Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Research claims battery-electric cars are greener than expected

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Brent, I followed the link to the original article at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es903729a

The main finding of this study is that the impact of a Li-ion battery used in BEVs for transport service is relatively small. In contrast, it is the operation phase that remains the dominant contributor to the environmental burden caused by transport service as long as the electricity for the BEV is not produced by renewable hydropower.

So, yes, I think they're in agreement.

As far as I can tell the research was carried out on a petrol gasoline car rather than Diesel so I think, all bets are off wrt the diesel headline.
 
Aren't the reports making the same claim? That is, they both seem to be saying that the greeness of electric cars depends largely on how the electricity is generated, and that batteries don't factor much into the equation.

Yes, they are. The numbers are peculiarly similar.

The Register chooses to read the report as negative for electric cars, while it is in fact very positive.

For a diesel car to have any chance of beating an electric, it will have to be small, underpowered, and never be even close to a traffic jam. No cold starts, please. Also, the electric car must get its power from "european mix", which includes a lot of coal.

They also assume that heating/cooling/electronic devices consume 17% of the battery capacity, a whopping 2.9kWh/100km. Electronic devices can safely be ignored, so they assume resistive heating. Switching to a heat pump would immediately blow the ICE away.
 
Last edited:
Brent, I followed the link to the original article at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es903729a

As far as I can tell the research was carried out on a petrol gasoline car rather than Diesel so I think, all bets are off wrt the diesel headline.

They state that to achieve break-even with an electric car charged with european power mix, an ICE would need to consume 3.9 liters of fuel of unspecified type per 100km according to one life cycle impact assessment method (CED), or 2.6 liters according to another (EI99 H/A). Then they point out that consumption in this range is achieved by some small diesel cars. What they don't mention is that real-life fuel consumption will always be higher than this unless you live in the countryside and always use an engine block heater in the winter.
 
Last edited:
They state that to achieve break-even with an electric car charged with european power mix, an ICE would need to consume 3.9 liters of fuel of unspecified type per 100km according to one life cycle impact assessment method (CED), or 2.6 liters according to another (EI99 H/A). Then they point out that consumption in this range is achieved by some small diesel cars. What they don't mention is that real-life fuel consumption will always be higher than this unless you live in the countryside and always use an engine block heater in the winter.

That's not the main problem. The main problem is the diesel fans always like to use their MOST efficient diesel cars to compare to the baseline average of different technologies. They do the same to hybrids. They always bring up a car like the Polo to compare to the Prius, when the Prius is both significantly larger and more powerful. It isn't a fair comparison unless they compare similar cars.
 
Last edited: