Originally Posted by pedex
manufacturing these things isnt very environmentaly friendy, and although they are more efficient, it doesnt make the non renewable resource problem go away, not on the scale of auto usage we enjoy now, and the emissions just get shifted out of direct sight
also, beware of these specs for these electric cars, at 30F you can knock off about 50%, the rules of physics and chemical batteries still applies
Although there is pollution associated with battery production, I'd guess they tend to cut overall emissions by a factor of three to four. They do require more energy to *build, but the pollution released while in operation is easily a quarter of what's released by a comparable gasoline vehicle. They are after all, four times more energy efficient well to wheel than gasoline powered cars are.
The only electric cars that have trouble with lower temperatures are home/hobbiest built versions. Any EV engineered with a lick of common sense will have a insulated, temperature regulated battery pack, like the Tesla Roadster does. You could just as easily complain about how straight water freezes in the cooling systems of ICE powered vehicles, but we don't use straight water for a reason. Just like a well engineered EV will have active thermal management.
To illustrate the efficiency of an EV, over 10,000 miles a sportscar like the Roadster will use ~2,000kwh of electricity per year, which is enough to power two fridges during the same time interval. A gas car that averages 25mph will use 400gallons~13,000kwh of gasoline per year. An interesting irony is that each gallon of gasoline requires at least 4.5kwh to extract, refine and distributed. The likely figure is probably somewhere around 6kwh per gallon of gas since it requires more than a lot of other petroleum products. So, we could either use energy to refine gasoline, which will take us ~10,000 miles in a year in a gasoline vehicle, or would could use that energy to directly power an EV, which should take us ~12,000 miles. With little to no pollution.
We are literally trading the some amount of clean useful energy, for slightly less useful energy, with all the pollution that comes with burning hydrocarbons. This happens because oil companies want to sell as much oil as they can, while they can. Sure, we could get more useful work and a fraction of the pollution if we used the natural gas/electricity directly, but then they wouldn't sell any oil... Oil use is all about profit.
*Something like 10% of total energy used during the life of a ICE powered vehicle, so a BEV probably requires at most, twice that amount.