I've heard that argument long ago pushed by totally-not-oil-industry-marketers. If I recall correctly math worked out as 'pays for itself in three to five years'. If you are of the practice of getting a new car every two years it wouldn't help, but if you are doing so already just keeping your cars until they die/it becomes more expensive to repair would be the easy environmental improvement that would also save money.
Yep, at least using numbers from an LLM, the break even emission standpoint seems to be about 3-4 years.
For people who use leases to get a new car (average lease is 36 months) they’d be doing more harm to the environment, but for people who hold onto their cars longer, they’d be reducing CO2e.
Those are just rough generalizations, and of course it depends on driving distance, grid emissions, etc. For example, if you get your electricity primarily from coal, the break even is closer to 12 years. But as others have said, the EV market tends towards the type of people who don’t hold on to cars very long.
>expensive to repair would be the easy environmental improvement that would also save money.
This line of thinking seems to miss the financial reality of the vast majority of Americans. Most people aren’t choosing between an $1800 repair vs a $50k new EV for environmental reasons, it’s because they can only afford one of those options.
