I normally do not get dragged into this discussion as the rights and wrongs are to an extent perspectives and like ‘slicing the pie’ or ‘pie-ing’.
I am not suggesting here anything but as you wondered what I feel about this. This is what I know.
It is common knowledge electric vehicles (EVs) are better for the environment than gas cars, because they are more efficient and don't directly emit harmful gases that warm the planet. However, you have asked a slightly different question which is harder to answer. Say you have a perfectly good gas-powered car that may last several more years. Is it still environmentally friendly to replace it with an EV?
The complicating factor here is that all cars require a lot of energy to build. All the parts have to be made, transported around the world to assembly factories, built, then finally transported to the dealer or customer. Before a car has been driven a single mile, it already has had a substantial environmental impact. And EVs have an even greater environmental impact prior to that first mile because batteries require minerals that take lots of energy to get out of the ground and into usable form.
Indeed, there is generally an assumption in the right-to-repair and sustainability world that using products as long as possible is better for the environment than buying new ones for this exact reason. In most cases, such as with phones and laptops, that assumption is correct, because most of the emissions from such devices occur before customers ever receive them.
While
roughly 10 percent of the life cycle emissions of gas cars comes from manufacturing,
85 percent of the life cycle emissions of, for example, the iPhone 13 come from manufacturing. Nearly all of the emissions produced by gas cars happen on the road. This, combined with how much less EVs emit from day-to-day use relative to their gas counterparts, drastically alters the conventional wisdom.
A quick caveat before we dive into the details:
There are two main variables in deciding whether replacing your used gas car with an EV is better for the environment than not. The first is how many miles you plan to keep driving your gas car for. The more miles you plan to log on it, the more likely it is that buying a new EV is the better option for the environment. The second is how the electricity in your area is produced.
As a very,
very rough rule of thumb and erring on the conservative side, it is probably only better for the environment to keep your used gas car if you think it has less than 50,000 or so miles left in it. If you plan to put more than that on the gas car currently sitting in your driveway, it is almost certainly better for the environment to replace it with an EV.
Source and thanks to Bloomberg NEF and vice.com for the facts related to EV emissions.
