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.