[kiklion]

Uh what?

Quick google shows that a Hyundai Ioniq gets around 4 miles per kWh. An average US household uses 886 kWh per month. You’d have to drive 3,500 miles a month to have the electric car use more energy than the entire household.

Yes, there is an energy cost in building the car, but there’s also an energy cost in building the refrigerator and dryer and washing machine etc in the house.

I’m sure some electric cars are worse than the Ioniq, but they’d have to be considerably worse to equal the energy used by a household.

[Brotkrumen]

>An average US household uses 886 kWh per month

Oh wow. The average German household of three uses 2500kwh in a multi-tenant and 3500kwh in a single family home PER YEAR.

[dzhiurgis]

You need to compare it with similarly cold state + adjust for house size. I bet difference would be like 20%.

[fomine3]

Does it include gas heating usage?

[wyager]

Wow, that's terrible. Do Germans not have as good of climate control or something? I wonder what it would take to get German energy consumption up to a better level. It looks like wholesale electricity costs in Germany are around 4x higher than in the US.

[JeremyNT]

> Yes, there is an energy cost in building the car, but there’s also an energy cost in building the refrigerator and dryer and washing machine etc in the house.

I don't think you can really hand wave away that cost. My instinct is that battery, aluminum, and steel production should be very energy intensive.

The 3500+ pounds of "stuff" in your car is over an order of magnitude more "stuff" than a household appliance just by weight alone.

(Maybe we should forego the other luxuries as well, of course).

All that said I imagine the biggest direct end user energy usage would be the cost of HVAC systems running nearly continuously in inhospitable climates.

[_kulang]

It’s not that bad. Fossil fuel burn is actually much worse. I used to think this as I thought buying used cars would be a great help but the break even point for the extra cost of building an entire vehicle is something like 2 years of driving. So building all new cars with half the fuel use could reduce overall emissions after about 4 years. Electric vehicles are worth it after 2-3 years. As long as your electric vehicles run for about 5 years, even if you make a whole new car, emissions would reduce considerably

When you look at it further, you find even an electric car uses 20-30kWh/100km at highway speeds. That basically a constant 20kW. Driving a car is just stupidly energy intensive and very little can be done about that. Trains and public transport have a huge benefit in energy use per person