Battery Powered Cars

We have seen Governments promoting battery powered cars as the saviour from pollution, but how true is their claim.

Only one actual survey has been done into the full lifecycle emissions from cars and this included everything from the supply chain to shipping new cars around the world, then their "in use" emissions, followed by their disposal and some interesting facts emerged, the most interesting was the fact that the most environmentally friendly car was the large 4X4, now who remembers the Government led attack in the media on large 4X4's using fear tactics? the Suzuki's which apparently rolled over, the large 4X4's running into you that would kill your children, and the generally environmentally unfriendly nature of 4X4's. This was then followed by the fear of them hitting a pedestrian head on and how they always killed children, strange how they always kill children and never adults, some emotional blackmail anf fear porn there.

The stark reality was simple, when independant testing was done it showed that modern vehicles such as the Ford Mondeo or Vauxhall Astra, and many other cars would kill a pedestrian with a 30 MPH impact by throwing them into the air and inverting them so they landed on their heads on the bulkhead panels of modern vehicles, whereas you could be hit at 40 MPH by a traditional 4X4 and not have life threatening injuries as they threw you forwards, and while you sustained injuries they were fairly mild and easily survivable.

Now we are seeing the same fear tactics being used to support cars such as electric cars, so are they claiming the BMW electric vehicles are not carbon fibre, are they claiming that smaller electric cars are not built from lighter and stronger carbon steels, and are they simply ignoring what is inconvenient to them? look at how much energy is used to recycle carbon fibre and other composite materials, and then look at carbon steels, then compare them with the traditional mild steel recycleability.
Each Tesla battery is made from lithium ion and it produced over 18 tonnes of CO2 before it is even fitted to a car, if we include the cost of mining, processing, and transporting this material to be produced into batteries this figure becomes much higher, just producing the battery alone produces more emissions that the production of an average American petrol engined family saloon and its use for 8 years, so are we being sold another pup. If we factor in the rare earth magnet motors and unrecyclaeble power electronics it tells us another story. If we factor in that Lithium Ion batteries also produce emissions as they are charged and discharged this adds more inconvenient emissions which they haven't factored in.

One final thought, if we return to the only in depth survey done into the full CO2 lifecycle costs then we know that a large 4x4 is the best vehicle to own as t produces the least emissions, at the bottom of the list for emissions produced was the electric car.

oops.

Let's add to that the emissions caused by the war in Afghanistan where coincidentally billions of pounds worth of lithium was discovered as well as loads of other minerals and metals that were getting in short supply.