“EV EMISSIONS ARE WORSE THAN ICE CARS OVER A LIFETIME”

A new electric car embeds a lot of energy as CO2 in the making of its battery. So it starts out its driving life with a big CO2 debt compared with a petrol car. When EVs were a novelty, much-quoted studies assumed largely fossil-derived electricity, and also that batteries wouldn’t last long so you’d need to buy a spare during the car’s life. They concluded an EV might never recover its manufacturing debt.

Those assumptions have changed. The UK grid is greener, all the more so every year as we get more renewables. Grid CO2 intensity has roughly halved in a decade. You would also be very unlucky to need two batteries. OK, we don’t know how long an electric car actually does last, because they’ve only been around a decade. But look them up on the DVLA site and a high proportion of early Leafs, Zoes and even Mitsubishi i-MiEVs are still licensed and alive. A similar proportion to comparable 2011–13 petrol cars. And replacement batteries aren’t yet a thing.

Polestar published a very detailed study that put the CO2 break-even point (Polestar 2 vs Volvo XC40) at about 45,000 miles on UK generation mix, or just over 30k miles if you happen to have your own wind or solar to drive it.

So sceptics said, “Ha! If you get an EV and keep it for three years it’s barely breaking even for CO2.” So what then? Do you drive it off a cliff? No, you sell it. You have thus put an electric car into the secondhand market where it will live a happy life emitting vastly less CO2 than the petrol car you would otherwise be selling.