Oh dear God, talk about deliberately ripping the lid off a can of worms.
Simple truth, no, absolutely no personal form of transport that doesn’t require the said person to propel it is good for the environment. However, selling that to the general population is going to be a very hard sell.
As a compromise, a car using the cleanest form of energy is a good bet. However, such a vehicle will have a more complicated manufacturing process and raw materials. Lets not forget though that petrol and diesel vehicles have to be forged, raw materials manufactured (often in coal fired furnaces) and there are still a huge amount of electronics that also contain many rare minerals. Also, the fuel isn’t ready to go fresh from the drill, so there’s additional energy and minerals involved in their manufacture.
The creation of a battery is no different to the creation of the Lithium batteries we all have in our mobile phones, laptops and other portable devices, it’s just that there’s more per unit. If you want to create havoc over the creation of an EV battery, do it from a desk top computer and use a land line for phone use, cabled power for all your tools and never, ever throw away a battery.
A standard laptop battery is good for around 30,000 cycles (power to full and use until empty) if the car battery is good for the same and can do 200 miles per cycle, then that’s 6,000,000 miles use out of a battery. Although there’s details like the degradation which means the car battery will be undesirable for it’s original use before then, as at 30% degradation that’s a car down to 140 miles. The battery is still good for many thousands of cycles, so use them as batteries for other needs, like home storage – how long will your home run off 40kWh energy? – charge from solar or wind power and that’s 100% green energy as the battery’s manufacturing process has been met by ecological savings over petrol in the car.
Then there’s local pollution. The air quality in cities is poor because cars produce a bunch of bad chemicals in the combustion process, remove that process (renewable electric production) or move it elsewhere (combustion power generation) and the cities will be less unhealthy places to breathe. Again, it’s not a 100% cleaner solution but it’s much, much better than the combustion process.
Finally, the improvements over ICE are completely dependent on where you’re based. In China or India where power is largely produced from coal fired generation, all you’re doing is moving the problem, not reducing the output. However, if you have large capacity renewable production, taking up 75%+ of your power production, then the difference in national pollution will be phenomenal.
I'm Autistic, if I say something you find offensive, please let me know, I can guarantee it was unintentional.
I'll try to give my honest opinion but am always open to learning.
Mark