The Battery Car Delusion

Gautam Kalghatgi: Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) do not represent a significant improvement over internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) in terms of their carbon dioxide footprint unless all the energy for their manufacture and use is CO2-free. That is not likely to happen in the next ten years. A large investment in infrastructure is needed to enable wide deployment of BEVs and possibly continuing incentives to encourage people to buy them. Also, a large increase in BEV numbers will bring other problems, such as the impacts on human health of mining for the minerals, although these take place far away and are often ignored. Even with a hundred-fold increase in BEV numbers to 10 million by 2030, over 85% of transport in the UK will still run on internal combustion engines.