The Dark Truth of Electric Cars

By Jake Lock

Many people wonder how much better are electric cars for the environment? Manufactures say
that these electric cars are zero emissions. Well the answer is a bit strange to what you think it actually
is. Tesla, Nissan and Chevy (These are the only manufacturers I can think of that produce electric cars)
aren’t wrong about zero emissions if you take it from the pipe, meaning when you drive the car. Now if
you use reusable energy to charge your electric car then it is cleaner for the environment in the moment
you use it, the impact is a lot less than an internal combustion engine (your everyday car). But the story
of environmental impact doesn’t start when you first start driving your car. Unfortunately, it starts
before your car is even assembled in the factory. As great electric cars are once you start driving them
(the instant torque is amazing by the way) the impact from certain materials to create the cars is the
biggest factor for the environment compared to your everyday internal combustion engine vehicle. As
many if not all know that internal combustion vehicles run off gasoline (we can pretend diesel engines
don’t exist just for now) run off of gasoline or petrol depending on where you are from, but electric cars
use lithium-ion batteries, which power many electronics from your cellphone to anything that really has
a battery today. Now you might be using reusable resources to power your electric car, but it is not
made out of reusable resources. That is one problem without some recycling the problem will come
back to we need a different way to power our cars. But to get back on topic to produce these batteries
ends up creating a lot of greenhouse gasses. One chemical companies use in production of these
batteries is something called NMP, N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) is a dangerous chemical to humans as
it can be absorbed through the skin and cause a bunch of health hazards I won’t get to but when burnt
off it creates CO2, you know the gas that is created by cars. Just the production alone creates a lot more
than just your typical car or truck since the materials used range from mostly metals although nearly all
cars today include intricate electronics, so the impact is more than what it was fifty years ago when
everything was a little simpler. Even with all these new fancy computers there is still less of an
environmental impact producing these cars compared to electric cars. To put some numbers down,
electric cars end up producing around sixty percent more CO2 emissions than your standard car. The
biggest contributors are the lithium-ion batteries, chassis, and the body of the car. Out of the three the
lithium-ion batteries create the most emissions during production but that doesn’t mean we should say
good bye to electric cars. Looking at this complicated data (I got all my sources from scientific journals)
and figuring out all the scientific jargon they use and deciphering their graphs and charts it looks grim
for electric cars. I’m not denying that electric cars aren’t good for the environment, they’re amazing
once they get off the line and actually after a while are less impactful, but you have to take in the big
picture you can’t just look at the part that’s pretty. With all that’s been said I’m excited to see the
progress of electric cars in the future, maybe the first step is hybrid cars (don’t forget all the fancy hyper
cars are hybrids now) and work from there until the manufacturing process is less impactful on our
current home that we call Earth.
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Qiao, Q., Zhao, F., Liu, Z., Jiang, S., & Hao, H. (2017). Comparative Study on Life Cycle CO2
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Hawkins, T. R., Gausen, O. M., & Strømman, A. H. (2012). Environmental impacts of hybrid and
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Notter, D. A., Gauch, M., Widmer, R., Wăger, P., Stamp, A., Zah, R., & Althaus, H. (2010).
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