this doesn’t account for the carbon footprint of making a entirely new car vs keeping an old one running well.
Part of the problem is deliberate Planned Obselecence as an industrial manufacturing strategy. Cars - particularly American cars - begin to fail after ten to fifteen years. Finding parts becomes more difficult over time, finding skilled mechanics even more so, and risks of accident (particularly on highways with speeds exceeding 55mph) lead to cars getting totaled before they’ve been fully exhausted.
I’ll spot you that simply yanking new ICE cars off the road and replacing them with electrics is wasteful. But when you’re talking about a ten year old vehicle, the math for those next ten years gets fuzzier as the risks inherent in ownership rise.
Incidentally, this is why mass transit improvements are an overall better play. Swapping old cars for new is never going to be as efficient as swapping cars for buses and trains, which are maintained as a fleet rather than as an oddball assortment of flavor-of-the-month private vehicles.
No doubt. Most people don’t have the skill or desire to keep 27 year old vehicles running at good efficiency. It’s also common to start adding performance parts or disabling the emissions tech, which is even worse.
I’m on my fourth vehicle lifetime, including the one I lost in a flood. Been drving for over three decades. Figure that I’m actually pretty far down on emissions as so much pollution is tied to the original manufacturing.
There’s that whole reduce and reuse thing everyone forgets about and jumps right to recycle.
The proper comparison here is replacing used ICE with used EV. As battery tech and manufacturers get better, new ICE should have a heavy tax that disincentivises private purchase and ultimately bans them except for edge cases. Keep a collector class with a small maximum mileage and other restrictions.
Part of the problem is deliberate Planned Obselecence as an industrial manufacturing strategy. Cars - particularly American cars - begin to fail after ten to fifteen years. Finding parts becomes more difficult over time, finding skilled mechanics even more so, and risks of accident (particularly on highways with speeds exceeding 55mph) lead to cars getting totaled before they’ve been fully exhausted.
I’ll spot you that simply yanking new ICE cars off the road and replacing them with electrics is wasteful. But when you’re talking about a ten year old vehicle, the math for those next ten years gets fuzzier as the risks inherent in ownership rise.
Incidentally, this is why mass transit improvements are an overall better play. Swapping old cars for new is never going to be as efficient as swapping cars for buses and trains, which are maintained as a fleet rather than as an oddball assortment of flavor-of-the-month private vehicles.
No doubt. Most people don’t have the skill or desire to keep 27 year old vehicles running at good efficiency. It’s also common to start adding performance parts or disabling the emissions tech, which is even worse.
I’m on my fourth vehicle lifetime, including the one I lost in a flood. Been drving for over three decades. Figure that I’m actually pretty far down on emissions as so much pollution is tied to the original manufacturing.
There’s that whole reduce and reuse thing everyone forgets about and jumps right to recycle.
The proper comparison here is replacing used ICE with used EV. As battery tech and manufacturers get better, new ICE should have a heavy tax that disincentivises private purchase and ultimately bans them except for edge cases. Keep a collector class with a small maximum mileage and other restrictions.