So you think electric cars are clean?

VW Golf TDI 2009

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sues against the Volkswagen company in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on last Tuesday. The agency said U.S. consumers suffered "billions of dollars in injury" as a result of deception by VW, which has admitted to using software that allowed 580,000 diesel vehicles built since 2009 to emit up to 40 times legally allowable pollution. The FTC claims VW falsely advertised more than a half million diesel vehicles as environmentally friendly when it knew they were emitting excess pollution.

There is effective technology to cut nitrogen oxides (NOx), but sadly the car manufacturers are not implementing it because of its cost and weight.

Diesel cars tested in Norway produced four times the NOx emissions of large buses and lorries in city driving conditions, according to a report from the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research. An independent study for Transport for London showed that a small car emitted several times more NOx than most bus and heavy trucks.

Since cars release toxic gases and lots of green house gases. People tends to think electric cars are way more cleaner than diesel or petrol car. However, a Electric vehicles study by Yale University stated that the carbon footprint of EVs could be “indistinguishable from those of a diesel vehicle” depending on the distance they are driven and the location they obtain electricity.

An Electric Car recharging its battery

In the study, they calculate all the energy needed to manufacture the vehicles, also the amount and sources of energy used during operation and the energy needed to recycle them. they found out the predominantly coal- and natural gas-powered grid in Germany means an EV will generate 100 to 120 g of CO2 per km. The situation is even worse in China, which generates 85% of its electricity from coal. China is already at a miserable levels of urban air pollution, which will only get worse if Chinese consumers embrace electric cars. However, most of the electricity in France generated from nuclear power, an EV may generate only 15 g of CO2 per km, which is really clean.

In addition, a recent report from the Environmental Protection Agency on the life-cycle research of lithium-ion batteries discovers they may cause resource depletion, global warming, ecological toxicity and human health impacts.

I love driving electric cars because it is really quiet and smooth in driving. I will not drive electric cars in Sydney until I find out where is the electricity of Sydney comes from. But for now I think I would probably still choose public transport or bicycle. To conclude, I think electric cars are not sustainable yet because of the life cycle of the batteries and the origin of the electricity.

Reference:
"World Environment News." Planet Ark. Accessed April 25, 2016. http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/74298. 

Carrington, Damian. "Diesel Cars Emit up to Four times More Toxic Pollution than a Bus, Data Reveals." The Guardian. 2015. Accessed April 26, 2016. 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/21/diesel-cars-emissions-toxic-pollution-than-a-bus-data-reveals. 

"Electric Vehicles Not Sustainable." Electric Vehicles Not Sustainable. Accessed April 26, 2016. http://wardsauto.com/blog/electric-vehicles-not-sustainable. 

"VW Might Not Be Able to Make Rigged Diesels Compliant with U.S. Air Quality Rules." TreeHugger. Accessed April 25, 2016. http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/vw-it-might-not-be-able-make-rigged-diesels-compliant-us-air-quality-rules.html. 

"Electric Vehicle." - Simple English Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 27, 2016. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle.