This post highlights some persistent myths surrounding electric vehicles: 1) Even if you're using electricity derived 100% from burning coal, you're still caus

This post highlights some persistent myths surrounding electric vehicles: 1) Even if you're using electricity derived 100% from burning coal, you're still causing less pollution than most gas-powered cars. This is because power plants are hugely, massively more efficient than internal combustion engines, and because it's much easier to filter pollution out of one big smokestack than thousands of small ones. Furthermore, even just refining oil into gasoline takes almost as much electricity as you'd need to power an EV directly. In the worst-case 100% coal scenario, certain fuel-efficient vehicles might be better than an EV in terms of carbon emissions, but in most real-world cases any EV is more environmentally friendly than any gasoline vehicle. This gap will only continue to widen as renewables continue to replace fossil fuel generation. 2) The production of lithium ion batteries doesn't cause significant environmental damage beyond what would otherwise go into building a gasoline car. There is some environmental damage caused by mining the required metals, but not nearly as much as the environmental damage caused by drilling for oil and refining it into gasoline. None of the materials involved are particularly exotic or toxic, and they are all easily recyclable, so the long-term damage here is pretty limited. Tesla uses batteries made of lithium, aluminum, carbon, and nickel. Older battery tech used toxic metals like cadmium or lead, and were somewhat less easy to recycle, but this is not the case with modern lithium cells. Driving your current car for longer might be better than buying a brand new EV, assuming your current car is really efficient, and assuming you don't live somewhere that already uses a lot of renewables for generation, and assuming you don't slap some solar panels on your house (which many EV owners already do). But, driving an old F150 for 300k miles is definitely, unequivocally worse than buying a new Tesla. It would also cost you nearly as much money, when you factor in the fuel costs. And, even then, you're assuming that your options are "trash my current car and buy an EV" or "keep driving my current car". You could also, say, sell your current car to someone else and put the proceeds toward buying an EV.