Relax, Electric Vehicles Really Are the Best Choice for the Climate

It has been a bumpy few weeks for carmakers who sell electric vehicles, which are moving more slowly off the lot than they were earlier this year. What’s going on? It seems that American drivers may be more hesitant about E.V.s than automakers expected.

I am familiar with trepidation about electric vehicles; I hear it when I give talks around the country about how each of us can take small steps to slow and stop climate change, when I chat with my neighbors and when I go on a road trip in my own E.V. Some people worry about running out of battery power far from a charging station; others are dissuaded by the upfront costs. The electric Volkswagen ID. 4, for example, sells for about $40,000, while the similarly sized, gas-powered Volkswagen Tiguan sells for about $30,000 — though the E.V. has a lower total cost over the life of the car.

Those concerns will likely diminish in 2024 as money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into building more charging stations and making discounts for electric vehicles available right at the dealership. But I think something else may explain why so many Americans, including those who consider themselves climate conscious, have been hesitant to buy an electric vehicle. It’s a fear that such vehicles aren’t really all that much better for the environment than hybrid vehicles that have both gas and electric motors, and might even be worse, because of everything required to manufacture batteries and mine the materials that go into them. This worry is keeping some would-be buyers on the sidelines of the E.V. revolution.

If you look under the hood, so to speak, these concerns share two fundamental misunderstandings: They assume that the electric vehicle industry is locked in to today’s technology, and they discount the huge environmental drawbacks of gas-powered alternatives. Electric vehicles are like digital cameras in their early iterations. They are already better than the alternative for almost everyone, and improving at a breathtakingly fast clip. And while there are environmental concerns with them, they are dwarfed by the benefit they provide regarding climate change — the biggest environmental threat to human well-being in the 21st century.

Let’s start with the concern about emissions during battery construction, a topic that comes up in almost every talk I give on this subject. Electric vehicle batteries require a lot of materials and electricity to manufacture, and that process does produce more greenhouse gas emissions than not making a battery.

But let’s do the math as I’ve done for my family’s two E.V.s. We got the first to replace our 10-year-old, gas-powered Subaru, and after only two years of driving, the E.V. has created fewer emissions over its lifetime than if we had kept the old car. It will take our second E.V. only four years to create fewer emissions over its lifetime than the 2005 hybrid Prius it replaced. That’s counting the production of the batteries and the emissions from charging the E.V.s, and the emissions payback time will only continue to drop as more emissions-free wind and solar power comes onto the grid and battery technology improves.