**The Environmental Payoff of Electric Cars**

I wanted to make a similar chart for electric cars again, with the x-axis being the fuel economy of our current vehicle and the y-axis being the number of years it would take for the electric car to be the greener option. In this case, using the emissions data for a Tesla Model 3. For example, if our current car gets 15 miles per gallon and we switch to electric in less than two years, we're already doing better from an emission standpoint, including the production emissions required for the Tesla.

So, for instance, if your current car gets 40 miles per gallon, it'll take seven years for the environmental payoff in switching to electric. And above 40 miles per gallon, it's probably best to just run your car into the ground and then buy something new. However, if your current car gets below 40 miles per gallon, which is the vast majority of gasoline vehicles, it's actually very likely that the best thing you could do from an emissions standpoint isn't holding on to your old car but instead trading it in for a new electric car.

**The Materials Issue**

One concern with electric cars often surrounds the metals used in the motors and batteries. Metals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese are used in lithium-ion battery chemistries. However, lithium itself is pretty abundant, so it's not really an immediate concern. Cobalt, however, is rare and sometimes involves human rights violations when it's mined. Most of it comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. But many companies working within the electric car space are working to reduce the amount of cobalt needed in their batteries.

For example, GM reduced its cobalt by 70% in their modern batteries by using more aluminum. Tesla states that they're working to eliminate cobalt from their cathodes long-term. While materials are a problem, there are three things often overlooked when discussing electric cars. First, a single car doesn't use much of this stuff. According to the Argonne National Laboratory, as cited by Nature.com, a single electric car's battery uses just 8 kilograms of lithium, 35 kilograms of nickel, 20 kilograms of manganese, and 14 kilograms of cobalt. These numbers are for 1800-kilogram vehicles, which is a small overall percentage of the stuff required.

Second, these materials don't go anywhere once the car is built; there's no such thing as "waste" in this sense. There's some material here, it is here, and it's going nowhere. Once this car is toast and no longer able to function well, you can reuse these materials and make another electric car. The amount of materials that can be reused is quite impressive. CNBC did a really cool video on battery recycling and the current players in the field; I'd recommend checking it out.

Third, what else takes stuff? Gasoline cars, not just to make them but also to fuel them. This is a one-time use thing we take the fuel out of the ground, we use it, and then it's gone. The actual amount of fuel that these things use is pretty mind-blowing. Take the average 25 mpg car for example over 200,000 miles; that's 8,000 gallons of gasoline or 50,000 pounds of fuel. That's the equivalent weight of about 22 MX-5s. If your car gets around 15 miles per gallon, like the new Ford Bronco, it's still using 25,000 pounds worth of fuel over 200,000 miles. Even if your car gets really good fuel economy, like 50 miles per gallon, it's still using 25,000 pounds worth of fuel.

That's a lot of stuff, and certainly there is some environmental consequence involved with extracting and refining 50,000 pounds of stuff for the average car. An electric car's battery might weigh two percent of that, and it can be reused again and again and again. It also takes less stuff to power the power plants that charge the electric cars because electric cars are so much more efficient, and because the entire grid isn't fossil fuel-based. Well, it's far, far less stuff overall, and as the grid gets cleaner, the gap between EVs and gas burners gets bigger and bigger.

**Conclusion**

So, in summary, cars are bad for the environment, but often keeping your old car is actually worse for the environment than buying something new that's much more efficient. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be answering the question is it better for the environment to simply keep the car that you already have rather than buying something new and i think this is a great idea because you know why buy something new and more efficient if you already have something that works just fine now i realize this car here is still pretty new it's only five years old right so it's still got plenty of life left in it but this video will apply to whatever the age is of your current car so for the most part i agree with the mentality of just keep what i already have because do we really need more and more stuff we're just creating more and more waste and ruining this place further but you might be surprised how the numbers work out on what the best thing to do is from an environmental standpoint so with regards to the environmental impact we're going to focus on two main parts first the emissions involved and then second the stuff yes the physical stuff extraction mining manufacturing disposal the stuff has to come from somewhere and then eventually the stuff has to go somewhere so let's start with emissions oh and surprise we're not just talking about gas versus electric here it's very possible that your next car could be gas powered but get better fuel efficiency unless you're buying the new ford bronco then it's probably gonna be worse so let's say we currently have car a which gets a certain fuel economy and we're considering buying a new car car b that's gas powered or car c that's electric the question is what's the most environmentally friendly option and what's the worst keep a buy b or buy c let's start with a simple example and say our current car gets 25 miles per gallon that's the current average for the united states let's say car b gets 35 miles per gallon and let's say the electric option is a tesla model 3. next we want to know how much emissions are required for each option our current car that gets 25 miles per gallon already exists so the production emissions are zero remember we're trying to see if it's better to buy a new car that doesn't exist yet or keep our current car to produce a new combustion car requires about 9 000 kilograms of co2 emissions so we'll use that for car b producing a tesla model 3 creates about 10 400 kilograms of co2 emissions you'll notice more than a gas car where do these numbers come from well usually i have to hunt down academic publications to get ballpark figures for these numbers but tesla actually provided them in their 2020 environmental impact report so for the first time i get to use data directly from a manufacturer the numbers do line up with my previously cited sources but just to be safe we'll add in a buffer to make it harder for tesla later on in the video so we have the production emissions for our three cars now let's add in driving emissions for gas cars this is fairly easy to calculate because there's a direct correlation between your fuel economy and how much carbon you produce for every gallon of gasoline burned there's a certain amount of carbon in that gallon of gasoline and that results in a certain amount of co2 produced when you add in the emissions required for extraction refinement and shipping of that fuel it works out to about 400 grams or 0.4 kilograms of co2 emissions per mile for a car getting 25 miles per gallon for a car getting 35 miles per gallon that number is significantly lower just 286 grams or 0.286 kilograms per mile for a tesla model 3 that's charged using the average electrical mix in the united states and taking into consideration charging losses that number is 125 grams or 0.125 kilograms of co2 emissions per mile so now we can start posing our hypothetical question is it better to keep our old car or buy a new car let's say we drive 12 000 miles a year which is actually less than the u.s average after one year if we add up our production emissions and driving emissions keeping our current car is the best option because the production emissions from the new cars make up the bulk of their overall emissions after two years keeping your old car is still the best option after three years our 25 mpg vehicle is now getting super close in total emissions to the tesla model 3 but still beating the 35 mpg vehicle after four years our current car which is getting 25 miles per gallon is already worse than had we bought a new electric car that's pretty wild because it really puts to bed this myth that keeping your old car is better for the environment after seven years even the 35 mile per gallon vehicle turns out to be better on overall emissions versus that 25 mile per gallon car so it's not like the only option is going electric though from an emissions standpoint electric is quite obviously superior yes even though sixty percent of the energy used to charge electric cars comes from fossil fuels in the united states they're still dramatically better than the average gas car so just to play devil's advocate let's say tesla's production numbers were way off or you had to replace the battery pack or something like that heck let's say you had to replace the entire car so let's double our production emissions the tesla is still a cleaner vehicle in less than seven years it's worth mentioning most electric car battery warranties are eight years so it's incredibly unlikely this scenario would ever occur and even if it did the electric car is greener what now a lot of people are still very skeptical of the longevity of these cars but here's a chart from tesla's 2020 impact report which shows the battery's capacity after 200 000 miles according to tesla capacity retention of tesla vehicle batteries averages 90 after 200 000 miles of usage that's incredible so it's very unlikely you'll be replacing the battery pack during your ownership okay so obviously everyone isn't switching from a 25 mile per gallon car to a 35 mile per gallon car that's far too specific so what about your current situation well i made this really cool chart so that anyone could figure out whether they should keep their car or buy new so what are we looking at well our x-axis is the fuel economy of whatever car we're currently driving let's say our current vehicle gets 15 miles per gallon the y-axis is the fuel economy of whatever car we're looking into buying let's say the new car gets 30 miles per gallon now let's find the intersection of these two points if it falls above the trend line like we see here then it's better from an emissions standpoint to buy new let's do a different example say we currently get 30 miles per gallon in our car and we're looking at buying a car that gets 40 miles per gallon well this falls below the trend line so actually it's better to keep our current car than to buy new now all of this is assuming our payoff will occur in 5 years or 60 000 miles a 40 mile per gallon car could eventually have better emissions than your current car but it would actually take nine years for that to break even maybe your current car has nine years left in it maybe it doesn't but to me it makes sense to try and find a shorter payoff period so i chose five years for the purposes of this video as an example here's what the chart looks like with the 10-year break-even period as you can see in this scenario switching from a 30 mpg to a 40 mpg car makes sense to do for folks that prefer metric here's the chart for a hundred thousand kilometers of driving or about five years and here's the second chart for two hundred thousand kilometers of driving or about ten years pause the video if you'd like to look at these further okay here's a live hack if instead of buying a new car you buy a used car a car that already exists well now any improvement in mpg say you go from 15 to 16 mpg well any improvement means you're going to have an immediate emissions benefit because you don't have to factor in production for either of those vehicles now you might say well isn't your old car still being used by someone out there so it doesn't really make any difference and yeah maybe it is still being used by someone but also maybe it was an improvement for that someone we don't know so this is why i think it makes the most sense to analyze this at the individual level because we don't know what's going on everywhere right so look at one person see for their scenario does it improve and if it improves for each person's scenario we all improve all right now i wanted to make a similar chart for electric cars again the x-axis is the fuel economy of our current vehicle and our y-axis is the number of years it would take for the electric car to be the greener option meaning less overall emissions in this case using the emissions data for a tesla model 3. so for example if our current car gets 15 miles per gallon and we switch to electric in less than two years we're already doing better from an emission standpoint including the production emissions required for the tesla of course that gets more difficult if your current car gets really good gas mileage if you get 40 miles per gallon currently it'll take seven years for the environmental payoff in switching to electric and above 40 miles per gallon it's probably best to just run your car into the ground and then buy something new but if your current car gets below 40 miles per gallon and that's the vast vast majority of gasoline vehicles it's actually very likely that the best thing you could do from an emissions standpoint isn't hold on to your old car but instead trade it in for a new electric car now this brings us to part two the stuff jason what about all the stuff that you need to make an electric car now the concern with electric cars often surrounds the metals used in the motors and batteries metals like lithium cobalt nickel and manganese lithium itself is pretty abundant so it's not really an immediate concern cobalt however is rare and sometimes involves human rights violations when it's mined as most of it comes from the democratic republic of congo so pretty much everyone working within the electric car space is working to reduce the amount of cobalt needed in their lithium ion battery chemistries for example gm reduced its cobalt by 70 in their modern batteries by using more aluminum and tesla's environmental impact states they're working to eliminate cobalt from their cathodes long term so while materials are a problem there's three things i think that are often overlooked when using yeah but the stuff as a counter argument against electric cars first of all a single car doesn't use much of this stuff according to the argonne national laboratory as cited by nature.com a single electric cars battery uses just eight kilograms of lithium 35 kilograms of nickel 20 kilograms of manganese and 14 kilograms of cobalt and these are 1800 kilogram vehicles we're talking about so this is a small overall percentage of the stuff required i bet these numbers are way less than most people think they are second these materials don't go anywhere once the car is built there it is there's some materials here they are they're going nowhere so once this car is toast and no longer able to function well you can reuse these materials and make another electric car the amount of materials you can actually reuse is quite impressive cnbc did a really cool video i'd recommend checking out all about battery recycling and the current players in the field i'll include a link to this in the video description so point two being yeah an electric car requires more stuff to make but you can reuse that stuff again and again and again third you know what else takes stuff gasoline cars and not just to make them but to fuel them and this is a one-time use thing we take the fuel out of the ground we use it and then it's gone and the actual amount of fuel that these things use is pretty mind-blowing take the average 25 mpg car for example over 200 000 miles or the life of the car that's 8 000 gallons of gasoline or 50 000 pounds of fuel that's the equivalent weight of about 22 of these mx-5s say your car gets around 15 miles per gallon like the new ford bronco that's 84 000 pounds of fuel or about 36 mx5s in weight over its lifetime and even if your car gets really good fuel economy like 50 miles per gallon it's still using 25 000 pounds worth of fuel over 200 000 miles that's a lot of stuff certainly there is some environmental consequence involved with extracting and refining 50 000 pounds of stuff for the average car an electric car's battery might weigh two percent of that and it can be reused again and again and again now it also takes stuff to power the power plants that charge the electric car however because electric cars are so much more efficient and because the entire grid isn't fossil fuel-based well it's far far less stuff overall and as the grid gets cleaner the gap between evs and gas burners gets bigger and bigger so in summary cars are bad for the environment amazing but often keeping your old car is actually worse for the environment than buying something new that's far more efficient if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be answering the question is it better for the environment to simply keep the car that you already have rather than buying something new and i think this is a great idea because you know why buy something new and more efficient if you already have something that works just fine now i realize this car here is still pretty new it's only five years old right so it's still got plenty of life left in it but this video will apply to whatever the age is of your current car so for the most part i agree with the mentality of just keep what i already have because do we really need more and more stuff we're just creating more and more waste and ruining this place further but you might be surprised how the numbers work out on what the best thing to do is from an environmental standpoint so with regards to the environmental impact we're going to focus on two main parts first the emissions involved and then second the stuff yes the physical stuff extraction mining manufacturing disposal the stuff has to come from somewhere and then eventually the stuff has to go somewhere so let's start with emissions oh and surprise we're not just talking about gas versus electric here it's very possible that your next car could be gas powered but get better fuel efficiency unless you're buying the new ford bronco then it's probably gonna be worse so let's say we currently have car a which gets a certain fuel economy and we're considering buying a new car car b that's gas powered or car c that's electric the question is what's the most environmentally friendly option and what's the worst keep a buy b or buy c let's start with a simple example and say our current car gets 25 miles per gallon that's the current average for the united states let's say car b gets 35 miles per gallon and let's say the electric option is a tesla model 3. next we want to know how much emissions are required for each option our current car that gets 25 miles per gallon already exists so the production emissions are zero remember we're trying to see if it's better to buy a new car that doesn't exist yet or keep our current car to produce a new combustion car requires about 9 000 kilograms of co2 emissions so we'll use that for car b producing a tesla model 3 creates about 10 400 kilograms of co2 emissions you'll notice more than a gas car where do these numbers come from well usually i have to hunt down academic publications to get ballpark figures for these numbers but tesla actually provided them in their 2020 environmental impact report so for the first time i get to use data directly from a manufacturer the numbers do line up with my previously cited sources but just to be safe we'll add in a buffer to make it harder for tesla later on in the video so we have the production emissions for our three cars now let's add in driving emissions for gas cars this is fairly easy to calculate because there's a direct correlation between your fuel economy and how much carbon you produce for every gallon of gasoline burned there's a certain amount of carbon in that gallon of gasoline and that results in a certain amount of co2 produced when you add in the emissions required for extraction refinement and shipping of that fuel it works out to about 400 grams or 0.4 kilograms of co2 emissions per mile for a car getting 25 miles per gallon for a car getting 35 miles per gallon that number is significantly lower just 286 grams or 0.286 kilograms per mile for a tesla model 3 that's charged using the average electrical mix in the united states and taking into consideration charging losses that number is 125 grams or 0.125 kilograms of co2 emissions per mile so now we can start posing our hypothetical question is it better to keep our old car or buy a new car let's say we drive 12 000 miles a year which is actually less than the u.s average after one year if we add up our production emissions and driving emissions keeping our current car is the best option because the production emissions from the new cars make up the bulk of their overall emissions after two years keeping your old car is still the best option after three years our 25 mpg vehicle is now getting super close in total emissions to the tesla model 3 but still beating the 35 mpg vehicle after four years our current car which is getting 25 miles per gallon is already worse than had we bought a new electric car that's pretty wild because it really puts to bed this myth that keeping your old car is better for the environment after seven years even the 35 mile per gallon vehicle turns out to be better on overall emissions versus that 25 mile per gallon car so it's not like the only option is going electric though from an emissions standpoint electric is quite obviously superior yes even though sixty percent of the energy used to charge electric cars comes from fossil fuels in the united states they're still dramatically better than the average gas car so just to play devil's advocate let's say tesla's production numbers were way off or you had to replace the battery pack or something like that heck let's say you had to replace the entire car so let's double our production emissions the tesla is still a cleaner vehicle in less than seven years it's worth mentioning most electric car battery warranties are eight years so it's incredibly unlikely this scenario would ever occur and even if it did the electric car is greener what now a lot of people are still very skeptical of the longevity of these cars but here's a chart from tesla's 2020 impact report which shows the battery's capacity after 200 000 miles according to tesla capacity retention of tesla vehicle batteries averages 90 after 200 000 miles of usage that's incredible so it's very unlikely you'll be replacing the battery pack during your ownership okay so obviously everyone isn't switching from a 25 mile per gallon car to a 35 mile per gallon car that's far too specific so what about your current situation well i made this really cool chart so that anyone could figure out whether they should keep their car or buy new so what are we looking at well our x-axis is the fuel economy of whatever car we're currently driving let's say our current vehicle gets 15 miles per gallon the y-axis is the fuel economy of whatever car we're looking into buying let's say the new car gets 30 miles per gallon now let's find the intersection of these two points if it falls above the trend line like we see here then it's better from an emissions standpoint to buy new let's do a different example say we currently get 30 miles per gallon in our car and we're looking at buying a car that gets 40 miles per gallon well this falls below the trend line so actually it's better to keep our current car than to buy new now all of this is assuming our payoff will occur in 5 years or 60 000 miles a 40 mile per gallon car could eventually have better emissions than your current car but it would actually take nine years for that to break even maybe your current car has nine years left in it maybe it doesn't but to me it makes sense to try and find a shorter payoff period so i chose five years for the purposes of this video as an example here's what the chart looks like with the 10-year break-even period as you can see in this scenario switching from a 30 mpg to a 40 mpg car makes sense to do for folks that prefer metric here's the chart for a hundred thousand kilometers of driving or about five years and here's the second chart for two hundred thousand kilometers of driving or about ten years pause the video if you'd like to look at these further okay here's a live hack if instead of buying a new car you buy a used car a car that already exists well now any improvement in mpg say you go from 15 to 16 mpg well any improvement means you're going to have an immediate emissions benefit because you don't have to factor in production for either of those vehicles now you might say well isn't your old car still being used by someone out there so it doesn't really make any difference and yeah maybe it is still being used by someone but also maybe it was an improvement for that someone we don't know so this is why i think it makes the most sense to analyze this at the individual level because we don't know what's going on everywhere right so look at one person see for their scenario does it improve and if it improves for each person's scenario we all improve all right now i wanted to make a similar chart for electric cars again the x-axis is the fuel economy of our current vehicle and our y-axis is the number of years it would take for the electric car to be the greener option meaning less overall emissions in this case using the emissions data for a tesla model 3. so for example if our current car gets 15 miles per gallon and we switch to electric in less than two years we're already doing better from an emission standpoint including the production emissions required for the tesla of course that gets more difficult if your current car gets really good gas mileage if you get 40 miles per gallon currently it'll take seven years for the environmental payoff in switching to electric and above 40 miles per gallon it's probably best to just run your car into the ground and then buy something new but if your current car gets below 40 miles per gallon and that's the vast vast majority of gasoline vehicles it's actually very likely that the best thing you could do from an emissions standpoint isn't hold on to your old car but instead trade it in for a new electric car now this brings us to part two the stuff jason what about all the stuff that you need to make an electric car now the concern with electric cars often surrounds the metals used in the motors and batteries metals like lithium cobalt nickel and manganese lithium itself is pretty abundant so it's not really an immediate concern cobalt however is rare and sometimes involves human rights violations when it's mined as most of it comes from the democratic republic of congo so pretty much everyone working within the electric car space is working to reduce the amount of cobalt needed in their lithium ion battery chemistries for example gm reduced its cobalt by 70 in their modern batteries by using more aluminum and tesla's environmental impact states they're working to eliminate cobalt from their cathodes long term so while materials are a problem there's three things i think that are often overlooked when using yeah but the stuff as a counter argument against electric cars first of all a single car doesn't use much of this stuff according to the argonne national laboratory as cited by nature.com a single electric cars battery uses just eight kilograms of lithium 35 kilograms of nickel 20 kilograms of manganese and 14 kilograms of cobalt and these are 1800 kilogram vehicles we're talking about so this is a small overall percentage of the stuff required i bet these numbers are way less than most people think they are second these materials don't go anywhere once the car is built there it is there's some materials here they are they're going nowhere so once this car is toast and no longer able to function well you can reuse these materials and make another electric car the amount of materials you can actually reuse is quite impressive cnbc did a really cool video i'd recommend checking out all about battery recycling and the current players in the field i'll include a link to this in the video description so point two being yeah an electric car requires more stuff to make but you can reuse that stuff again and again and again third you know what else takes stuff gasoline cars and not just to make them but to fuel them and this is a one-time use thing we take the fuel out of the ground we use it and then it's gone and the actual amount of fuel that these things use is pretty mind-blowing take the average 25 mpg car for example over 200 000 miles or the life of the car that's 8 000 gallons of gasoline or 50 000 pounds of fuel that's the equivalent weight of about 22 of these mx-5s say your car gets around 15 miles per gallon like the new ford bronco that's 84 000 pounds of fuel or about 36 mx5s in weight over its lifetime and even if your car gets really good fuel economy like 50 miles per gallon it's still using 25 000 pounds worth of fuel over 200 000 miles that's a lot of stuff certainly there is some environmental consequence involved with extracting and refining 50 000 pounds of stuff for the average car an electric car's battery might weigh two percent of that and it can be reused again and again and again now it also takes stuff to power the power plants that charge the electric car however because electric cars are so much more efficient and because the entire grid isn't fossil fuel-based well it's far far less stuff overall and as the grid gets cleaner the gap between evs and gas burners gets bigger and bigger so in summary cars are bad for the environment amazing but often keeping your old car is actually worse for the environment than buying something new that's far more efficient if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"