Are ICE cars regarding CO2 footprint fair EV comparisons?

[CertLive]

You see there I am researching into various new battery technologies and roll onto the total CO2 count for the production of a Tesla. Now this is where I am not sure the public are being told the correct information about ICE cars. You see an ICE car has a certain CO2 output when you drive it burning dinosaur juice. It is put into a Tax band depending on how bad this is. But as far as I can tell none of those figures at all include the overhead of ICE production and how much CO2 it took to refine and build the car. It has way more parts to produce and transport. This surely should be included in these emission figures no? So you think you are green in the self charging <-- LOL or hybrid. But an ICE actually far worse because it will never cross a 0 co2 threshold.

A Tesla gets bashed about its total CO2 figure to make and then outputs no more CO2 if the electricity is produced green. But it seems to be the whole ICE CO2 output figures sold to consumers are much worse than displayed. Consumers should know how much Co2 they are buying for mother earth.

 

[Gasaraki]

Most analysis i've seen do include the "cost" of the ICE also. "Cost" here is the energy and CO2.

 

[akenham]

There was a much touted analysis a while back that took best case ICE (WLTP mpg) and worst case EV (largest batteries, constructed and charged using coal-fired electricity) and managed to get the click bait-y "ICE is better than EV!".

Completely ignored using renewables in making batteries (tesla gigafactory), and greening of the grid (your EV gets greener over time).
I think these looked interesting when I was thinking about this:

Gasoline vs Electric—Who Wins on Lifetime Global Warming Emissions? We Found Out

Factcheck: How electric vehicles help to tackle climate change

The TL;DR seems to be that even large battery EVs like the M3 LR pay off quickly in many parts of the world. Smaller battery EVs even faster.

 

[SageBrush]

Just like the carbon intensity of the grid, the carbon intensity of EV manufacture is a moving target. The latter mostly happens because mining is becoming more local, and green battery recycling has a pretty clear roadmap. I think it is obvious that EV manufacture will be much less carbon intensive than ICE in the next few years. Today is fairly irrelevant

 

[akenham]

Agreed - I'm happy that even my "today" CO2 is much better than I could achieve with an ICE (and improving all the time).

On top of this, my local air quality impact is much lower which is a big issue in the UK (NOx).

On particulates it's a more mixed bag - typically 1/3 each for tyres, brakes and exhaust for ICE.

The m3 has little brake use and no (local) exhaust** but it is heavy (2200 kg vs 1600 for a similar ICE saloon), so tyre wear particulates are likely to eat up some of that gain

** remote exhaust is also likely good - my area base load is nuclear and wind, but it is a national grid so could include some other sources.

 

[Chuq]

Quite often these comments come from people who don't actually care about environmental impacts - they are just anti-EV for unrelated, often illogical reasons, and they're just looking for any sort of FUD to justify their views. So while there are numerous examples that show the emissions during construction are negligible compared to lifetime operating emissions, the people who put up these arguments aren't going to listen to them.

They're often keen to include the production of electricity in the comparisons for an EV, but not so much the emissions from the drilling, refining and shipping of petroleum products. Or the emissions of powering those oil tankers as they cross oceans.

That's not to say that there aren't improvements which can be made, but they'll be improvements on an already excellent record. Not only do Tesla use 100% renewable energy in their factories, they're also shipping parts between their factories with Tesla Semis, which are built in those factories and powered by the same renewable energy. (Just a small number of Semis now but of course this will increase.) If you follow the chain up, the solar panels on those factories are built at their New York factory which itself is powered by hydroelectricity.

With the talk about Tesla securing their mineral supplies, this may include buying and operating the mines themselves, which (of course) they could do with their own solar and battery storage.