this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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Electric Vehicles

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Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.

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Your gas car works fine. Consider an EV anyway, scientists say. (grist.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to c/electricvehicles@slrpnk.net
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The new research finds that in order to repay the carbon debt of making a new EV, it must be driven 4,400 miles if it’s a car and 6,700 miles each year if it’s a truck. That’s already well below the 12,500 miles the average driver travels in a year, and the benefits to making the switch are likely to grow. 

As the United States increasingly relies on renewables, for example, charging an EV becomes even more environmentally appealing. Campbell and his co-author also point to improvements in battery recycling as a way of reducing the emissions involved with making an electric car. 

One hole in this latest study is that it doesn’t consider the cost of going electric. While previous research has shown that EVs come with higher upfront costs but lower operating expenses, it’s a thread that Campbell hopes economists pull on. He would also like to see someone better account for the emissions generated while extracting oil and getting gasoline to the pump, rather than simply the burning. But, for now, he believes the study sends a clear message.

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[–] Courantdair@jlai.lu 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Retrofitting ICE cars to EV would be the obvious best option but unfortunately it's still really expensive to do. Plus, most of the kits target classic cars, which are not the priority imo

Edit: read the responses and you're right, it doesn't scale well. I would love to see OEMs organize some kind of mass retrofitting for their most sold models though.

[–] sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't think that actually would be more efficient than mass producing new cars. Much of the resources consumed prototyping and testing and tooling and actually assembling the vehicle are made much more efficient when you have a full assembly line putting together many identical vehicles from interchangeable parts.

With smaller production runs for some kind of retrofit, the labor will need to be much higher skill, there will need to be a lot more labor per vehicle, the parts will not be as efficiently produced, etc.

It's expensive and labor intensive because it's so inefficient, which is fun as a hobby but can't scale the same way that just lining up an assembly line of all new vehicles would.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Two things here I think we should hold seperate.

  1. Combustion cars are everywhere on earth, the amount of creative uses people will find to repurpose them in a more electric transporation context will be bewildering, I am sure whole cottage industries will prop up around specific models of used cars that just have decent platforms and interiors to throw an electric motor into... but yeah none of it is going to be simple which leads me to 2.
  2. At the end of the day if what you want is a simple, small hatchback sized EV to do daily driving type tasks (i.e. long distance travel isn't prioritized necessarily in the design) while the resources needed to produce such a vehicle are non-trivial... the end result isn't something that is waste and an EV hooked up to the grid sitting in your garage is still very much doing something if we design grids intelligently. At some later point someone can use that frame to put new batteries in, replace the controls on the dashboard that broke, get a new breaking system and tires on... whatever and when you look at EVs from that perspective it just gets harder and harder to justify retrofitting combustion used cars at mass scale as a "mass transit" solution that can be applied generally.
[–] betanumerus@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

no. new cars are built in bulk. old cars are retrofitted individually. customs are always more expensive per unit. to retrofit cars in bulk, you'd have to sort used cars per model nationwide and deliver them to matching retrofit stations. that would be quite an operation.