The inner workings of an electrically-powered Mercedes.
The inner workings of an electrically-powered Mercedes.
Everyone knows the main selling point for electric vehicles: we need to help our environment and electric cars don’t produce as much dangerous gases as your typical internal combustion, petrol-guzzling motor vehicle.
But how accurate is this assumption? Without a doubt, electric cars don’t produce any dangerous exhausts when you’re driving them, but they’re also much more difficult to build, particularly their batteries, and the electricity we use to run these green machines is largely produced by burning fossil fuels.
So, are electric cars really better for the environment? Or at least, are they good enough to warrant so massive a change to the driving infrastructure of not just the UK, but potentially the entire planet?
The short answer is yes, they are, eventually. And the long answer is… well the long answer is the rest of this article.
While in theory electric cars offer a load of environmental benefits, they have to overcome some fairly difficult, and costly, hurdles before those benefits can be appreciated.
The major problem is the battery, and this must be addressed on two fronts. The first is the range the batteries can provide before needing to be recharged; one of the biggest concerns buyers have when it comes to electric cars. The second is the materials that the battery is made from. Some of these materials are extremely difficult to refine (not to mention that there are some rather unfortunate ethical landmines that must be navigated at the same time) and can produce hazardous waste far worse than the typical hydrocarbons we know.
There’s no point replacing petrol engines if what we’re replacing them with is worse, and that was the defining problem for electric cars for a long while. Keep in mind, electric cars have been theorised as an environmentally friendly alternative for well over three decades (the first electric car was actually built in 1884!), but it’s only been recently that they have been considered a viable option. This is because there have been some huge leaps with the range and cost of the batteries.
Namely, moving from the inefficient lead acid batteries to lithium-ion ones gave EVs the range and power to compete with petrol cars.
An excellent report conducted by Carbonbrief compared the amount of greenhouse gases produced by a typical ICE vehicle and the Nissan Leaf to see how and when there was an environmental benefit to using an electric car.
In terms of constructing the cars, the Leaf produced a hefty initial carbon debt, roughly 10 tonnes of CO2 compared to roughly six tonnes produced by an average ICE vehicle. This discrepancy is almost entirely from producing the battery and refining its rare metals. However, as we start to compare the rates of CO2 produced in running the cars, (including an estimate for planned improvements for CO2 emissions of producing electricity), we see the Leaf quickly catches up and pays off its CO2 debt by the two-year mark.
By the end of a typical car’s life, roughly 150,000 miles, the difference is startling; the Leaf would have only produced an estimated 14 tonnes while the ICE vehicle would have produced just over 40.
So, case closed right? Electric vehicles are better, especially the more we use them... Right?
But wait, there’s more.
Unfortunately, this is just a side-by-side comparison and doesn’t give us the whole picture. The fact of the matter is that electric cars are so much more than just electric cars. Switching solely to them has far-reaching ramifications: infrastructures for whole countries will have to be re-examined and adjusted; electricity demand is expected to explode, taxing power grids and changing peak times and hours; not to mention the increased electrical demand will require more power plants, producing more greenhouse gases and causing further environmental problems.
Also let’s not also forget that is still 14 tonnes of CO2 produced from one car. There are currently around 1.4 billion cars in the world; even if every single one of them was a pure electric car, that would be 19.6 billion tons of CO2 across their entire lifetimes.
As outlined by the University of Toronto in this 2020 article, the current aim of climate scientists isn’t to convert the world to electric cars, that’s just one way for them to achieve their actual aim; to stop the world from heating up two degrees and prevent irrevocable damage to the planet. However, even if we hit the rather ambitious target of 50% pure electric vehicles before 2050 (up from the 10% that we currently have), that will not be enough to prevent the rapid increase in temperature.
That’s why so many countries are also developing additional green initiatives to work in conjunction with the electric car push, along with plans to help manage the potential issues EVs may cause.
Of course, as electric vehicles become more and more mainstream, the technology involved with them will continue to improve as well, as we are already seeing with new and even more efficient batteries being developed.
At the end of the day, the important thing to remember is that electric cars have the potential to effectively help the environment, but they are not the whole answer. What they represent is merely one aspect of a multi-faceted approach to the problem. Incorporating all the different solutions – renewable energy, better public transport, alternative fuels – will all contribute to the bigger picture.
Changing one aspect of transport and energy will only ever have a minimal effect, but the more areas we improve, the stronger the effects across the board. Electric cars become so much more effective when they are charged through renewable energy sources, and renewable power plants become far more valuable the more electric cars we use on the roads.
Each of these are pieces of the puzzle that bring us ever closer to Net Zero, and hopefully to a bigger, brighter tomorrow.
