Who has seen the Unipol study on electric cars? But does it exist?

Why is providing information on electric cars in Italy an operation full of traps? Dino Marcozzi's complaint and the general picture on fake news

One of the most common and recognizable characteristics in the Italian information panorama is that of factionalism. Telling things, providing information in our country is often an operation subordinated to the instinct to take sides. Showing that you are for or against an issue, absurdly, matters more than describing the facts. And one of the topics in which these trends are easily traceable is that of the transition of mobility to electric cars.

THE FACTA.NEWS REPORT

The latest report produced by Facta.news and L'Eco della Stampa, entitled "Short circuit: Disinformation in the automotive sector" and which will be presented on February 1st, investigated how many times the most authoritative Italian newspapers in the press and on the web have denounced the existence of fake news in reference to electric vehicles in 2023.

Out of 679 articles reported, most of them refer to five specific topics. As a percentage, Facta.news indicated the weight of the total fake news found.

1. Prohibitive expense (151 articles, 22.2%): The belief that the list price of electric vehicles is prohibitive is questionable. The high price is compensated by the fact that the "Total Cost of Ownership" is more advantageous over time thanks to incentives and lower costs.
2. Charging, costs and difficulties (138 articles, 20.3%): The idea that charging costs are excessive is wrong because energy costs, although they have grown, remain lower than traditional fuels. The feeling that there will never be a widespread network of charging stations is wrong: the absolute number of installations is not important but the relationship with the fleet of cars in circulation.
3. Battery Disposal (113 articles, 16.6%): The difficulty of disposing of batteries is a myth. While it is true that these are still expensive processes, batteries can be recovered and reused, contributing to sustainable solutions. For example, old electric car batteries can be used to create energy storage units for photovoltaic systems.
4. Fire Risk (84 articles, 12.4%): Electric cars are no more flammable than traditional cars. In reality, electrically powered vehicles present the same fire risk as combustion engine cars, and the presence of a lithium battery does not fuel the possibility of incendiary phenomena. The numbers tell us that the quantity of fires in relation to the fleet of cars in circulation is greater in combustion vehicles than in electric ones.
5. Pollutants (63 articles, 9.3%): The thesis considers that part of the electricity used to "fill up" is still produced today with fossil fuels and that the production of lithium batteries itself is polluting. This, however, is compensated by the fact that over their entire life cycle electric cars emit on average 69% less CO2 than a petrol or diesel car.

WHICH HOAXES CIRCULATE THE MOST ON ELECTRIC CARS

It will be a long journey between now and 2035, the date set by the EU for the ban on the sale of traditional combustion vehicles.

Interviewed last year by Vaielettrico , Nicola Armaroli (director of the Cnr) responded to the following fake news found by the portal, dismantling them :

1. According to authoritative studies, new generation combustion cars emit less CO2 than electric ones over their entire lifespan.
2. Renewable sources will never be able to cover humanity's energy needs, much less in Italy.
3. In batteries there are rare earths and very polluting materials which are extracted by exploiting child labor and devastating the environment. Then after 8 years they all have to be thrown away.
4. Global warming is not caused by man-made emissions, so much so that Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants two thousand years ago, so there was certainly no snow and glaciers and it was warmer than now.
5. We will never have enough green energy to power our cars if they were all electric. We would be forced to build 26 new nuclear power plants in Europe alone.

Federcarrozzieri, an association founded in 2012, is also constantly involved in the operation of reporting and dismantling false news on the topic of electric cars. In October, for example, it relaunched its collection of the most circulating hoaxes after a road accident that occurred in Mestre. Here they are:

• 1) Electric cars catch fire easily.
• 2) The electric car pollutes like the thermal ones if not more
• 3) Petrol and diesel engines no longer pollute
• 4) Electric car batteries cannot be disposed of
• 5) Electric cars must be continuously recharged because they have low autonomy
• 6) Charging an electric car is very expensive
• 7) In Italy there are not enough charging stations
• 8) Electric car batteries are not under warranty
• 9) Electric cars are not convenient
• 10) Electric cars have higher maintenance costs

Recently, there has been renewed discussion about the negative effects of battery-powered vehicles following images of Norwegian buses stopped due to freezing temperatures . The alerts on the risks of electric buses were promptly returned to the sender, since the cold weather reduces battery life but the cold in Northern Europe also affects traditional combustion cars.

THE HARD TRANSITION TO ELECTRIC CARS

Of course, not everything will be rosy with the transition towards full electric mobility. According to a recent paper titled “The Automotive Industry: When Regulated Supply Does Not Meet Demand. The case of Italy”, it will take around 30 years to replace the entire Italian vehicle fleet with electrified cars and in any case the renewal of the fleet will not be sufficient to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Furthermore, Italians are still not convinced of the transition to battery-powered cars. But this does not mean legitimizing the circulation of specious and false information on the topic, regardless of personal opinions.

As Dino Marcozzi, founder and former general secretary of the Italian electric car stakeholder platform Motus-E, wrote in this newspaper, "campaigns against the transition, especially the technological one, are a common and daily commodity in certain media outlets". And recently, "many newspapers, even important ones, have appropriated this data to torture them for their own benefit but if one seriously wanted to address the content, even analyze the results and perhaps for a constructive comparison, one would not be able to do so." Marcozzi's reference is to a study cited in the press, "carried out by the Polytechnic of Milan and Unipol, presented as a novelty when in fact it is the usual rehashing already presented in the past. In fact, if you try to obtain a copy of the study cited, to be able to analyze and verify it, you end up in a thick fog: you can't find anyone who can provide it."

And, Marcozzi comments, from the few traces found online in a presentation dated 23 June, "we can also see the extraordinary discovery that '26% of Euro 4 has a lower CO2 impact' than the median of Euro 6".

Article published in Energia Oltre

– Read also: Will the Chinese electric car hit the jackpot in the West? Report Ft

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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/auto-elettriche-fake-news/ on Mon, 29 Jan 2024 06:34:31 +0000.