Is eletric cars really more enviromentally firendly than fuel cars?
Assume 8-10 pages of text, plus any illos/graphics/links. For your topic, look for the most comprehensive
footprints you can. At least try for the embedded footprints of manufacturing (are the materials used the
same or mostly the same; what are the big differences if any?). These may be mostly the same or you
could assume they are the same except for the electric’s big battery, but the electric has a smaller motor
than the gas as a rule. Vehicle weight matters, as a rule. Then compare their operating footprints as
carefully as possible. For the electric, consider two cases: electricity from fossil fueled power plants and
from renewable powered ones. You will need to go through some units conversions, maybe. The transport
part is given in gms CO2 per tonne-km and you can choose a rough vehicle size. Make it the same for gas
and electric if you can. Then you need a figure for the number of kilowatt hours (kwhrs) per km for the
electric car.
Look for this for specific cases, for Tesla and/or Volt or an average…On the bottom of the same page
there are figures for power plants of various types that give estimates for gms CO2 per kwhr they
generate, so you can get the gms CO2 per km by MULTIPLYING kwhr per km by the gms CO2 per kwhr.
Finally, assume kms/yr and lifetimes for these cars. Try the same kms/yr and a range of lifetimes, 3, 5, 10
years, and then think about whether they actually have different lifetimes. Are the embodied footprints as
large as the operating ones? Feel free to invent any other standards of comparison or matters of interest
Sample Solution
