this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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In countries that generate almost all of their electricity from renewables, they are better tbh. Although more environmentally damaging to produce.
Its always more costly and less efficient to produce new things in smaller quantity than large numbers. So electric car manufacturers at this point in time costs more to produce from an environment perspective. As the number of electric cars go up, my understanding is that this will compare to fossil fuel car production.
Imo you cannot compare these two as its impossible to be as efficient as a large scale manufacturer until you become one yourself.
It has nothing to do with quantity.
Electric cars have batteries that need cobalt and other stuff that is hard to get which a normal gas car would never need.
At the moment they do with the Lithium batteries but better and cheaper batteries are already on the market that have solved that rare minerals problem. Sodium ion batteries have most of the capacity by weight of Lithium type batteries, but they do not require any of the rare minerals, in fact they can be made with minerals that are cheap and abundant in the USA. They are also non-flammable, much safer than lithium.
Fossil fuel cars do use cobalt though, significantly less though. But they also need fossil fuels which are hard to come by (in an environmentally friendly way.