Reply #57: About plastics in cars. [View All]

Lets assume the entire car is made of plastic. No steel. No aluminum. No copper. No carbon or glass fibers. No wool or cotton cloth. No Soy foams (Ford Mustang seats, for example.) Nope, the entire car is plastic.

Since that's extreme, lets also say it's a small, very light-weight car. 2,000 lbs.

If the car is an electric vehicle, that's the majority of it's petroleum usage. At some point it will need it's batteries replaced. But, if those are being handled correctly, their plastic casing will me made of recycled materials, possibly some previous cars battery casings. You'll probably need a little more to be honest. But not much.

Now lets consider if this car was a petroleum burner, in the form of diesel or gasoline. It's a small, light car, so lets say it gets an average, city/highway 45mpg. Let's say it gets driven 15,000 miles a year. It'll need about 333 gallons of gas. At around 6lbs a gallon, we can find that it wil burn 2,000lbs of petroleum EVERY YEAR. If that car has a lifetime of 10 years before it's retired, it will consume a total of 22,000lbs of petroleum, vs maybe 2,200lbs of petroleum for the EV. In other, simpler terms, TEN TIMES the petroleum of the EV.

And that's assuming cars are 100% constructed of plastic. Which we know isn't the case. If we say they are 50% plastic, the final numbers are 21,000lbs for the IC car, vs 1,200lbs for the EV, which shows the IC car using over 17 times the plastic.

So, the insinuation that EV's use even close to as much petroleum as IC's is non-sense.

And others are debunking the myth that creating the electricity used to charge EV's creates as much or more GHG than running gasoline powered cars. In short, EV's charged off utility grids result in the production of significantly less GHG than gasoline burning cars, even when using nasty old coal to make that power.

What else you got?