The Green Alliance thinktank tells peers in the House of Lords the actor's views are "damaging" to the government's plans for phasing out petrol and diesel vehicles.
You’re taking a useful piece of equipment, a perfectly running car, and doing what with it? Scrapping it? Reselling it? Just letting it sit? None of those make sense from a “save the planet” perspective.
You can scrap the internal combustion car. Sure, it won’t make any more emissions itself, but it does cause demand for another EV to be manufactured RIGHT NOW, which has opportunity cost - manufacturing is expensive, monetarily and environmentally. Would this eventually even out, yeah, probably but it’d cause a lot of stress in the short term.
Reselling it is probably the MOST environmentally friendly option, but that car is still making emissions. If the buyer of your internal combustion car already had a car, it’s the same problem as scrapping it, kicked down 1 more chain link. the emissions necessarily increase. If they didn’t already have a car, well now there’s the same combustion engine car on the road, and we made a new EV to fit demand.
Letting the car sit is a bit of a sunk cost fallacy, I admit. The manufacturing cost of the car has already been paid, and it has useful life left in it. This is where we have to actually make a cost-benefit decision. If the car is older, yeah probably don’t drive it anymore. If it’s less than 20 years old, it probably has enough life left in it to offset the benefits of producing a new EV right now. This just feels like scrapping it, with even more junkyard requirements.
Obviously this isn’t all on the individual level, one person doing any of these things isn’t causing any shift in demand, but if everyone suddenly started having that mentality, I don’t think it’d end well at all. Use what you have, don’t buy until you have to or comfortably can. Reuse is as important as reduce and recycle.
There’s a sunk cost already spent for an ICE car that’s already been produced. There’s an opportunity cost to swapping to an EV immediately. My point is simply that the situations are complicated enough that the only reasonable “one size” approach for a heuristic to balance those costs is one along the lines of “replace your ICE car when it’s reached the end of its useful life, and replace it with an EV”.
No, this probably won’t be the best overall. That requires individualization. Someone still clinging to a 40 year old gas guzzling truck would be better off scrapping it. Someone who bought a sedan in, like, 2017, it still has a few years of well performing life in it would do best to keep it til it dies and then replace with an EV.
I specifically mentioned sunk cost because it can be fallacious. I was aiming to get ahead of that. Not every sunk cost is fallacious, and that’s why I went into depth about sunk costs vs opportunity costs.
And again, on an INDIVIDUAL level I agree with you. Individuals don’t have that kind of impact on demand as something like a ban of ICE engines, or broad adoption of them to the point of masses of people looking to buy at the same time does.
Individually, buy one as soon as it makes financial sense for you, ideally when you’d be buying a car anyway.
Systemically, buy one when your car dies, keep your running machine for as long as possible.
Specifically the opportunity costs I’m referring to are manufacturing related. Right now, producing EVs is more costly than producing ICE cars, in terms of carbon footprint. If too many people adopt too quickly, it results in more being produced while the manufacturing process is still shitty.
There’s a problem with the “pass down the cars” thing too. At the end of that chain is still a car being decommissioned. If it’s still usable, that’s a higher net carbon footprint. A new EV still had to be produced for that chain of used car sales to go through.
Yeah, the policy causes more cars to be sold, which is also an important thing to take into account.
But you initially said “If most people replace their cars every three years they’re not getting to 80,000 km before they buy a new one.”, and that is plain wrong, the car is not scrapped after those 3 years, so when it changes owner for the first time is irrelevant. And that 80k km is worst case scenario, that assuming all electricity is generated in the least environmental way possible, in practice it’s often <40k km that there is already a break even because not all electricity is generated by coal.
Except that is ignoring the filtering effect of the used market. As a car ages and changes hands, it is likely to replace an older, less efficient car. How else could we replace the oldest cars that are going out of service due to being at the end of their life?
It’s not like the people that are buying old used cars are suddenly going to afford an expensive new car. Instead, they need an affordable used car.
Are we sure newer cars are more efficient ? With dieselgate and recent articles about how Co2 emissions are better in lab but same on real conditions, we are allowed to have fat doubts.
If like the guy further up this thread you only drive 8k km a year that’s going to take 10 years to reach parity. The Li-Ion battery may not even last that long.
Obviously if you drive for work or commute long distances that can’t be covered by public transport then an EV makes sense, but with the expansion of WFH it may not for many.
We’re about 10k past that mileage where we’re supposed to be having battery issues, maybe need a replacement, with our Prius and they aren’t happening. I’ve been wondering if it was just a scare from the salesman to push me to an ICE. We’ve kept on top of the maintenance and it’s been the most reliable car I’ve ever driven. Might just be a Toyota thing tho. I set aside the money for the repair and I’m waiting, but I’d really rather spend it on hookers and blow.
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The best car for the environment is the one you have.
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You’re taking a useful piece of equipment, a perfectly running car, and doing what with it? Scrapping it? Reselling it? Just letting it sit? None of those make sense from a “save the planet” perspective.
You can scrap the internal combustion car. Sure, it won’t make any more emissions itself, but it does cause demand for another EV to be manufactured RIGHT NOW, which has opportunity cost - manufacturing is expensive, monetarily and environmentally. Would this eventually even out, yeah, probably but it’d cause a lot of stress in the short term.
Reselling it is probably the MOST environmentally friendly option, but that car is still making emissions. If the buyer of your internal combustion car already had a car, it’s the same problem as scrapping it, kicked down 1 more chain link. the emissions necessarily increase. If they didn’t already have a car, well now there’s the same combustion engine car on the road, and we made a new EV to fit demand.
Letting the car sit is a bit of a sunk cost fallacy, I admit. The manufacturing cost of the car has already been paid, and it has useful life left in it. This is where we have to actually make a cost-benefit decision. If the car is older, yeah probably don’t drive it anymore. If it’s less than 20 years old, it probably has enough life left in it to offset the benefits of producing a new EV right now. This just feels like scrapping it, with even more junkyard requirements.
Obviously this isn’t all on the individual level, one person doing any of these things isn’t causing any shift in demand, but if everyone suddenly started having that mentality, I don’t think it’d end well at all. Use what you have, don’t buy until you have to or comfortably can. Reuse is as important as reduce and recycle.
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There’s a sunk cost already spent for an ICE car that’s already been produced. There’s an opportunity cost to swapping to an EV immediately. My point is simply that the situations are complicated enough that the only reasonable “one size” approach for a heuristic to balance those costs is one along the lines of “replace your ICE car when it’s reached the end of its useful life, and replace it with an EV”.
No, this probably won’t be the best overall. That requires individualization. Someone still clinging to a 40 year old gas guzzling truck would be better off scrapping it. Someone who bought a sedan in, like, 2017, it still has a few years of well performing life in it would do best to keep it til it dies and then replace with an EV.
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I specifically mentioned sunk cost because it can be fallacious. I was aiming to get ahead of that. Not every sunk cost is fallacious, and that’s why I went into depth about sunk costs vs opportunity costs.
And again, on an INDIVIDUAL level I agree with you. Individuals don’t have that kind of impact on demand as something like a ban of ICE engines, or broad adoption of them to the point of masses of people looking to buy at the same time does.
Individually, buy one as soon as it makes financial sense for you, ideally when you’d be buying a car anyway.
Systemically, buy one when your car dies, keep your running machine for as long as possible.
Specifically the opportunity costs I’m referring to are manufacturing related. Right now, producing EVs is more costly than producing ICE cars, in terms of carbon footprint. If too many people adopt too quickly, it results in more being produced while the manufacturing process is still shitty.
There’s a problem with the “pass down the cars” thing too. At the end of that chain is still a car being decommissioned. If it’s still usable, that’s a higher net carbon footprint. A new EV still had to be produced for that chain of used car sales to go through.
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Do you want me to explain why marginal analysis is flawed or do you already understand?
If most people replace their cars every three years they’re not getting to 80,000 km before they buy a new one.
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According to Mr. Bean’s original article, that’s the average length of car ownership in Britain due to the prevalence of three year leases.
And it doesn’t matter if they’re going on the used market because there’s still another new car getting built that doesn’t have to be.
Yeah, the policy causes more cars to be sold, which is also an important thing to take into account.
But you initially said “If most people replace their cars every three years they’re not getting to 80,000 km before they buy a new one.”, and that is plain wrong, the car is not scrapped after those 3 years, so when it changes owner for the first time is irrelevant. And that 80k km is worst case scenario, that assuming all electricity is generated in the least environmental way possible, in practice it’s often <40k km that there is already a break even because not all electricity is generated by coal.
Except that is ignoring the filtering effect of the used market. As a car ages and changes hands, it is likely to replace an older, less efficient car. How else could we replace the oldest cars that are going out of service due to being at the end of their life?
It’s not like the people that are buying old used cars are suddenly going to afford an expensive new car. Instead, they need an affordable used car.
Are we sure newer cars are more efficient ? With dieselgate and recent articles about how Co2 emissions are better in lab but same on real conditions, we are allowed to have fat doubts.
If like the guy further up this thread you only drive 8k km a year that’s going to take 10 years to reach parity. The Li-Ion battery may not even last that long.
Obviously if you drive for work or commute long distances that can’t be covered by public transport then an EV makes sense, but with the expansion of WFH it may not for many.
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We’re about 10k past that mileage where we’re supposed to be having battery issues, maybe need a replacement, with our Prius and they aren’t happening. I’ve been wondering if it was just a scare from the salesman to push me to an ICE. We’ve kept on top of the maintenance and it’s been the most reliable car I’ve ever driven. Might just be a Toyota thing tho. I set aside the money for the repair and I’m waiting, but I’d really rather spend it on hookers and blow.
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