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Purchasing an electric vehicles causes more pollution than simply driving your exiting vehicle if it's relatively fuel efficient.

Drive your current car until the wheels fall off and then, if you have to buy a hybrid or electric, try to buy used.




That was my conclusion, too. The personal economics and the carbon footprint correlate surprisingly strongly. The CO2 costs of hybrids look attractive on a 5-6 year timescale, but it gets bad when the environmental costs of a new set of batteries get factored in. People underestimate the various costs of the vehicle itself, and how they look over a longer haul.

I just threw in the towel on my 20 year old vehicle for a new small gasoline engine car. I figure my odds of getting >12 years out of this vehicle are quite high.

Maybe the picture will be very different in 10 years, with improvements to battery technology. But today I stayed away from the hybrids and electric vehicles, for both fiscal and environmental reasons.




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