Study shows EV owners have bigger carbon footprint than average because they are wealthier

Perhaps the tax credit should be down payment assistance of the same value for those who purchase the EV if they have a household income below 150k. Maybe limit it to vehicles below a certain total cost as well.

Up front cost is a bigger road block than taxes.

Perhaps there should be policies to even out the wealth distribution.

This is why I'm frustrated with the US and the EU, who are placing heavy penalty tariffs on Chinese EVs.

Exactly. I don't drive an EV because I can't afford one. That's literally the only reason. I'd like to have one.

Can also eliminate all corporate offices, if your job can be done on a computer, there shouldn’t be an office. Unless you need to be physically at your job, no need for you to be commuting at all.

The concept of corporate buildings isn’t even that old.

There are, with the federal government alone paying 7k on most EVs sold in the US. The problem is that they are neoliberal flat subsidies applied at the point of sale that needed Republican support to enter law and as such companies just tack on 7k to the price customers are willing to pay anyway.

What we need is to incentivize manufacturers to focus on bringing down costs by focusing on things like LFP batteries and smaller vehicles, but manufacturers are currently incentivized to make larger vehicles because people are willing to pay a lot more than the added space cost to make, thusly increasing margins. At the very least making the full subsidy only available on vehicles under 25k, with a decreasing subsidy for vehicles under 50k would probably help, but you would need to be ready and willing to call manufacturers on their near certain attempts to get around it.

Some actual price wars between manufacturers would help too, but US auto manufacturers will fight tooth and nail to forestall that possibility.

The problem is that to effectively fight climate change you need to cut emissions in five to ten years, and not fifty to a hundred, and in a nation where even a solidly blue locality openly dedicated to fighting climate change can take ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a bus lane, it should not come as a surprise that many people with the resources to do so are choosing an imperfect solution now rather than running for office so they can get a bus line to their neighborhood in a few decades.

This is before we get to the fact that even nations which world leading public transport systems known for connecting to every small village and house still have plenty of cars and highways, people just don’t try and use them to for every trip in a dense city and plenty of people can get by without owning a car at all. We need to eliminate all emissions, not just city emissions, and we needed to do so ten years ago.

Yes north america needs more common, frequent, and reliable mass transit and the fact that the richest country in the world’s mass transit is in such a state is a national disgrace, but that is not opposed to the quick elimination of oil burning cars but rather should be done in parallel to them.

America specifically doesn't want to build sane infrastructure, we've gone too deep on car culture over the last century+. Going out of the way to build self-driving cars rather than running more rail (or even bus, or trolley) is a solution hunting for a problem that shouldn't exist. Especially given how much car prices have sharply increased in the last decade. Nobody will be able to afford personal transport, people will continue to use older cars for longer periods of time, or get into insane mortgage-sized car loans.

...but we want our "independence" and "freedom" dammit! .... /s

Even so, the status quo changes with EVs. You see it with dealerships/shops charging more for simple repairs, manufacturers trying to go to subscription models for basic car features.

So much of the US is car-based:

• Regular maintenance at a shop to pay for parts and fluids
• The oil industry living at its current large size (it will still need to exist even if we were all EV, until every other product that uses it switches to something else)
• Refueling at gas stations that can upsell you on impulse-buy food, drink, smoke, booze
• Gas station price wars to spur pointless driving around, pointless media attention (which causes further driving around of media vehicles), pointless arguments and chaos
• Supply chains generating every part, widget, and accessory, with the assumption there will be frequent replacement
• Training for mechanics and techs on servicing all these convoluted chemical powered mechanical systems
• Emissions testing and regulation used by municipalities as a money grab
• The engineers paid to design these machines
• Tax on fuel and other car consumables
• The aftermarket accessory market selling upgrade gizmos to customize, trick out, make louder, make more powerful, make coal-rolling
• Even parts theft like catalytic converter theft rings

Yes. Easy patch.

I mean, public transport is a fucking ton of money to start up, and anywhere outside an urban center it is not just a loss but almost a total loss due to distances.

I remember being in a meeting in grad school to discuss the school bus system as part of the student review of finances. We had a bus route that went to another town a good distance away, and it was nearly always empty or with like 2 people on it, so they basically said once the grant money is gone we will shut down this route. We can't afford to put good money into something expensive and isn't getting used.

I realize there is a lot about car culture feeding that, but it remains a massive obstacle. Switching from existing structures like parking etc to public transport? How? How fast? What do we do with that space? Who pays for it? I'm frustrated by the system but we can't just start from a blank slate, we have to work with it.

Electric cars are better than gas, but the extensive car infrastructure needed to sustain cars remains the same. The real solution is having viable alternatives to driving to reduce the need for car use altogether.

Technically, it’s not wrong that worldwide the largest method of electricity generation is coal, but it does tend to be far smaller and shrinking in the richer western nations with lots of EV’s people are probably thinking of, even before getting to the whole electricity is on track to be made carbon neutral a lot sooner than gasoline thing.

I’m actually very impressed that Finland managed to avoid the ‘clean LNG’ that North America got sold on, good work.

I think the study analyzed the footprint of the person, not the vehicle:

In this new study, the research team investigated whether consumers who purchase and drive such vehicles have a smaller carbon footprint than other consumers

The merits of electric vehicles are irrelevant to their study - and their study is irrelevant to the merits of electric vehicles.

So maybe they're not lying (or maybe they are, if they made a direct claim about the power mix of the Finnish grid), but they're definitely far from barking under the correct tree. They're barking in a different forest, not of transport economy, but of wealth and consumption. :)

No one thing is a comprehensive solution.

You'll be surprised one day when you encounter those people.

Ok even if it does shift it, shouldn't big power plants be way more efficient and clean than hundreds of thousands of little engines?