this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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A very long time. On the order of multiple decades, IIRC. Realistically, keeping an old ICE vehicle in proper running order beats the carbon footprint of purchasing a new EV.
My daily driver is a '98, I keep it running without codes in efficient closed loop and keep up on all the maintenance.
Now, the classic Ranger to electric conversion I want to do, not sure what the footprint is.
Not true. It also very much depends on where your power comes from (coal/sun).
Skimmed that article. If I'm reading it right, it's 100k miles for a NEW EV to match the carbon footprint of a NEW ICE. That larger footprint is due to the batteries and rare earth/copper.
I.E. this doesn't account for the carbon footprint of making a entirely new car vs keeping an old one running well.
Any car’s carbon footprint is very much about the fuel, that will be much greater impact than the production of the vehicle itself. That’s why coal powered electricity is around the same as fossil fuels. Look at the graphs in the article.
I don't think you understand the scale of the carbon footprint of manufacturing a new car. The footprint of all those raw materials. The majority of the materials are virgin and not recycled for new cars.
I'll look again if you say it's there, but that article is comparing the costs of new EV to new ICE. It does not show new EV to used ICE.
When talking about individual carbon footprints vs industrial footprints you get some counterintuitive effects. Recylcing often has a larger footprint than virgin and costs more, most corporations only pay lip service to recycling as it is more expensive. That being said, even with virgin materials, the footprint of manufacturing dwarfs the fuel usage footprint for decades when talking about vehicles. Especially if the vehicle is relatively efficient and the annual mileage is low.
Think about it this way, with a large margin of error, you can directly covert the cost of a new vehicle into carbon. Say $30k of carbon. Every step of the process from mining the ore to make the alloy to the carbon produced by workers driving to work. How many years does it take to burn $30k of carbon in fuel?
The person that purchases a new EV every few years has a larger footprint than the person that drives the same old ICE the entire time. The footprint disparity is also increased the lower the ICE driver's milage.
The article does compare two new cars, but it’s not hard to see that if your ICE don’t have a start “price” (your well maintained ICE), then the EV will have to drive two years on hydro based power, about three years if it’s mixed power (green + fossil), and 13-15 years if pure coal power.
The success of EV (lower carbon emissions) highly spends on green power.
Part of the problem is deliberate Planned Obselecence as an industrial manufacturing strategy. Cars - particularly American cars - begin to fail after ten to fifteen years. Finding parts becomes more difficult over time, finding skilled mechanics even more so, and risks of accident (particularly on highways with speeds exceeding 55mph) lead to cars getting totaled before they've been fully exhausted.
I'll spot you that simply yanking new ICE cars off the road and replacing them with electrics is wasteful. But when you're talking about a ten year old vehicle, the math for those next ten years gets fuzzier as the risks inherent in ownership rise.
Incidentally, this is why mass transit improvements are an overall better play. Swapping old cars for new is never going to be as efficient as swapping cars for buses and trains, which are maintained as a fleet rather than as an oddball assortment of flavor-of-the-month private vehicles.
No doubt. Most people don't have the skill or desire to keep 27 year old vehicles running at good efficiency. It's also common to start adding performance parts or disabling the emissions tech, which is even worse.
I'm on my fourth vehicle lifetime, including the one I lost in a flood. Been drving for over three decades. Figure that I'm actually pretty far down on emissions as so much pollution is tied to the original manufacturing.
There's that whole reduce and reuse thing everyone forgets about and jumps right to recycle.
The proper comparison here is replacing used ICE with used EV. As battery tech and manufacturers get better, new ICE should have a heavy tax that disincentivises private purchase and ultimately bans them except for edge cases. Keep a collector class with a small maximum mileage and other restrictions.
Those figures also assume all virgin materials for batteries. The reality is that as more batteries are built, they will reach a critical point where battery recycling is a major source of elements for new batteries. We're only just now coming to that point where there are 10+ year old EVs out there that have batteries that need to be recycled.
Also those studies all look at the super inefficient 3rd world exploitation of minerals and labor to get lithium. There are new techniques being developed out in the Salton Sea (desert in southern california) that extract lithium from ground water pumped in a closed loop. The expectation is that production technique alone will be enough for the entirety of the next few decades of American need. And that's a far, far more efficient technique.
No doubt. I'm not anti electric vehicle or anything. Common sense says mass transit, robotic taxis/communal cars with low private ownership and all of it electric would be the ideal end goal.
You can easily make the argument that you should buy used electric when your current vehicle repair cost is beyond the value of it.
Thanks for the source.
you carry oxidizer?
Closed loop in the ECU, i.e. check engine light is off. That means it's reading the O2 sensors, including post-cat, and adjusting fuel injection for efficienct burn.
That efficiency gets you better gas milage, better acceleration, and lowered emissions.