[ademonrower]

From the calculations I did for my book, the situation is the following:

If you "needlessly" swap your "worthy" internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) for a new battery electric vehicle (BEV) of comparable **size** - i.e. comparable **utility** (important qualification!!!); and assuming current average mileages and current electricity mixes (i.e. proportions from fossil / non-fossil electricity generation),

-- If you were a “global average person”, you’d need to drive well over 700,000 km / 435,000 miles before the cumulative CO2 burden of the BEV broke even with that of the ICEV.
-- If you were in the US, the figure is near 330,000 km / 205,000 miles.
-- If you were in Europe it would be near 190,000 km / 118,000 miles.

In terms of number of years that it would take you, on average yearly mileages (averages for location), to "break even", we're talking about ranges that are way beyond the usual buying-selling cycles, and way beyond the battery warranty periods... What does one do with a second-hand BEV, even at a mere 10 years? New battery, at massive environmental cost? Will anyone even want to buy it from you without a new battery?

And, yes, there is often a "use" for the car that you unnecessarily swapped, but the second-hand car market is currently way beyond saturation in many, if not most, places where the EV market is taking off. Good used diesels are hard to shift from second-hand dealer forecourts, and used cars in general are simply piling up... I see it regularly here in Europe. What's the situation in the US?

The biggest "deception" in all of this is the energy, CO2 (and environmental burden in general) that battery manufacture, and the manufacture of ancillary technology for EVs has in comparison with the much less "burdensome" ICEV. The real figures - hard to find, but I scoured the peer-reviewed published literature - reveal five- to six-times the ordinarily-reported figure for energy consumption in making most of the things that differentiate a BEV from an ICEV. Then you can also imagine what the other climate- environment-related impacts truthfully are...

Even if/when all electricity/energy is green, the environmental impact of the current battery economy is enormous. The break-evens that I calculate from that perspective are so large that they're "ridiculous".

Basically, if we continue to dig up more and more of the Earth, thereby producing the typical environmental impacts of mining, to get at all the metals and minerals that we need for making batteries and electronic/electric ancillaries, we're off to a very bad start in terms of sustainability... Yes, fossil oil mining is also terrible... so what about E-fuels? Well, many people are doing their best to "rubbish" them, but I've done calculations, and I come to some very different and sobering results. I can't reveal that bit yet...

My book will be out around July this year.