How long does it take to drive an electric car to make it more environmentally friendly than a car with an internal combustion engine?

The debate over the environmental friendliness of electric vehicles, despite the active growth in sales of the latter, does not subside. Reuters, based on a model by Argonne National Laboratory, calculated how much it would take to drive an electric car before it really became green.

In this case, we mean that the production of an electric vehicle is more harmful to the environment than the production of a car with an internal combustion engine. More precisely, in the first case, carbon dioxide emissions are higher (8.1 versus 5.5 tons), which is due to the extraction and processing of raw materials for the production of batteries.

As a result, the source got different results for different cars and different countries. For example, in the USA, in the case of a Tesla Model 3 with a 54 kWh battery, you need to travel 21,725 ​​km before the car becomes more environmentally friendly than an alternative car with an internal combustion engine. This was the Toyota Corolla.

However, for Norway, the payback period of this kind is much shorter – only 13,519 km. This is due to the fact that in the United States, about 23% of electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants, and in Norway, almost all electricity is produced using renewable sources.

If we take, for example, China or Poland, where almost all electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants, then you will have to drive more than 126,600 km.

It should be understood that any such research models are based on specific parameters, so the results of different studies may be different. For example, in this particular case, apparently, the issue of car disposal is not taken into account.