Electric cars don’t start out “clean”. The battery is their cross and delight: essential to move them, but heavy to build in terms of CO₂. It’s like starting a race with a heavy backpack: you start at a disadvantage, you feel it, you see it. In this case, however, that weight disappears much sooner than we think.
This is what researchers from Northern Arizona University and Duke University say, who set out to investigate everything that concerns an electric car: from the minerals extracted to build it, to the emissions it produces while traveling, up to the behavior of the electricity grid. In short, a complete journey into the “behind the scenes” of what we use to get around every day.
The start is limp, but the race is all downhill
Yes, initially the electric car pollutes more than a petrol one. In the first couple of years it brings with it an extra CO₂ load of up to 30%. Not exactly an eco-friendly business card. But if you wait three years the overtaking happens: from that moment, the electric becomes cleaner and only continues to improve.
Every additional kilometer lowers its impact, because it does not produce exhaust and because the energy it uses changes over time. The electricity grid, in fact, does not remain static: coal decreases, wind and sun increase. And with every step forward in the network, the electric car becomes greener. It’s a bit like having a house that self-renovates while you live in it.
The researchers even managed to calculate how much each kWh of battery is “worth”: today it can already avoid hundreds of pounds of CO₂, and this value will drop even further in 2050, when electricity will be much cleaner.
Looking at the entire life of a car, a petrol one causes two to three and a half times the environmental damage of an electric one. Not only for the climate, but also for the air quality. Because electric cars move pollution away from the streets: we no longer breathe carbon monoxide, nor all those substances that make the air heavy.
An electric is not perfect, but it gets better every day
The study did not consider battery recycling, a sector that is exploding and which could greatly reduce the initial impact in the coming years. However, it analyzed everything relating to use: the energy produced, the fuels processed, the emissions at each acceleration.
And here comes the important lesson: In 2022, transportation generated 28% of U.S. emissions. Every choice made now weighs on the next thirty years. And those three years of initial “disadvantage” of electric? They are nothing compared to the rest of his life.
If you want to reduce your footprint, going electric is not a leap in the dark: it’s a quick, measurable and growing advantage. If we look at planning instead, the study reminds us that mobility and energy must go together. A cleaner electricity grid also makes our journeys cleaner.
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