LogFAQs > #972582682

Treating personal vehicles as the default mode of transportation isn't sustainable in general, regardless of what sort of fuel you're using. Still, EVs offer improvements in sustainability and environmental health over ICE vehicles (which also aren't sustainable), so until a sizable portion of the world pulls its collective head out of its collective car-humping ass and starts designing cities with a modicum of common sense, finding ways to get more EVs on the road is better than not. Other beneficial ideas include closing the emissions loopholes that have led to car manufacturers pushing large trucks and SUVs over smaller cars to cut down on the number of ridiculously oversized vehicles on the road, since that makes everything vastly more dangerous for everyone, damages roads, and requires more fuel than smaller vehicles (making it that much harder to make a viable EV with that design).

RedHawk4 posted...

There isn't enough electricity in power grids to support a widespread increase in use of EVs.

There's always room to increase electrical production, especially considering that more EVs means less demand for gas and makes it cheaper to run a gas-powered plant (which isn't ideal, but burning gas in a power plant and using that to power a car is more efficient than burning the gas directly in the car). This concern is also generally base don the assumption that everyone will charge their cars simultaneously, when in reality charging tends to be staggered enough that girds have no particular difficulty keeping up. Problems exist, certainly, but they're not insurmountable.

RedHawk4 posted...

The facilities that manufacture EVs also operate on coal power.

As opposed to ICE vehicle factories being powered by unicorn farts? That's a problem with all vehicle factories, not just EVs.

There's a common thread among anti-environmentalism arguments that anything less than a perfect 100% solution to a problem isn't worth trying and we should just stick to the status quo of accepting that problem. That really doesn't make much sense. Can every single ICE car be replaced overnight by an electric car that produces zero emissions of any sort over its entire lifetime? Of course not. That doesn't mean, however, that replacing some ICE cars with electric cars that produce fewer total emissions won't have a beneficial effect.