and maintenance itself could be 20 g CO2/km (this number is valid for Switzerland, which has very high utilization rates).

I think most people who are have seriously investigated the current system and possible future developments in the next 10 to 20 years have come to the conclusion that a lot of the change has to be in consumer behaviour - clean tech is not clean enough, or can't be scaled up enough in the current economic and political climate, to reach any reasonable climate goal.

2 comments

http://carculator.psi.ch/start "Simple" doesn't work and fails with an error "We have not been able to detect the country to run the analysis for. Please wait a few seconds and try again."

"Intermediate" doesn't work and directs me to http://carculator.psi.ch/tool/ which gives a 404

Just thought you might want to know

Unfortunately for me, I can't access simple analysis since the site can't figure out what country I'm in (no permissions were even asked for), and when I click on the intermediate analysis, the link doesn't seem to be valid. Only the advanced seems available to me. It would be great to not have to make an account as well.