Autocar report that Mazda have made a surprising claim about electric vehicles with larger batteries (i.e. 95kWh):
Mazda says it will never build a ‘big-battery’ electric car, because it believes such vehicles are less environmentally friendly than even conventional diesel-powered models, judged over a whole energy life cycle.
Speaking in Portugal at a prototype test drive of the upcoming MX-30 electric car, Joachim Kunz, head of product development and engineering at Mazda Europe, said the firm has studied the CO2 emissions of building a vehicle “from extraction to disposal”.
Citing a study by a Japanese university using the average CO2 output of the European grid, Kunz said an EV with a 95kWh battery has such a disadvantage of embedded CO2 at the point of sale that a new Mazda Skyactiv diesel car will probably be more CO2 efficient across its lifetime, even if the EV’s battery pack is not replaced at 100,000 miles.
However, in this related question, Are electric cars beneficial to the environment compared to low consumption modern cars?, the answer concludes electric cars have lower CO2 equivalent emissions, without discussion of the battery size.
I'm quite confused, where does the truth lie?
