ENG 102 UNLV Hybrid Cars Are Conducive to The Environment Essay INFO I RECOMMEND ADDING IN THE ESSAY SOMEWHERE Before coming to any conclusion about which

ENG 102 UNLV Hybrid Cars Are Conducive to The Environment Essay INFO I RECOMMEND ADDING IN THE ESSAY SOMEWHERE

Before coming to any conclusion about which type of vehicle is better for the environment we have to ask yourself three questions.

The two biggest questions when it comes to this topic are first emissions and then materials and Mining.

so starting with the emissions we need to answer two questions. how many emissions are produced for vehicle production? and how much emissions result from the vehicle?

Based on those 2 questions, we could understand which car is better for the environment throughout the life of the car.

About 2-17 metric tons are produced in order to create the average normal car. Such a difference between the numbers due to the size and production differences between the wide array of cars that are being produced today.

Every study looked at showed that more CO2 emissions are produced by creating and building these electric cars rather than the cars that run on fossil fuels. Mainly because of the batteries. They produce roughly 15% – 70% more emissions than regular cars just because of the battery alone! The amount of emissions is based on the size of the battery. Example: Tesla is much worse than a Nissan Leaf.

Now comparing the cars: 10 tons to produce each, without considering the battery of the electric car. Now with the battery in perspective as well, the electric car has takes about 1-6 tonnes to produce the smaller battery and 6-17.5 tons to produce the bigger battery. With everything in play now, for a normal gas emissions car it takes 10 metric tonnes to produce, a small battery car is 15.3 metric tonnes, and for the bigger battery car it’s about 27.5 metric tonnes.

Now when driving the cars, the gasoline-powered cars are at about 5.2 metric tonnes after an average driving mileage of 12000 miles per year. Electric cars as a whole create about 2.02 metric tonnes of CO2 after looking at the national average. All information in this paragraph was found on the US department of energy website. They have everything summarized on there.

In conclusion, for electric cars with smaller batteries it will take 1.67 years for the electric car emissions to offset the difference in production emissions. But for electric cars with the bigger batteries it could take up to 5.53 years. In the long run, the electric cars are better for the environment because the average lifetime of a car is much more the just 5 or 6 years.

This information doesnt include the maintance on the cars. Gasoline-powered cars need much more maintenance than electric cars as well.

The best option is still going to be any hybrid vehicle because it produces the least amount of CO2 emissions.