For every car enthusiast there are probably a hundred poorly maintained vehicles on the road. Black smoke is likely soot, and white smoke is almost certainly an oil leak.

> Infact a popular tuner company, APR, that provides flashes tested the recent Volkswagen GTI and R generation with their most common tune and determined that with their tune removing the cat had a nominal impact.

Do you mean minimal impact?

As someone into performance cars and motorcycles, removing a cat is pretty uncommon, and you're generally seen as a dick if you do it.

I don’t have hard numbers on this, but I once read a claims that the lawnmowers and weed-whackers in California with their two-stroke engines are responsible for more nitrate and particulate emissions than all the cars and trucks in the state put together, even though by fuel burned the latter outnumbers the former by orders of magnitude. I could totally see a malfunctioning four-stroke ICE with dirty burns being worse than 100 maintained ones.

I used to work for the Air Resources Board of California, and while there is a warm-up period, modern ice cars are so profoundly cleaner than cars even from the early 2000s. It’s pretty stunning.

Regardless, there’s nothing cleaner than no combustion, and I can’t wait until EV‘s have replaced them all

Yes, any cyclist daring to drive in winter can easily confirm this. It is so disgusting (and unhealthy) having to stand behind a ICE car on a traffic light and being behind a electric car is such a relief, that thoughts of wishing to ban all ICE cars as soon as possible (at least in cities) come automatically.

You could run them on propane, which doesn't need the catastrophic converters - they make no difference at all if there's no CO or HC in the exhaust stream.

You've got the added bonus that you don't need to strip-mine huge chunks of Africa for precious metals, too.

I try to keep my cat indoors, but he won't work anyway. Maybe I should get one of those newer electric cats.

As an aside, I'd like to mention that like 9 times out of 10 if you are driving down the road in an ICE vehicle and smell weird oil or hot coolant smells you are smelling someone else's car. The wind blows away a lot of your own stink before it gets to you. I learned to ignore anything that didn't smell 1) when I was stopped, and 2) more than once in totally different locations. After trying to track down smells that I thought were mine and were invariably from someone else nearby.

I’ve driven an EV for 5 years now, and I still occasionally think it’s something wrong with my car, instinctively lol

As the fleet of EV's age, I'm sure we'll see equivalents...

"The high voltage wires were just dragging on the street sparking, presumably with all the safety features disabled"

"They were driving with a 10 gallon coolant tank on the roof, presumably because the coolant loop had a big leak and needed continuous topping up".

The health consequences of inhaling exhaust particulates are far more harmful than the equivalent CO2 contribution to greenhouse effect warming unfortunately.

All in all, a well tuned ICE is better for everyone than a poorly tuned one, if you had to pick between the two.

I know in some car tuning circles, or even just blue collar Joes in some places, will recommend removing the catalytic converter. Supposedly it makes the car use less fuel at the cost of worse emissions, and can make it sound better for those who care about that.

HEPA filters stop dust particles and not those tiny organic molecules that cause the smells. Filters for these exist as well, usually used in respirators, but those need to be exchanged pretty frequently and are not cheap.

We love privatising the benefits and socialising the harms of everything.

If the exhaust had to go through the cabin so the driver got the worst of it, car exhaust would be the cleanest air on the planet within months and/or alternatives to cars would rocket.

But as long as it’s other peoples health affected, meh.

I feel like ICE cars put out such a quantity of exhaust that any HEPA filter you put on it would reach its end of life within a few hours of driving.

If it "reeks" though it's not just water vapor. I see a lot of these cars too, and you can tell it's been going on for a long time when the back of the car is covered in a layer of black grime. I think that's what kind of car problem the post is referring to.

> White smoke is water vapor.

Could also be coolant or oil

Stolen cars, exhaust leaks before the cat, incomplete combustion so bad the cat can’t cover it up. I assume it’s stuff like that.

It’s not whatever tiny bit of oil gets burned in a healthy engine.

A lot of old cars also since new cars are so expensive.

A lot of Americans take their cat off on purpose for louder noises.

Additionally, a lot of conservatives love to "Roll coal", and literally will shit up the environment on purpose just because they feel schadenfreude from pissing of an environmentalist.

you still have tyre rubber, which is a major source of microplastics

Huh, no. Pollution close to humans is bad for both city and rural people.

> The pollution always goes somewhere,

"The solution to pollution is dilution". We want the concentration of pollution low, so the health effects are low too, and we can give natural processes the time to decay/oxidize/etc the pollutants.

> not like we have large swaths of useless places

We do... we mostly care about the lower ~100 meters of atmosphere because that's where people live. That's less than 1% of the total atmosphere. This means we can distribute pollution over a volume a 100x larger than that that is important for us. And then I'm not even counting the vast amount of the planet that's uninhabited / non-land.

Also, smokestacks are designed to not directly pollute the air close to people, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnYdt4T76mk

Probably because Santa Clara County has more EV sales compared to its neighbors, according to this map:

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/zero-e...

Germany maybe 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 ( at least in the south ). I drive mostly the commuter schedule and I am amazed how many are driving the EVs.

Truth is: for commuting up to 100kms, the EVs are wastly cheaper long run ( you have to factor everything ! )

Actually it's considerably less explosive than petrol and far safer in a crash.

If a petrol-fuelled car goes on fire, the fuel tank will explode. The tanks are usually thin plastic and will split open in an accident, spilling fuel everywhere.

By contrast, the LPG tanks are pretty much indestructible and if you remove a tank from a car that's been on fire (a lot of taxis are LPG-powered and seem to go on fire late at night for some reason, especially if they're parked in the wrong part of town) you'll find the tank is still about as full as it was before the car got burnt.

You forget the most important aspect of policy: it can't cost a single dime, and everyone must lie about that. Read the first sentence of the article:

"When California neighborhoods increased their number of zero-emissions vehicles"

Obviously neighborhoods/cities/states didn't increase anything. It was just rich people living there buying fancy cars. Of course, this needs to be described as a great accomplishment of local government.

And nowhere in the article is the obvious solution even suggested: advancing electric car technology so they're cheaper than ICE cars. And I don't mean charging extra tax while cutting public transport to make sure poor people don't go anywhere anymore, I mean fixing the technology so everyone has transport, for less money.

Connect and infotainment must be firewalled from the engine computer for security reasons. It’s not like two raspberry pis are that expensive.

I hate that. If I live in the country, my car spies on me. If I live in the city everyone spies on me. One value I agree with the libertarians on is, I just want to be left alone.

Personally I’m not very keen on owning a vehicle the manufacturer can completely brick at will

> "Smart" EV's are demonstrated to be significantly safer than "dumb" EVs. Waymo’s 2025/2026 data shows an 80–90% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers in the same cities.

It's important to realize the reason for that.

Crashes by human drivers are hugely disproportionately by people who are driving drunk or with insufficient sleep or significant distractions etc. In other words, it's not a difference in the cars, it's a difference in the drivers. Waymo can beat a drunk driver, and therefore can beat the human driver arithmetic mean which has the drunk drivers averaged in.

That doesn't mean it's any safer than driving an ordinary car when you're not drunk.

I assume GP meant cars with internet connectivity features, not (real) self driving tech.

Waymos are driverless vehicles. We're talking about always-connected human-driver vehicles. The comparison is not apt.

You're missing "reliability" in your rhetorical dilemma.

The business case is that I will actually buy it. I won't buy "consumer electronics" garbage when I want to buy safe and reliable transportation.

The business case is the same as every “dumb” device since the dawn of time, up until maybe 10 years ago.

Sell and product with enough margin to make money. Don’t sell it at or below cost, then spy on your users and sell them to the real customers, the advertisers.

“Dumb” stuff has a very simple and honest business model. Market the cars by exposing what every other car brand is actually doing.

>Edit: Any answer that does not take COGS or Magins into account is moot.

Auto quality touch screes are not cheap. A high quality switch/button assembly is still cheaper for a give lifetime (100k, 200k, whatever), which is why it's what the 3rd world compact cars all use. The switches start losing when you start having a ton of different sets of features the car needs to support.

The case is that you’ll sell more cars giving people options. Slate is bucking the trend, we’ll see if successful.

Typically, yes. Although I chalk much of that up to traditional ICE companies being extremely slow to adopt new technology and implementating it poorly or only superficially.

Not really, they are just newer than the average ICE car. Parent wants an EV from the early 2000s or the 1990s.

Cupra Born in aus, same thing here haha

Though it means connected charging via API stuff doesn’t work. Not that it’s mattered to me!

Ah yes, the previously-marketed $20,000 Slate which is actually $30,000 now, still comes with nothing, and hasn't hit production yet. If only BYD could come in and destroy the non-smart/budget EV market.

Jesus Christ... this entire thing looks like such a far-fetched dream to me. I am worried for the VCs that dumped their money into this idea.

Did the new Leaf get dumber? I have an old 2019 model and it’s connected. In the mobile app I see its location, turn on AC etc.

Does Nissan still not put telematics in the base model in 2026?

Looking at the specs page the base model includes "Dual 12.3" widescreen displays" Why? What the hell is wrong with modern cars?

Does Nissan still air cool their batteries or have they wised up?

They often have eSIMs I think, but (depending probably on the car) pulling the modem's fuse can be safe. That's the case for the VW ID.4 at least.

A few years ago it came out that one of the manufacturers (my hunch is Samsung but I don't remember the specifics) had their "smart" tvs aggressively try connecting to any and all networks it can find in range, if you didn't connect it to one.

I reluctantly bought an LG with webOS (least bad option available) a couple of years ago. For some reason they weren't content to let the TV menu/remote work with up/down/left/right buttons.

That's too fucking predictable, and anyone who's used a tv in the last 2 decades could use it....

Let's give it a fucking nipple, just like those horrific fucking IBM/Lenovo laptops.

Then of course it also tries to "help" by detecting HDR content and change view mode... while something is playing.... which makes the screen go black for several seconds.

Depending on the TV, it will still kick you to their bloated “smart” interface all the time, instead of just simply cycling through inputs.

Other car companies fucked it up is funny way to put it. Tesla hasn’t made a new car in a decade and the whole lineup is for my 80-year old Dad. I have 2014 Tesla S, my neighbour 2025, same car. Tesla X is from a decade ago, Tesla 3 is basically Toyota Corolla and Y is basically Model 3 that was pumped up a bit to look like a “crossover”

>You mean we can do something today that will reduce PM10 pollution by half?!

We could. We could massively fund public transit and massively reduce private car ownership. But we won't, because then capitalists will make less money.

> tire particles --- different compounds can effect that, but will always be a side effect of tires on vehicles.

There's vehicles like trains, subways and bycicles, responsible for transporting hundreds of at least a billion people per day, which don't use tires whose particles are the biggest source of microplastics.

I’m not going to try to convince you that you can’t control your immediate environment better in a car, but not having to deal with parking or insurance or traffic is quite freeing.

You know what would make me more free? Being able to just walk and bike to all the places I want to go, and not have to pay car insurance and the energy cost and the high upfront cost or a loan to buy a giant chunk of metal every time I need a loaf of bread.

You know what would make my kids more free? If they could just play outside without the giant death machines flying by with their operators looking at their phones well over the speed limit.

I'm trapped in a world where I need to spend a good chunk of my life in a cage just to work and eat, and you call that "freedom".

Rarely in everyday life situations do I feel as claustrophobic as being in a car in traffic in a typical road.

Can’t change direction (one lane no junctions), can’t change speed (vehicles in front and behind), can’t stop (flow of traffic), can’t break concentration (driving), can’t change body position (car cabin is tiny, seats and hand/feet controls are fixed, no space to stand), can’t look away for more than a moment (responsibility of driving).

And the only places to go are on the predetermined road, from a car park, to a car park, following a lot of strict prescribed rules about how.

This meme of “freedom” is brainwashing and marketing (which has been picked up as an identity thing by the right wing recently).

There’s nothing free about having to use a $20,000 vehicle to buy bread because no other options are available.

> Hey! Stop right there! Do you have a license and registration for that freedom?

God I love freedom so much.

Yep and politicians believe they can recreate utopian Singapore wherever they are governing. Regarding eliminating car use.

8.9 kWh / litre of petrol [1]

But more than 60% of that is lost as heat. The inefficiency increases in colder temperatures.

[1] _ https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-efficiency/transp...

Based on my firsthand experience, cold weather (big one) or hauling/towing significantly reduces that 400 mile range (sometimes by 50%+). Yes to comfortably get 400-500 miles per charge in the worst case scenario it needs to be atleast 2x.

And if I have to park on the street at night where I live?

Tesla has used more than 40 billion of capital

Yes do the same for ICE - very constructive suggestion. Completely unnecessary to call the argument silly though.. There are marked differences in what's needed in an EV vs an ICE, most obvious of which is the giant battery with a very different supply chain.

Just because a tire lasts as long doesn't mean it isn't wearing in different ways. EV specific tires are a lot different than their ICE counterparts.

This isn't "black PR". It's comparing apples and oranges. But throw non-EV tires on one and you'll definitely chew those tires up much more quickly [0][1][2][3].

[0] https://www.wheel-size.com/articles/how-are-electric-vehicle... [1]: https://www.pepboys.com/car-care/tire-care/ev-tire-wear [2] https://recharged.com/articles/do-ev-tires-wear-faster [3] https://www.evuniverse.com/whats-the-difference-between-regu...

>"I have a heavy and high performance EV (Tesla Model S) and I have replaced my tires twice in the last six years. So it’s about the same as an ICE vehicle in that regard."

Well no, it's not "the same". We have things like physics to tell us that more torque and more weight means more tire wear, despite your anecdote. There are even studies on this. They also have a greater impact on road wear.

EVs have many advantages over ICEs. I don't understand why people have to lie and say they are worse nowhere.

https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2024-us-orig...

Micro plastics pollution is a relatively new problem and thus many direct and indirect effects are not yet fully understood. Moving emissions from CO2 (gas) to micro particles (solid), means emissions will be deposited more local to roads. Moving emissions from 'big oil' installations to the road, means more local emissions/deposits nearer to your home and backyard.

Additionally, due to the fourth power law [0], you only need 20% weight increase to obtain a 2x road wear. Asphalt/concrete production is also accompanied with substantial emission, although progress is made to reduce it [1].

Is there a break-even for weight vs emission reduction? And if so, is it somewhere between personal and cargo vehicles or is it 'EV always better'?

Are we trading 'well-known and bad for global environment'-emission for 'poorly-understood and possibly very bad for local environment on a global scale'-emission?

Of course, with the available information EVs seem to be the better solution, but it should not prevent us from researching/solving unknown effects or being careful choosing a single solution on such a large scale.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

[1] https://www.pbl.nl/uploads/default/downloads/pbl-2022-decarb...

"The oil companies! The oil companies!". Yeah, they only lie, nobody needs their products! We all hate it! Buy a car from a good company with honest leadership, like Tesla (made of oil products)!

The Tesla Model S has been out for almost 13 years, so you can already see it.

Your phone doesn't have liquid cooling temp management and is probably recharged daily. With a car that has 300 miles range, a lot of people probably only do a full cycle every week.

Modern EVs with thermal management simply haven't been around for long enough for a significant quantity to reach 1 million miles, especially those with LFP cells.

There are some taxis and limo service Teslas that famously did make it to 300-400k+ miles on their original pack.

The technology exists, CATL is offering a million-mile/15 year warranty for some of their packs: https://chargedevs.com/newswire/catl-warrants-its-new-ev-bat...

It's a solved problem. When you consider TCO, EVs win even if the battery needs replacement.

I was giving the Leaf as an example of a worse warranty offering from 15 years ago sorry. Toyota now have the longer warranty compared to all the others, and even as a fairly poor EV they’re hugely popular with taxi drivers etc.

I’m a bit EV obsessed so spend a lot of time answering questions about them online, the longer warranty is 100% impacting buying choices.

This seems like something EV buyers would care about. If they don't, it raises the question of why a solution is needed at all.

>The anti-EV propaganda already works pretty well

Is that why EV sales have absolutely sky rocketed?

The average car is 12 years old (us, but other countries are similar). so gas stations are likely still common in 20 years. in 10 years new gas stations will be built a lot less often, but nobody will close an existing one that they wouldn't close anyway.

Half the US takes pride in pollution though, and despise efforts to reduce it, so that's not gonna be the case everywhere.

>Really step back and imagine a world where the modern EV [1] was first to market and a gasoline combustion engine was second.

.... you worded that extremely poorly. Being first to market is completely different then someone's personal first experience. Between that first sentence and the follow post, it's like reading the question what if the smartphone came out before the electric telegraph.

If you're trying to say like a future time when we've got fast chargers everwhere with no need for an app, and at home charging is common which makes BEV's 80% of the market? Sure that makes sense. Probably it's going reality by 2040 or so.

But for me right now, as is, I'd probably still sticking to ICE, or MHEV engines for a while. No easy access to home charging, and I don't have data on my phone which makes fast charging way more complicated. And I don't drive enough KM in a year to make break even point in costs reasonable.

And I've test driven BEVs and I could afford to buy a BEV. The advantages don't outweigh the drawbacks in my situation at least, and there wasn't enough there for me to want to just put objectivity aside.

I don't disagree with you, but the question wasn't about numbers. And supercars aren't a replacement for economic and simple sports cars, sadly.

PHEVs are a very interim solution. There are some advantages while range anxiety is an issue.

Yes, EVs have a weight penalty of ~250-500kg of battery currently.

Battery technology is rapidly advancing, when Na-ion batteries are introduced more widely, the whole range anxiety issue will become moot, because a recharge will take as long as refueling an ICE vehicle.

The weight difference will also start to reduce, both due to newer batteries, but also moving to lighter weight construction and increased use of alternatives to steel.

Arguing for ICE technology in 2025 is like Blackberry/Nokia users complaining about the loss of keyboards & T9 texting.

Unfortunately most people's actual usage patterns for plug-in hybrids appear to make them worse than just a straight up ICE - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...

I looked into PHEVs on my last vehicle shopping go-round, since few pure EVs met my cargo size requirements (stroller/baby life is a whole thing).

Ultimately, it was way more worth it to go all the way up to an F150 Lightning than to go with a good PHEV, partly due to up-front cost, but mostly due to ongoing cost: I will need to change the oil on the electric motors maybe every 150,000miles, and I never need an emissions test again. PHEVs require keeping the gas engine up, and getting it emissions-tested.

A whole category of cost just straight-up disappeared, for cheaper than I could get a RAV4 Prime too.

Hybrids don't solve the main problem which is global warming, which demands zero carbon, not 50MPG gas cars.

ICE cars also often leak all sorts of liquids onto roadways (and thus into our water ways).

Hi, I’m indeed the same person. I also hate oversized trucks. I’m generally against things that make the world worse for marginal benefits.

The cybertruck clocks in at around the same weight as oversized trucks. Whenever I see people alone in either, I’m pretty annoyed.

Semis for long haul are also annoying and we should substantially increase rail infra in the US

Isn't brake pollution a lot less with EVs?

I'm the person who commented it and I don't appreciate your straw man here.

Please don't downvote comments because you don't agree with the argument. Downvotes should be for comments that add little to the discussion.

I agree that discussing weight with regard to EVs, without acknowledging that (in the US) the fashion is for big heavy ICE cars is just as polluting is disingenuous.

That said, outside the US the trend is for smaller cars, and equally the weight of a small EV is not hugely dissimilar to a common ICE car.

Frankly I'm not sure there's a whole lot to say about tire dust- cars need tires. EVs generate less brake dust. If there's a tire dust discussion to be had, then that discussion is independent of the vehicle fuel source.

That literally makes no sense. There’s a point on the accelerator pedal curve where you are coasting (between it applying power or applying regen), you get used to staying around that position pretty quickly because you stop short of where you are aiming to stop otherwise. You basically only back off past that point and into regen when you would be braking in an ICE car, so there is really no difference.

Braking from regen or braking from a brake pad has the same net impact on tire wear. EVs can coast too and don’t apply full regen the moment you apply brakes. Some even have brake coach alerts to get you to gradually apply the brakes to maximize energy return.

The tires and their dust don't care whether you're braking by regen or friction. The reason there's more dust is from the increased weight of the EV not because of regen braking. You can coast in EV as well, that is not exclusive to ICE.

Yes current EVs are heavy. It's not at all clear that this will prevail as solid state batteries evolve to become standard. It is highly possible that EVs will soon be lighter than comparable ICE vehicles [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505975

> A 40 ft bus 2 axle bus with 80 passengers [...] If instead those 80 passengers each drove alone in a Kia Niro EV

Bzzzt. Wrong, unless you literally have a bus that goes from A to B without stopping. City buses do not carry "x passengers", they serve trips. An 80-passenger bus serves way more trips than 80 (though not on average of course), as people can freely get on and off at any time.

And of course, there are way more aspects of this problem than just road wear, parking space for one.

But sure, we absolutely should put buses on rail tracks!

Thank you for doing the calculations. This is interesting and useful. Yes, people should switch to EVs, but mostly because it helps build resilient independent grids (eventually), EVs add a layer of energy storage, we can dump excess energy when its negatively priced (or free) and supply power back to the grid when its costly, replacing peaker plants.

I wasn't talking about passenger buses, because thats unlikely going to happen in US. Almost all of damage is done by 18-wheelers. A fully loaded 18-wheeler: 80,000 lb. Everytime a discussion comes on ICE vs EV, the fossil fuel proponents immediately jump to but EVs weigh more (debatable) and cause more damage. The damage they cause is insignificant compared to 18-wheelers. I'm not entirely sure if EVs weigh more either, maybe the earlier models did, but energy density keeps increasing. Also, there is no compelling reason to have 300+ mile range batteries when most of the trips are under 3 - 5 miles.

> "Walking and biking environments result in ghettoes"

I must admit this viewpoint is one I have never seen before! Instead I've heard many arguments that bike lanes and pedestrianization are forms of gentrification, but resulting "ghettoes?" +1 for creativity!

That's a ... take.

What a ridiculous take. There are many, many cities and towns worldwide that are primarily walk/bike friendly and they seem to do very well in terms of quality of life.

One other decent argument I heard in favor of EVs is that they’re agnostic to where that power is generated. So once that coal plant is replaced with natural gas, solar, wind, or whatever, all the EVs in that area will instantly become cleaner without everyone having to buy a new car after the changes is made.

There are no reputable studies that show EVs having anything like the harms of legacy cars. The worst you can get is that if you're on a carbon-intensive grid, a Hummer EV might be as bad as a compact gas car.

there are no disagreements about the fact that any electric is FAR more efficient than any combustion car.

    Compare the same category of car in gasoline and EV versions.

OK, the Former French Concession.

They’re still filled with motorbikes and mopeds, they’re just electric.

Developing in Hong Kong has been much harder and expensive than before. The high speed rail that connected Hong Kong to the mainland system was (IIRC) the most expensive rail project per kilometer. (They did it anyway since it was a national objective from the central authorities.) And, given the recent tragic fire in Tai Po, there has been a lot more worry about people not being able to afford to renew aging infrastructure (as in residential buildings).

> This is economics 101.

OK.

And did you go to Economics 201?

Because there, you might have learned that the basic economic principles you describe as "economics 101" are the equivalent of the "spherical cow in a frictionless vacuum"-type examples you get in introductory physics classes.

In the real world, demand is affected by all kinds of things, and sometimes, a product or service is just no longer desired by the population. Do you think that if you were selling buggy whips for $0.05 each, you'd be able to make a profit on them today? Of course not, because people don't need them. You'd barely sell any, and those purely as a novelty.

While there's still a lot of work to do to make it fully possible, and certain political groups are actively working against it, the world at large recognizes that getting off of fossil fuels is an important goal. Demand for oil is going to continue to drop—maybe not monotonically, but overall—regardless of what the price of oil does.

That's why I said (ish). I agree, it's predominantly an EV. I hope they backpedal on the decision a bit and offer both an EREV and a regular EV at the same time. I'm quite happy with my Lightning and will buy another, but I'm not super interested in the EREV as it just adds expense, complexity, and maintenance requirements without offering me much additional functionality for my use case.

The insurance part will settle out over time as they get more data I would imagine.

500$ a year is very little for any car, but I opened a Nissan leaf for 8 years and spent less that 2K, of which 1K was for the AC

The insurance premiums here in Sweden are very similar between ICE and EVs, with one exception: Teslas!

They are 2-3x as expensive as many comparable EVs to insure.

Depends on the country. People living in richer European countries buy more new cars on average, while people in poorer European countries give second life to those same cars once those "rich people" decide to sell them and fail to buy any buyer domestically.

This is still a net positive even in poorer countries. If you can't afford a new car, you buy as close to a new car as you can afford. The newer the car is, the higher the EURO standard is that it had to abide by when it was sold brand-new, achieving the same result of reducing pollution.

I live in one of those poorer ones where most people can't afford new cars, but even if you can, the percentage of brand-new ICE cars that are even available for purchasing is going down pretty fast in recent years. So those better off are slowly being pushed towards EVs (or at least hybrids), and the vast majority of others still relies on importing like 15 years old second-hand cars (EURO 5 standard) to replace their 25yo cars (EURO 3 standard). In the capital, cars below EURO 4 are even banned when air pollution gets really bad, but the vast majority doesn't even realise this rule exists because their cars are now EURO 4 or above.

Every cheap used car was once a mid-price or expensive new car.

Most likely expensive, since the cheap ones don't tend to survive past 10-15 years.

Yes, EVs generate more tire and road dust. My car needed new tires after ~32,000 miles.. (52,000 km) which I think is about half the life of an ICE car?

Ah, yes. Buy two $40k cars, one of which funds one of the people actively trying to destroy democracy.

There's. A lot to unpack there.

But I've still got 3 suitcases of my own stuff sitting waiting for me to get a real flat, so I think I'll pass on that and just let you assume that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid and can't do their own research. And, I guess, has $80k just lying around to spend on whatever.

True. But there are 2 ways to read this:

1: Yes, let's stick with ICE cars and die of preventable illnesses because EVs are only a massive improvement, rather than absolute perfection

2: Hey let's take this massive improvement and enjoy enormously cleaner air

I meet way too many people from group 1 unfortunately.

> When the price declines those people can (and do) buy the oil westerners aren't using.

You're missing that the supply drops as well since it is not economical to produce the same amount of oil as before at a lower price.

As long as the supply curve does not change (and nothing about EV usage changes the supply side here), a reduction in demand leads to lower consumption.

Edit: And in addition, your chart doesn't show anything like you purport it to show. By your claim, oil consumption by non-Western countries should have been drastically higher in 2000-2007 when oil prices were lower than they are today. Yet the opposite is true.

Oil consumption is up over time, including in non-Western countries, but that was driven by organic changes in demand, not changes in supply. Switching to EVs would act as a reduction in demand and therefore reduce overall oil usage, at least as compared to a world where vehicle transport required ICE vehicles.

BMW has hardware and software bloat for sure, I hate driving them. But sedans, even the heavy ones, don't really hurt roads much compared to a lorry.

As your wikipedia link indicates, any road that is designed for lorry use should be able to take heavy sedans all day and not be worse for wear:

> Therefore, the resulting stress difference between truck and car is 15,000 to 1.

> Do you have some information or argument that will help me see things differently?

I already told you 2 things, coastal areas and agriculture.

This is Bangladesh elevation map. Bangladesh is amonng the most dense countries in the world, and also among the poorest.

https://www.floodmap.net/elevation/ElevationMap/CountryMaps/...

People are gonna lose their homes and starve to death, this will create massive refugee crises. They won't care if you have micro plastics in your testicles

Almost anywhere where the measurements behind climate science is being discussed. Just pay attention to the x axis on the plots.

It seems like you won't have any trouble finding that yourself if you really wanted to. This "I'm just asking questions" mode you're in can be considered a type of trolling called "sealioning".

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning