Thread by @AukeHoekstra

I love Rowan Atkinson the comedian and I believe he learned electrical engineering once, but I feel this erroneous article on EVs dupes the readers of the @guardian and that's starting to become a pattern.

Electric vehicles really emit 3x less CO2.
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theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

I didn't do something similar in school once. I actually study this specific topic at the @TUeindhoven. So I do actually dive into the facts.

And debunking nonsense like this from people like Atkinson who think or pretend to know better sometimes feels like a full time job.

Please do look up all my studies and debunks in my pinned thread if you would like more in depth info but in essence it's simple:

EVs use around 4x less energy and that energy can come from electricity that is becoming increasingly low carbon.

I'm not entirely convinced Atkinson is being honest here, because he is very precise in cherry picking all the anti-EV tropes, including citing an extremely conservative outlier study that @MLiebreich and I picked apart when we did #Astongate.

On the other hand he is complaining about the rare earth's in the lithium battery. Well you can put those in an electric engine but they don't go into the battery, indicating he is not that well informed. (You can also easily make electric motors without rare earth's by the way.)

Maybe it's just that he wants to defend his love of combustion cars. Because although he has an electric one, he has boatloads of really expensive combustion cars too, and it seems that is where his heart lies.

He's complaining about current batteries and implying we have to wait for better ones. But the current ones will already last the lifetime of the car and the car will emit 3x less CO2 over its lifetime. (Yes, I'm sure about this, because that is my actual field of study.)

It is true that next gen batteries combined with the lighter drivetrain will actually make EVs lighter than combustion cars long before 2030 but Atkinson conveniently doesn't know or mention that factoid.

Instead he fantasizes about hydrogen and efuels that are the future. Well he might *want* that to be the future (for reasons he doesn't want to share with us) but the problem is that you need 2x more energy for hydrogen and 5x more energy for efuels.

Apart from that eFuels require a heavy and maintenance prone combustion engine that will make the entire car heavier in the future and still emit unhealthy particulates. And on top of this you need 5x more energy. Sounds like a genius business plan Atkinson!

And I have more news for him: the statement that batteries are way too heavy for trucks is about 10 yrs out of date. I have been one of the persons to explain this to the world and my pinned thread also points to my keynote to the world's biggest EV conference on this last year.

This week I will send in a paper (I hope it will be accepted by @Joule_CP) where I show you should look at the TCO per ton per km and using this metric diesel trucks will become uncompetitive as soon as @Tesla and others come out with long range trucks.

Onwards: Atkinson dreams of hydrogen directly into combustion engines, taking JBC diggers as an example. Well, hydrogen could make sense for equipment that uses lots of power on some days but little on average. But combustion is much less efficient than fuel cells.

And then we get to the most curious move of all: complaining about "fast fashion" in cars because people get rid of their car after 3 years, or so he claims.

But where does he think cars go after that? Can't he remember the time when he had to buy second hand cars?

Now I don't blame Rowan Atkinson that much. He's an actor, comedian and writer. And the world is full of outspoken people with nonsensical opinions that they swear by.

I mainly blame the #guardian. Shouldn't a serious newspaper scan their content for misinformation?

Maybe @elonmusk was right when he retweeted my debunk of a recent hit piece on EVs in the @guardian claiming the paper "had lost it's way". (That article overhyped the challenges with lithium and also got the amounts wrong by a factor of 1000x.)

It seems like the @guardian these days is all about blowing every negative aspect of climate solutions out of proportion, while shielding readers from the calculations that show what works and what doesn't. Instead of making readers informed, they make them complacent.

To summarize:

Atkinson is a great comedian but doesn't understand the environmental impacts of EVs

The @guardian quality control should have picked this up

EVs emit 3x less CO2 over their lifetime currently

EVs sold in 2050 will emit 10x less

/end

I just came across this excellent debunk by @gnievchenko so I'll add it to the thread for reference.

https://twitter.com/gnievchenko/status/1664926665225453568?t=KvFmGPPP_E8WdlTTbfHUAQ&s=19