400 mile electric RV

3 tons wrote:
While I can well appreciate the characteristics of modern EV’s (BTW, made possible by adoption of lithium), I’ve yet to see a single competent academic study that empirically demonstrates a ‘net net’ reduction in CO2 emissions via the adoption of EV’s…Yet I’ve heard it said (by some far more knowledgable than me…) that in actually the opposite is very true…I’d love to experience the uber performance of an EV, but AFAIK there’s never been demonstrated a net, net study that EV’s reduce net carbon emissions - How come?? Without any empirical evidence whatsoever that a cleaner environment is the outcome, I call this overly romanticized claim pure nonsense - admittedly however, sometimes nonsense can be the greatest source of entertainment…

3 tons

Here's a recent one:

https://theicct.org/publications/global-LCA-passenger-cars-jul2021

Results show that even for cars registered today, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have by far the lowest life-cycle GHG emissions. As illustrated in the figure below, emissions over the lifetime of average medium-size BEVs registered today are already lower than comparable gasoline cars by 66%–69% in Europe, 60%–68% in the United States, 37%–45% in China, and 19%–34% in India. Additionally, as the electricity mix continues to decarbonize, the life-cycle emissions gap between BEVs and gasoline vehicles increases substantially when considering medium-size cars projected to be registered in 2030.

I suspect though that the comparison is much less clear with RV's because it takes a lot more raw materials to build an RV, and they tend not to be driven much (the average is around 5000 miles/year) so the emissions from the drivetrain are a smaller part of the total lifecycle emissions.