Thread by @AukeHoekstra

I hope this will finally lay to rest the nonsense that diesel is better for the environment than electric.
My detailed rebuttal to Buchal, Karl and Sinn. Pls RT
innovationorigins.com/no-diesel-is-n…

A recent opinion piece (or study as they call it) by Buchal, Karl and Sinn claims a Tesla Model 3 emits 11% to 28% more CO2 over its lifetime than a Mercedes C 220 diesel. Correcting errors in their calculation reveals the electric vehicle (EV) emits 63% less. Even in Germany.

First correction: replacing the flawed NEDC test with real-world energy use. This increases diesel emissions with 80 grams of CO2 per km driven (abbreviated ‘gr’) while electric emissions only increase 15 gr.

Replacing an outdated study on battery production with new studies and taking into account the Tesla Gigafactory runs on renewable energy reduces battery emissions from 85 to 33 gr. Increasing the battery lifespan to 300 thousand kilometres reduces battery emissions to 16 gr.

Replacing the current German energy mix with the gradually greening German energy mix over the lifetime of the vehicle reduces driving emissions of the electric vehicle from 97 gr to 66 gr.

The end result is that emissions from the Mercedes C 220 diesel increase from 141 gr to 221 gr, while the emissions of the Tesla Model 3 decrease from 167 to 83 gr.

For context: Hans Werner Sinn is a famous economist in Germany, so even though he has never researched electric vehicles people take him very seriously and the 'study' got a lot of attention in the popular press. I wrote a rebuttal thread. I was not alone.

https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1120327764543004672

But now Buchal, Karl and Sinn came back with a detailed rejection of all their errors which made it possible for me to show very precisely where they went wrong compared to the recent scientific literature. (Studying that is my job.)

So I hope that this could be a teachable moment for the press and twitter that when someone goes against established scientific studies it is almost never a 'gotcha' and almost always someone who is opinionated but wrong when you double-check: science works.