based on these two parts of the equation we can determine which vehicle is better overall for the life of the vehicle now of course there are emissions related to the vehicles end of life getting rid of it once it's no longer useful however a study out of Yale University found that end of life emissions for both electric cars and gasoline-powered cars is relatively low
very low in comparison to usage and production so we're not going to be looking at end of life emissions in this video all right so the first part of the question is vehicle production and there's a wide variety of estimates out there as far as the carbon required to produce a vehicle.

now that makes sense because there's a wide variety of vehicles out there so I looked at about a dozen studies looking at what are the average emissions required to produce the average vehicle and so I saw a low estimate a study out of MIT saying about two metric tons of carbon required to produce a vehicle and then I saw a cost analysis saying as high as 17 metric tons in order to produce a vehicle now every single study I looked at agreed that electric cars.

require more co2 emissions to produce than gasoline-powered cars and this is primarily because of the batteries so they range from about 15% more emissions to about 70% more emissions now this percentage is based on the size of the battery so a small Nissan Leaf battery will require about a third of the carbon emissions to produce versus a larger Tesla battery so it's important when you're buying an electric car that you buy the right size battery for your needs for the purposes.

we're going to give the combustion engine every benefit of the doubt and so we're going to assume that both of these vehicles require the same baseline of emissions to produce them assuming you don't include the emissions required for the battery and this is a safe assumption to make because most studies show that an electric car would actually have less emissions than producing an internal combustion car if it weren't for the battery then so we're gonna start with that common baseline and we'll add on top of that the emissions required for producing the battery for just the electric car from the wide range of estimates out there let's.

simply say that it requires 10 metric tons of co2 emissions to produce a new car now whether or not that's higher low doesn't really matter all that much because we're giving the same number to both cars then we add the emissions for battery production the studies I read showed a range of co2 emissions for battery production from about one to five tons for a small battery 30 kilowatt hours like in the previous leaf - about 6 to 17.5 tons for a larger battery pack such as the hundred kilowatt hour pack in a Tesla p 100 d so to play it safe let's go with the higher estimate so once again we're giving the internal combustion engine the benefit of the doubt.