This is a good read of an article and some good technical calculations that a electric car has to travel 697,612 km to finally become green, most cars don't last that long overall.
Need to read the whole article.
Electric car: 697,612 km to become green! True or false?
Author: Prof. Damien Ernst, University of Liège
Very recently, the RTBF, a Belgian media outlet, published an article titled « Electric car: 697.612 km to become green! » I had given an interview to the journalist Gérald Wéry about this article, and I made some calculations. So yes, under certain hypotheses, I found that when we took into account the CO2 emitted for the manufacture of the battery of an electric vehicle, it was only after that car had travelled 697612 km that we could consider that the electric vehicle emitted less CO2 than a petrol-driven car. Here we are talking about an electric vehicle with an 80 kWh battery. Note that some high-end electric vehicles can come with even larger batteries. As examples, the Audi E-Tron has a 95 kWh battery. And the new Tesla Roadster a 200 kWh battery. Gérald Wéry and I were lambasted following the publication of this article which was badly misunderstood. I tweeted about it to explain, quite directly, what was the basis for my coming up with this number during the interview:
https://twitter.com/DamienERNST1/status/1104060419897991168 (Sorry for those who do not understand French. You can still use the translation service of Twitter).
