A traffic jam inside Yellowstone National Park - Mario Tama/Getty ImagesBad-faith actors invest a lot of energy in maintaining the illusion that electric vehicle technology is more immature than it actually is. Combine anti-EV propaganda with EVs' relative rarity in the U.S., and even well-meaning people can get sucked into believing long-disproven myths that still refuse to die. Does it sound plausible that mining resources and manufacturing batteries is so dirty that gas cars remain the environmentally superior choice? Sure. The problem is, it's not true, and we've known it for years. In fact, even if you're generally pro-EV, you may not realize just how quickly new EVs end up being cleaner than gas cars. Again, there's no denying the fact that digging raw materials out of the ground to build big EV batteries is a dirty process. Newer battery chemistries, including sodium-ion batteries that are lithium-free, promise to reduce EV battery manufacturing's environmental impact, but you don't have to wait for future battery tech to clean things up. Back in 2024, BloombergNEF ran the numbers and found that for the typical U.S. driver, an average EV evens out after about 25,000 miles or a little over two years. Drive more miles in a year, and you'll get there even faster. Of course, those are averages, so an EV owner in a region with a dirtier power grid will need more time to catch up than someone living in a region that generates more electricity from renewable sources. As bad as lithium mining is, the fact that the break-even point averages out to about 25,000 miles, even including states that burn a lot of coal, emphasizes just how much pollution you get when you burn a gallon of gasoline.AdvertisementAdvertisementRead more: These Are The Cars You Could Drive ForeverFacts don't care about your feelingsAn overhead view of an EV charging at a charging station - Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesLet's say you don't trust Bloomberg. Maybe the business news organization's in-house research division is a little too woo-woo for you, or that research feels too new. But it's far from the only research anyone's done on the subject, and if you check out this 2022 University of Michigan study, the results aren't far off from what BloombergNEF found. In fact, those results were even more positive for EVs than the previous study, putting the average break-even point at slightly less than two years. If EVs needed new battery packs as frequently as the anti-EV crowd wants you to believe, that could be a big problem for their green credentials. Especially since we know first-gen Nissan Leaf batteries didn't last very long. The thing is, time goes on, technology gets better, and not every EV is a first-gen Leaf. A study published last year found you can expect modern EV batteries to work just fine for 15 years. Again, that's an average, so exceptions will exist, but 15 years without needing any expensive power train repairs sounds pretty nice. Considering that none of this research is new, maybe you already knew the "battery manufacturing kills any claim EVs are greener" crowd was full of crap. But if the anti-EV crowd tricked you, there's no shame in admitting it. There's so much happening all at once these days, it's basically impossible to keep up. As XKCD would put it, you're just one of today's lucky 10,000. Maybe an EV, even a used EV, isn't the right purchase for you at the moment. But if you're worried about cradle-to-grave emissions, at least you now know gas cars lose their head start way faster than the anti-EV keyboard warriors would love you to believe. AdvertisementAdvertisementWant more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox, and add us as a preferred search source on Google.Read the original article on Jalopnik.
