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Burning Gas Pollutes So Much, Dirty EV Battery Manufacturing Evens Out In About 2 Years
(www.jalopnik.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Burning gas is so extremely bad that even throwing away your old ICE car and buying a new electric car is better than driving the ICE car until it „falls apart“. This was the research finding in Switzerland, but this result was so unwelcome that the research got hidden away. https://www.republik.ch/2025/06/11/amtliche-selbstzensur
oh wow I didn't know that!
would make sense to give more a lot incentives for EV buying if so!
I wish they weren’t so expensive though.
IMO the biggest incentive of all is that the battery exists for the life of the vehicle and can be recycled at the end (the lithium inside does not disappear!), vs the gas which is literally burning money away.
They are getting a lot cheaper overall. The EV Bolt is less than $4k more than a Camry. In expensive places like California, or with gas as high as it is, you can quickly make back that additional cost and get ahead over time, especially if you are able to charge from home. And TBH the Bolt isn't that bad of a car, and get's great distance per charge.
That and there's only so much gas, once we burn it all up it'll take millions of years to replenish. Yea, you could say the same about battery materials, but those get reused for what a decade before they start to degrade? And the actual energy is free once we have the means to harvest it (wind, solar etc are all "free" infinite energy so long as we have the panels and turbines)
Umm, AFAIK, we actually can't make more oil, so there isn't going to be any more gas, just work harder to find what's left. We absolutely should be moving to alternative energies to power civilization.
When I say millions of years I mean the plankton and our decomposing bodies will eventually make some oil, but by then our planet will be gone anyways lol. I'm sure human civilization won't make it to see any more oil produced
Pretty sure the conditions on the planet when oil/coal formed were substantially different from today. In particular, there are now various organisms which feed on the decaying matter that's at the start of that process. These organisms eat that matter and emit CO2 as they live and breathe, returning the carbon to the air instead of burying underground.
“Degrade” doesn’t mean “dead”. Once a battery pack has lost sufficient capacity to run your car, it will still have a ton of capacity for other applications. If you’re setting up some grid-scale battery storage, if you can get used packs cheaply enough why would you care that they only hold 70% of a charge? If you can buy two (or more) for the price of a single new battery pack you’re coming out way, way ahead.
And even if you then run those until they only hold 20% charge, it’s likely not all of the individual pack cells are evenly holding charge — some are likely going to be much better than others. So you can remove the “better” cells and reuse those in other applications. At once point in Japan Nissan was selling home power packs from reclaimed Leaf cells from “dead” battery packs.
It’s only once the cells get so bad they can’t be used anymore that you have to worry about recycling them. At that point recycling will likely become a closed loop (as it is with lead for lead acid batteries) — you no longer have to mine more lithium, as the cheapest source of lithium will be from dead cells.
We will eventually get to a virtuous cycle with these cells, but it’s going to take quite a while. Most of the EV cells manufactured to date are still in cars on the road. I wouldn’t expect to see significant recycling until maybe 2035 or 2040 at the current rate.
Everytime you bring it up, you get a whole lot of people with gasoline powered cars getting very angry. Sure batteries are not 'perfect', but they are a whole lot better in almost every way compared to gasoline powered vehicles.
The anger is less about how bad EV's are and more about being expected to buy a hilariously expensive EV when someone has a perfectly functional car. Make them cheaper and people will buy them, because other than the environmental aspect EV's just require less maintenance overall, making them cheaper to run.
I’d rather spend $100k converting an old ICE car to electric than give the auto industry another dime. The surveillance crap is literally a life or death decision for me. I have a 20y/o ice car I’ll likely have to convert, so no one try your dumb “new car math” with me.
If any fuckers want to make what I’m doing illegal, people will die.
Yes THERE is the issue that everyone seems to forget about new cars. I have a project car that I'm thinking will become an EV when it needs an engine because it will be so much easier to deal with. And it won't call home to the feds every day.
Old muscle cars converted to EV I think are so cool. There was a show that converted an old K10 truck and hid the batteries in the bed tool box.
A 80s station wagon, a Country Squire, or 70s luxury cruiser like a Cadillac or Lincoln would be awesome.
EVs, or just newer cars in general, are just so boring and cramped. Not to mention all the connection and surveillance concerns.
Boring, cramped, and almost impossible to see out of.
I think Ford straight-up sells an electric motor swap that will fit right in their older cars.
I have a weird little 4x4 that would be amazing if it were electric. I wouldn't have to worry about getting in a situation where the engine is tilted too much and it's simultaneously starving for fuel and oil.
I'd also like to know why Harley acted so ashamed of the Livewire. Probably one of the coolest things they've done up to the Pan America.
They are only hilariously expensive because ICE manufacturers are lobbying to keep Chinese EVs out of your country...
As an American who would really like a small truck, I know that. :-(
the climate, oil industry did not like it was being contradicted.
But most people wouldn’t send their old car to the scrap heap, they would sell it on the secondary market to someone else (or a dealer, who would auction it into the secondary market). The old car would then continue to burn gas for likely many more years, until it “falls apart” anyway.
Stepping back, your old car may be the first in a chain of older (or more falling-apart) vehicles getting traded out, all the way down to one that really does get fully retired, or replacing one that was totaled in a collision. So choosing to keep it deprives someone else of its availability and thereby drives up used prices slightly.
For any study of this type of net effect, the authors need to pick a boundary for what gets considered. How many secondary market transactions do you study in that replacement chain, and what do those buyers substitute when the original ICE vehicle is not replaced with an EV? How far do you go in the pollution and other supply chain effects of manufacturing a new vehicle? I didn’t read a machine translation of your Swiss link, so I don’t know where the study authors drew the bounds, but I suspect it’s easy to choose and defend framing that supports either conclusion.
In my personal calculation, I can only see one step down the used chain, wherein my old vehicle would continue to be driven by someone else, so replacing it with an EV wouldn’t make a substantial difference. I love my old car with no surveillance, so I’m in no hurry to switch even though I’ll presumably buy an EV eventually.
Ultimately this is just one more example that that’s no ethical consumption within capitalism.