Quote from: Shirik on August 14, 2012, 03:25:06 PM

Quote from: Factory on August 08, 2012, 03:24:09 AM

What are your views towards electric cars? They are advertised as 'green' due to a much lower consumption of fossil fuels. However, in order to create the batteries for these cars, there has been a massive spike in rare earth mining in more recent years. The processes that yield these rare earth elements are not green at all. They utilize diesel machinery, a plethora of chemical agents for refining, and do it in such a way that it is non-sustainable. Mind you, the majority of REEs come from China as well, where they are even more lax in regards to both protecting the environment and protecting the workers.

I personally believe that the concept of these vehicles is an excellent one, but the current processes taken to create them do not really help the environment at all. Instead the extent of damage to the environment is just shifting hands, from the car owners to the people mining these resources.

Of course, rare earth elements go into many other devices, such as phones, tablets, surgical equipments, but a large amount of demand recently has been due to this notion that green cars are actually green.

I worked on a team in the EcoCAR competition a few years back, which, among other things, had a goal of making the "most green car". Trust me when I say car manufacturers are thinking about far more than fuel when they design these cars. Granted, marketing is surely putting a spin on things, but there are a lot of other factors to consider. In actuality, we found (from GM's own analysis tools) that creating an all-electric car is much less green than you might think. It's still a Really Good Thing, but you have to consider other things as well.

We had to do a "Well-to-Wheel analysis" on the vehicle, and found that all-electric vehicles weren't coming out so great after all. We found that a plugin hybrid electric vehicle was in fact the way to go, but preferred a smaller battery. I believe the Volt's general logic is something along the lines of "run on electricity as much as you can" whereas we preferred to make more intelligent decisions on when to choose gas over electric.

You did pick up on the battery, but you missed the big one: That electricity has to come from somewhere. It is a sad fact that most of our grid power comes from Coal right now, though that seems to be in decline. Now admittedly, not everyone in the world uses coal power, but when you're doing an analysis like this, you take averages. So effectively more than 50% of our electricity used was being counted as if it came from Coal. That's not very green at all. You just moved the problem.

I do think the Volt is a step in the right direction, but I bought a new car last year, and it was not a volt. Not because I couldn't afford it, but because I don't think we've solved the problem yet. That being said, there is something to be said for putting more demand on the electric grid - if it increases, eventually someone will start thinking about how we can start decommissioning these coal power plants.

Here in Ontario, most power comes from Nuclear (Hydro takes 2nd place). I believe all fossil fuel plants are scheduled to be shut down in 2014.