American EVs reduced gasoline consumption by just 0.54% in 2021

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/11/american-evs-reduced-gasoline-consumption-by-just-0-54-in-2021/

by mfiguiere • 4 years ago

18 104 4 years ago

Compounding curve, reducing gas consumption by 1/200 units of gas consumed is good, and over time this amount will increase until the point at which EVs are economically cheaper than gas, at which point it will experience takeoff.

proc02• 4 years ago

The electric grid is a big bottleneck that I don't think has a solution yet. At some point EVs will create stress on the grid, slowing down the adoption and leaving the state of this transition in the worst of both worlds--costly electricity but many people still using gas. IMHO, the #1 priority should be cheaper electricity. Everything else follows from that, like more demand for EVs. It seems focusing on EVs too much is putting the horse before the cart, or w/e that saying is.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Plugin hybrids would bridge that gap pretty effectively- especially for short trips where it could go battery only.

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

EV's mostly charge at night, and the grid is sized to handle air conditioners during the day time. So if the grid can handle air conditioning during the day time, it should be fine.

bunabhucan• 4 years ago

"If they perform scheduled charges for times in which electricity is cheaper, the US power grid could deal with 65 million EVs."

https://insideevs.com/news/436665/24-million-evs-limit-curre...

2021 sales were less that 1% of that. At what point does the bottleneck kick in? I would imagine electric utilities have a huge incentive to make this work given that demand has been flat at ~4 trillion kWh for over a decade.

eldaisfish4• 4 years ago

You make a good point but this sort of thinking is unfortunately dismissed here by those who view technology as the solution to all problems.

Your observation is correct - the grid as designed is indeed a bottleneck and this will become increasingly obvious in northern climates as more services switch to electric - heat and transportation are good examples. An excellent case in point is the trans canada highway which has failed to electrify large sections due to insufficient grid capacity. Before people point to a map from an auto maker, do those maps show instances where the power feeding EV chargers has overloaded a circuit causing multiple hours of no charging?

Cheaper electricity should indeed be a short term goal.

bluGill2• 4 years ago

The grid operators are watching EVs coming and making plans.

The limit is regulation, not technical. Often the law doesn't allow them to build the lines where they need to.

benj111• 4 years ago

As discussed in the article these EVs only added 0.15% to electricity demand, so at 100% EVs were talking 30% extra demand.

I don't know about the US, but in the UK electricity demand has dropped ~20% in the past 10 years. (10% in 7 years if you want to avoid covid etc) Adding in the fact that EVs are more likely to be charged off peak and I'd be surprised if it made any appreciable difference.

rootusrootus8• 4 years ago

the point at which EVs are economically cheaper than gas

From a fueling standpoint, EVs are already far cheaper than gas. So much so that many people are already jumping to EVs despite having to make compromises when road tripping.

kevinpet2• 4 years ago

But not from a total lifecycle perspective. 100000 miles at 25 mpg at $5/gal is $20,000, and that's spread out over the ten years you drive those 100,000 miles. Add in another few thousand in extra maintenance costs for gasoline, subtract out a few thousand for the cost of charging at home, subtract out a bit more to get the charger installed, and for a full size car the fuel savings are about $12,000 up front.

For compact cars comparable to cars that get better mileage, that's less.

jotm2• 4 years ago

Where does the math work out? In much of Europe, charging instead of fueling is around 2x more expensive per KW of useful energy and that's with diesel/petrol being 2 Euros/Liter.

And we're not even getting into the reduced range, availability of (fast) charging stations, availability of electric work vans, the cost of EVs, cost of repair/batteries, etc.

Right now for the vast majority of people, EVs are frankly, ridiculously unaffordable.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure the "just" is warranted, they appear to be punching above their weight.

But it should be clear now that EVs on their own are not a panacea to our transport-related climate problems, and the future will require many more people to walk, cycle, or take the bus to get to where they're going.

I think this claim is true (and a good thing) but it's not really supported by the evidence presented, which mostly says "the US needs less ICE cars".

abracadaniel• 4 years ago

Having trouble finding a primary source, but it looks like EVs are only 0.43% of operational cars in the US. So, something on the order of a half percent decrease in fuel seems reasonable. Likely hitting above their weight as 2 car families opt to drive the new EV over the older gas car.

https://www.experian.com/blogs/insights/2021/10/ev-registrat...

melling3• 4 years ago

Yes, I remember when only a handful of people had the iPhone too.

Why do we have these silly discussions?

Six years ago Tesla was going out of business and the stock price was going to tank.

When that didn’t happen, we started having other silly conversations.

If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air.

Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States.

https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-ov...

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years ago

I think the main confounder is that sales are doubling year on year, so the most recent year's sales add the most to the number of cars, but at the same time, those sales will be spread through the year, so will on average only have 6 months of fuel savings.

supergeek2• 4 years ago

Also likely hitting above their weight as people who drive more have a much larger incentive to switch to EVs. Not just fuel costs, but time spent going to the gas station a few times a week if you've got a long commute.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

Also - EVs just started to be somewhat available to the average consumer only 3-4 years ago.

Given projected growth rates of adoption and the average lifespan of ICE vehicles - this number is going to be quite impressive in 10 years - like the entire oil output of a big OPEC country [1].

i.e. ~10% of all cars on the road in the US will be EVs, and another ~8% will be PHEVs.

Combined with rates in China & the EU - the difference is going to literally change the entire geopolitics of the planet.

You're looking at ~10M barrels of oil per day - that's ~35% of OPEC...

By 20 years - you're looking at 100% of OPEC...

[1] https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-el...

dr_orpheus• 4 years ago

It looks like the 0.43% stat is just on EV's and doesn't include plug-in hybrids. If you look at the stats in the article (2.1 mil plug-in + 1.3 mil EVs / 276 mil total cars) it comes out to 1.2%. So I agree that is still reasonable and within the order of magnitude I would expect but I think that is why they are saying "only" because they would expect it to be closer to the 1.2%. But I think one of the things offsetting it and why the plug-ins aren't helping as much is that for longer drives you are running through the plug-in battery or you are just driving a gas car.

I would be curious if there was an average miles driven per day/week/whatever for each of the different types of cars.

lm28469• 4 years ago

the future will require many more people to walk, cycle, or take the bus to get to where they're going.

People would probably gladly do that if they could.

I'm from Europe, I spent some years in the US, I never had a car in Europe (I wouldn't have one even if you paid me to), I couldn't do most things without a vehicle in the US (except NYC)

jdsully• 4 years ago

They're including plugin hybrids which apparently saw a massive efficiency drop. I don't think we should consider these transitional technologies anymore now that battery vehicles have become "good enough" in most population centres. Even if you can't charge at home there is now a good network of chargers here in Toronto.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Quite a few non-plug-in hybrids are still being sold, and transitioning those to plug-in would be an improvement.

hnav2• 4 years ago

Non-plug in hybrids are becoming the norm, almost everyone is going to at least a 48v mild hybrid, which is a 10-15% improvement over a normal ICE. Something like a Prius, Insight or Ioniq get 50+mpg combined. If everybody switched from godawful crossovers to hybrid econoboxes (comparable utility and price), we'd see a 30% reduction in gas usage.

Imnimo2• 4 years ago

This report is not an argument against people buying EVs, of course; any gas savings is an improvement on turning that gasoline into atmospheric pollution that worsens climate change. But it should be clear now that EVs on their own are not a panacea to our transport-related climate problems, and the future will require many more people to walk, cycle, or take the bus to get to where they're going.

I don't understand how the 0.54% statistic has any bearing on this conclusion. Like if all miles were driven by EVs, then it would be a 100% reduction in gasoline (using the metric in the study). Would that make EVs a panacea?

supergeek2• 4 years ago

Fuel consumption is only a portion of the transportation related emissions. Road construction, vehicle consumables like tires, and car related infrastructure like parking lots and garages all contribute.

There's also some cost to bear with the huge numbers of vehicle accidents and deaths each year from driving.

KingOfCoders8• 4 years ago

That would be good journalism.

rascul2• 4 years ago

Like if all miles were driven by EVs, then it would be a 100% reduction in gasoline (using the metric in the study).

It wouldn't be quite 100%. Generators, mowers, ATVs, and some other things are also using gasoline. I don't see in the article if that was accounted for. I doubt it would be much more than a few percent at the most, though.

Imnimo2• 4 years ago

Well, but the metric in the study doesn't count those anyway. It's just about gasoline used by cars, and they get their number by considering how much gas would have been used if all the miles driven by EV had instead been driven by a similar gas-consuming vehicle.

LawTalkingGuy• 4 years ago

It seems the right thing to look at is how much energy was saved/added/shifted and from what sources.

Less gasoline is good unless the alternative is coal-fired electricity.

codepoet80• 4 years ago

This. We bought a small EV a little over a year ago, and I expect our personal gasoline reduction is close to 50% -- easily more than half our trips are now in the EV. However, the grid in our area is primarily coal-based, so I'm aware we're just shifting. I've begun my own solar charging project to address that, but its expensive and will take multiple years to get ROI, and is clearly not for everyone. My thesis is diversification -- having 100% of the average family's transportation needs dependent on gasoline creates (or creates potential for) lots of problems. Frankly the infrastructure is not there (in my area) for everyone to go 100% EV, but I'm in favor of experimentation and diversification.

ThrowawayIP• 4 years ago

You are shifting the reduced amount of energy that your car consumes. So even with a coal-based grid, it is a net-positive. The MPGe rating is a great indication of this.

bdamm2• 4 years ago

If you took the gasoline that powers one car and put it in a power plant that powered EVs, you could power maybe 4 or 5 EVs with that gasoline. So even that is a net positive.

Why? Because converting gasoline to electricity in a large-scale plant is far more efficient than converting gasoline to motion in little engines scattered about in the environment. Once the power is available as electricity, the downstream losses are really quite small (10%? 5%?) compared to the downstream losses for gasoline - 85% just in the car itself, and that's not even including delivering the gasoline to the gas station or the energy required to pump it into the car etc.

asdff3• 4 years ago

If we want to prevent a future of EVs being powered by fossil fuels, we need to start building nuclear powerplants like right this instant. This will be tough considering even the most forward thinking state, California, has hardly an interest in nuclear power. The federal government had to bail out diablo canyon before the state was going to let it die like they let san onofre die to replace it with a natural gas plant that produces less power.

Tagbert6• 4 years ago

Even with a pure coal fired grid, an EV only produces as much carbon as an ICEV getting 40mpg. Most grids are much cleaner and there are only a couple of such fully coal powered grids in the US. In the last few years, the percent of coal use in the US electric grid has fallen from about 40% to 18% and it is predicted to continue falling.

Take a look at this map showing the carbon output of an EV in various districts measured in equivalent MPG. https://blog.ucsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Microsoft...

2OEH8eoCRo05• 4 years ago

When does the deluge of electronics waste begin? Are there any studies about the carbon footprint of recycling these things?

senko3• 4 years ago

All modern cars have tons of electronics already.

My new (medium class) ICE car has a bunch more than a small second-car EV I recently drove (Renault Twingo).

Car batteries meanwhile, are likely to be recycled as much as possible, as they are the priciest single component of the car.

2OEH8eoCRo05• 4 years ago

Tons? The Tesla Model 3 has over half a ton of electronics. Just the battery is 1000+ lbs.

bdamm2• 4 years ago

Yes. There is a lot of information on the manufacturing cost of EVs in terms of environmental footprints. One thing we know for sure is that mining resources from dead cars is far less resource intensive than mining resources from traditional resource extraction.

And you have to keep in mind that the carbon footprint of a traditional car is very well understood, and it is enormous. An efficient mid-size car will consume something like 12x its weight in gasoline, and harvesting that gasoline also has a carbon footprint.

Tagbert6• 4 years ago

To date, the number of EVs is small compared to the rest of vehicles. On top of that, relatively few of those EVs have crashed or had their batteries fail. Aside from the first gen Leaf, which had an inadequate cooling system, EV batteries seem to be lasting 10-20 years. At least some batteries are being repurposed for grid storage.

The result is that there are not a lot of batteries that can be recycled yet. There are groups looking into how to do it on an industrial scale and there are some prototype programs out there to test out the processes, but this is not a problem that needs to be solved in the near term.

https://electrek.co/2022/10/14/us-increases-ev-battery-recyc...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/volkswagen-partners-wit...

wiskinator• 4 years ago

I think the simplest way to express my concern with this article is that I would like to have "just" 0.54% of Elon Musk's wealth direct deposited into my bank account tomorrow.

timeon• 4 years ago

Good for him but is the point of article about Musk?

rootusrootus8• 4 years ago

I think that's fantastic, actually. It's only been a few years. I'm starting to see EVs everywhere, more each day.

taolegal2• 4 years ago

I basically just see them in snobby rich areas.

Same place as the virtue signal yard signs with luxury shops everywhere.

Tagbert6• 4 years ago

That is a very snobby attitude. Do you assume that only poor people are earnest? You do a disservice to the whole income spectrum by prompting the stereotype of the “honest working man vs the rapacious rich man”.

samstave• 4 years ago

Would this be related to the massive fossil fuel consumption is in logistics; shipping and semi trailers?

creeble• 4 years ago

I’d like to see the results for just California, where EV adoption is highest. What has happened to gasoline use in the state where 18% of new car sales are EVs?

obblekk• 4 years ago

Sales of EVs are growing linearly so the displacement effect of EVs grows quadratically (at least for the first 10 years before any significant number are taken out of service).

Quadratics aren't quite exponentials, but they're still pretty fast for a society. US gasoline consumption grew only 5% from 2010 to 2019, so by 2023, EV sales will be offsetting all growth in gasoline demand. By 2024, gas demand will be less each year than before. By 2030, significant numbers of gas stations will be reducing/converting pump counts. That sounds like a pretty awesome arc for the 2020s compared to the 2010s.

And the linear sales growth constant seems decently high too: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1231872/battery-electric...

Gas consumption: https://www.statista.com/statistics/188448/total-us-domestic...

robomartin5• 4 years ago

In every single one of these discussions people always fail to look at reality in the proper context. Baselines are important if the objective is to evaluate the merit of any proposed solutions.

There are many reality-check baselines one can refer to in the case of the planetary-scale problem we are discussing. Here's one:

https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png

A very simple chart that speaks loudly. Among other things, it says that electric cars do not matter. At all.

What?

OK. In case it isn't obvious, I'll walk you through it.

The argument presented is that a full conversion of the US into electric-powered ground transportation is crucial in the fight against climate change. Some say this can actually start to roll back atmospheric CO2 concentration levels. This, of course, is preposterous.

Let's take it a million times further than just converting the US to electric power:

Let's completely erase the US from this planet. We go from 300 million people to zero. All buildings, factories, vehicles, power plants, trains, planes, etc. evaporate overnight. Gone. Beamed into space by Captain Kirk.

What effect would that have on global atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change?

Well, the simple answer (refer to the chart) is the planet would see a reduction in annual contributions of 14%.

This is NOT a reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentration. This is a reduction in annual inputs, that's all.

Instead of 32 giga-tons of CO2 per year contributed by humanity we would contribute 28 GT.

Which, in turn, means nothing whatsoever would change.

Atmospheric CO2 would continue to accumulate and increase at about the same rate.

Therefore, electric cars do not matter at all. Their potential impact is dwarfed by comparison to the absolute elimination of an entire nation from the planet. It is, at best, a rounding error.

I know people won't like this. Well, rather than being offended, how about explaining how electric cars would do any better than eliminating the entire US from this planet?

Here, I'll help with a fill in the blank exercise (using current White House estimate on impact of full ground transport electrification to be 1 GT per year):

  Ten years from now if we change nothing:
  32 GT * 10 = 320 GT more than we have today
  
  If the US didn't exist at all:
  28 GT * 10 = 280 GT more than we have today

  Best case if we convert all cars in the US to electric power:
  31 GT * 10 = 310 GT more than we have today

So...310 GT instead of 320 GT added to the atmosphere in ten years if we go full electric. That's assuming the 1 GT savings per year is real. Given the massive required increase in energy generation this remains to be seen.

BTW, this also assumes all other nations will remain at their current emissions levels. That is unlikely. China and India are likely going up before they come down, if ever.

Comparing our ideas to reasonable baselines is of crucial importance. In this case we learn a very harsh reality.

Electric cars are great, yes. However, we really need to stop painting them as a "save the planet" technology. That's nothing less than laughable given the data.

Again, refute the data before being angered by an argument you do not like. After all, reality does not care about your emotions. Are you actually arguing that full-electrics will have a greater impact than erasing the US from the planet? If you can't do that, you really need to re-evaluate how you see this problem.

Tagbert6• 4 years ago

Yes, climate change is happening. The point is to reduce the CO2 input to reduce the amount of change and to reduce the curve. EVs, across the globe, are one mechanism to reduce the CO2 input to reduce the rate of change.

If you don’t think there is value in reducing CO2 in this are as well as other areas, then do you have any suggestions for reducing the impact of climate change, or should we all just have a big party and burn as much oil as we can?

robomartin5• 4 years ago

Yes, climate change is happening.

It is. Nobody is proposing it is not.

Having the hubris to think we can actually control a planetary scale issue of this magnitude is the problem. We are wasting time, money and resources on nonsense.

The point is to reduce the CO2 input to reduce the amount of change and to reduce the curve.

You cannot. This is wishful thinking.

Even if we convert ALL energy generation on the entire planet to the most optimal forms of renewable energy, not only will we not reverse atmospheric CO2 accumulation, it will continue to increase.

Among other things, keep in mind that we are going to add at least three billion people to this planet by the end of the century. That's the equivalent of two countries the size of China, ten equivalents of the US or about four clones of all of Europe.

This idea of reducing CO2 input at a global scale is a fantasy. The fact that we don't like this does not magically negate the raw math of matter.

Referring to the graph I posted in my prior comment:

https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png

Adding the equivalent of ten times the population of the US or twice that of China means adding the equivalent in terms of annual atmospheric CO2 contributions.

If we go by US living standards, this would mean this additional population would contribute 47 giga-tons of CO2 per year.

If, instead, we take China's emissions, the added population would contribute about 20 giga-tons per year.

How are over three billion people going to live so that they contribute nothing whatsoever to the atmosphere? The answer is: They can't, that idea is a fantasy. Three billions additional people will have a significant and non-trivial impact on atmospheric CO2 contributions, no matter where and how they might live.

All of these discussions wave a magic wand to conclude a miracle occurs, we violate the laws of physics and everyone gets pink unicorns. As great as that might feel, it isn't reality. All of these so-called solutions ignore reality in a egregious way. They assume we turn on a magical vacuum cleaner (or some kind of a perpetual motion machine), no other variable changes and magic happens. Great. Yet, that's not how reality works.

If you don’t think there is value in reducing CO2

I have never said that. Reducing CO2 emissions has value. We simply need to understand we cannot take it as far as reversing climate change or reducing atmospheric CO2 concentration.

That last part is one of the most important concepts to grasp. We know that, if humanity left the planet, a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 requires about 100K years. Any solution short of us not existing on this planet is going to take longer or, more than likely, never result in a reduction at all.

do you have any suggestions for reducing the impact of climate change, or should we all just have a big party and burn as much oil as we can?

There are no solutions. Thinking we can reverse climate change is as silly as thinking we can slow down the planet's rotation so we can have 48 hour days. The scale is massive beyond comprehension.

And then there's the question of impact. And it is a question. I don't have the answers any more than anyone else might. This is a very complex multivariate problem.

Here's one hypothetical. What if we have to, slowly, over a few centuries, move towards the poles? Why would that be a problem? Is it a silly question? I don't know.

Every time someone voices concern about CO2 concentration I suggest they go and buy a CO2 meter and measure concentration around where they live and work. It is eye opening. For example, here's a table in the office:

https://i.imgur.com/3jEru4d.png

Here it is on the grass, outside:

https://i.imgur.com/srjNIYE.png

In the car I got measurements in the 1100 to 1300 range.

If you do this, one of the revelations should be: We have been living in very high CO2 ppm environments for centuries and none of use have turned into blobs of meat-like jelly on the ground. Why are we being told we are going to cease to exist if we gain another 100 or 200 ppm? Is this fear-mongering or true scientifically supported facts? How do they explain people driving on the highway many hours per day, every day, in a 1100 to 1400 ppm environment and not dropping dead by the millions every day? Etc.

There are a lot of questions, the most fundamental of which being just how much of what we are being told is fantasy used for financial and political gain?

I don't have the answers. All I can do is point out a lack of alignment between the message and reality.

Schroedingersat4• 4 years ago

Here's an absolutely wild idea that you don't seem to be aware of at all:

There are cars in places other than the US.

Mind blowing, isn't it? What will they think of next.

robomartin5• 4 years ago

Here's an absolutely wild idea that you don't seem to be aware of at Mind blowing, isn't it?

You excel at using insults in place of any form of logical argument. This has happened in other discussions. The bad news is reality does not care.

Have a great day.

Tagbert6• 4 years ago

the argument that makes the most sense to me about why EVs with slightly less than 1% have “only” reduced CO2 by 0.54% is that until recently the available EVs were mainly replacing relatively gas efficient vehicles: hatchbacks, sedans, and small SUVs. The owners of less efficient trucks and large SUVs have not seen EV equivalents to switch to. that is starting to change with the introduction of the Ford F150 Lightning and the upcoming Silverado and other larger EV SUVs. Also the number of PHEV SUVs has increased in the last year or so. As EVs become available to replace vehicles across the range, that impact number should correct and more closely track market penetration.

American EVs reduced gasoline consumption by just 0.54% in 2021

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