Electric cars are taking over the roads
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In the last five years, a revolution has accelerated in the transport sector. Once the preserve of the deep-pocketed, electric cars have entered the mainstream.
The latest figures released on April 26 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggest that nearly one in five new cars sold worldwide this year will be full battery electric or plug-in hybrid models. In total, 14 million such vehicles are expected to be sold this year, up from about a million in 2017.
This explosive growth is a testament to the sector’s innovation and government interventions. Falling battery costs have led to longer-range cars, increasing their appeal to consumers. Meanwhile, government policies, including imminent bans on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in some countries, have pushed people to adopt zero-emission driving.
The result is a transformation in the automotive industry that will reshape the world’s energy use. Global oil demand for road transport will peak in 2025, the IEA predicts. “The internal combustion engine has been unrivaled for more than a century, but electric vehicles are changing the status quo,” the IEA’s Fatih Birol said in a statement.
But while the electrification of the global vehicle fleet brings climate benefits, there are also reasons for concern. SUVs have been growing in popularity in recent years, accounting for 42% of all car sales in 2020. At the same time, electric SUVs have also gained ground, accounting for approximately 35% of electric passenger car sales in 2022.
Oxford University’s Christian Brand calls this trend towards bigger cars an epidemic of “crowding”. Electric SUVs are still greener than their gasoline and diesel counterparts, but their size and weight erase some of the climate gains of switching to electric vehicles (EVs). Their larger batteries also require more raw minerals, such as cobalt and lithium, putting additional pressure on already stretched global supplies. “The trend towards bigger cars is definitely not desirable at all,” says Brand.
It suggests that new policies may be needed to encourage people to opt for smaller electric vehicles, such as increased taxes on electric SUVs. “Of course this is unpopular with policy makers because they would be afraid of losing votes. But we could save hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon over time, cumulatively, up to 2050, if we did something like this in the UK “, he says.
Air pollution is another concern. In poorer countries like India, electric scooters and tuk-tuks are replacing diesel vehicles, the IEA reports, leading to significant improvements in urban air quality. But in wealthier countries, where petrol and diesel cars tend to be cleaner, the situation is not so clear, says Frank Kelly of Imperial College London.
“The benefit of switching to an electric vehicle, from an exhaust emissions perspective, is really quite small,” says Kelly. And because electric vehicles still produce pollution from tires, brakes and road wear, air pollution won’t go away entirely. “We’re still going to have a pretty big problem in our cities,” Kelly says.
As such, governments need to do more to reduce reliance on cars, especially in urban areas, says Kelly. “Clean public transport is the solution to our air pollution problem in urban areas,” he says. “And really, we should be minimizing all private vehicles as much as possible, not celebrating the increase in numbers.”
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