I wouldn’t want to be an electric car in the United States right now. Just a few years ago the U.S. looked like a potential EV boomtown, but the Biden-era fever pitch of enthusiasm, investment, and federal support for electrification seems far away now. Demand has fallen as manufacturers exhausted the pent-up demand for electrification, and federal support for EV tax credits and infrastructure disappeared almost entirely under the Trump administration. Depending on who you ask, this means that the EV revolution is dead in the water, or a slightly delayed inevitability.
For more than a decade, EV skeptics have protested promoting electric cars as climate friendly, on the grounds that the emissions manufacturing process and non-renewables in electric grids offset an EV’s on-the-road efficiency gains. There is some truth to this concern. Building massive lithium-ion batteries is dirty business, and creating a new EV produces around 80 percent more emissions than a comparable internal combustion car, according to the Argonne National Laboratory. Cars create most of their emissions after they hit the road, however, and the last decade of research shows that in almost every scenario imaginable EVs produce significantly lower lifetime emissions than their gas-powered counterparts. On typical U.S. power grids, EVs offset their greater manufacturing emissions in 1-2 years of driving and produce 40 to 80 percent lower lifetime emissions. Even on a 100 percent coal-powered grid (blech!) or given half the expected lifetime miles due to battery degradation, an EV will emit significantly less greenhouse gas over its lifetime than a gas-powered car would.
In the long run, electric cars will not save us. Building out buses, high-speed trains, commuter rail, and bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure cuts down on emissions per passenger-mile far more than even the most efficient private vehicles running on the cleanest electricity. In both manufacturing and usage, buses and trains are simply far more efficient ways of moving people around than private vehicles. While this sounds good on paper, this is America, land of the free and home of the car. While someone in Paris, France has a robust metro system and walkability galore to get around the city — or the legendary TGV to cross the country in hours, talk of public transit sounds a bit farther fetched if you live in, say, Paris, Texas. Aside from a handful of our largest metropolitan areas, American public transit lags lightyears behind most of the developed world, to say nothing of high-speed rail. For all the good intentions of our public servants and planners, American public transit construction in recent decades has largely proven agonizingly slow and eye-wateringly over budget. For most Americans interested in decarbonizing their movement, waiting for public transit networks to reach any fraction of the access, density, reliability, and reach needed for a true transportation revolution is a pipe dream. Until we can build rail as fast as we can build batteries, the EV may remain our best compromise.
~ Jacob Madley `26
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