As of 7:30am on the 2nd of February, Tesla Motors, a California-based electric car automaker, will have completed a high-profile road trip across the United States. Taken boldly in the midst of a States-stopping snow spell, Tesla will soon be inducted into the Guiness Book of World Records for the quickest trans-America journey undergone by an electric vehicle, as well as the record for doing so with the least amount of charge time. This is the latest milestone in the creeping growth of electric vehicles across the automotive industry. As a result of rising greenhouse gas emissions often attributed to the boom in the amount of cars we drive, governments across the world have been offering both automakers and their customers incentives to create and purchase hybrid or fully electric vehicles. This has spawned a range of vehicles from the ubiquitous Toyota Prius to the $500,000 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG E-Drive. This, many hope, will bring an end to the climbing rates of CO2 emissions and fossil fuel depletion.
But, is the entire electric car movement a moot point? While electric and hybrid vehicles give off exactly zero carbon emissions at the philosophical tailpipe – electric cars have no exhaust system owing to the lack of gases to burn – the electricity running through their motors still requires an energy source. The electricity running through the sockets to which one would plug in their electric vehicle may, depending on the local power grid, be even more polluting than a traditionally-powered car would be. While oftentimes the plug-in electricity source is at least at parity with internal-combustion engine cars in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, there is still the significant matter of battery production and disposal. Each hybrid or electric vehicle requires hundreds, if not thousands, of battery cells and each of these must at some point be disposed once their capacity to hold a charge is depleted. Doing so exposes a variety of toxic pollutants to the environment. While newer batteries and newer methods of disposal may mitigate this, the automobile electrification problem has still another hurdle to overcome.
It simply doesn’t matter. In a recent exhaustive study, scientists showed that even by 2050, with optimal electric vehicle market share growth, the reduction of net man-caused CO2 emissions is meagre at best; it is more than likely that the true net change in emissions would be very slim. In fact, emissions due to passenger vehicles account for a mere 20% of the total emissions caused by humans. This statistic draws into question the practice of governments offering hundreds of millions in loans to automakers, often without successful repayments, to provide incentives for the production of electric cars. While a world with exclusively electric vehicles would make for at least cleaner air in cities, it will not be enough to curb the harm we continue to cause to the environment.
Helon Law