The EV emissions claims tested

Sam Hawley: We’re told electric vehicles are our future, but have you ever wondered just how much better they are for the environment? Well, it’s a more complicated picture than you’d think. Today, ABC climate reporter Jo Lauder compares an electric car with a traditional petrol one and delivers the verdict. I’m Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Jo, this test you undertook is sort of a bit out there, right? Because I would have thought the answer was obvious that electric cars are better for the environment than cars that run on petrol. So tell me first, why on earth did you want to test this in the first place?

Jo Lauder: It does seem obvious in a lot of ways, Sam, but this is something that comes up so much. And I think for people when they want to make a choice for environmental reasons, whatever it is, they just really want to make sure that it’s having the impact that they intended. And there are always some naysayers who will throw it back and they’ll kind of point out that the alternative is still bad for the environment. And I think some of that is genuine concern. Some of it is, you know, maybe a bit of misinformation in there as well. And look, I’ve had these conversations with people. I had one just recently at a party. I think a lot of people might have had, you know, a conversation at a barbecue with an uncle who’s telling them that their new EV, you know, it still runs off fossil fuels and, you know, maybe that’s not better overall. And so we really wanted to dive into those numbers and look at it. And it is kind of complicated because if you look at the lifecycle emissions of an electric car and a fuel car, there are lots of different stages where they produce emissions. So the four main stages are when the car is made, so all the manufacturing, when the battery is produced, driving the car, which is the biggest part, but, you know, that is just one of the four. And then the last stage around disposing of the car and the battery or recycling it. And so different cars, petrol cars and electric cars, they produce different amounts of emissions at each of these stages. And so that’s where some of the claims come from, that EVs are worse for the environment from some of these stages. And so we just really wanted to dive into it and spell this out for people. And so this modelling comes from the EV Council, but we’ve had it independently verified with transport experts. And we also checked, you know, in terms of all the data in points of where the power figures come from, petrol use, all of that, it’s all been verified.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, I think really useful. Okay, so then let’s start with how the car is actually made. And you went and compared two mid-sized SUVs.

Jo Lauder: Yeah, so SUVs, it’s now the most popular body of car in Australia. You see it a lot on Australian roads. And so for this comparison, we’re talking about for electric cars, the example might be a Tesla Model Y or for a petrol one, a RAV4, a Mazda CX-5. So we’re talking about that kind of size. And so setting aside the batteries for the moment because that’s actually, we’ll look at that separately, to make the car and all the components, the body, the interiors, the tyre, the engines, when you compare the two, EVs and petrol cars, they’re pretty similar. Petrol cars have slightly higher emissions footprint because they’ve just got a lot more components in their engine compared to an electric car. But it’s not really significant. So essentially manufacturing, they’re pretty similar for emissions.

Sam Hawley: Okay, so on par there. But then, of course, we add the battery and then what happens?

Jo Lauder: Yeah, this is the point where you start to see a big differentiation between petrol cars and electric cars. I think this is where a lot of the claims around EVs being worse from the environment comes from because electric cars are powered by batteries. Their batteries are much larger. They’re much heavier. They contain a lot of critical minerals that need to be processed and refined compared to petrol cars. And also for this example, looking at SUVs, it’s a bigger car. They’re going to need a bigger battery again compared to, say, a hatchback. And so when you look at this, it adds almost double the amount of emissions to the electric car from the manufacturing point. So it’s almost twice as much again for an SUV of those embedded emissions. And so for this example, a lot of Australian cars have batteries that are made in China. And so these batteries actually probably have slightly higher emissions than, say, batteries produced in Europe. And a lot of that comes down to the energy that’s used to make the batteries. And so it’s largely fossil fuels at the moment. So at this point in time, electric cars do have almost double the emissions that come from manufacturing, mostly because of that battery.

Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting. So that’s before we actually hit the road. The petrol car is more environmentally friendly.

Jo Lauder: Yeah. If you were never going to drive a car, if it never leaves the showroom, at that point in time, the electric car does have higher embedded emissions. But also what I was saying around the energy that’s being used to make the batteries, that’s also changing really quickly as well. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they reckon that these figures are going to drop as more renewable energy is used to make the batteries. At the moment, it’s fossil fuels. So there is going to be a lot of change. But before they hit the road, the EV definitely has higher embedded emissions.

Sam Hawley: Of course, we do make cars to actually drive them. So tell me then, once we’re on the road, over the life of a car, what are we seeing then in terms of emissions?

Jo Lauder: Yeah, if we’re going to use a really bad car pun, it’s like it’s where the rubber hits the road, essentially. This is where the emissions are coming from. And so for this modelling, the number that’s used, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that the average Australian car drives about 12,600 kilometres a year. So over a lifetime, that’s going to be about 190,000 kilometres. That’s what’s used in this modelling. And when you look at it overall, an electric car that’s plugged in and charged in the national grid, a petrol car will still produce much higher emissions over its lifetime.

Sam Hawley: Okay, but then we go back to that argument that you had at the dinner party, which is that to power an electric vehicle, a lot of the power still comes from fossil fuels, unless of course you also have rooftop solar powering the car. So in that sense, is it better than a petrol vehicle if you’re just still using fossil fuels to charge it anyway?

Jo Lauder: Yeah, so where you charge the car in Australia does make a big difference because state by state, and we can get into this, there are different amounts of renewables. But basically across Australia, on a national average of the national energy grid, there is still a large amount of coal, gas, and also renewables in the grid. Doesn’t matter, essentially at the end of the day, even with a car that is charged with quite significant amounts of fossil fuels, say in Victoria, where I am, for example, it has a lot of brown coal. Even an electric car in Victoria will still produce significantly less emissions than a petrol one. And this really goes into, like I was saying, there are a lot of variables around this, but really it does come down to looking at what’s in the grid at the moment, but also over the lifetime of the car, this is changing quite a bit because more and more renewables are coming into the system. And so this modelling does take into account more renewables coming into the system, which means actually the emissions that are going to be produced from charging the electric car are going down. And the other interesting thing is with petrol cars, there’s a lot of energy that’s wasted. So you’ll know after driving around the engine gets quite warm. And so that’s actually wasted energy that’s not being used to power the car. And so electric cars are also more efficient, so that’s a bit different as well.

Sam Hawley: Okay, and you mentioned it depends where you live. So which state’s the winner when it comes to efficiency of electric vehicles?

Jo Lauder: Well, Tasmania mostly powers just about all its state. I think it’s a really, really, really high amount, besides a tiny amount of gas, from hydro. So that’s a renewable source that doesn’t produce any emissions. And so it’s really interesting to see over the lifetime an electric car in Tasmania will produce very, very, very few emissions. It’s under one tonne, which is incredibly low over the entire lifetime. But, you know, even going back to the national grid on average and going back to, you know, the electric car, like we said, if it never left the showroom, it does start with higher emissions. But that actually changes on average at 38,000 kilometres, and that’s when the petrol car kind of catches up with the lower emissions that it started with. And after that point, going on from 38,000 kilometres, that’s when the electric car basically becomes the more efficient model. So that’s a couple of years of driving.

Sam Hawley: And then, of course, there’s people who are very lucky, who have rooftop solar, they might even have a battery, and they have an electric vehicle. So I reckon they’re doing pretty well at this point, Jo.

Jo Lauder: Yeah, and you’d know that Australia has huge uptake of rooftop solar. It’s the highest in the world per capita. And this changes it all again. If you’re charging a car with solar, that crossover point of when it starts to become the more efficient model and it makes up that disadvantage that it had is only around 23,000 kilometres. So really quickly it becomes a more efficient model.

Sam Hawley: Let’s get to the end of the car’s life, which can be, you know, a long time really. But when the car is done and we want to chuck it in the scrap heap, I can imagine the electric battery in an EV, because they’re massive, right? They’d be super hard to break down. So what are we looking at then in terms of environmental impact?

Jo Lauder: Yeah, this is really interesting. So for the modelling, actually looking at the end of the life of a car, and so you’re taking it off the road and a lot of the parts are recycled and, say, the metal in the body, it’s actually a deduction, if you imagine, from the overall emissions because you’re kind of reusing that. But batteries are really interesting because electric batteries are really big. If you think about what’s required, the energy that’s required to power a car is really significant. And so a lot of the materials can be recycled, and this is going to be a really big growth industry, I reckon, in the next decades or even closer than that in the coming years because there are lots of critical minerals in these batteries that still hold a lot of value when they come out of a car or even the battery itself. So a battery that can no longer power a car, like I said, that requires lots of energy, it still has a lot of potential. Some people overseas are using them for backup household batteries, so it can still be used for that. Or, for example, Tesla is already using some of its old car batteries to power their factories. And so that’s actually changing those emissions that we said came into creating the battery in the beginning. And so it’s estimated that going forward, there’s some climate research around this saying that this second life of EV batteries could actually cut the carbon footprint of the battery production at the start in half. So this is a really vastly changing environment.

Sam Hawley: Alright, so Jo, the verdict, it seems pretty clear that the electric car is the winner over the fuel car, right?

Jo Lauder: Yeah, basically no matter where you are, an electric car, no matter what grid it is charged on, it will produce fewer emissions than a petrol car. And the other really interesting thing to point out here is that this really highlights the potential around decarbonising the electricity grid because the cleaner the grid gets, the more renewables that come into the grid. That means that our transport emissions are going to get lower and lower as well. So that’s also greening the car and the transport emissions for an electric car. And that just shows a huge potential there of kind of doing two things at once, if you think of it like that.

Sam Hawley: Alright, Jo, tell me. I don’t know if you can answer this, but just tell me, when will we all have an electric vehicle in Australia and there will be no fuel cars anymore? They’ve all gone.

Jo Lauder: I do not know. And this goes back to the cost as well, I think. I think there are a lot of people who are watching closely and want to make that switch, but I do think, you know, cost is another big factor as well, and that’s changing. So at some point in the future?

Sam Hawley: Absolutely. A little way to go.But it’s the dream. Alright, Jo, thanks so much.

Jo Lauder: Thank you so much.

Sam Hawley: Jo Lauder is a climate reporter at the ABC. This episode was produced by Jess O’Callaghan, Bridget Fitzgerald and Anna John. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. To get in touch with the team, please email us on ABC News Daily at abc.net.au. Thanks for listening.