Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was aware that internal combustion cars catch fire more often. There's a bit of a compensatory difference in severity: EVs don't catch fire as often, but it's especially bad when they do. But hopefully we can quickly move past the era of super-flammable EV batteries even if actual EV fires are rare. I look forward to kicking fossil fuel based cars out of everywhere for reasons unrelated to safety. Or you could say…
The negative externalities of the large-scale strip-mining and fossil-fuel-burning effort to convert all cars to electric will not improve the collective safety of life on Earth. Also, remember that lithium is also a fossil fuel. Electicity is not magic, you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.
What about the large-scale strip-mining, fossil-fuel-burning, and other absolutely nasty environmental efforts of continuing to use oil? And how much of that oil pulled from the ground is actually recyclable and reusable?
> lithium is also a fossil fuel
Lithium is by definition not a fossil fuel, as it isn't from the remains of long dead living organisms. Fossil fuels are all organic chemistry! Lithium is inorganic!
> you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.
A significant percentage of the electricity from my wall socket does not come from fossil fuels. And even then, the EV is massively more efficient per mile than an equivalent gas car and the natural gas power plant supplying the non-renewable part is also massively more efficient and less emission producing per watt of power than a car's motor. The break even, even if 100% of the electricity was natural gas, is still like 30,000mi.