Electric vehicles will start to cut emissions and improve air quality in our cities – but only once they’re common
- by The Conversation
- May 02, 2024
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Can EVs really improve air quality?
Combustion engines expel smog-causing chemicals that are dangerous to our health, such as carbon monoxide, soot and nitrogen oxides.
Countries such as Norway and China have embraced EVs faster than others. As Chinese researchers have found, air quality in polluted cities begins to improve as EVs arrive in numbers. American researchers have found even small increases in the proportion of EVs improves air quality and reduces the number of people attending hospital with asthma attacks.
What most people think of as EVs are battery electric vehicles made by companies such as Tesla or BYD. While hybrid cars have small batteries, they still have combustion engines. By contrast, battery-electric cars do away with it entirely in favour of much larger lithium-ion battery packs.
If you look at the entire lifecycle of a vehicle, emissions associated with an average EV – including production, shipping, maintenance, recycling, and of course use – are estimated to be just 12% those of a traditional combustion engine vehicle.
Cutting emissions and cleaning air means actually using EVs
The main challenge in cutting transport emissions is no longer technological – it’s uptake.
Last year, more than 8% of new vehicles sold in Australia were EVs. That’s a big jump up from the previous year’s figure of 3.6%.
But the real figure we should focus on is smaller – 1.2%. That’s the proportion of EVs across Australia’s entire passenger vehicle fleet. That is, of the 15.3 million passenger cars, utes and vans on our roads, just 181,000 are EVs as of the beginning of 2023.
So yes, uptake is accelerating. But based on current market trends, it will be at least 15 years before EVs outnumber internal combustion vehicles in Australia, and at least a decade after before these polluting vehicles disappear from our roads. (It’s likely they won’t disappear entirely, due to hobbyists and collectors.)
This is why government initiatives such as the New Vehicle Energy Standards are important – they speed up this transition. Even with this, it will be decades before we actually see falls in transport emissions.
Battery electric vehicles rely on many battery cells linked together.
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