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I have unresolved questions surrounding this concept. I agree with you that for the X number of years that you own the vehicle, the less you drive the harder i

I have unresolved questions surrounding this concept. I agree with you that for the X number of years that you own the vehicle, the less you drive the harder it is to offset the manufacturing-related carbon emitted. Once you are done with ownership, that vehicle is going to be owned by someone else, and probably at least one or two people after that. How do we account for that? Do we assume that all vehicles will be driven the same distance over their lifetime? Should we even bother to consider this factor? Does it matter if the distance driven is front-loaded or back-loaded (the original owner drives a lot or a little)? Are we overcomplicating things?

fancyfredbot 3y ago
For a vehicle which has multiple owners it's easy - it's the average usage over all owners which will matter. My first comment was about emissions over a fixed amount of time. You could instead assume all vehicles lasted for a fixed number of miles instead of a fixed amount of time. If you do that (and you assume the vehicle lasts say 100k miles) then I suspect the EV would always be the greenest over its life. However, since we know that both the age of a car as well as it's mileage influence how usable it is I think my main point still stands. There's a range of levels of greenness which will depend on how you use and maintain your car.