Electric cars are a huge resource sump, where do you think the lithium comes from
A big hole in Australia, mostly. And remember there's a lot less lithium in a lithium-ion cell than a lithium cell. And you can get it from scrapped batteries, if there were any scrapped batteries to recycle[1]. (AIUI there's a company in the Netherlands who have a commercially viable industrial process, but a limited supply of raw materials.)
The rare earths in permanent-magnet motors are as much of an issue. Those mostly come from China. But there are other ways to build electric motors.
I thought most came from south america these days?
There's not actually that much in an electric car. Google suggests:
"A 70kWh Tesla battery uses 63kg of Lithium Carbonate Li2CO3, of which 19% or 12kg is Lithium. That's about 0.17kg/kWh in Tesla Batteries"
And because mass is a stupid way of describing it[²], that works out as approximately 22.4l in volume (just under half the typical volume of a Kitchen bin).
The big issue with your battery isn't the lithium, it's the cobalt. Cobalt is added to increase the durability of the battery and improve performance, it's about 5% (I can't find out if that's by weight or by volume). Only Cobalt is almost exclusively found in the DRC. Which gives rise to all sorts of ethical issues wrt conflict minerals etc...
How much aluminium do you think is in your average car engine? Where do you think that comes from?
In theory a car should be nearly fully recyclable. The most difficult items being the tyres and the plastics.
Lithium ion battery recycling exists, and there is some evidence suggesting that the materials recovered from a used battery are of better quality and performance than the first time round. A proper case of upcycling. The problem Lithium battery recycling is having currently is one of supply. Lithium ion batteries in cars are lasting considerably longer than anyone expected, and once they have had their life in a car, they are often used as static batteries in homes and grid scale storage.
all the other components and their constituents?
The same places they do for combustion-engine cars.
The latest Renault Zoe has tried to do something about this, all the plastic in the Zoe is recycled, and even the fabric of the made from recycled fibre.
Even if we pretend all the electricity is made by in a completely renewable fashion by cuddly creatures, the impact is huge.
But no huger than the current status quo, and electricity functions as an abstraction layer. You can power an electric car on petrol, diesel, coal, natural gas, uranium, wind, solar, geothermal heat, pixie farts or quantum foam without modifying the car, and it's approximately five times more energy efficient. That's an improvement.
It's that energy efficiency that is the key point here. It may be that you replace 200 diesel cars with 200 teslas, and you charge the teslas by burning coal, but it's a lot more plausible to put filtering equipment into the output of the 1 coal plant, than it is into the output of 200 cars. If CCS ever takes off, this will be even more useful until we have completely divested our grid of the burning of coal. What is more in some places the CO² from some power plants is being used, along with the waste heat to improve the growing of food crops to help feed people. Which reduces the CO² emmisions of the power plant.
What about end-of-life.
In general the batteries get a retirement in a static application and then recycled. The car gets a new battery and goes back on the road, until some fuckwit writes it off, then it gets scavved for parts to retrofit a combustion-engine vehicle. (Currently, a written-off Tesla is almost worth more than a working Tesla.)
Yep, the amount of moving parts in a modern EV are so few, that if the frame of the vehicle is intact, then swapping the battery is a worth while path, esp when that battery can be used in static applications.
This is actually going to make for interesting issues. An EV in theory has a lot longer life before it wears out, meaning that manufacturers don't have the expected obsolescence keeping their business going.
I'm sorry, but electric cars are Marlboro Lights of driving. The let us keep our vehicle-dependent lifestyle and the majority of the costs and impacts, while avoiding reflecting on the impacts of that lifestyle.
Absolutely agreed. But vehicles, where used, should be powered by something less wasteful and harmful than burning stuff. We need this technology for buses and vans and fire engines so on, even in a car-free utopia. And - as the government have been careful to avoid - we need a fuckload of electric-assist cycles.
There is also the major improvement that the emissions are moved to outside the city. This greatly improves the health of the population at large, even if it isn't making a massive difference in total amount of CO² going into the atmosphere.
To go back to the previously mentioned point regarding non-tailpipe particulate emissions, even your bike has these. Sure it's a lot less than on a 2t death box, but my tyres still lose weight over their life, and it's going somewhere. Everything has an impact.
It's easy to be sceptical, it's easy to say that electric cars are feel good green washing for the middle classes. But as long as each new EV is removing a dinosaur burner from the road, it does make things better. Sure it doesn't solve the problem of entitled wankers misusing public space, sure it doesn't help with inactivity related illness. But if we replaced every single dinosaur burner with an EV in the same phyiscal envelope, it would make a noticeable difference to the world. And that is a step on the way towards replacing those EV's with cargo bikes and public transport.
Now if we could just solve the chicken and egg problem of pubic transport, we'd be onto a winner in actually improving out world...
J
[1] The current supply of end-of-life lithium-ion cells is mostly lurking in obsolete computing devices in people's drawers-of-shame. The ones used in cars have barely made it to static applications.
The problem with the computing device cells is they are so varied and small, making it more expensive to recycle. If you have 100t of leaf batteries, it's a lot more cost effective to recycle than 100t of nokia batteries, and increasingly, integrated into the rest of the device.
[²] It's actually a big problem when it comes to discussing things like nuclear waste. People say a nuclear plant is generating lots of waste, you can even find numbers like a 1GW nuclear plant will generate 27t of waste in a year. But if you ask people to visualise that, it's about 52l, or about the same as your Kitchen bin. If you empty your kitchen bin once a year, you're generating a greater volume of waste than a 1GW nuclear plant does. Sure the nuclear waste is pretty damn dangerous, but we are coming to realise that the plastic waste we generate isn't all that great either. When you consider that the full stock pile of 100t of plutonium the UK has, would fit in a transit van. Sure that would be a bad idea on so many levels. But people are just crap at visualising stuff if you use mass to describe it. It's even worse when you think about CO². A flight across Europe will produce 2t of CO² per passenger. Just how much is that? How much does all the air in the room you're in weigh? Using mass is great from a science point of view, but we really can't visualise it as normal humans.