Good, now our (european) politicians should stop forcing companies like Volkswagen, with an incredible history and technological background, giving money to Musk for carbon credits. Use the same money to improve public transportation and the long term impact on CO2 will be better for sure. Not only civil cars are a trivial part of CO2 emissions, but there are many other effective ways to improve things: avoid trucks to move goods, in favor of trains (we have good trains on average) and boats, like 30/40 years ago. Public transportation, as I said. Warming systems... All changes that could have greater effects without destroying our car industry. For reference: Volkswagen has 650k employees. 300k in Germany, 350k outside.
What shocks me with European automakers is that all small EVs have disappeared from their offerings. Renault Zoe, Twingo, VW Up, etc. SUVs on the other hand are absolutely everywhere. Public transports are the ultimate solution of course, but we can't do without cars after decades of car-centric urban development.
I live in a city with one of the best public transport systems in the world. Anywhere I want to go, there's a bus/tram/trolleybus/subway that goes there and leaves in less than 15 minutes. It costs $150 a year. If that isn't luxury then I don't know what is.
Shouldn't that be 1% of emissions in the world? Btw, still more practical to address other stuff. Not that EV are a bad idea, but you can't force such change: the EU plans failed, because people don't have often a viable setup to switch to EV, so it should be made more incremental and together with other infrastructural changes.
Yeah, c/p mistake, thanks for noticing. ~1% it is.
> Not that EV are a bad idea
From an engineering point of view, if we were to solve the pollution problem, and if the numbers above are not terribly wrong, then the EVs are not an answer. There is a huge (operating) cost attached to rebuilding the whole industry with apparently a very small impact. And I'd say with a reasonably large negative impact since we see many automotive manufacturers folding under the EV pressure.
> because people don't have often a viable setup to switch to EV
I agree and I would also add that not that many people can afford buying a new car for ~40k EUR. For many people this is inaccessible.
> according to a report from the European Environment Agency
and I don't know how they got to their numbers. Don't have time to read it right now but do you see a mistake in my calculations? I think I used valid sources?
Can you please elaborate what do you mean more precisely? I am not sure I understand. If 5 bln tonnes is total CO2 emissions, how else would you calculate the contribution of petrol/diesel car industry?
(Depending on context we might include the car roads construction and maintenance as well, for example when considering the merits of different transportation modes)
Sure but that's the total manufacturing CO2 footprint and that's not what I was trying to deduce here. I was trying to understand how much of the problem are we trying to solve with the transition to the EVs. Manufacturing CO2 emissions of the EVs ≈ manufacturing emissions of ICEs.
