Electric vehicles are rapidly taking off – but is that a good thing?

In the past five years, a revolution has gathered pace in the transport sector. Electric cars, once the sole preserve of those with deep pockets, have hit the mainstream.

The latest figures released on 26 April by the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggest almost one-in-five new cars sold worldwide this year will be either full battery electric or plug-in hybrid models. In total, 14 million of these kind of vehicles are expected to be sold this year, up from around a million in 2017.  

This explosive growth is testament to industry innovation and government interventions. Falling battery costs have delivered longer-range cars, boosting their consumer appeal. Meanwhile, government policies, including looming bans on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in some countries, have nudged people to embrace zero-emission driving.  

The result is a transformation in the car 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 gone unrivalled for over a century, but electric vehicles are changing the status quo,” said Fatih Birol at the IEA in a statement. 

But although electrification of the global vehicle fleet brings climate benefits, there is also cause for concern. SUVs have been growing in popularity in recent years, accounting for 42 per cent of all car sales in 2020. In tandem, electric SUVs have also gained ground, representing roughly 35 per cent of electric passenger car sales in 2022. 

Christian Brand at the University of Oxford dubs this trend towards larger cars a “mobesity” epidemic. Electric SUVs are still greener than their petrol and diesel counterparts, but their size and weight erases some of the climate gains from moving to electric vehicles (EVs). Their larger batteries also require more raw minerals, like cobalt and lithium, putting extra pressure on already stretched global supplies. “The trend towards larger cars is definitely not desirable at all,” says Brand.  

He suggests new policies to encourage people to opt for smaller EVs may be needed, such as hiking taxes for electric SUVs. “Of course, that’s unpopular with policy-makers because they would fear losing votes. But we could save hundreds of millions of tons of carbon over time, cumulatively, to 2050, if we did something like this in the UK,” he says. 

Air pollution is another worry. In poorer countries like India, electric scooters and tuk-tuks are replacing diesel-powered vehicles in their droves, the IEA reports, which will lead to significant improvements in urban air quality. But in richer countries, where petrol and diesel cars tend to be cleaner, the situation isn’t so clear, says Frank Kelly at Imperial College London.

“The benefit of moving to an electric vehicle, from an exhaust emission point of view, is actually pretty small,” says Kelly. And since electric vehicles still produce pollution from their tyres, brakes and road wear, air pollution won’t fully go away. “We’re still going to have a pretty big problem in our cities,” says Kelly. 

As such, governments must do more to reduce car dependency, particularly 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 minimising all private vehicles as much as possible, not celebrating the increased numbers.”