Are electric cars a truly sustainable solution?

The car is the most widely used mode of trans­port in France, account­ing for around two-thirds of all mobil­ity¹, in terms of the num­ber of jour­neys, trans­port time and kilo­metres trav­elled. It is also a major source of green­house gas emis­sions, account­ing for just over half of domest­ic trans­port emis­sions (exclud­ing inter­na­tion­al trans­port), or 16% of emis­sions in France². The auto­mobile is there­fore a key sec­tor in the fight against glob­al warming.

The elec­tric car is seen as a solu­tion for redu­cing the envir­on­ment­al impact of trans­port, being sup­por­ted by pub­lic author­it­ies, developed by man­u­fac­tur­ers, and increas­ingly adop­ted by users.

Even if elec­tric car sales have increased sig­ni­fic­antly since 2020, rep­res­ent­ing 10% of sales³ in 2021, they only rep­res­ent a little over 1% of the num­ber of cars cur­rently on French roads. Nev­er­the­less, polit­ic­al decisions sup­port this growth, which is expec­ted to con­tin­ue. In France, the tar­get date for the end of sales of com­bus­tion engine cars is cur­rently 2040, while the EU is expec­ted to bring this tar­get for­ward to 2035⁴.

To judge wheth­er this elec­tri­fic­a­tion is good news and leads us towards sus­tain­able mobil­ity, we need to look at its advant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages on sev­er­al envir­on­ment­al, social, and eco­nom­ic impacts of mobility.

Unlike intern­al com­bus­tion vehicles, the emis­sions from elec­tric vehicles are zero when in use and are instead con­cen­trated on the pro­duc­tion of the vehicle and the power sup­ply. The pro­duc­tion of an elec­tric car bat­tery requires min­er­al resources. The extrac­tion of which has an undeni­able envir­on­ment­al impact, and their refin­ing, like the pro­duc­tion of bat­ter­ies, also con­sumes energy. In the pro­duc­tion phase of the vehicle, elec­tric cars emit more green­house gases (in addi­tion to oth­er envir­on­ment­al impacts) than com­bus­tion cars, because of the addi­tion of the battery.

It is in the use of the vehicle that the cli­mate impact will be off­set, espe­cially for coun­tries with a highly decar­bon­ised elec­tri­city mix. In France, which is one of the coun­tries with the best record in this respect, the elec­tric car can already reduce green­house gas emis­sions by a factor of 3 com­pared with a com­bus­tion engine car (depend­ing on the stud­ies, the start­ing hypo­theses and the type of vehicle stud­ied, emis­sions are reduced by a factor of 2 to 5).

While oth­er altern­at­ive to fossil fuels (hydro­gen, bio­gas, agro­fuels, or syn­thet­ic fuels) are not as suit­able for light vehicles, elec­tric power is a pre­ferred and even essen­tial solu­tion for achiev­ing our cli­mate object­ives in trans­port. The IPCC report⁷ states in its sum­mary for policy makers that “elec­tric vehicles powered by low-car­bon elec­tri­city offer the greatest poten­tial for decar­bon­isa­tion of land trans­port in life cycle ana­lys­is”⁸. How­ever, even a factor of 3 on emis­sions is not enough and would need to be improved by mov­ing to much more fuel-effi­cient vehicles, as we shall see.

In addi­tion to cli­mate change, anoth­er import­ant issue is air pol­lu­tion, which affects health. The con­sequences for pub­lic health in France⁹ are mainly due to emis­sions of fine particles (PM), fol­lowed by nitro­gen oxides (NOx) and ozone (O₃). Depend­ing on the pol­lut­ant, the trans­port sec­tor has a more or less sig­ni­fic­ant impact¹⁰: more than 60% for NOx and 17.5% for PM2.5 (particles with a dia­met­er of less than 2.5 µm), although these pro­por­tions increase in the most densely pop­u­lated areas, par­tic­u­larly along road­sides, where road trans­port accounts for more than half of the particles¹¹, where pop­u­la­tion expos­ure can be significant.

Until now, tailpipe emis­sions have been the main source of air pol­lu­tion from road trans­port. Sig­ni­fic­ant pro­gress has already been made on these issues for new vehicles, and elec­tric vehicles will com­pletely solve this prob­lem for both fine particles and NOx.

On the oth­er hand, as a res­ult of the pro­gress made on fine particles from exhaust, the share of non-exhaust particles is becom­ing increas­ingly sig­ni­fic­ant, rep­res­ent­ing 59% of PM10 and 45% of PM2.5 emis­sions¹² in 2019 in France. These emis­sions cor­res­pond to the abra­sion of brakes, tyres, and the road sur­face, as well as the resus­pen­sion of fine particles already present on the roads. Elec­tric vehicles reduce emis­sions of particles from brakes through regen­er­at­ive brak­ing, but emis­sions are high­er for particles from tyres and pave­ment because of their great­er weight. Over­all, emis­sions are some­what lower for elec­tric vehicles, espe­cially giv­en that the driv­ing range, and there­fore the weight, of the vehicle is limited.

In terms of both green­house gas emis­sions and atmo­spher­ic pol­lut­ants, the elec­tric car there­fore appears to be a bet­ter choice than the intern­al com­bus­tion engine. But the amounts are still insuf­fi­cient and should not over­shad­ow the fact that emis­sion levels are still high, par­tic­u­larly when com­pared with oth­er modes of trans­port or forms of mobil­ity that are more eco­nom­ic­al and more envir­on­ment­ally friendly. This is also the case for oth­er impacts or extern­al­it­ies of trans­port, where the elec­tric car does not solve the prob­lems identified.

As with air pol­lu­tion, noise pol­lu­tion, an import­ant factor in the qual­ity of life, is reduced by elec­tric vehicles without dis­ap­pear­ing entirely. In fact, the noise of com­bus­tion engine vehicles comes not only from the engine, but also from tyre fric­tion and aero­dy­nam­ic noise, which is even more import­ant at high­er speeds, and these types of noises will not be sig­ni­fic­antly altered by elec­tric cars.

Oth­er car-related issues remain unchanged with the switch to elec­tric cars. These include the space taken up by cars, which is often sum­mar­ised as con­ges­tion, but which also con­cerns park­ing space (on roads, in build­ings and car parks) and, more broadly, trans­port infra­struc­ture, lead­ing to soil arti­fi­cial­isa­tion and impacts on biod­iversity. The prob­lems of acci­dento­logy also remain unchanged with the switch to elec­tric vehicles. The car is also an inact­ive mode, and phys­ic­al inactiv­ity and sedent­ar­i­ness are a major pub­lic health issue, although too often for­got­ten since they con­cern no less than 95% of the pop­u­la­tion¹⁴.

The prob­lem of unequal access to mobil­ity, for social or geo­graph­ic­al reas­ons, can be rein­forced or reduced by switch­ing to elec­tric vehicles, depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances. With a high­er pur­chase price, at least for the time being, the dis­tri­bu­tion of the car to the most fin­an­cially fra­gile pop­u­la­tions is com­plic­ated, but the costs of use are then much lower, for an over­all cost of own­er­ship that remains high in com­par­is­on with the use of pub­lic trans­port, car shar­ing or even more act­ive mobil­ity, even if the lack of motor­isa­tion can some­times require the use of car sharing.

Finally, regard­ing the con­sump­tion of resources, and in par­tic­u­lar cer­tain metals (lith­i­um, cobalt, nick­el, cop­per, etc.), the elec­tric vehicle may lead to new ten­sions com­pared to the intern­al com­bus­tion engine car, in terms of sup­ply dif­fi­culties and price volat­il­ity, the lim­it­a­tion of cer­tain resources or pol­lu­tion linked to their exploitation.

Respond­ing to these dif­fer­ent issues togeth­er will there­fore require going bey­ond a simple switch to elec­tric cars – assum­ing it is pos­sible to do so without major con­straints, espe­cially as the world’s car fleet is expec­ted to grow in the com­ing decades.

The first step is to review the size of the cars or, more broadly, the vehicles used, which are not adap­ted today to every­day use, i.e., to the vast major­ity of uses. A car gen­er­ally has five seats, can go up to 180 km/h, and weighs around 1.3 tonnes, where­as the most fre­quent uses are for one per­son, on roads lim­ited to 80 or 90 km/h max­im­um (more rarely up to 130 km/h), for dis­tances of a few kilo­metres to a few dozen kilometres.

Here again, the risk is that the race for great­er driv­ing range for elec­tric vehicles will con­tin­ue, when driv­ing ranges of sev­er­al hun­dred kilo­metres are only use­ful for a few rare jour­neys per year, at a fin­an­cial cost to the buy­er and with very sig­ni­fic­ant envir­on­ment­al impacts. In the future, there­fore, we need to devel­op much more fuel-effi­cient vehicles, i.e., smal­ler, light­er, less power­ful, and less fast, more aero­dy­nam­ic, with a lim­ited driv­ing range… which is the oppos­ite of cur­rent trends, marked by heavy elec­tric vehicles (such as SUVs) that do not meet any of the vir­tu­ous cri­ter­ia men­tioned above.

More broadly, the aim is to devel­op inter­me­di­ate vehicles between the bicycle and the car, ran­ging from elec­tric­ally assisted bicycles (EABs) to mini-cars (such as the Renault Twizy or Cit­roën Ami), as well as fold­ing bicycles, cargo bikes, speed-ped­elecs (elec­tric bicycles which can achieve speeds of up to 45km/h) and velo­mo­biles (recum­bent bicycles with a fair­ing). These vehicles extend the pos­sib­il­it­ies of the tra­di­tion­al bicycle to replace the car, while mak­ing elec­tric mobil­ity much more access­ible and much less impact­ful in terms of green­house gas emis­sions, pol­lut­ants, and con­sump­tion of resources and space.

More gen­er­ally, we also need to review the place and uses of the car in mobil­ity, by act­ing on the five levers of decar­bon­isa­tion of mobil­ity, cited by the nation­al low-car­bon strategy¹⁶, namely mod­er­a­tion of trans­port demand, by get­ting closer to people on a daily basis and redu­cing the longest jour­neys; mod­al shift, by favour­ing walk­ing, cyc­ling, trains, buses and coaches as much as pos­sible (and in this order), well ahead of cars and planes, whose use must be reduced; by improv­ing vehicle occu­pancy, in par­tic­u­lar through car­pool­ing; energy effi­ciency, which also con­cerns the reduc­tion of speed on the roads, in addi­tion to the levers of more envir­on­ment­ally friendly and elec­tric vehicles already men­tioned; and finally the decar­bon­isa­tion of energy, in par­tic­u­lar through elec­tri­fic­a­tion for the light­est vehicles, and also hydro­gen, bio­gas, agro­fuels, or syn­thet­ic fuels as a com­ple­ment or for the oth­er modes that are more dif­fi­cult to electrify

If tech­no­logy, and in par­tic­u­lar this last lever, are major and indis­pens­able, they must be placed in their right­ful place in the trans­ition, as the last levers of decar­bon­isa­tion, after the pre­vi­ous levers which bet­ter enable the impacts of mobil­ity to be tackled at the root and thus respond pos­it­ively to more sus­tain­ab­il­ity issues. As far as the car is con­cerned, the elec­tric car must be encour­aged, because it is the best altern­at­ive to get rid of oil, but it can­not be seen as a mir­acle cure… because it is not.