Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
It’s important to ask these questions about EVs’ hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered “exhaustively” — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas.
Aside from heating or cooling the occupants, that is.
Yeah, compare 500w heating to 30kw starts. But it does matter if you’re gonna be there eternally for 8 hours or something. Heating is inefficient when you’re not doing something else with the water before hand.
Somehow instead of having a GPS app tracking traffic to top off the batteries before you get there, I much rather have an app try to convince me to park my car, take a bus and try again tomorrow.