Following is in video description by @MoneyShift
The most common argument against electric cars is that once you factor in battery manufacturing and lithium mining, they aren't actually cleaner. MIT tested that directly, and the answer is no longer ambiguous.
Researchers Marco Miotti and Jessika Trancik built a lifecycle model covering thousands of US zip codes, drilling down to individual driver behavior rather than comparing broad regions. They accounted for battery and vehicle manufacturing, fuel extraction and refining, regional electricity mix, local meteorological data, traffic density, trip length and duration, acceleration patterns, gas and electricity prices, and state fees. The study appears in Environmental Research Letters.
The concession first: building a battery is dirtier than building a comparable gas car, and an EV starts life with a larger manufacturing footprint. MIT states that plainly rather than working around it.
The findings: in most US locations, a battery electric vehicle reduces lifetime greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 60 percent compared to a similar gas vehicle, with larger reductions in urban areas. On cold weather, MIT found that in a climate like North Dakota, efficiency can drop as much as 50 percent on a particularly frigid night, but the effect on annual emissions benefits is minimal. Miotti's own conclusion was that even in the most unfavorable conditions, EVs still reduce emissions substantially.
On cost, EVs are competitive with comparable combustion vehicles in lifetime ownership cost across most of the country, even without clean vehicle tax credits. Where electricity is relatively affordable, battery electrics tend to cost less outright. The study also found that individual driving behavior matters roughly as much as regional electricity mix, with the biggest reductions going to people who drive more, drive larger vehicles, and spend more time in traffic.
MIT also updated their public tool at carboncounter.com, where you can compare lifecycle emissions and ownership costs for nearly any car on the market.
None of this means you have to like electric cars. Dislike the steering feel. Dislike the brake feel. Want a manual. Those are real objections. The emissions one is finished.
Car news the way Doug DeMuro, Jason Cammisa and Chris Harris cover cars, every day
That's true, and I highly recommend doing that. I keep my jeep because it has a AMC I6 engine. I can probably get 300k to 500k miles out of the engine. Honestly I don't know how much mileage there is on it because the vehicle is a 2003 but the engine is a 1998. I work on my own cars so that makes it easy to maintain even though it doesn't really need anything.
Oh no, not to maintain a combustion car. My maintenance expenses would have been much more than what the car was worth and a significant fraction of the cost of replacing it with an EV. Even when owning a home, it's much easier to install an EV charger than it is to install a garage with all that's required for the owner to do all that maintenance. You just happen to have the time to do so. That isn't all of us.
I get that, that's why I'll never buy a new gas car. Too much of a headache after 2006. I've been wanting to do an electric conversion for over a decade. The charger thing I can do now, but the previous place I lived was HOA hell. Those assholes had the audacity to look in my shed; I watched it on camera. No way was it possible to have a charger, even if it was a 120v extension cord, someone would complain. But yeah, like the OP mentioned; I'll have all the benefits of an EV and while keeping all the classic car aspects if I convert. I'm hoping to be able to engine brake with an EV motor... or maybe add in electric brakes in tandem.