Yes, also Teslas

They also do all those things much worse than transitioning away from car dependence.

And they give people an excuse to not move away from cars.

And they are so much heavier and deadlier than ICE cars at the same speed that they may actually actively discourage other modes, like walking or cycling.

edit: Look, I think every car should be an EV. And I also think there shouldn't be many cars because cars still suck. Both can be true.

Since much of the noise pollution from cars comes from tire noise, I doubt EVs will reduce noise pollution that signifcantly.

Also Pedestrian crash avoidance mitigation (PCAM) systems are great, and will be required on all new vehicles soon.

They also reduce noise pollution

Only at low speeds. At high speeds for a modern car the tyre noise is louder that the engine noise, and since electric cars are heavier they would be noisier.

And reduce the propping of petrostates

Replace mining oil with mining rare metals. Not a big improvement.

They also help normalise the usage of renewable energy (this is a factor that shouldn't be overlooked, imo)

Why? Electric cars are causing a huge load on the grid and will continue to do so. In countries that haven't managed the load and invested heavily in renewable capacity, those EVs are powered by fossil fuels.

You could also potentially use them as a solution for more efficiently allocating energy, less by pumping energy back into the grid, and more by running home power from the car battery during peak hours, rather than having to produce too much energy during off hours, having to shut down the power during peak hours or provide limited access, or having to provide power for less people. You can make the power go further, and especially for renewables which have potentially less consistent energy production (the nice part being that peak demand roughly lines up with peak production for solar power, at least, in the summer). But none of that's really an attractive proposition to the american car buyer who wants to travel as far as possible at the drop of a hat, and you have to make car batteries larger and the cars themselves less efficient to compensate for this power draw and power storage that may or may not be happening at any given moment, so it's sort of self-defeating with the american car market.

Obviously, it isn't really a more equitable or more efficient solution broadly than doing something like pumping water uphill. Or trying to limit demand in the first place by decreasing surface area of homes, by moving towards multiple units in one building, increasing r-values by using better building materials you could shell out for with a larger amount of occupants, yadda yadda urban design garbage. Stuff that generally is antithetical to car-centric infrastructure and thus electric cars. You also potentially run into problems where the as the grid as a whole becomes less relied upon, they make less money, and then the grid starts to fail further in a positive feedback loop. Poor people can't afford rooftop solar and electric cars, because most of them can barely afford rent and aren't really the ones making those decisions anyways.

Local commuter rail, walkable cities, and nationwide high speed rail are all necessary to completely eliminate 90% of individual car ownership. We should be advocating for these systems of convenience which will make car ownership obsolete while incentivizing EVs while the infrastructure is built up, not demonizing EVs and making them appear as useless and a waste of time for helping fight climate change. Plus we need EV utility vehicles and trucks for professionals who need them to do their job.

Incremental steps are not personal EVs. They are diesel and electric buses. EVs eliminate 1 problem (tailpipe emissions) while creating 2 more (battery manufacturing, increased vehicle weight making road and tire wear worse, and making them more deadly - there's others, take your pick) and not addressing the other hundred problems with car dependence.

Buses use the same infrastructure as cars. Bus stops are stupid cheap in comparison to anything else. And then, bus lanes can be implemented to prioritise buses and keep them from getting stuck in traffic.

It's not that perfect (public transport) is more difficult than good (electric cars). More often good is the enemy of perfect since the industry is lobbying for it and against the other

Hence mocking Musk instead of guillotining him.

My brother in Christ, you literally have no idea how much stuff is made out of petrochemicals, do you? Try asphalt, industrial solvents, cosmetics, any real lubricant, fertilizers, pesticides, textiles, circuitry, detergents, insulation, PVC, paint, adhesives, roofing material, synthetic rubbers, as well as a ton of pharmaceutical products and food additives. And that's not even an exhaustive list. Gasoline is a big part of the petrochemical industry, but it's not the totality of it.

The funny thing is, electric cars help with the tire/brake dust and mined materials issue. Regenerative braking reduces the wear on brakes, and electric motors provide smoother power delivery, which reduces tire wear. As for the mined materials, electric cars generally take more material to make, but they are also easier to recycle, and the batteries themselves are able to be recycled in to even better batteries that they were when brand new.

I'm curious why you think ocean microplastics can stick around for a few more decades or centuries

But We need to get rid of gas NOW.

That's fine, but electric cars are only moving the gas right now.

Anyone who thinks cars are a solution to anything is my enemy.

I see them as "diet" cars. Similar to if someone is trying to cut back on sodas, switching to diet sodas is a net benefit. That's not to say diet sodas are good for you or remotely healthy, they're just less bad than the alternative.

I wouldn't say prioritizing rather than worth practicing. Corporations do much more damage than all the automobile drivers.

I'm lucky enough to live somewhere with 24/7 public transit and generally walkable spaces. Some of my coworkers have moved out of the city to cheaper places and I'm just like yeah sure you pay less for rent or your mortgage, but now you're in a car-first wasteland.

To keep in line with the meme, you must acknowledge that bikes also have pollution from tire wear and replacement, require road salt many places, causes accidents which lead to wounds or death of humans and animals and causes pollution from brake wear and manifacturing.

As the post clearly implies, if you can't fix every issue with something simultaneously, then you should't attempt to fix anything at all. /s

But massively increase tire dust, which is a much bigger source of air and water pollution than brake dust.

edit: There are literally dozens of articles about how EVs will produce more tire particulate pollution than ICEs.

Here is an article in the Guardian about how much worse tyre particulate pollution is than tailpipe exhaust.

This Atlantic article discusses tire particulate increase from EVs:

New EV models tend to be heavier and quicker—generating more particulates and deepening the danger. In other words, EVs have a tire-pollution problem, and one that is poised to get worse as America begins to adopt electric cars en masse.

According to this Forbes article:

Tires were already a problem, but when we switch to electric cars, according to Michelin, we increase tire wear by up to 20%. According to Goodyear, it’s up to 50%. This is validated also in other research that we’ve seen.

edit: To be clear, EVs are better than ICEs and every car should be an EV. But EVs also suck and we still need to transition away from car dependence.

When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? [...] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?

This line of questioning is really important, and it's why I think there's no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.

Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn't work. We can't live like that. It just doesn't work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn't be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can't be in such a hurry all the time.

So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that's not really possible.

This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.

Yeah, I think the argument is that you shouldn't need the cars to get people where they need to go. This can be addressed two ways: either we don't use cars or we don't need to go (as far).

People should be able to travel with other modes that require less salt to deice, and cities could be built to not require cars for most trips. Salting sidewalks and bus lanes is better than salting those things plus roads and highways.

It's also worth considering that yes, people should be able to just stay home. People shouldn't be at risk of losing their job/home because they couldn't safely make it into work. Parents shouldn't have to rely on school as daycare.

I'd be curious to see if urban heat Island affects salt use. Maybe if we build dense enough, we don't even really need salt to cover 99% of the population.

You can use a brine salt solution before it precipitates to reduce overall salt usage by 60-70%.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/climate/road-salt-water-supply.html

In Colorado we spray 'sand' which is still a chemical mix with actual sand, but less disruptive

Beet Juice? Do they remove the color or will everything be stained purple forever?

They use sand around here (Indiana).

I don't think trains de-ice anything, no one's out there deicing train tracks - they are far too remote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(Toronto)

Except EVs still have a significant carbon footprint from their manufacture. So do train cars and buses, but to transport everyone in cars instead of public transportation would require orders of magnitude more materials, and therefore a much higher carbon footprint. Not to mention the poor land use that car dependency causes, which both leads to deforestation and impedes reforestation, which is a further climate change contributor.

But alternatives we have and know to work solve both greenhouse gasses and local porblems.

We'll have to stop driving gas cars specifically, but we'll also just have to drive less in general.

Are they? Because unless you live in some green energy paradise, most EV are charged using coal plants.

Sounds like Houston, TX.

Fuck you, (insert insult of your choice here)!

... I agree.

But less brake pad wear. The regenerative braking reduces a lot of the need for brake pads.

I wouldn't doubt people driving EVs may even have less sustainable lifestyles in general because of their absolved guilt from driving the EV. Not that the average driver matters much when considering cargo and air traffic.

Your right it is a childish problem because a child could think of the solutions you seem to be unable to, instead of cars we could use trains or bicycles, or just walk. Solutions from that fantastical world you lived in before you could drive.

Brake dust is bad but tire dust is the real issue

Emissions Analytics has found that adding 1,000 pounds to a midsize vehicle increased tire wear by about 20 percent, and also that Tesla’s Model Y generated 26 percent more tire pollution than a similar Kia hybrid. EVs’ more aggressive torque, which translates into faster acceleration, is another factor that creates more tire particulate mile for mile compared to similar internal combustion engine cars.

I will say that "autopilot" features should absolutely be outlawed and cause nothing but trouble to everyone

Autopilot is a pretty broad category. I like the autopilot on my car, which is nothing like elon musks self driving bullshit. It only turns on on supported highways and uses lidar instead of machine vision. All it does is maintain a following distance and follow the curve of the road. On Long drives it stops your foot and arms being fatigued and frees up a lot more mental space to look out for road hazards, it has a camera in the wheel that makes sure you have your eyes pointed at the road. I don't see any risks for this sort of simple autopilot but it does have a lot of upside.

I'd definitely rather ride the train if it didn't cost 200 dollars and come once a day, but until it gets better(and I've been writing a lot of letters to my officials) my self driving ev is the best alternative.

100 years is ambitious only if you want to remove all of the cars. There are plenty of milestones that can be attained fairly quickly :

• Smaller cars. Less energy, materials, etc. Safer for other road users (you don't get hit on your vital organs, better vision for the driver and everyone else since pedestrians can easily see over the car).
• Less car use is available now, if we just empower the alternatives (make bike usage safe, make public transport good enough)
• No more cars in cities. Bikes + trains mostly do the job, you can rent a car if you leave the city, or park it at the outskirts.
• Even smaller cities used to be liveable without a car. This could be brought back, but that's probably a tough hill to climb.

Which market is it that is producing smaller EVs? They're all just regular cars turned EV, which means they're heavier and you can't feature-rich your way out of physics as per pedestrian safety

I know that in the UK 1.3% of our land is road, so maybe the global average isn't much lower

Death to the car, every car. It will kill is if we don't employ radical solutions and just replacing every gas car with an electric ain't magically saving the world.

Hell it might just make things worse, those rare minerals have to come from somewhere and have to go somewhere when we are done with them. I have little hope for any of this in a capitalist world.

I'm pretty sure even Horses beat cars by a mile on enviromental standards. They're needless though, we have invented the bicycle

bikes don't cause as much tire dust because they are less heavy

oh yeah? you think a better world would be better? heh

Horses - shit everywhere you look

I'm certain dense human populations are better for the environment than non-dense human populations, because dense human populations need to be moved around less.

You're basically advocating for human extinction in this comment.

Let's spend the EV money on a time machine and drop a comically large anvil on Henry Ford

@TheLastHero @Masimatutu Nah, there's not much intercontinental transport of used cars. Too expensive and complicated. If the West adopted EVs en mass there would be a lot less gasoline consumption there, and little increase elsewhere.

Agree with almost everything you said here, EVs are definitely significantly cleaner than ice vehicles but you're oversimplifying a little when it comes to brakes and tires. Some cheap evs are going to drum brakes but the vast majority of modern evs are using significantly larger brakes with softer pads than equivalent gas vehicles due to the acceleration offered by electric vehicles. Its possible that as time goes on and electric vehicles make up a bigger market share of economy cars this will change.

The bigger issue with clean EVs is the insane amount of rubber they use in their tires. I'm not sure where you've heard the tires on EVs are roughly equivalent to ICE, sue to the weight increase EVs use much bigger tires that wear down faster than gasoline vehicles and I've read a few studies about the possibility of these tires throwing more "marbles" or small pieces of rubber than their lighter ICE counterparts. All this not to mention the increased road maintenance required by doubling the weight of the average car in the last thirty has me concerned were trading toxic fumes for other forms of pollution.

epa.gov link

turns out just throwing a fuck ton of salt into the environment has negative effects

No dude, the point is that half-measures and baby steps aren't enough. Our planet is quickly becoming uninhabitable for us. We need radical change.

The point is that electric cars are shit, have never been a solution to anything, and that they shouldn't be presented as one, doubly so when as a technology, public transport exists.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good

P.S. electric cars are here to save Cars, not the environment

yeah and tyre abbrasion correlates with weight, which given the current trend of "Same car but now EV = lots heavier" that one's just gonna get worse, same for brakes. Pretty much just trading exhaust particles for more particulate dust from tyres and brakes

@showmustgo @Masimatutu I wonder if the tires edison invented that were made from golden rod would have been any better. it was more profitable to make tires how we've been doing it for 80 years.

@showmustgo @Masimatutu
Great fact 👍

When you talk about “pollution” (compared to a shipping vessel) you are only talking about greenhouse gas emissions. This is the exact fallacy that the comic is addressing.

Localised particulate matter pollution will have a much more severe and direct impact on human health. Whether widespread individual car ownership is worth the cancer and microplastic pollution in our bodies is certainly still open for debate. However, this “environmentally friendly car” that you are imagining is a pipe dream.

Humans living fulfilling, individualised lives has been happening for more than just the last century.