Electric vehicles aren't perfect, but their critics miss the bigger picture.
- Feb 2, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 15, 2025
I'm avidly focused on solutions to climate change - so much so that I've focused my professional life on improving rail systems to get people out of cars and reduce emissions. But despite being passionate about environmentalism, I've long struggled to fully identify with the climate activist community. In part, this is because I think many activists make the perfect the enemy of the good, often in ways that are detrimental to the biggest environmental goal of all: reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I see this in the anti-nuclear movement, which has curtailed the development of emissions-free atomic power around the world based on fears of accidents and radioactive waste storage. I see it in agriculture, where conspiratorial anti-GMO campaigns have limited the legality of genetically modified crops which grow more efficiently on less land. And I see it in media and public cynicism towards recycling, which seems to tell people that plastic recycling is a scam simply because it often doesn't work as well as it should.
In my industry though, I see this counterproductive thinking most often on the subject of electric vehicles. Lately, I've encountered a lot of social media and activist takes decrying EVs as dangerous greenwashing toys that distract from efforts to improve public transport and leave a trail of toxic lithium mines in their wake. I hear these criticisms often enough that I've become a bit frustrated. I want a more transit-oriented, walkable world more than most but I'm also really excited by the growing popularity of EVs. Cars and trucks still accounts for about 12% of global emissions, the second largest sector after electricity generation, and I've long viewed EVs as the most important way we can reduce transportation emissions. Rather than stand on this assertion though, I thought I'd examine some of the criticisms of EVs to determine for myself whether I'm wrong to be excited by their growing global presence.
Average Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector
Critique 1: EVs are still bad for the environment
A common tick against EVs is that despite not producing tailpipe emissions, they're still bad for the environment. Most of this critique centres on the impacts of manufacturing EVs, particularly mining the cobalt, lithium, and nickel needed for EV batteries, but they also extend to the impacts of generating electricity for EVs.
First, let's accept that manufacturing almost anything, from cardboard to computers, comes with some negative externalities - cars are no exception. Car manufacturing has always required significant amounts of metal, rubber, and plastic and in this regard, EVs are no different. The average internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle weighs between 1100 and 1800 kilograms - heavier American cars pull the average higher. Electric cars tend to be slightly heavier, weighing just over 2,000 kilos on average. Of that, about 65% is metal, 10% is plastic, and 5% is rubber. This means that regardless of whether the car in question is electric or gas-powered, between 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of materials have to be mined, grown, or processed to make it, with EVs requiring 15 to 25% more input materials than ICE cars.
Average Vehicle Weight by Model
What's the impact of that difference? On average, manufacturing an ICE car creates 5.6 tonnes of CO2 emissions, most of that from steel production. If we assume that the additional 15 - 25% of material inputs required for EVs has a corresponding impact on emissions, manufacturing an EV might produce 1 to 1.5 additional tonnes of CO2 emissions, for a total of about 6.5 to 7 tonnes per car. Almost 100 million cars are produced annually these days, so if we extrapolate all the way, shifting all that manufacturing to EVs could produce an additional 150 million tonnes of CO2 per year relative to ICE vehicle manufacturing. That's roughly equivalent to the entire annual emissions of the Philippines. This has not happened yet, because EVs still account for less than 20% of cars being made, but it seems fair to say that EV manufacturing on its own is more harmful to the planet.
What about EV batteries though? Is building these substantially worse for the environment than building engines? In short, also yes. As best I can tell, producing an EV battery emits around 8 tonnes of CO2, accounting for both the mining of the input minerals and assembly of the battery itself. By comparison, producing an internal combustion engine in an average car seems to produce roughly 0.6 tonnes of CO2.
Lifetime Emissions by Vehicle Type
The takeaway here is that the manufacturing EVs and their batteries seems to be much more harmful to the environment than conventional car manufacturing. EVs require more material than ICE vehicles, mostly for their batteries, which are much more carbon intensive to make than engines. My back-of-the-envelope carbon accounting shouldn't be take too seriously, but EV manufacturing likely produces twice as much CO2 as ICE vehicle manufacturing and, at a global scale, this could add a large nation's worth of emissions to our annual output.
Critique 2: EVs are dangerous
Even after working on street-safety projects earlier in my career, I'm still surprised by how deadly cars are. Car crashes kill 1.2 million people per year - about 2% of all deaths globally. Increasingly, more people and governments are becoming aware of the danger they pose, particularly large SUVs and trucks. Cars have gotten a lot larger in the past 50 years, and larger vehicles hurt and kill people much more than smaller vehicles. In fact, they're about 7 times more likely to kill people in crashes than medium sized vehicles, and almost 18 times more likely to kill people than small vehicles.
Electric vehicles could spell bad news for road safety. As we've already seen, they're heavier, on average, than petrol-powered counterparts meaning that when they hit someone, they're more likely to seriously injure or kill them. Very large EVs can even be more dangerous for drivers, because they're heavy enough to crash through roadside barriers designed to stop lighter cars.
EVs are also quieter. A study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that EV collisions with pedestrians are roughly twice as likely as conventional vehicle collisions with pedestrians, largely because EVs are not as audible. While these findings are concerning, there is still very little research into the road safety implications of EVs, mostly because EVs still make up a very small portion of cars on the road globally. Nevertheless, based on weight trends alone, it's reasonable to assert that EVs are likely to be more dangerous, particularly to vulnerable road users, than conventional ICE vehicles.
Critique 3: EVs distract us from building better cities
Many urbanists and activists I've bumped into have a more emotional reaction to EVs, boiling down to something like "yes, EVs reduce emissions but they're distractions from efforts to build better public transport and make cities more walkable." I've heard versions of this from urban planning groups and left-leaning media arguing that EV's won't be adopted fast enough to matter, or that they come with too many negative impacts, or that they're a capitalist ploy by car companies and politicians to keep us all consuming. Inevitably, these voices suggest that instead we should overhaul our mobility systems to build more transit, get more people walking and onto bikes, build denser cities, and fundamentally tackle private car ownership.
I share all of those goals and I'm working on it. But that vision has begun to feel too utopic for me to take seriously. Of course I prefer the urban and mobility landscape of cities like Copenhagen and Paris to the low-density sprawl of North America or the congested cities of Asia and Latin America, but those cities are not going anywhere. Huge swathes of the world are locked in on suburbia, where it's inherently difficult to make transit work. Hundreds of millions of people live in single-family homes and don't seem interested in the urban densification desired by urbanists like me. Changing cities to make them less car-centric is the work of lifetimes, not years.
My own experience has shown me just how difficult it is to achieve the type of low-car future espoused by many of the loudest anti-EV voices. In the US, I worked on designs for bike lanes in suburban New York, Los Angeles, and New Jersey that have yet to be built almost a decade after I worked on them. I worked on bus network improvements in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York that aimed to simplify route patterns and concentrate frequent service where people were more like to use transit. Even these simple efforts took years to move through planning to implementation. Now in Toronto, where I'm part of an effort to electrify the regional rail service and run more frequent trains, it will take a decade (and a lot of money) just to electrify existing rail lines, let alone build new ones.
I agree with activists that we'd be better off focusing society's efforts on reducing automobile dependence, but after a decade of working to do so, I just don't see that happening fast enough and at a large enough scale in the time we have to cut emissions. In this context, I don't see EVs as a distraction from more sustainable cities, but rather as a parallel project. For a long while to come, lots of people are still going to drive. We should continue to work against car-centrism but while we do that, we should celebrate the transition away from petrol-power.
The Bigger Picture
So far I've mostly highlighted the ways in which EVs ARE negative for people and the planet. They are carbon-intensive to make, they probably are more dangerous to pedestrians, and they don't really help us build better cities. Why then am I still enthusiastic about them? Because EVs do more to address our transportation emissions than almost anything else we have at our disposal right now.
Recall that gas-power vehicles account for 12% of humanity's current annual CO2 output. In absolute terms that's roughly 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. The vast majority of that output comes from car use, not car manufacturing. Lifetime emissions matter much more than manufacturing emissions. This is where EVs really start to shine. Despite producing more carbon emissions during assembly, EVs more than make up for it over their lifetimes. Even when relying on 'dirty' electricity generated by burning fossil fuels, EVs still beat ICE vehicles. Globally, ICE vehicles produce an average of 163g of CO2 per kilometre, compared to EV's 62g per kilometre.
The long and short of it is that even in our current 'business-as-usual' scenario EVs produce about 60% fewer emissions in active use than ICE vehicles. If we apply that reduction to the 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2 currently generated by cars per year, we'd instead be dealing with 1.4 billion tones. That's equivalent to eliminating India's entire annual CO2 output and would be a massive win for the planet. And it could be even better. The upshot of EVs is that as power-generation becomes decarbonised, and gradually it is, EV emissions can theoretically fall to zero. This may be my own utopic dream, but the more EVs replace ICE vehicles, the closer we get to it.
So much of the work of fighting climate change is a question of prioritisation. Local vs. global impacts, idealism vs. pragmatism, one tradeoff vs. another. Getting our priorities right is vitally important because time is of the essence, and convincing people to act is hard. Sometimes, as in the case of EVs, this means accepting some bad in order to achieve a greater good. Would you accept 150 million tonnes of extra manufacturing emissions to eliminate 2 or 3 billion tonnes of emissions on the road? Would you accept that car crashes will get worse, and would you accept that we're not going to transform all cities into transit paradises any time soon? Over time, I have.
None of this is to suggest that the negative externalities of EVs don't matter, or that we shouldn't move away from cars. But it is to suggest that we should remember the bigger picture. EVs are far from perfect, but they're part of getting us to a more perfect world.
