Odd question to ask, perhaps, on this sub. But I recently had a conversation with someone who is blindly anti-EV and he kept rambling on about a “silent majority” of EV owners who “don’t care at all” about the environment. I personally don’t think that’s true, but I may be (sadly) wrong.
(We are both car enthusiasts, but he leans right, I lean left (and am concerned climate change). In case people are curious)
‘Silent majority’ of ALL people probably don’t care about the environment. It’s likely a higher fraction of early EV adopters who ‘care about the environment’, but still a good chunk who don’t.
None of that actually matters. What matters is what mode of transport is best environmentally, regardless of the specific reasons an individual has for choosing it.
Currently, that hierarchy roughly goes:
Active transport (Foot/biking)
3+ person car pooling EV
Public Transit
3+ person car pooling ICEV
Single-occupancy EV
Single-occupancy ICEV
Depending on specifics of the grid in your area, options 4 & 5 could flip order. And in areas with high utilization of transit, 2 & 3 could flip.
But main point is still that for the same use case, EV > ICEV.