[robocat]

CO2 output is a fixed manufacturing output (approximately proportional to vehicle cost ignoring taxes/incentives) plus a variable output approximately proportional to distance.

If you buy an electric vehicle for short lifetime distance (say, because trip length is limited), you can easily end up producing more CO2 from an electric vehicle than a cheaper ICE vehicle (depending at your location on how a marginal extra kWh is generated due to your marginal extra load on the electricity network).

I would like to see a graph of summed CO2 generated per driver on Yaxis per annum (including annualised fixed manufacturing costs), and distance on Xaxis. Two graphs, one for electric vehicles and one for ICE vehicles. At what distance is the crossover point for the two graphs? Do people with long commutes unsuitable for cheaper electric vehicles overwhelm the CO2 production?

Personally I think our CO2 production per capita is basically proportional to income: very few changes you make actually change the amount of CO2 produced… The CO2 savings with an electric vehicle are approximately proportional to the savings in $, and you then spend those $ on something else like a plane flight! It is actually quite difficult to make a difference — not that we shouldn’t try of course. It is also very hard to get facts versus greenwashing feel good delusions and deception.

[eptcyka]

The average age of cars on the road is above 10 years, if I recall correctly. This is plenty of time to rack up enough mileage to offset the carbon cost of manufacturing. Using averages, it seems like replacing a car with average MPG (25) with a car with 35 MPG, it only takes 7 years of driving to be better off CO2 wise. It takes even less for electric cars. I think most people overestimate how much CO2 is produced during manufacturing vs how much CO2 is produced by driving. I'm mostly going off of this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k

Moreover, I don't believe that there is a daily commute that's more than 120 miles each way, and this is well within the capabilities of even reasonably priced electric cars today. If you have a charger at your workplace, you could accommodate even longer trips, however colder weather might make a big dent in the range of most electric cars.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

If I recall correctly, it’s around the 100,000km for a similar sized vehicle EV vs ICE, when the EV is charged from a mixed source electricity supply similar to what most developed nations presently have (mostly coal, some gas and renewables).