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Originally Posted by smicker
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no no no... this is not true... when you do a comparison between the energy used by an ICE car and an electric car you have to take into account eveything that is used; its not a comparison between the battery pack creation and the overall useage of energy by an ICE car. The proper way is to determine what is really different between the two during construction: how much energy and materials does it take to build an electric drivetrain vs. an ICE drivetrain. then you do the comparison between usage and cost of fuel over a lifetime. an electic car's fuel is not electricity, for most americans an electric car runs on coal and coal is a *big* polluter. electric starts to make much more sense when we start running lots of solar and wind.
The tesla blog on the battery packs is nothing more than irresponsible spin... The battery packs contain lithium compounds that *are* toxic. our laws may allow them to be landfilled but that doesnt make them safe. additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, the *production* of the battery packs is where the enviroment takes its hit. lithium battery production requires lots of energy and uses all sorts of toxic and polluting chemicals like lead, cyanide, acids, etc. right now the batteries are being produced in japan but what is going to happen when electrics become widely adopted? the production will move right to china where there are no stringent environmental regulations. Finally lithium is one of those metals that simply does not exist in large supply on the planet (as opposed to steel and aluminum) so as the number of electric cars in use goes up the supply for lithium becomes more scarce. There are serious questions of sustainability.
Again I am not saying electric cars are bad and i think the tesla is cool. The problem is that we have to stop reducing the whole problem to oversimplified analogies "electric is good, gasoline it bad" and start asking the difficult questions. There are some hard facts that exist that are direct obstacles to any sort of mainstream acceptance of electric vehicles, even at the lower price that whitestar is projected to sell at and nobody is talking about how to resolve them...