Electric Vehicles

These kinds of studies usually go by the average emissions of the relevant country's power generation.

Heres the relevant bit for this study though, it has both national and by province:

In addition, electric vehicles also benefit from the low-emissions intensity of electricity generation relative to gasoline in most parts of Canada. Comparing the lifecycle emissions of the two fuels on an equivalent energy basis, grid electricity emissions are 61% lower than those of gasoline at the national level and 20%-93% lower in the 8 provinces/territories whose grid electricity is cleaner than gasoline.6 A handful of provinces and territories have grids that are more emissions intensive than gasoline based on the 2023 domestic electricity generation profile (chart 2). That said, even in this latter group, most electric vehicles still have lower fuel-related emissions and lifetime emissions than comparable gasoline vehicles because they use less energy during operation. (See appendix for a breakdown of electricity generation by fuel type).

They go into detail. Most FF electricity will be 40%-60% effiency, though peaker plants can be as low as 25%. ICE to wheel efficiency is 18%, and natural gas is cleaner than oil to boot. Canada has a lot of hydro and nuclear.

Any chance you can source your numbers? I tried to do the same calculation for my 18 year old gas car, and it came out a being a wash.

Finding hard numbers on the energy cost to build a new car was tough - the green sites showed the EV car poofed into the world with magic and butterflies, while the gas-centric sites made it sound like it took the entire world's GDP to produce a single EV.

Also disheartening, the very few sites I could find that would list replacement costs for a battery pack had the price higher than the vehicle itself - IE, when the battery pack goes, you throw the car away & buy another one. That's been a huge turnoff for me.

Diesel has more NOx emissions and significantly more particulate emissions than cars running on gasoline, which is why cities are banning older vehicles running on Diesel. They're harmful to people's health, especially if they lack modern filters.

For CO2 though, Diesel usually runs miles around gasoline. That's why the EU has favored Diesel engines over gasoline one's since signing and ratifying the 1997 Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse emissions.

The lightest model 3 weighs about 3900lbs. Which is going to be like 1000lbs on any similarly sized ICE car

Have you ever worked in a mechanic shop to actually smell tire and brake dust? Hell, even if I wasn't a smoker, my lungs are already probably fucked.

And you're not considering, where does all that tire dust actually go? Every time it rains, it gets washed off the roads, off into drainage canals and the environment in general. It doesn't just disappear.

Do you know the name of this study? I'm curious to see if they tested the same set of tires on both or if the EV was on factory low resistance ones

Not OP, but tire dust is a real problem. It's one of those things we haven't studied until very recently. It's just gone under the radar because it's easy to point at tailpipe emissions.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2024/12/18/tires-shed-millions-of-tonnes-of-microplastics-into-the-environment/

Now are EVs worse? If we compare the same class of vehicle, EVs are going to be about 20% heavier, so yes, they're going to create more tire dust. Is that worse than the tailpipe emissions from a gas vehicle? Probably not. But it's deceptive to not include tire dust when comparing emissions between the two vehicle types.