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We replaced our 2010 Ford Transit (diesel) with a 2022 Ssangyong (LDV) eDeliver 9 (battery electric), and one of the benefits I didn’t expect was just how much quieter it is in the cab - a conversation with my partner when we’re driving is much easier/more pleasant. (It’s not due to better insulation - both these vehicles are basically steel frames on wheels) - I don’t see this mentioned much in articles comparing EVs and ICEVs.
This is _very_ noticeable with buses. My local transport system uses a mixture of modern-ish (last 10 years) diesels, heavy/plugin serial-hybrid, BEV, and a small number of ancient (20 year old) diesels, all double decker. The BEVs are a shockingly different experience from the old diesels, noise and vibration-wise.

(The most disconcerting are the hybrids, which go from near-silent to very noisy and back periodically.)

The fact of the matter is that the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them. As for me, no way am I trading my 20 year old, fully paid for, cheap to insure, cheap to register ICE vehicle for a new EV with payments, higher insurance, and higher registration fees.
> The fact of the matter is that the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them.

This is what I used to think for decades, people are rational and they make purchases based on costs/efficiency. I learnt thats not how the world works. Humans don't work that way, they buy for emotional reasons, status, what they've bought before (the power of defaults, familiarity), signaling identity (I'm macho, I drive a F350), what other people buy (social validation -- you don't want to stand out by being the odd one out, or subject of ridicule). Most importantly, what people think of EVs is manipulated by Big Oil, there is a lot of scaremongering, you can't charge cars (range anxiety), EVs catch fire, they spy on you, they have more electronics(all new cars have electronics), battery needs to be replaced every few years, it won't work when its hot, when its cold, batteries pollute more than gasoline, and so on ...

Whats worse is the vast majority of people are innumerate and illiterate, regardless of degrees. They can't do the math of how much driving an EV costs, because doing the OpEx calculation over a lifetime of ownership requires doing multiplication.

The 2 dozen people who can do the arithmetic either walk to work, bought a Nissan Leaf back in 2012+, or buy a used EV.

Looking at how Norway basically reached 100% EV for new cars, it is not that complicated to get people to make rational decision. The government subsidized new purchases by 50%, they removed bridge tolls and city taxes for EV users, reduced car taxes, and even reduced costs for people to use car ferries if they owned an EV. The only people who still bought an ICE car was those who had a hobby in owning ICE cars.
What makes economic sense isn't necessarily the same as what is rational. All of what you said is factored into people's notion of "economic sense". My main takeaway from that is that we can induce people to do better things with arguments and nudges outside of "pure" economic incentives.
> the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them.

The other thing is the UX of figuring out how much an EV costs to charge is painful. It changes every few miles based on who your utility provider is, going through the various plans, figuring out the right plan. The vast majority of people are incapable of that.

It works out to be cheaper (a lot cheaper) for most people, but its hard to refute arguments by fossil fuel shills when they use Hawaii, CA or NY electricity prices. We can say, no its not true, but I can't refute the argument until you provide zip code and utility provider.

It would be awesome if we can state costs like, it costs $0.01/km for EV vs $0.08/km for gas. For eg: What Kind of EV Can a Low-Income Family Buy in China? ($0.01/KM) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4860RGi7IY

Is it really that painful? If you are charging from home, you just look at your local power rates. If you charge for one or two road trips a year, you don't even bother calculating that. If you don't have charging at home, then you add the charging costs of the superchargers you usually go to, actually I'd be surprised if your vehicle couldn't just tell you those numbers.

It makes sense in Hawaii, CA, and NY compared to local petrol prices. Heck, UK, France...it doesn't make sense in countries that heavily subsidize gasoline, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and maybe Venazuala.

Chinese gas prices being what they are, and electricity prices being fairly low, you don't even need to really bother doing the math. The bigger cost is going to be parking and plate costs.

The fact of the matter is that the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them.

Yes, and that's why we should have carbon taxes that better align what makes economic sense with what's environmentally beneficial.

If you were living in Nepal and your country was getting all of its refined gasoline from India, and therefore that was super expensive, while China was helping your country build a bunch of hydro plants, oh, and they were sending a bunch of EVs to buy over the pass from Tibet, I think your math might change (but then you would highly likely not have that ICE car to begin with).
I fully agree with you but you're leaving out two ongoing costs that are usually in an EV's favor, fuel and maintenance.

That probably wouldn't make the difference for a fully paid for vehicle but it can make a substantial difference depending on electricity (and access to solar) and fuel prices.

The economy does not occur naturally. We can turn the knobs on this equation by just having some taxes. For example, carbon taxes. That should change your calculus pretty significantly.
How very tyrannical.
Eh, for cars _in particular_, people are quite resistant to doing the maths. If they weren't, then low-mpg cars would be almost unsellable. But people make decisions on cars quite weirdly.
>higher insurance, and higher registration fees.

And higher propensity to beep and whine at you and higher propensity to pull a "I'm sorry dave" at any given time.

This is a big part of it for me. With 'driver assist' systems that intervene when you're driving now being mandatory for all new vehicles sold in my country, I don't want anything newer than 2024. Practically , probably nothing newer than around 2020. You can disable driver assist, but for most modern vehicles, you need to do so every time you start the car. Insurance will eventually be used as a hammer to force compliance on this. Removing safety equipment that came with the vehicle already makes a car unroadworthy, so that's not an option either.

I'll be driving my old cars to the bitter end.

There is an element I haven't seen in this conversation: as the number of combustion engine cars goes down the number of gas stations also goes down. At some point, combustion engine drivers will start feeling range anxiety. So when you get rid of your fossil-fuel-burner vehicle, you are pushing others to do so.

The full calculus of CO2 emissions reduction should also include the reduction induced in others.

That process has likely already started, with the long term trend towards consolidation having accelerated over the past five years.

In the UK, for example, the number of petrol stations has fallen by around 75% in the past 50 years and drivers now have to travel twice as far on average to fill up.

I'd expect the remaining sites in city centres to have entirely vanished by 2035. Out of town, they'll last a little longer but the distribution component of petrol prices will rise as the fixed costs are born by dwindling numbers of ICE drivers.

By the mid 2040s, there'll only be a tiny market driven largely by enthusiasts who don't care much about price. Perhaps we'll see delivery services springing up, similar to those for home heating oil, but the traditional large petrol station will be all but dead.

Depends on country maybe? In Germany they make more by being small supermarkets, selling snacks, energy drinks, tobacco/vapes, alcohol, at insane prices, 24/7. In the USA similar, with even wider range of stuff, except alcohol, though that may depend on the state, or even county also.
Original title “The climate benefits of retiring a fully operational internal combustion engine vehicle” compressed to fit within title limits.

A new lifecycle study in the journal Science concludes there are substantial climate benefits to swapping an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle for an electric vehicle (EV) even if the ICE or hybrid vehicle is brand new, if driven more than ~7,054 km/year (4,384 miles/year).

I would like to get rid of it in the next few years but all new cars have only touch screen and phone home. Are there "stupid" e-cars too? I don't need much.
Pretty much all new cars incorporate touch screens - that's the wrong thing to look at. What's important is if they retain physical/tactile controls for the things that matter (or matter to you). There are a number of cars out there that still have old-fashioned controls - Hyundai Kona is on my list for that reason.
It looks like they have the BEV lasting just as long as ICE car without any battery replacement. Has it turned out that way? Seems like owning an electric car for 18 years really hasn’t been a thing since the model s was released in 2012, but is it projected to last that long.
As a data point: I’m at year 8 of Model X 100kWh with basically 0% capacity loss. If it exists at all, it’s less than 1-2%, so less than what I can reasonably measure with just the odometer and battery indicator.

Nissan Leaf gave BEV a bad name because it had much worse battery tech. Battery longevity is not a problem for modern, or even decade old cars.

Yes.

EV Batteries Last Way Longer Than Expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43001996 - February 2025 (2 comments)

New study shows: EV batteries last much longer than expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228901 - November 2024 (70 comments)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

4% of Toyota engines need to be replaced before 250,000 miles; 3% of Tesla batteries need to be replaced before 250,000 miles. "More reliable than a Toyota engine" is pretty high praise.
The issue is less the wear and tear of the battery and motors and more the wear and tear of everything else -- suspension and brake components are going to need replacing, along with radar and ultrasonic modules, etc. These parts will be at least partially end-of-life and hard to get by the end of that 20 year period. Federal law requires some amount of parts availability for 10 years + some release of part designs to the aftermarket after that, but I have a hard time getting parts for 21 year old Ford designs that were less than popular, so I would be surprised if early Tesla models are having an easy time 20 years on. This gets much much worse as you start to look at the number of abandoned EV models from the Big 3, the abandoned/dead/dying companies (Fiskar, Lucid, Lordstown, etc). That doesn't hit the vast majority of all EVs, which are just Tesla, but it does put a dent/makes the buying decision harder. Now expand that to not just Tesla, but what does Tesla do with a Cybertruck? Like all things, the specific product decision matters a lot, and this is a new area (even at 14 years old) so there will be lots of people who optimized for cost and not maintainability.
The surprising thing is that parts availability is even worse for new cars. Sensors are built into every part now, so it's no longer just a windscreen or a bumper. If those sensors are critical to the driver assist systems, the car can be a write-off for trivial damage because of the difficulty of getting parts. And in many places, you can't just disable those systems and get on with things, even if the car is otherwise perfectly fine, because the law states that roadworthiness requires the original safety systems to be intact.

Even more alarmingly, the speed of revisions now is such that vehicles can have parts that were only used for a very short run before being updated and replaced. Your particular vehicle batch may not necessarily have identical parts to other batches even within the same generation. We're a long, long way from the way things used to be, when parts commonality stretched for decades.

Nissan Leaf went production-scale in 2010. There are still a surprising number of the very old ones around, even though the Leaf had a particularly _problematic_ battery by EV standards.
Certainly not the case for hybrids like Priuses. The battery system lasts 10-15 years and 150k-200k miles. Any ICE car on the market now should be expected to last a lot longer than that; I drive cars that are 25+ years old and really don't need much significant in the way of repairs.
Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance. They have their benefits and are key to fighting climate change, but mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides.

There is no way you are driving a 25 year old car without serious maintenance like exchanging the timing belt. Add the frequent oil changes and all other yearly maintenance and it does add up.

Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads, and you may or may not need to change the battery, and the batteries keep outperforming the expected lifespan. BEV are simply mechanically much simpler devices.

Hybrid batteries get much more of a work-out than BEV batteries, particularly light hybrids; they're tiny, and get a lot more discharge cycles.
The Prius up until about 2016 uses a NiMH battery that is different than Lithium ones.
Why not sell a fully operational car as a used car and buy a new electric vehicle? Then, when looking into all cars, the fleet will get one more electric vehicle, but at the same time fully operational cars are still used until the end.
The US Post Office was slated to use EVs as replacements for worn out mail delivery vehicles. For many areas, especially urban areas, those would have been perfect and cheaper in the long run. I know because I knew a lot of Mail cCarriers and I know how these are used. As a kid I was driven around a route one day with a relative.

But Trump and the Postmaster General cancelled that and went to use gas guzzlers instead. I wonder how that is working out now.

Still happening.

https://news.usps.com/2025/12/01/usps-is-delivering-its-new-...

> The Postal Service’s $9.6 billion upgrade of its delivery fleet is proceeding apace.

The organization plans to roll out 106,000 new vehicles by 2028, including 45,000 battery-electric next-generation delivery vehicles and 21,000 commercial-off-the-shelf battery-electric vehicles.

> Additionally, USPS is upgrading infrastructure at its facilities with the addition of charging stations for the zero-emission electric vehicles, of which over 14,000 have already been purchased.

> So far, more than 35,000 new vehicles are on the road.

> “The new fleet rollout is proceeding well, aligned with our plan,” said Justin Glass, the Postal Service’s fleet management senior director.

(USPS spends ~$500M/year for fossil fuels, so it’s a no brainer to electrify)

Wow, a small glimmer of good news. I almost want to hide this comment over fear of drawing attention to this thing that got away from the powers that be.
The new EV mail trucks are running routes in my area now. Not my route yet but I have seen them within a few miles of my house.
"But Trump and the Postmaster General cancelled that and went to use gas guzzlers instead. I wonder how that is working out now."

What makes you say that? The biggest impediment to the rollout was that the company that was supposed to build them repeatedly failed to do so, and finally had their contract pulled in 2021 and it was given to a defence contractor who seems to be on track to actually deliver the things.

The admin fought quite hard to destroy the electric conversion, not just cancelling future orders but scrapping existing trucks and infrastructure despite that being a major expense. It's in line with the way it's fighting against renewables and environmental protections on many fronts.

I would say it's obviously in service of the fossil fuel industry but it's gotten to the point of being so absurdly senseless and against our interests that it seems primarily ideological/emotional.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/senate...

I'd love a BEV but where do I charge it?

If I use public chargers isn't that vastly more expensive?

Propaganda for "Scrap your old car now and buy new—now with AI driver spying features as mandated by Congress, and personal data sales to insurance companies!"
The "get rid of a working car" is particularly suspect, and reminds me of the "cash for clunkers" scheme which was basically a giant sop to the auto industry. Why not just have EVs replace ICE vehicles when they break down and aren't worth repairing?
> Why not just have EVs replace ICE vehicles when they break down and aren't worth repairing?

That’s exactly what the article you’re commenting on tries to answer. I recommend you read it

The TLDR is “Replace your combustion vehicle with an EV if you’re a high mileage driver; a low mileage driver can then buy the combustion vehicle for low mileage use.” An EV sold to someone who drives 1k miles a year is somewhat inefficient at this point of the adoption curve, versus someone who drives 5k-15k miles a year. You want to maximize EV miles traveled to minimize CO2 emissions.

25% of total annual global vehicle sales are already EVs. We’re just arguing timeline to get to 100%. Peak combustion vehicle sales was 2017.

https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/09/chinese-ele...

https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-technology/evs-take-...

Exactly.

My daily driver turns 54 this year.

Never cared much about the climate scam, never will.

Can we not finally close all volcanos?