The climate benefits of retiring an operational combustion engine vehicle(www.science.org)
28 pointsby toomuchtodo4 hours ago7 comments
  • SoftTalkeran hour ago
    The fact of the matter is that the only thing that matters to most people is what makes economic sense to them. As for me, no way am I trading my 20 year old, fully paid for, cheap to insure, cheap to register ICE vehicle for a new EV with payments, higher insurance, and higher registration fees.
    • parineum17 minutes ago
      I fully agree with you but you're leaving out two ongoing costs that are usually in an EV's favor, fuel and maintenance.

      That probably wouldn't make the difference for a fully paid for vehicle but it can make a substantial difference depending on electricity (and access to solar) and fuel prices.

    • cucumber373284237 minutes ago
      >higher insurance, and higher registration fees.

      And higher propensity to beep and whine at you and higher propensity to pull a "I'm sorry dave" at any given time.

      • coderenegade20 minutes ago
        This is a big part of it for me. With 'driver assist' systems that intervene when you're driving now being mandatory for all new vehicles sold in my country, I don't want anything newer than 2024. Practically , probably nothing newer than around 2020. You can disable driver assist, but for most modern vehicles, you need to do so every time you start the car. Insurance will eventually be used as a hammer to force compliance on this. Removing safety equipment that came with the vehicle already makes a car unroadworthy, so that's not an option either.

        I'll be driving my old cars to the bitter end.

    • jeffbee29 minutes ago
      The economy does not occur naturally. We can turn the knobs on this equation by just having some taxes. For example, carbon taxes. That should change your calculus pretty significantly.
  • 31 minutes ago
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  • twobitshifter3 hours ago
    It looks like they have the BEV lasting just as long as ICE car without any battery replacement. Has it turned out that way? Seems like owning an electric car for 18 years really hasn’t been a thing since the model s was released in 2012, but is it projected to last that long.
    • FabCH2 hours ago
      As a data point: I’m at year 8 of Model X 100kWh with basically 0% capacity loss. If it exists at all, it’s less than 1-2%, so less than what I can reasonably measure with just the odometer and battery indicator.

      Nissan Leaf gave BEV a bad name because it had much worse battery tech. Battery longevity is not a problem for modern, or even decade old cars.

      • cgyvbunjian hour ago
        > I’m at year 8 of Model X 100kWh with basically 0% capacity loss

        > Battery longevity is not a problem for modern, or even decade old cars

        Thanks to this N=1 study I can conclude that battery longevity is not a problem like you said. Thank you!

    • wcunning32 minutes ago
      The issue is less the wear and tear of the battery and motors and more the wear and tear of everything else -- suspension and brake components are going to need replacing, along with radar and ultrasonic modules, etc. These parts will be at least partially end-of-life and hard to get by the end of that 20 year period. Federal law requires some amount of parts availability for 10 years + some release of part designs to the aftermarket after that, but I have a hard time getting parts for 21 year old Ford designs that were less than popular, so I would be surprised if early Tesla models are having an easy time 20 years on. This gets much much worse as you start to look at the number of abandoned EV models from the Big 3, the abandoned/dead/dying companies (Fiskar, Lucid, Lordstown, etc). That doesn't hit the vast majority of all EVs, which are just Tesla, but it does put a dent/makes the buying decision harder. Now expand that to not just Tesla, but what does Tesla do with a Cybertruck? Like all things, the specific product decision matters a lot, and this is a new area (even at 14 years old) so there will be lots of people who optimized for cost and not maintainability.
      • coderenegade12 minutes ago
        The surprising thing is that parts availability is even worse for new cars. Sensors are built into every part now, so it's no longer just a windscreen or a bumper. If those sensors are critical to the driver assist systems, the car can be a write-off for trivial damage because of the difficulty of getting parts. And in many places, you can't just disable those systems and get on with things, even if the car is otherwise perfectly fine, because the law states that roadworthiness requires the original safety systems to be intact.

        Even more alarmingly, the speed of revisions now is such that vehicles can have parts that were only used for a very short run before being updated and replaced. Your particular vehicle batch may not necessarily have identical parts to other batches even within the same generation. We're a long, long way from the way things used to be, when parts commonality stretched for decades.

    • bryanlarsenan hour ago
      4% of Toyota engines need to be replaced before 250,000 miles; 3% of Tesla batteries need to be replaced before 250,000 miles. "More reliable than a Toyota engine" is pretty high praise.
    • toomuchtodo3 hours ago
      Yes.

      EV Batteries Last Way Longer Than Expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43001996 - February 2025 (2 comments)

      New study shows: EV batteries last much longer than expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228901 - November 2024 (70 comments)

      https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

    • trollbridge2 hours ago
      Certainly not the case for hybrids like Priuses. The battery system lasts 10-15 years and 150k-200k miles. Any ICE car on the market now should be expected to last a lot longer than that; I drive cars that are 25+ years old and really don't need much significant in the way of repairs.
      • FabCH2 hours ago
        Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance. They have their benefits and are key to fighting climate change, but mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides.

        There is no way you are driving a 25 year old car without serious maintenance like exchanging the timing belt. Add the frequent oil changes and all other yearly maintenance and it does add up.

        Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads, and you may or may not need to change the battery, and the batteries keep outperforming the expected lifespan. BEV are simply mechanically much simpler devices.

        • gibspauldingan hour ago
          > Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance.

          While this seems intuitively true, I have some pushback, and I think that the reliability record of e.g older generations of Prius backs me up.

          While you do have effectively two cars (an EV and an ICE) crammed into one, you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear. Your ICE is almost never run under load before it warms up, and is kept running at its most efficient rpm most of the time, your transmission is running under less load since it has help from the electric motors, and is often simpler (the aforementioned Prius does not have a reverse gear for example).

          No it’s not nearly as simple as a BEV, but a well implemented hybrid system is absolutely an upgrade from a full ICE vehicle.

          • joshdontan hour ago
            Personal experience backs up. Had a 2009 Prius, let it go because I did a terrible job handling rust buildup. Was still running great on the original battery pack with nearly 200k miles when we sold it.

            Only significant problem was pothole related damage.

          • esikichan hour ago
            Unless it's -40F, modern cars don't need to "warm up".
          • cucumber3732842an hour ago
            >you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear.

            In theory this should be true. In reality hybrids eat motors compared to the same engine in an ICE. That's just what happens you have two ways of making the vehicle go to potentially mask "something's funny" type issues and your customer base is people who are buying an appliance based on an MPG number and some math.

            With competent ownership (fleet vehicles provide a lot of examples, lots of hyrbrid Fords from the 00s and early examples still around) they come out about the same as an ICE car so you essentially get the hybrid system "for free" from a maintenance perspective. But that's not the median consumer.

        • bryanlarsenan hour ago
          A modern Toyota hybrid doesn't have a transmission -- it's "eCVT" is basically a differential with a couple of embedded motors. It doesn't have a serpentine belt. It runs its engine in a highly efficient, highly reliable Atkinson cycle.

          A modern Toyota hybrid is far more complex than an electric car, but the fact they are more reliable than a gasoline car is by design, not just good manufacturing.

        • cgyvbunjian hour ago
          > mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides

          Not really. The transmission is an e-CVT in hybrids which has no torque converter, the main part that breaks first in an automatic transmission. Unlike a regular CVT, the e-CVT has no belt, either. The e-CVT basically never breaks, so you basically never have a transmission go bad in a hybrid. On top of that, because the traction battery is so small, it's replaceable for $1-2k instead of $10k+ for a BEV. If anything, hybrids are the best of both worlds. Had you specified plugin hybrids you would have been correct.

        • margalabargala42 minutes ago
          > Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads

          If you are not replacing your tires after decades, you and those around you should be fearing for their lives.

      • Mistletoe29 minutes ago
        The Prius up until about 2016 uses a NiMH battery that is different than Lithium ones.
  • toomuchtodo4 hours ago
    Original title “The climate benefits of retiring a fully operational internal combustion engine vehicle” compressed to fit within title limits.

    A new lifecycle study in the journal Science concludes there are substantial climate benefits to swapping an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle for an electric vehicle (EV) even if the ICE or hybrid vehicle is brand new, if driven more than ~7,054 km/year (4,384 miles/year).

  • bitwize2 hours ago
    Propaganda for "Scrap your old car now and buy new—now with AI driver spying features as mandated by Congress, and personal data sales to insurance companies!"
    • trollbridge2 hours ago
      The "get rid of a working car" is particularly suspect, and reminds me of the "cash for clunkers" scheme which was basically a giant sop to the auto industry. Why not just have EVs replace ICE vehicles when they break down and aren't worth repairing?
      • dieortin27 minutes ago
        > Why not just have EVs replace ICE vehicles when they break down and aren't worth repairing?

        That’s exactly what the article you’re commenting on tries to answer. I recommend you read it

      • toomuchtodoan hour ago
        The TLDR is “Replace your combustion vehicle with an EV if you’re a high mileage driver; a low mileage driver can then buy the combustion vehicle for low mileage use.” An EV sold to someone who drives 1k miles a year is somewhat inefficient at this point of the adoption curve, versus someone who drives 5k-15k miles a year. You want to maximize EV miles traveled to minimize CO2 emissions.

        25% of total annual global vehicle sales are already EVs. We’re just arguing timeline to get to 100%. Peak combustion vehicle sales was 2017.

        https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

        https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/09/chinese-ele...

        https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-technology/evs-take-...

        • cucumber3732842an hour ago
          Dude, everything you post is borderline propaganda. There's probably a few people who'll keep their 2017 Mazda an little longer because of who the message is coming from.

          >Peak combustion vehicle sales was 2017.

          Peak oil was every year starting decades before I was born.

          • toomuchtodoan hour ago
            If you don’t like data and facts, I’m not for you. If you believe it’s propaganda, that’s firmly a you problem. My condolences. The data and facts stand regardless of your belief in them, like gravity. Comment as long as mods let you, doesn’t bother me in the sleightest. With all due respect, your thoughts and belief system are irrelevant to me. They are not data and facts, nor peer reviewed.

            Facts: Climate change is real. Combustion vehicles contribute to climate change through their emissions. EV sales keep going up globally, combustion vehicle sales keep going down. This will continue. Comments here change nothing about these systems or trajectories, nor their rate of change.

            • cucumber373284241 minutes ago
              Being partially (direction of trend vs magnitude) right doesn't make you not a flagrant propagandist. This sort of cherry picking links to support any position, no matter how obviously asinine (though this one doesn't really move the needle), has been your MO a loooooong time. It's a classic rhetorical trick of trolls. Gets people distracted arguing about sources (Louis Rossman has a good quote about this).

              Thankfully AI renders it fairly obsolete. I'd be happy to come up with some competing facts if you'd like. Then I can look down my nose and say vaguely insulting things too.

    • userbinator41 minutes ago
      Exactly.

      My daily driver turns 54 this year.

      Never cared much about the climate scam, never will.

  • jmclnx2 hours ago
    The US Post Office was slated to use EVs as replacements for worn out mail delivery vehicles. For many areas, especially urban areas, those would have been perfect and cheaper in the long run. I know because I knew a lot of Mail cCarriers and I know how these are used. As a kid I was driven around a route one day with a relative.

    But Trump and the Postmaster General cancelled that and went to use gas guzzlers instead. I wonder how that is working out now.

    • chrisBoban hour ago
      The new EV mail trucks are running routes in my area now. Not my route yet but I have seen them within a few miles of my house.
    • toomuchtodo2 hours ago
      Still happening.

      https://news.usps.com/2025/12/01/usps-is-delivering-its-new-...

      > The Postal Service’s $9.6 billion upgrade of its delivery fleet is proceeding apace.

      The organization plans to roll out 106,000 new vehicles by 2028, including 45,000 battery-electric next-generation delivery vehicles and 21,000 commercial-off-the-shelf battery-electric vehicles.

      > Additionally, USPS is upgrading infrastructure at its facilities with the addition of charging stations for the zero-emission electric vehicles, of which over 14,000 have already been purchased.

      > So far, more than 35,000 new vehicles are on the road.

      > “The new fleet rollout is proceeding well, aligned with our plan,” said Justin Glass, the Postal Service’s fleet management senior director.

      (USPS spends ~$500M/year for fossil fuels, so it’s a no brainer to electrify)

      • virgildotcodes2 hours ago
        Wow, a small glimmer of good news. I almost want to hide this comment over fear of drawing attention to this thing that got away from the powers that be.
        • stockresearcher26 minutes ago
          The ICE version of the new vehicle uses a 2-liter turbo 4-cylinder engine and an 8-speed auto transmission, both straight out of the Ford parts catalog. Calling them gas guzzlers is a bit much. They will be significantly more fuel efficient and cleaner-burning than what they’re replacing. Not to mention cheap parts and service everywhere in the US.

          (Yes, they would have been better as EVs)

    • trollbridge2 hours ago
      "But Trump and the Postmaster General cancelled that and went to use gas guzzlers instead. I wonder how that is working out now."

      What makes you say that? The biggest impediment to the rollout was that the company that was supposed to build them repeatedly failed to do so, and finally had their contract pulled in 2021 and it was given to a defence contractor who seems to be on track to actually deliver the things.

  • okran hour ago
    Can we not finally close all volcanos?