One of the biggest arguments against electric vehicle adoption is that they couldn’t possible be much cleaner than gas-powered cars thanks to the increased energy demands of their production. Processes like mining to extract the rare earth metals essential for EV batteries are pretty bad for the planet, and the extra transportation emissions associated with EV construction all add up. This doesn’t mean gas-powered cars are cleaner, however, and there’s actually a distinct point in a car’s lifecycle when electric power becomes cleaner than gas.
The big difference between the emissions of an electric car and a gas car come in the way they are spread across the vehicle’s lifetime. In the case of gas cars, the production emissions are relatively low but the pollution produced while you drive around is much higher. With an EV, it’s the other way around and production emissions are relatively high while emissions from use are much, much lower.
The average gas car in America will emit around 26 tons of CO2 during its life cycle, according to figures shared by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership. Around 20 percent of those emissions will come from production, mostly due to the energy needed to create metals like steel and aluminum, and the rest will be released by burning gasoline to keep the car moving.
In contrast, an EV has lifetime emissions of around 19 tons, and 46 percent of that comes from production.
The electric vehicle starts its life on the back foot, then, but the CO2 it releases while driving around is much lower, and can be close to zero if it’s powered by electricity generated through renewable means like wind and solar.
So when does the EV make up for its dirty start in life and overtake the gas car as the clean option for getting around town? Well, that moment comes around two years into a car’s life once it surpasses 25,000 miles, according to a report from Canary Media:
For the typical EV made in the U.S. in 2023 — think a Tesla Model 3 — that payback happens after driving just 41,000 kilometers (25,476 miles). A typical American driver would hit that in 2.1 years. By 2030, this will take half as long because the grid will have gotten considerably cleaner.
“Two years in the U.S. — that’s not that long in the life of a car,” said Corey Cantor, BNEF senior associate for electric vehicles and one of the authors of the report.
Several insights follow from this. If someone buys an EV, works from home and basically never drives it, that could well be worse for carbon emissions than just keeping an old gas car around (or ditching car ownership altogether). Conversely, supercommuters could reap the climate benefits of switching to electric within a year of purchase.
This means that if you’re in the market for a new car and you travel around 12,000 to 13,000 miles a year, you’ll cut your emissions from travel pretty quickly if you switch to an EV. If you want to cut your emissions even quicker, then Bloomberg reports that the time of day EV drivers charge and the sources of their power can quickly cut emissions further.
In states like California, where a lot of the energy in the grid is generated by sources such as solar, an EV owner who charges in the day can cut their emissions in half compared with a driver who charges at night, Bloomberg explains.
In addition, buying your EV from a factory with an emphasis on renewable energy will further cut its lifetime emissions. Ford has set itself the target of assembling its cars with the equivalent of 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2026 through carbon credits and offsetting programs. Hyundai, meanwhile, has signed a 15-year deal to supply clean energy to its U.S. factories and EV startup Rivian says that by 2030 its factory will operate on 100 percent renewable energy.
Steps like this will all help reduce the lifetime emissions of an EV even further, meaning that over the coming decade the point at which a new electric car becomes cleaner than a gas model could be even sooner than 25,000 miles.