We've talked a lot on this thread about how EV's are not an environmentally good thing, they can't be as private cars on this scale cannot be. What we are dealing with is degrees of bad.
You're right to make the point about how the electricity is produced and how 'green' your EV is will depend very much on where you live. If you like in Iceland then its about as 'green' as a private car can get but if you live in a country with a very dirty grid (such as Germany or Poland) than you're currently substituting one fossil fuel for another. I will say it again though an EV will be as clean as the grid and as grids are cleaned up an EV will be getting cleaner and cleaner. An ICE car can only ever run on fossil fuel for its whole life.
As someone who drives a so called modern 'cleaner' ICE car I will say honestly that they are still shit. Talking about trying to make ICE cars cleaner is deckchairs on the Titanic stuff.
Anyway, even if our grids are still far too dirty there has to be some improvement for our choked towns and cities. I was walking around Bristol over the weekend and as I do I was looking at the architecture and as beautiful as a lot of it is so much of it is filthy dirty. Years of exposure to toxic fumes being pumped into the air. Then there's this from my home city:
Some 98% of London schools are in areas with high air pollution, City Hall analysis suggests.
www.bbc.co.uk
As someone who has lived very near primary schools for the best part of two decades it never ceases to amaze me how many parents will quite happily park outside the school gates and leave their engines idling because they want the heater on or the AC or more often than not they're parked somewhere they shouldn't and want to escape quickly should a traffic warden turn up. Just sat there pumping poisonous air into the classrooms and and playgrounds where their children are. The disconnect is extraordinary.
I appreciate the situation in London is a lot more complicated than just private cars (large commercial vehicles etc) but surely EV's with no emissions have to be an improvement on just pretending we can get by on ever such slight improvements to ICE cars or people will suddenly just decide to give up their cars?
We live in a society that is so wedded to the idea of private car ownership. I look around at the amount of houses in London that have multiple cars. I see cars parked on the street that are clearly hardly ever used and despite all the costs involved people still choose to retain them. If this is how it is in London with such a good public transport network than what hope do we have elsewhere?
I don't believe there is a viable and achievable short cut to fixing this problem. Its not that I don't want it to happen I just cannot see a pathway to how it comes about. It will need a very strong top down approach from government which will not happen at the moment because they know full well enough people won't vote for it. In the meantime EV's are at least a step in the right direction and besides its happening so we may as well get on board with it.
