Re: Charging
"(they require very polluting components, and then run mostly on coal"
If you are in the Pacific Northwest of the US, it would run on hydro. There are two coal plants in California and I know one of them produces power for a mining town out in the desert.
A blanket statement that EVs run on coal is silly. A logical next step for plenty of EV homeowners is to install solar panels on the roof. Dave Jones of the EEVblog and Robert Llewellyn (Scrapheap Challenge, Red Dwarf) are both EV owners with installed solar. BTW, check out Dave's report on Sydney's trail of electric busses on his second channel (EEVblog2).
The vast majority of a car is the same whether it's EV or ICE. EVs drive train components are being built to be recycled either to make the company look good or satisfy government mandates. I will agree that some are better than others. The Tesla Model 3 battery pack appears to be filled up with silastic making it a right bastard to recycle where the S and X use a modular design that hobbyists and others are super keen to get their hands on and are much easier to get apart.
The problem with ICE engine parts is that an aluminum housing will have brass and steel fitting that are swaged in solid. The recyclers hate that sort of thing as it's a pain to separate. A scrounger also has a hard time removing those mixed metals making it not very cost effective to do. An electric motor can be easier to break down into more easily processed materials. It's still not perfect, but going by weight, it's easier to scrap out an EV. It's easier to extract Li from used batteries than to bring it down from Bolivian mountain tops, so it will be done.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
