People ignore the energy and scarcity of the materials involved in creating the hardware. It's like recharging a car battery with power from a coal plant.
Instantaneously that may be true, but what about factoring in the environmental costs of manufacturing, including mining the raw materials and transporting the completed product (mass) to its final location?
You're now talking about the entire life cycle. I'd be interested to see how many EV drivers today are expected to keep their vehicles for that long before moving on to flashier, longer-range, etc. vehicles before they reach EoL.
Why wouldn’t the entire life cycle be the most important thing? As long as the used car market doesn’t become so saturated that good cars are getting scrapped, or everyone starts buying multiple cars just for fun, I don’t see how the duration of initial ownership matters. If anything, I thing a lot of people depend on the used car market. If everyone likes their EV so much that they never sell it and drive it until it dies, the used market will dry up and some people may not be able to afford cars.
As an anecdote, my car (ICE) was owned by someone else for about 6 months before I bought it used. I’ve been driving it for the last 16 years.
