I specifically mentioned sunk cost because it can be fallacious. I was aiming to get ahead of that. Not every sunk cost is fallacious, and that’s why I went into depth about sunk costs vs opportunity costs.
And again, on an INDIVIDUAL level I agree with you. Individuals don’t have that kind of impact on demand as something like a ban of ICE engines, or broad adoption of them to the point of masses of people looking to buy at the same time does.
Individually, buy one as soon as it makes financial sense for you, ideally when you’d be buying a car anyway.
Systemically, buy one when your car dies, keep your running machine for as long as possible.
Specifically the opportunity costs I’m referring to are manufacturing related. Right now, producing EVs is more costly than producing ICE cars, in terms of carbon footprint. If too many people adopt too quickly, it results in more being produced while the manufacturing process is still shitty.
There’s a problem with the “pass down the cars” thing too. At the end of that chain is still a car being decommissioned. If it’s still usable, that’s a higher net carbon footprint. A new EV still had to be produced for that chain of used car sales to go through.
You’ll really have me show you with maths that it doesn’t work the way you think, will you?
Go for it, or link me to where you did before. All I’m seeing is the math working in certain individual cases, not broadly at least not yet, and at best moving the emissions 2 or 3 steps down a chain of emissions.
There will be a time when, broadly speaking, it’s best to just nuke your car and get an EV. That time is not there yet. It’s probably when the manufacturing emissions are roughly equal to those of ICE cars, and/or when there’s more renewable energy than coal. Please, though, show me math.
5.6 tons of CO2 to produce a gas car, 8.8 tons of CO2 to produce an electric car.
We’ll use 10k km/year as a baseline (with is way less than average)
Three Toyota Corolla, 2010, 2015, 2020
They release 1.8, 1.7, 1.6 tons of CO2 a year respectively driving 10k km (fueleconomy.gov)
The EV is a 2024 Toyota bZ4X (what a stupid name) and it releases zero CO2 a year to drive 10k km
So we’re in 2024, the emissions from the gas cars so far are:
2010 > 5.6 + (1.8 x 14) = 30.8 tons
2015 > 5.6 + (1.7 x 9) = 20.9 tons
2020 > 5.6 + (1.6 x 4) = 12 tons
Total: 63.7 tons
So we can already see that the 2020 has released enough CO2 in 4 years to beat an EV.
Let’s say we add another 5 years to each cars… We’re now at 39.8, 29.4, 20 tons respectively for a total of 89.2 tons
Now, what’s the impact in 5 years if we take the 2010 off the road and introduce a 2024 EV instead? Scraping the 2010 releases CO2, it’s evaluated at half the production so 2.8 tons. So our new numbers are:
33.6, 29.4, 20 and 8.8 for the EV for a total of 91.8
After five years with the 2010 off the road we’re at 91.8 - 89.2 = 2.6 tons extra so two years from being carbon negative compared to never changing the 2010 for an EV.
Two more years of gas car: 89.2 + (2 x 1.8) + (2 x 1.7) + (2 x 1.6) = 99.4 tons
What’s the portrait in two more years if we had scraped the 2010 in 2029 instead?
89.2 + (2x1.7) + (2x1.6) + 8.8 = 104.6 tons
By switching in 2024?
91.8 + (2x1.7) + (2x1.6) = 98.4 tons
By scraping the 2010 in 2024 we saved 6.2 tons of CO2 in 2031(equivalent to 3.4 years of driving the 2010) compared to doing it in 2029.
If we didn’t scrap it at all and didn’t introduce an EV to replace it, we would be at + 1 ton in 2031 and it would keep increasing the longer we keep the 2010 on the road.
Keep in mind that that’s with less than half the annual average mileage in the USA (14k miles/22.4k km) AND it doesn’t take maintenance into consideration and gas cars need more of it and it pollutes more (lots of oil) so the real difference is even greater!
