alt Hacker News> If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil.
This is not realistic nor scalable. The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars, and even if we had huge transit projects there would still be a need for roads and vehicles due to the size and rural/industrial areas.
Lithium batteries can be recycled. All the studies have shown that electric cars are a huge net win for the environment, and the cries about the environmental cost of building the cars in the first place don't actually match the reality. Especially when you consider that future ev ecosystems should and hopefully will have a strong battery recycling operation.
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"The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars,"
This need not be permanent, there is a Pareto improvement to be made and it has nothing to do with Rural/industrial areas.
I appreciate that the question deserves a more pragmatic response than “buy used”
So I will speculate, there could be a more adequate supply of used cars if we found ways to keep old cars running longer. back in the 90s, a 200,000mi car was a real beater, doomed to transmission failure at least, uneconomical to repair. cars made in the 2010s are lasting into half a million miles just from improvements in engineering (Toyota hybrid planetary drivetrain eliminates many points of failure: no clutch, no alternator, 0 belts. Brake pads are only engaged below 5 mph and may not need replacing in the useful lifetime of the vehicle)
I don’t even know why I’m such a hater on EV, it is better in the same ways, it’s just also a luxury vehicle that is heavy and fast af. I would love to see more ev hype for efficiency, like this car is so lightweight it goes twice as far for the same kWh. Maybe Aptera will pull it off.
Unfortunately, lithium is abundant enough that it will always be cheaper to manufacture from virgin material, battery recycling will probably just look like power grid load balancers. When batteries age they don’t fail, they just lose the ability to deliver hundreds of amps when you floor it.