Verizon lost an attempt to overturn a $46.9 million fine for selling customer location data without its users' consent. The US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit rejected Verizon's challenge in a ruling issued today.

The Federal Communications Commission fined the three major carriers last year for violations revealed in 2018. The companies sued the FCC in three different courts, with varying results.

AT&T beat the FCC in the reliably conservative US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, while T-Mobile lost in the District of Columbia Circuit. Although FCC Chairman Brendan Carr voted against the fine last year, when the commission had a Democratic majority, his FCC urged the courts to uphold the Biden-era decisions.

A ruling against the FCC could gut the agency's ability to issue financial penalties. The different rulings from different circuits raise the odds of the cases being taken up by the Supreme Court.

Today's 2nd Circuit ruling against Verizon was issued unanimously by a panel of three judges, and it comes to the same legal conclusions as the DC Circuit did in the T-Mobile case. The court did not accept the carrier's argument that the fine violated its Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial and that the location data wasn't protected under the law used by the FCC to issue the penalties.

"We disagree [with Verizon]," the 2nd Circuit ruling said. "The customer data at issue plainly qualifies as customer proprietary network information, triggering the Communication Act's privacy protections. And the forfeiture order both soundly imposed liability and remained within the strictures of the penalty cap. Nothing about the Commission's proceedings, moreover, transgressed the Seventh Amendment's jury trial guarantee. Indeed, Verizon had, and chose to forgo, the opportunity for a jury trial in federal court. Thus, we DENY Verizon's petition."

Verizon claimed law doesn’t cover device location data

Until 2019, Verizon "ran a 'location-based services' program that sold access to certain kinds of wireless customer location data," the ruling said. "As part of that program, Verizon contracted with 'location information aggregators,' which collected customer data and resold it to third-party location-based services providers. Verizon had arrangements with two aggregators, LocationSmart and Zumigo, which in turn contracted with 63 third-party entities."

Instead of providing notice to customers and obtaining or verifying customer consent itself, Verizon "largely delegated those functions via contract," the court said. This system and its shortcomings were revealed in 2018 when "the New York Times published an article reporting security breaches involving Verizon's (and other major carriers') location-based services program," the court said.

Securus Technologies, a provider of communications services to correctional facilities, "was misusing the program to enable law enforcement officers to access location data without customers' knowledge or consent, so long as the officers uploaded a warrant or some other legal authorization," the ruling said. A Missouri sheriff "was able to access customer data with no legal process at all" because Securus did not review the documents that law enforcement uploaded.

Verizon claimed that Section 222 of the Communications Act covers only call-location data, as opposed to device location data. The court disagreed, pointing to the law's text stating that customer proprietary network information includes data that is related to the location of a telecommunications service, and which is made available to the carrier "solely by virtue of the carrier-customer relationship."

"Device-location data comfortably satisfies both conditions," the court said.

Verizon chose to pay fine, giving up right to jury trial

As for Verizon's claim that the FCC violated its right to a jury trial, the court said that "Verizon could have gotten such a trial" if it had "declined to pay the forfeiture and preserved its opportunity for a de novo jury trial if the government sought to collect." Instead, Verizon chose to pay the fine "and seek immediate review in our Court."

By contrast, the 5th Circuit decision in AT&T's favor said the FCC "acted as prosecutor, jury, and judge," violating the right to a jury trial. The 5th Circuit said it was guided by the Supreme Court's June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which held that "when the SEC seeks civil penalties against a defendant for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury trial."

The 2nd Circuit ruling said there are key differences between US telecom law and the securities laws considered in Jarkesy. It's because of those differences that Verizon had the option of declining to pay the penalty and preserving its right to a jury trial, the court said.

In the Jarkesy case, the problem "was that the SEC could 'siphon' its securities fraud claims away from Article III courts and compel payment without a jury trial," the 2nd Circuit panel said. "The FCC's forfeiture order, however, does not, by itself, compel payment. The government needs to initiate a collection action to do that. Against this backdrop, the agency's proceedings before a § 504(a) trial create no Seventh Amendment injury."

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Someone might want to tell David Zaslav to read the room. Despite people’s ongoing frustration with the rising prices of streaming services—and just about everything else—the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) thinks that there is reason for HBO Max to charge more.

Zaslav shared his sentiments while speaking at the Goldman Sachs Cornucopia + Technology conference today in San Francisco. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Zaslav as saying:

The fact that this is quality—and that’s true across our company, motion picture, TV production [and] streaming quality—we all ... think that gives us a chance to raise price. We think we’re way underpriced.

Today, HBO Max starts at $10 per month with ads, $17/month for no ads, and $21/month for no ads and premium features (4K streaming, Dolby Atmos, and the ability to stream from more devices simultaneously and perform more downloads). The streaming platform has raised prices twice since launching (as Max) in May 2023. In June 2024, the Standard, ad-free plan went from $16/month to $17/month, and annual subscription fees went up by $20 or $10, depending on the plan. Subscription fees also increased in January 2023.

One of the ways the recently re-renamed HBO Max will try to make more money from its viewership is by getting tougher about subscribers sharing passwords with other households. The streaming service was supposed to crack down on password sharing in 2024, but Zaslav said today that HBO Max hasn't “been pushing” against password sharing yet. That’s largely because WBD is trying to get people to “fall in love" with HBO Max's content first, Zaslav noted.

Once viewers are seemingly hooked on HBO Max, WBD would ideally like to charge more. Per Variety, Zaslav said today that WBD has a "real ability" to raise prices as "people become more and more in love with the quality that we have, and the series that we have, and the offering that we have."

The executive reportedly recalled a time when people relied on broadcast and cable for their TV entertainment and paid more than what the average person pays for streaming today:

Consumers in America would pay twice as much 10 years ago for content. People were spending, on average, $55 for content 10 years ago, and the quality of the content, the amount of content that we’re getting, the spend is 10 or 12 fold and they’re paying dramatically less. I think we want a good deal for consumers, but I think over time, there’s real opportunity, particularly for us, in that quality area, to raise price.

A question of quality

Zaslav is arguing that the quality of the shows and movies on HBO Max warrants an eventual price bump. But, in general, viewers find streaming services are getting less impressive. A Q4 2024 report from TiVo found that the percentage of people who think the streaming services that they use have "moderate to very good quality" has been declining since Q4 2021.

Research also points to people being at their limit when it comes to TV spending. Hub Entertainment Research’s latest “Monetizing Video” study, released last month, found that for consumers, low prices "by far still matters most to the value of a TV service."

Meanwhile, niche streaming services have been gaining in popularity as streaming subscribers grow bored with the libraries of mainstream streaming platforms and/or feel like they’ve already seen the best of what those services have to offer. Antenna, a research firm focused on consumer subscription services, reported this month that specialty streaming service subscriptions increased 12 percent year over year in 2025 thus far and grew 22 percent in the first half of 2024.

Zaslav would likely claim that HBO Max is an outlier when it comes to streaming library dissatisfaction. Although WBD’s streaming business (which includes Discovery+) turned a $293 million profit and grew subscriber-related revenue (which includes ad revenues) in its most recent earnings report, investors would likely be unhappy if the company rested on its financial laurels. WBD has one of the most profitable streaming businesses, but it still trails far behind Netflix, which posted an operating income of $3.8 billion in its most recent earnings.

Still, increasing prices is rarely welcomed by customers. With many other options for streaming these days (including free ones), HBO Max will have to do more to convince people that it is worth the extra money than merely making the claim.

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Nissan isn’t in a great spot right now. The Japanese manufacturer is planning to close factories to stay alive amid a downturn in market share and profits, and right now, its survival is uncertain. But the company has just introduced something that might help: the most thermally efficient engine to be put in a road car, ever—at least, according to Nissan.

The engine, a 1.5-liter turbocharged three-cylinder unit codenamed ZR15DDTe, is already in production and can be found in Nissan’s Europe-market Qashqai small crossover, at the heart of the company’s new e-Power hybrid powertrain. The secret to the record-breaking efficiency, Nissan says, is valve seats that are sprayed into the cylinder head, rather than press-fit.

The tech, which Nissan calls the Strong Tumble & Appropriately stretched Robust ignition Channel (STARC), was introduced by the company back in 2021. But this is the first time we’re seeing it in use on a production engine. Here’s how it works, according to Nissan:

In conventional engines, the design of the intake port is constrained by the necessity for press-fitted, sintered valve seats, which limit the ability to optimize port shape for ideal tumble flow. Nissan engineers addressed this challenge by developing a novel valve seat using cold spray technology.

This process allows a coating to be directly formed onto the cylinder head surface, eliminating the need for a separate valve seat component and enabling the creation of an optimized intake port geometry. Furthermore, compared to similar methods, its higher thermal conductivity enables improved cooling performance around the valves.

Here’s a look at a typical valve seat, via Japanese auto supplier TPR:

Those sintered valve seats are usually pressed into a cylinder head to seal off the combustion chamber using the valves:

Per Nissan, this typical method of valve seat manufacturing introduces compromises.

The use of a “cold spray” valve seat, Nissan says, means there aren’t as many hard edges in the pathway from the intake into the cylinders. The air has a smoother, less disruptive journey through the cylinder head, resulting in less turbulence and, as Nissan said, a better “tumble” flow. The tumble, in the case of engine science, is the actual rotational motion of the air/fuel mixture as it enters the cylinder. Having a healthy tumble means the air and the fuel can mix properly before it’s ignited. The more balanced the tumble is, the more efficiently that mixture will burn.

Nissan put together a helpful diagram (above) to show the comparison. On the left is a cross-section of a normal combustion engine, while on the right is the STARC tech. While the drawings aren’t very precise, the right side shows the straighter pathway into the combustion chamber. The zoomed-in photos, meanwhile, show the hard edges of the conventional valve seats compared to the smooth, uninterrupted edge of the spray-in material.

Anyone who follows Nissan closely will know it’s experimented with trick efficiency-minded engine upgrades before. The company’s variable-compression engines seemed like a cool idea, but fell out of favor after the NHTSA opened an investigation into reports of failures. Just last month, owners filed a class-action lawsuit over the engine’s issues.

Not only do the spray-in seats promise better efficiency, but they’re also installed in a far more interesting way:

The new valve seat is produced by spraying dissimilar metal powders at supersonic speed onto the aluminum alloy cylinder head surface, forming a robust and durable coating that adheres strongly without melting the base material.

Valve seats are what the intake and valves close against to seal the combustion chamber, which means they’re subject to intense heat, big swings in temperature, and lots of vibration. The automaker seems to have ironed out any potential problem points, though:

Cold spray technology operates below the melting points of the materials involved, enabling the bonding of dissimilar metals without melting. This process prevents the formation of excessive intermetallic compounds and micro-voids (porosity) that are common in traditional fusion welding methods. As a result, cold spray coatings exhibit superior adhesion, durability, and reliability—crucial qualities for engine valve seats.

This application represents a world-first in automotive engines and leverages Nissan’s extensive expertise in powertrain design, materials engineering, and manufacturing. The process incorporates a specially developed cobalt-free, copper-based alloy with excellent thermal conductivity, in-house nozzles inspired by polishing techniques used in forged mold production, and AI-driven quality assurance systems.

Adding these spray-in seats, Nissan says, raises thermal efficiency—that is, the amount of energy produced compared to wasteful heat—to 42 percent. That would make this engine the most thermally efficient to ever grace a production vehicle, beating out engines from Toyota and Hyundai, both of which claim to have 41-percent thermal efficiency. Interestingly, Nissan’s number falls short of the original 50-percent efficiency it claimed to achieve in 2021. To find engines more efficient, you’ll have to go all the way to Formula 1, where the hybrid power units see thermal efficiency numbers above 50 percent.

It’s likely impossible to test Nissan’s claims without a bunch of very expensive equipment and a team of scientists, which means you’ll just have to take the company’s word for it. The automaker performed a stunt back in August that had an e-Power-equipped Qashqai drive the entire length of the United Kingdom, where it achieved 75 miles per gallon. These are UK mpgs, so they might not necessarily match up with American figures (Nissan doesn’t specify how it made the calculations). Still, going a claimed 837 miles on a tank with 100 miles of extra range to go seems pretty impressive.

So, unless (until?) the lawsuits start to roll in, good idea, Nissan.

Top photo: Nissan

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Leading Internet companies and publishers—including Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Medium, The Daily Beast, Fastly, and more—think there may finally be a solution to end AI crawlers hammering websites to scrape content without permission or compensation.

Announced Wednesday morning, the "Really Simple Licensing" (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that's designed to block bots that don't fairly compensate creators for content.

Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train AI, a press release noted.

The standard was created by the RSL Collective, which was founded by Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com, and Eckart Walther, a former Yahoo vice president of products and co-creator of the RSS standard, which made it easy to syndicate content across the web.

Based on the "Really Simple Syndication" (RSS) standard, RSL terms can be applied to protect any digital content, including webpages, books, videos, and datasets. The new standard supports "a range of licensing, usage, and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response)," the press release said.

Leeds told Ars that the idea to use the RSS "playbook" to roll out the RSL standard arose after he invited Walther to speak to University of California, Berkeley students at the end of last year. That's when the longtime friends with search backgrounds began pondering how AI had changed the search industry, as publishers today are forced to compete with AI outputs referencing their own content as search traffic nosedives.

Eckart had watched the RSS standard quickly become adopted by millions of sites, and he realized that RSS had actually always been a licensing standard, Leeds said. Essentially, by adopting the RSS standard, publishers agreed to let search engines license a "bit" of their content in exchange for search traffic, and Eckart realized that it could be just as straightforward to add AI licensing terms in the same way. That way, publishers could strive to recapture lost search revenue by agreeing to license all or some part of their content to train AI in return for payment each time AI outputs link to their content.

Leeds told Ars that the RSL standard doesn't just benefit publishers, though. It also solves a problem for AI companies, which have complained in litigation over AI scraping that there is no effective way to license content across the web.

"We have listened to them, and what we've heard them say is… we need a new protocol," Leeds said. With the RSL standard, AI firms get a "scalable way to get all the content" they want, while setting an incentive that they'll only have to pay for the best content that their models actually reference.

"If they're using it, they pay for it, and if they're not using it, they don't pay for it," Leeds said.

No telling yet how AI firms will react to RSL

At this point, it's hard to say if AI companies will embrace the RSL standard. Ars reached out to Google, Meta, OpenAI, and xAI—some of the big tech companies whose crawlers have drawn scrutiny—to see if it was technically feasible to pay publishers for every output referencing their content. xAI did not respond, and the other companies declined to comment without further detail about the standard, appearing to have not yet considered how a licensing layer beefing up robots.txt could impact their scraping.

Today will likely be the first chance for AI companies to wrap their heads around the idea of paying publishers per output. Leeds confirmed that the RSL Collective did not consult with AI companies when developing the RSL standard.

But AI companies know that they need a constant stream of fresh content to keep their tools relevant and to continually innovate, Leeds suggested. In that way, the RSL standard "supports what supports them," Leeds said, "and it creates the appropriate incentive system" to create sustainable royalty streams for creators and ensure that human creativity doesn't wane as AI evolves.

While we'll have to wait to see how AI firms react to RSL, early adopters of the standard celebrated the launch today. That included Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., who said that "RSL moves the industry forward—evolving from simply blocking unauthorized crawlers, to setting our licensing terms, for all AI use cases, at global web scale."

Simon Wistow, co-founder of Fastly, suggested the solution "is a timely and necessary response to the shifting economics of the web."

"By making it easy for publishers to define and enforce licensing terms, RSL lays the foundation for a healthy content ecosystem—one where innovation and investment in original work are rewarded, and where collaboration between publishers and AI companies becomes frictionless and mutually beneficial," Wistow said.

Leeds noted that a key benefit of the RSL standard is that even small creators will now have an opportunity to generate revenue for helping to train AI. Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, did not mince words when explaining the battle that bloggers face as AI crawlers threaten to divert their traffic without compensating them.

"Right now, AI runs on stolen content," Stubblebine said. "Adopting this RSL Standard is how we force those AI companies to either pay for what they use, stop using it, or shut down."

How will the RSL standard be enforced?

On the RSL standard site, publishers can find common terms to add templated or customized text to their robots.txt files to adopt the RSL standard today and start protecting their content from unfettered AI scraping. Here's an example of how machine-readable licensing terms could look, added directly to robots.txt files:

# NOTICE: all crawlers and bots are strictly prohibited from using this

# content for AI training without complying with the terms of the RSL

# Collective AI royalty license. Any use of this content for AI training

# without a license is a violation of our intellectual property rights.

License: https://rslcollective.org/royalty.xml

Through RSL terms, publishers can automate licensing, with the cloud company Fastly partnering with the collective to provide technical enforcement that Leeds described as tech that acts as a bouncer to keep unapproved bots away from valuable content. It seems likely that Cloudflare, which launched a pay-per-crawl program blocking greedy crawlers in July, could also help enforce the RSL standard.

For publishers, the standard "solves a business problem immediately," Leeds told Ars, so the collective is hopeful that RSL will be rapidly and widely adopted. As further incentive, publishers can also rely on the RSL standard to "easily encrypt and license non-published, proprietary content to AI companies, including paywalled articles, books, videos, images, and data," the RSL Collective site said, and that potentially could expand AI firms' data pool.

On top of technical enforcement, Leeds said that publishers and content creators could legally enforce the terms, noting that the recent $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement suggests "there's real money at stake" if you don't train AI "legitimately."

Should the industry adopt the standard, it could "establish fair market prices and strengthen negotiation leverage for all publishers," the press release said. And Leeds noted that it's very common for regulations to follow industry solutions (consider the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Since the RSL Collective is already in talks with lawmakers, Leeds thinks "there's good reason to believe" that AI companies will soon "be forced to acknowledge" the standard.

"But even better than that," Leeds said, "it's in their interest" to adopt the standard.

With RSL, AI firms can license content at scale "in a way that's fair [and] preserves the content that they need to make their products continue to innovate."

Additionally, the RSL standard may solve a problem that risks gutting trust and interest in AI at this early stage.

Leeds noted that currently, AI outputs don't provide "the best answer" to prompts but instead rely on mashing up answers from different sources to avoid taking too much content from one site. That means that not only do AI companies "spend an enormous amount of money on compute costs to do that," but AI tools may also be more prone to hallucination in the process of "mashing up" source material "to make something that's not the best answer because they don't have the rights to the best answer."

"The best answer could exist somewhere," Leeds said. But "they're spending billions of dollars to create hallucinations, and we're talking about: Let's just solve that with a licensing scheme that allows you to use the actual content in a way that solves the user's query best."

By transforming the "ecosystem" with a standard that's "actually sustainable and fair," Leeds said that AI companies could also ensure that humanity never gets to the point where "humans stop producing" and "turn to AI to reproduce what humans can't."

Failing to adopt the RSL standard would be bad for AI innovation, Leeds suggested, perhaps paving the way for AI to replace search with a "sort of self-fulfilling swap of bad content that actually one doesn't have any current information, doesn't have any current thinking, because it's all based on old training information."

To Leeds, the RSL standard is ultimately "about creating the system that allows the open web to continue. And that happens when we get adoption from everybody," he said, insisting that "literally the small guys are as important as the big guys" in pushing the entire industry to change and fairly compensate creators.

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Like a rat, I want to be beautiful, because there’s a kind of beauty that can’t be photographed

The post Linda Linda Linda Is Good Good Good appeared first on Aftermath.

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to be trapped in a tedious argument about whether or not electric vehicles are genuinely, holistically, and completely better for the environment, then I suppose I either have good news or bad news for you, depending on which side you were arguing on.

The basic question has always been this: are EVs actually better for the environment, even in areas where electricity comes from some decidedly non-environmentally-friendly sources like coal? Are EV drivers, as they can be accused of in these debates, actually driving coal-powered cars, just with more steps? Or are EVs actually as good as they purport to be, and, even when factoring in the environmental tolls of sourcing their battery chemicals and rare earth elements and all that, still better, cumulatively?

The question seems to have at least a bit more of an answer now, as a study published in Environmental Science & Technology’s annual Swimsuit Issue (I’m kidding, they do that bi-monthly) titled Greenhouse Gas Reductions Driven by Vehicle Electrification across Powertrains, Classes, Locations, and Use Patterns, which is a study that, significantly, created a full womb-to-tomb life-cycle model for light duty vehicles (LDV, which I have to admit, is an initialism I’ve never used before, nor wish to use) including cars of varying sizes and body styles and pickups. The model looked at data that factored in a lot of use case variables, like location, climate variations (both seasonal and regional), charging patterns for the EVs, driver types based on usage (commuting, road trips, hauling up to 2,500 pounds of whatever), and so on, all to get as nuanced and complete a view of just how much greenhouse gas emissions these vehicles produced.

Here’s the abstract of the study, from the authors, who let’s shout out right now: Elizabeth Smith, Maxwell Woody, Timothy J. Wallington, Christian Hitt, Hyung Chul Kim, Alan I. Taub, and Gregory A. Keoleian.

“We assess the cradle-to-grave greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of current (2025) light-duty vehicles (LDV) across powertrains, vehicle classes, and locations. We create driver archetypes (commuters, occasional long-distance travelers, contractors), simulate different use patterns (drive cycles, utility factors, cargo loads) and characterize GHG emissions using an attributional approach. Driven by grid decarbonization and improved electric vehicle efficiency, we are first to report electric vehicles have lower GHG emissions than gasoline vehicles in every county across the contiguous United States. On average, a 300-mile range battery electric vehicle (BEV) has emissions which are 31–36% lower than a 50-mile range plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), 63–65% lower than a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), and 71–73% lower than an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV). Downsizing also reduces emissions, with a compact ICEV having 34% lower emissions than an ICEV pickup. We present the first evaluation of LDV emissions while hauling cargo, showing that carrying 2500 lbs. in a pickup increases BEV emissions by 13% (134 to 152 g CO₂e/mile) compared to 22% (486 to 592 g CO₂e/mile) for an ICEV. Emissions maps and vehicle powertrain/class matrices highlight the interplay between vehicle classes, powertrains, locations, and use patterns, and provide insights for consumers, manufacturers, and policymakers.”

In case you’re one of those strange people who doesn’t want to slog through every published study they encounter on the internet, I’ll try to hit some of the big highlights for you here, so, you know, spoiler alert. Here’s the big one:

Battery electric vehicles have significantly and consistently less output of greenhouse gas emissions than combustion vehicles or hybrid vehicles (even plug-in ones), even in locations where the electricity comes from filthy, filthy coal. On a county-by-county basis in America, battery-powered EVs outperformed combustion vehicles in every single county. All of them.

If we break this down into percentages, we find that BEVs – they specify the average here are ones that have at least a 300 mile range, which definitely isn’t all EVs, though testing factored in 200, 300, and 400-mile range cars – produced 31 to 36% fewer greenhouse emissions than even a plug-in hybrid car, 63 to 65% fewer (I want to say less here so badly) than a conventional hybrid, and a staggering 71 to 73% less than a gasoline-powered combustion car.

The study also notes that smaller combustion cars produce fewer emissions (duh, and 34% less), towing or hauling 2,500 pounds produces more emissions (duh again, 13% more for EVs, 22% more for combustion cars), and while none of these results are exactly shocking, it’s notable to see them so well-supported as in this study.

When it comes to materials, especially battery materials for EVs, and manufacturing emissions, the study used a specific model, which you can learn more about here. Battery replacements were not factored in:

“Vehicle cycle emissions (materials, manufacturing, and endof-life) are calculated using the GREET 2023 model from Argonne National Laboratory. We modified battery size and curb weight for each of the corresponding Car, SUV and Pickup options using vehicle parameters for model year 2025 (SI Note 2). Vehicle cycle emissions include production of components and fluids over the vehicle lifetime along with assembly and disposal of the vehicle. We do not include Li-ion battery replacements during the vehicle lifetime. The latest data shows that for new models, batteries tend to outlast the vehicle’s useful life. We assumed a battery chemistry of NMC811 for BEV, PHEV, and HEV as an example of a high nickel chemistry, the most common chemistry in the current U.S. EV market. For completeness, the impact of assuming NMC111, NMC622, or LFP battery chemistry is also explored and discussed in SI Note 7. The total emissions for vehicles with these other battery chemistries differ by less than 2.5% from those with NMC811.”

There’s a lot of other interesting details in the study; for example, their “use phase” calculations, which give their lifetime mileage estimates for different vehicle classes: sedans are considered to have a lifespan of 191,386 miles (that feels low to me?), SUVs last for 211,197 miles, and trucks at 244,179 miles. I’m not entirely clear how those estimates were calculated, but it’s interesting to see that the baseline amount of lifetime miles for a car has effectively doubled from the roughly 100,000-mile number that seemed to be the accepted standard of the past.

Here’s the equations used for calculating emissions for those lifetime miles, for combustion cars/hybrids and for BEVs:

Look at that, there’s a big sigma there! That’s some real math going on!

The study didn’t go into anything like ease of charging or frequency or made any assessments about the national charging network, or anything like that. It was undertaken just to get an answer to the question of what sort of vehicle drivetrain produces the fewest greenhouse emissions, and, even after factoring in manufacturing, transport, materials, and where and how electricity is produced, it does appear that battery electric vehicles don’t just produce less emissions at their non-existent tailpipes, but also across the board.

I know bringing up coal plants was a satisfying way to get impossibly smug EV-advocates to maybe shut up for five glorious minutes during an argument, but it looks like we’re all going to just have to let that one go. EVs produce fewer emissions, period, across the board. I think if this knowledge is making you feel uncomfortable in some way, perhaps it’s best to just avoid these sorts of tedious debates.

I know that’s what I’m going to do.

Top photo:

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