Electric Vehicles Create More Jobs than Fossil Fuel Vehicles — Research - CleanTechnica
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Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! In a comment thread on an article yesterday, a reader made an important point. Although there’s a common narrative that a transition to electric vehicles will reduce jobs in the auto industry, the opposite ... [continued]
  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    9·
    6 days ago

    First, there is a stupid metric. “Job creation” isn’t the metric we should use to evaluate a technology to determine if it serves us as a species.

    Second, there is almost no way the conclusion of this study holds water, because this study is only considers what amounts to an incredibly small fraction of any vehicles lifetime: its time in the factory. The vast majority of “labor” put into any vehicle isn’t the time it spends in the factory line: its the time it spends on the lift. Its only around 30-40 hours of labor going into a typical vehicle during its manufacturing process. So maybe its a bit higher for an EV? The VAST majority of hours that are put into ANY ICE are during its maintenance and repair lifecycle, which will end up being hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours in total.

    And there in lies the real catch that they don’t tell you about: EV"s require drastically less overall maintenance and repair than an ICE, and its very simple to understand why. EV’s have two advantages that ICE’s don’t. First, they have fewer moving parts. Like dramatically fewer moving parts. And the moving parts they have are ones we’ve got pretty damn well wired as to how to build them practically indestructible, like a transmission. What an EV doesn’t have is a rube-Goldberg-esque series of valves and timing belts and sensors initiating and controlling a series of microsecond precision controlled explosions to generate thrust in a particular direction. Not to mention the gaskets, valves, flaps, hinges, wires, hoses, clamps, etc to hold it all in and hold it all together. An EV can be made with a battery, an electric motor, and any way to transmit energy from that motor to wheels. Add in brakes and you are basically there. It might be counter intuitive, because we focused so much human energy into them, but an ICE vehicle is far more complicated in terms of just number of systems than an EV is. The second point about the whole rattly mess which needs to be made about ICE vehicles: that whole process generates a shit ton of heat. And you have to cool that whole system off. That itself is probably one of the most important systems of an ICE vehicle. If it can’t appropriately cool itself, the whole thing will burn out in minutes, in a catastrophic way. Just heating things repeatedly wears them out. Because of these reasons, an ICE vehicle just requires more maintenance. Its has more systems (systems we’ve really got figured out and engineered well). More systems means more things that can go wrong, and they do, all the time.

    I’ve got two Nissans, basically same year. A leaf and a frontier. Grocery getter and a dump runner. The EV is getting long in the tooth. We’re down to only like 35 miles of range. Old battery chemistry and not worth replacing. But in terms of maintenance… we’ve had the brakes done? the AC stopped blowing cold? new tires. and thats it. The sum total. The frontier? that piece of shit is a constant check-engine light away from another 1k bill to fix some other bullshit.

    After living it, its a no brainer. There is a reason EV’s are quiet. They aren’t constantly trying to rattle and cook themselves to death. But to the premise of the article, no. Wrong metric and wrong conclusion.