The encounter between a Rivian driver and uninformed Tesla owner highlights 'a need for better education and communication within the EV community,' the Rivian driver says.
The problem with all of these analyses is nobody can agree where to draw the system boundaries. I prefer to draw very large system boundaries (societal level), e.g. your car will enter the secondary market when you sell it and someone else will typically drive it somewhere approaching the end of useful life. So to me, any ICE (or EV) has sort of a “fixed” carbon cost consisting of production, fueling, maintenance, etc. over its lifetime. At this point, what matters is that as many new new cars as posible are EV so that they can enter the secondary market and replace the fleet. Amortizing or sunk cost fallacying the use of ICE doesn’t make sense because reality doesn’t care about amortization, it just counts the carbon dioxide ppm in the atmosphere as it occurs. The secondary and tertiary markets are driven by economics, so we need a combination of (a) wealthy people eating the depreciation as soon as possible and (b) much cheaper new EVs. Our goal should be to eliminate the production of ICE. Applying to an individual level, if you sell your older ICE truck to someone that was about to buy a new gas F150, and you buy an EV, that’s a win and you shouldn’t do some weird math that results in you burning a bunch of gasoline to get to some amortized level for that vehicle before moving on.
I live in Ireland where the NCT (state inspection equivalent) is so fucking stringent that people talk to me about my car all the time and its just over 20 years old. cars get NCT’d off the road here all the time, and you cant sell it here without the NCT. Once it finally fails, someone who knows what they’re looking at will probably ship it to Hungary or something, so there’s the cost of that, but your market idea has to be global for that to make sense, but something tells me your idea of the system is everywhere the atmosphere is, so
That makes sense. My understanding is that it’s quite common for cars to end up in poorer countries as they age, so that all checks out. The point is on average, cars get used, so we want to prevent the worst ones from being made moving forward (ICE). And yes, to me the system is the atmosphere since I’m primarily concerned with an overabundance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The problem with all of these analyses is nobody can agree where to draw the system boundaries. I prefer to draw very large system boundaries (societal level), e.g. your car will enter the secondary market when you sell it and someone else will typically drive it somewhere approaching the end of useful life. So to me, any ICE (or EV) has sort of a “fixed” carbon cost consisting of production, fueling, maintenance, etc. over its lifetime. At this point, what matters is that as many new new cars as posible are EV so that they can enter the secondary market and replace the fleet. Amortizing or sunk cost fallacying the use of ICE doesn’t make sense because reality doesn’t care about amortization, it just counts the carbon dioxide ppm in the atmosphere as it occurs. The secondary and tertiary markets are driven by economics, so we need a combination of (a) wealthy people eating the depreciation as soon as possible and (b) much cheaper new EVs. Our goal should be to eliminate the production of ICE. Applying to an individual level, if you sell your older ICE truck to someone that was about to buy a new gas F150, and you buy an EV, that’s a win and you shouldn’t do some weird math that results in you burning a bunch of gasoline to get to some amortized level for that vehicle before moving on.
thats all valid.
I live in Ireland where the NCT (state inspection equivalent) is so fucking stringent that people talk to me about my car all the time and its just over 20 years old. cars get NCT’d off the road here all the time, and you cant sell it here without the NCT. Once it finally fails, someone who knows what they’re looking at will probably ship it to Hungary or something, so there’s the cost of that, but your market idea has to be global for that to make sense, but something tells me your idea of the system is everywhere the atmosphere is, so
That makes sense. My understanding is that it’s quite common for cars to end up in poorer countries as they age, so that all checks out. The point is on average, cars get used, so we want to prevent the worst ones from being made moving forward (ICE). And yes, to me the system is the atmosphere since I’m primarily concerned with an overabundance of CO2 in the atmosphere.