I’ve seen strong arguments that Hybrid or PHEV are better for the environment.
Full EV is a waste of batteries, and batteries are incredibly dirty to manufacture in practice. Hybrid is like 30%+ reduction in oil/gasoline, while PHEV can be 50% to 80% reduction (depending on driving habits / conditions), despite only using a small fraction of the dirty Li-ion batteries.
EVs are of course 100% reduction in gasoline. But the battery question and how much you need to factor in all the acid that was poured into mountains to gather that Lithium… or the children who gather Cobalt, (etc. etc.) for the rare-elements needed to build a Li-ion battery. I know Toyota is working on Solid State Silicon Batteries (ie: primarily based with Sand as a chemical composition), so future tech will change this debate dramatically.
Many PHEVs qualify for the $7500 Federal subsidy as well. My expectation is that PHEV is the best for environment, for government, and for people ($7500 off, still cheaper than full-electric cars, etc. etc).
I think this is a short sighted take. The current batteries being produced will be useful for decades, even if they don’t support the full duty cycle for cars during that lifetime. If they degrade to being only able to charge/discharge to 70% of original duty cycle, they can be used for home solar systems in that state for decades. I fully expect this business model of repurposing degraded batteries to emerge as significant numbers of battery electric cars end useful life in a decade or so.
In the meantime, there will be alternative battery chemistry options that will become commercially viable and will continue to improve. A car based on sodium batteries launches in early 2024. It’s not as good a range / capacity as lithium chemistry, but that’s not going to be the case forever. Battery chemistry will continue to improve rapidly, there’s lots of competition in the space and good incentives to drive research.
Also, charging infrastructure continues to improve, battery charge times improve, battery only vehicles becomes a feasible option for more people, utilities introduce time of use plans to incentivize off-hours charging, etc.
I’ll naturally change my argument as new tech comes into play. I’m simply talking about today’s Li-ion cells and based on industry changes.
Today, only an estimated 1% to 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Yes, recycling technology is ramping up, but it doesn’t exist yet in any practical scale. We’re basically throwing away 95% of all that filth into our landfills and wasting the metal.
The current batteries being produced will be useful for decades
These Li-ion cells are only designed for a few thousand recharge/discharge cycles. You can somewhat hamper this degeneration process by building larger batteries and spreading the recharge/discharge among more cells, but on a cell-per-cell basis, the amount of recharge/discharge cycles is basically fixed and predictable. From an evironmental point of view, the optimization is to minimize the use of cells (IE: Hybrids or PHEVs), rather than building larger vehicles and wasting the batteries even further.
But give me one Li-ion cell, and charge / discharge it 3000 times or so (or whatever its endurance is), and it will be worn out and near worthless by the end of that. (Below specs on power, storage, etc. etc.). That’s just how they work chemically, the process isn’t purely reversable. The internal chemicals get mixed up and degrade after every use. They innately have a limited lifespan.
When technology changes, I’ll talk about that. My biggest hope is not the Sodium Batteries, but Toyota’s Silicon / Solid State Batteries. (Aka: built out of Sand). The Lithium still exists (its really a Silicon/Lithium battery), but at least the Cobalt and other dirty chemicals in the anode have been removed.
These Li-ion cells are only designed for a few thousand recharge/discharge cycles.
And if a pack gives you 300 miles of range, 2,000 charge cycles equates to 600,000 miles driven off a single pack. Compare that to a standard engine and transmission with a lifespan of 150,000-300,000 miles (depending on manufacturer) and the difference is clear.
One of these things is not like the other from an environmental point of view. Multiple car engines, transmissions (etc. etc.) can be built, rebuilt, and recycled through our recycling process. Every Li-ion cell made for these EVs? I don’t think so. Li-ion recycling infrastructure today is incredibly shit. So yes, I’ll focus very much upon the mostly unrecyclable batteries and the colossal amounts of waste involved in the Li-ion chemistries.
Why do you think the current state of things today is indicative of how things will be tomorrow? Recycling lithium out of EV packs is still limited because the market is brand new. You say 90% of steel is recycled from cars but what percentage was recycled back in 1920 or 1930 when that market was just as fresh as the current EV market?
What about all the oil used to fuel these ICE engines? How much of that gets recycled? 600,000 miles at a conservative 30MPG equates to 20,000 gallons of gasoline saved from being burned up into nothing. How many Gulf oil spills or Exxon Valdez does that prevent?
Why do you think the current state of things today is indicative of how things will be tomorrow?
Mostly because constructing recycling plants is a multi-year endeavor. Unless you are aware of any Li-ion recycling plants that are opening up tomorrow, your argument is dead.
Contact me when those recycling plants are built. Oh, and spoiler alert, I’ve been following the news on that. It turns out Li-ion recycling is a very difficult chemical problem that all the researchers are having trouble with. As it turns out, the chemical composition of Li-poly vs LFP vs Li-cobalt leads to seriously complex contamination issues. Large scale recycling of Li-ion is a fantasy right now, and will continue to be a fantasy for the near future (~next 5 years or so), as these crazy difficult research problems come up. And the invention of alternative chemistries (ex: Silicon-Lithium batteries, like the type Toyota plans to produce in 2025) will only make the recycling problem harder, not easier. There’s too much chemical diversity and contamination going on.
In contrast, Steel is steel. You melt it down and bam, its ready to be reused. No worried about the Cobalt being separated out for Cobalt-Lithium batteries, or for LFP batteries to be recycled into Li + Iron, or for Li-Poly batteries to be turned back into other chemistries. Its not even clear what kind of large-scale process we need to do to separate the crazy mix of chemicals that makes up a modern EV Battery.
I do await the day when EV Battery recycling is solved. But there’s a chance we need to wait for a future chemistry (ie: something easier to recycle) before any of this crap works out. There’s some very difficult chemical questions needed to be solved before Li-ion can be recycled in a way that is profitable (like Steel or Aluminum or other materials are easily recycled).
Hybrids also last longer than EVs. And it’s not even close:
As per the results, on average, EVs are 79% less reliable than ICE-powered vehicles - despite having fewer moving parts and simpler drivetrains. The results also show that plug-in hybrids fare even worse and are 146% more problematic compared to conventional ICE models. However, traditional hybrids were ranked the best - producing 26% fewer problems than even ICE models.
How am I going to justify the purchase of an EV if these gas prices keep falling? 😅
Still better for the environment if you go EV!
Well I did buy one already. And I can afford it. But I love seeing those higher gas savings numbers.
I’ve seen strong arguments that Hybrid or PHEV are better for the environment.
Full EV is a waste of batteries, and batteries are incredibly dirty to manufacture in practice. Hybrid is like 30%+ reduction in oil/gasoline, while PHEV can be 50% to 80% reduction (depending on driving habits / conditions), despite only using a small fraction of the dirty Li-ion batteries.
EVs are of course 100% reduction in gasoline. But the battery question and how much you need to factor in all the acid that was poured into mountains to gather that Lithium… or the children who gather Cobalt, (etc. etc.) for the rare-elements needed to build a Li-ion battery. I know Toyota is working on Solid State Silicon Batteries (ie: primarily based with Sand as a chemical composition), so future tech will change this debate dramatically.
Many PHEVs qualify for the $7500 Federal subsidy as well. My expectation is that PHEV is the best for environment, for government, and for people ($7500 off, still cheaper than full-electric cars, etc. etc).
I think this is a short sighted take. The current batteries being produced will be useful for decades, even if they don’t support the full duty cycle for cars during that lifetime. If they degrade to being only able to charge/discharge to 70% of original duty cycle, they can be used for home solar systems in that state for decades. I fully expect this business model of repurposing degraded batteries to emerge as significant numbers of battery electric cars end useful life in a decade or so.
In the meantime, there will be alternative battery chemistry options that will become commercially viable and will continue to improve. A car based on sodium batteries launches in early 2024. It’s not as good a range / capacity as lithium chemistry, but that’s not going to be the case forever. Battery chemistry will continue to improve rapidly, there’s lots of competition in the space and good incentives to drive research.
Also, charging infrastructure continues to improve, battery charge times improve, battery only vehicles becomes a feasible option for more people, utilities introduce time of use plans to incentivize off-hours charging, etc.
I’ll naturally change my argument as new tech comes into play. I’m simply talking about today’s Li-ion cells and based on industry changes.
Today, only an estimated 1% to 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Yes, recycling technology is ramping up, but it doesn’t exist yet in any practical scale. We’re basically throwing away 95% of all that filth into our landfills and wasting the metal.
These Li-ion cells are only designed for a few thousand recharge/discharge cycles. You can somewhat hamper this degeneration process by building larger batteries and spreading the recharge/discharge among more cells, but on a cell-per-cell basis, the amount of recharge/discharge cycles is basically fixed and predictable. From an evironmental point of view, the optimization is to minimize the use of cells (IE: Hybrids or PHEVs), rather than building larger vehicles and wasting the batteries even further.
But give me one Li-ion cell, and charge / discharge it 3000 times or so (or whatever its endurance is), and it will be worn out and near worthless by the end of that. (Below specs on power, storage, etc. etc.). That’s just how they work chemically, the process isn’t purely reversable. The internal chemicals get mixed up and degrade after every use. They innately have a limited lifespan.
When technology changes, I’ll talk about that. My biggest hope is not the Sodium Batteries, but Toyota’s Silicon / Solid State Batteries. (Aka: built out of Sand). The Lithium still exists (its really a Silicon/Lithium battery), but at least the Cobalt and other dirty chemicals in the anode have been removed.
And if a pack gives you 300 miles of range, 2,000 charge cycles equates to 600,000 miles driven off a single pack. Compare that to a standard engine and transmission with a lifespan of 150,000-300,000 miles (depending on manufacturer) and the difference is clear.
90% of steel from cars is recycled.
Less than 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled.
One of these things is not like the other from an environmental point of view. Multiple car engines, transmissions (etc. etc.) can be built, rebuilt, and recycled through our recycling process. Every Li-ion cell made for these EVs? I don’t think so. Li-ion recycling infrastructure today is incredibly shit. So yes, I’ll focus very much upon the mostly unrecyclable batteries and the colossal amounts of waste involved in the Li-ion chemistries.
Why do you think the current state of things today is indicative of how things will be tomorrow? Recycling lithium out of EV packs is still limited because the market is brand new. You say 90% of steel is recycled from cars but what percentage was recycled back in 1920 or 1930 when that market was just as fresh as the current EV market?
What about all the oil used to fuel these ICE engines? How much of that gets recycled? 600,000 miles at a conservative 30MPG equates to 20,000 gallons of gasoline saved from being burned up into nothing. How many Gulf oil spills or Exxon Valdez does that prevent?
Mostly because constructing recycling plants is a multi-year endeavor. Unless you are aware of any Li-ion recycling plants that are opening up tomorrow, your argument is dead.
Contact me when those recycling plants are built. Oh, and spoiler alert, I’ve been following the news on that. It turns out Li-ion recycling is a very difficult chemical problem that all the researchers are having trouble with. As it turns out, the chemical composition of Li-poly vs LFP vs Li-cobalt leads to seriously complex contamination issues. Large scale recycling of Li-ion is a fantasy right now, and will continue to be a fantasy for the near future (~next 5 years or so), as these crazy difficult research problems come up. And the invention of alternative chemistries (ex: Silicon-Lithium batteries, like the type Toyota plans to produce in 2025) will only make the recycling problem harder, not easier. There’s too much chemical diversity and contamination going on.
In contrast, Steel is steel. You melt it down and bam, its ready to be reused. No worried about the Cobalt being separated out for Cobalt-Lithium batteries, or for LFP batteries to be recycled into Li + Iron, or for Li-Poly batteries to be turned back into other chemistries. Its not even clear what kind of large-scale process we need to do to separate the crazy mix of chemicals that makes up a modern EV Battery.
I do await the day when EV Battery recycling is solved. But there’s a chance we need to wait for a future chemistry (ie: something easier to recycle) before any of this crap works out. There’s some very difficult chemical questions needed to be solved before Li-ion can be recycled in a way that is profitable (like Steel or Aluminum or other materials are easily recycled).
Hybrids also last longer than EVs. And it’s not even close:
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-satisfaction/electric-vehicles-are-less-reliable-than-conventional-cars-a1047214174/
Call me selfish, but I like really expensive purchase to last as long as possible.