He's right honestly, cars, especially electric cars, produce a large portion of their CO2 emissions when they are manufactured.

We would all be better off if people kept their "gas guzzlers" but only used them rarely. A car in a garage has zero co2 emissions.

It depends on how much you drive, and what you drive. If you have a Prius and drive 2000 miles a year the emissions payoff for getting an EV would probably be longer than you’d even want to keep the car. If you’re in a diesel F350 and do 20,000 miles a year, mostly city, then yeah an EV will be net zero in like 5 years or less.

As I’m sure someone will mention inevitably, not using a car in the first place is the best option. Public transit, walking, biking, are all much better solutions.

Anti-consumerism is bad because it would expose the fact that our economy is overproducing shit we don't need, so we would need a massive reorganization of society. You can tell who that is bad for.

A portion of the public thinks that anything saying that you shouldn't immediately hop on the electric car bandwagon this moment is saying that electric cars are failures entirely. Drive your internal combustion car til it's dead, it's already here and will be phased out itself over time. No sense in making significantly higher artificial demand, leading to further pumping out cars that, no matter how you look at it, are expensive to the environment to build. Let the adoption come as cars start dying, let the EV industry keep advancing, and get one as your next car whenever that is.

It's sky news, a far right media outfit with questionable factual credibility. Notice they didn't say that this what they attacked him on, only that it was in the piece that they were criticizing. It's intentionally misleading to make you think their position is ridiculous.

Don't fall for this propaganda.

No it's not wrong. Hell, I drive EV and lots of people ask me about it, And of course I'd love if more people did it, to cut down on fossils, but realistically it's always a financial decision, so I honestly tell them "If you already have a car, and don't need a new car, then it's a bad financial decision to buy a new car."

However, when you do need a new car, then it's likely a good decision to buy an EV, but you need to run the numbers if you want to know for sure. There are a lot of factors in this, some of which are dependent on your own personal milage and finances and others on where you live and what is available.

If you do run all the numbers for the duration of ownership, it's likely always a good decision to buy a new EV in comparison to ICE cars, and the thing that made my decision was that in my case, it wouldn't even make sense to buy the cheapest beater car, because over the years that I expect to drive this car, it's cheaper to buy a new EV than to exchange and/or repair older ICE cars. But I'm sure it varies. You gotta have some idea of how much you need to drive for the next 5 years, and most people probably don't.

Atkinson is sort of right in advising people to hold out a while. The prices are dropping and in just a few years, it won't even be a question. However I also understand the criticism, because as a public figure he should not be passing out blanket statements like that. There are likely people who will not buy an EV now because of his statement, even if it's against their own self interest.

Yeah, i'm driving a 20+ year old car and while i feel guilty about the higher emissions older design have, it's still run and in awesome shape. Got talked by my ex for still using an old car, but meh, if it still run it still run.

Definitely getting an electric car next though, if i ever have that budget. Even then the local electricity production is still not ready for clean energy.

CONSUME!

Yes, thank you for mentioning the real solution - less cars of any kind. Public transport, cities where you can walk around, and bikes are pretty great too.

Sadly, electric cars isn't about saving the environment and the planet. Is is about saving the car industry

The thing is that cars have a huge secondhand market.

So if you buy a new car, you sell your old one to someone else, who sells their car to someone else, who sell their car to someone else, ... all the way until one of the horrible gas guzzlers at the bottom gets finally replaced.

So in a way it is improving the environment if you look at the whole picture.

I think 3 mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima and Sosnovy Bor and Ibaraki and Forsmark were probably more influential in terrifying the general public about nuclear power.

And here's the rebuttal about he's mostly spouting FUD or down right lies.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/08/fact-check-why-rowan-atkinson-is-wrong-about-electric-vehicles