408
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
408 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
85600 readers
3441 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
the climate, oil industry did not like it was being contradicted.
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.
Even in the US, there are now a handful of EVs that are price competitive. For example I believe Equinox EV is similar price to Equinox ICE
But I don't want the EV equivalent of an Equinox, I want the EV equivalent of a base model Corolla.
Chevy Bolt? I don’t know anything about it and didn’t bring it up since there’s no direct comparison to highlight price competitiveness. However it’s a reasonably priced vehicle marketed as a value for basic transportation.
But yeah everyone wanted to follow the Tesla model of starting out with expensive models serving a small niche. That worked for Tesla when there was no market, but you can’t expect to copy the approach that established the market when you’re trying to break into an existing market. Legacy manufacturers were stupid for trying so of course never reached the scale for profitability. But then they gave up before pivoting to affordable vehicles, and politics broke everything …… we know there are plenty of affordable value-priced EVs in the world, just not in the US due to politics and legacy inertia.
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. :-(
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.
WARNING: PUI
I rode a Livewire on a demo day, and it was amazing. I'd never operated an electric vehicle other than a forklift before I rode that bike, I was ready for the lack of clutch but I wasn't ready for how fast it jumped when I first hit the "gas".
But then I saw the price tag. $15,000 would have been a bit too much, but it's a Harley. $10,000 I would have bought it. But they wanted $30,000 for it. That's CVO money for a short commuter or bar hopper.
The pan-am is a cool bike for sure, I sat on one the day I bought my Nightster and it was ~8k more, but I really considered the financial gymnastics because I would have loved it. I tried a sportster S, which has a de-tuned version of the pan-am engine. It was really quick but the seating position wasn't for me. The Nightster has mid controls and is very lightweight. It's a lot easier to ride long distances, but the Pan Am would probably be more comfortable.
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.
Socialize losses, privatize gains. I don't want my tax money incentivizing some rich asshole to buy an EV. Nobody that needs help buying a car can even consider an EV, their too expensive. The cheapest ev u can buy in USA is 30k, the cheapest ICE is 22k. And people that need help buying cars can't afford either. Only middle class + people are buying these things, and they don't need poor people's tax money to subsidize their purchase from a private corp. I'm all for evs but let's be honest the people buying them DONT need help buying them. Id rather see my tax money go toward renewable infrastructure or research on batteries and such! We can't keep relying on the private industry to fund research, in technology or in medicine or any science imo. But that's just my angry fist wagging opinion as somebody who refuses to spend more than 3k on a car because I'm not made of money. I'm not exactly poor, I'm a home owner under 30 and make around 60-70k a year depending on OT and bonuses. But if I went and got a loan on a Chevy bolt for 30k I would not be able to make my mortgage payments even with subsidies, so why should somebody who makes more get help buying a new car? Horseshit
There’s more reason to incentives than to “help people who can’t afford new”
EVs are inevitable, but we need to be encouraging a faster transition for environmental reasons. But the incentives were at least as much about trying to save legacy manufacturers as they were about encouraging consumers down that path.
Note that as soon as the US stopped incentives, legacy manufacturers withdrew from the EV market. Some were just reaching price parity, such as Chevy Equinox, but the few remaining choices will never have the volume to be profitable. Now they’re heavily protected, at the cost of less choice and much higher prices for all Americans, but that can’t last forever and they appear to be digging their own graves
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.
The authors discuss this exact question as well and they agree it’s difficult where to draw the line. Usually however your used car will in most cases replace another used car that is even more inefficient. In the end you cannot control what other people do only what you do and if you want to make the most climate friendly decision then ditching the ICE car is the right decision.