The Case for EVs Has Failed: ‘With lifetime emissions scarcely better & net health impacts three-fold worse than combustion vehicles, destroying our car industry cannot be worth it’
https://www.climateskeptic.org/p/the-case-for-evs-has-failed
By GAUTAM KALGHATGI – Professor Gautam Kalghatgi is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers. He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University and Imperial College London and is Chairman of the Academic Advisory Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Excerpt: UK Net Zero policy aims at balancing the production and removal of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide by 2050. The primary greenhouse gas from transport is CO2 produced by burning fuels containing carbon such as petrol and diesel in conventional internal combustion vehicles. The entire Vehicle Excise Duty regime pivots on this single metric. Current Government transport policy is aimed at reducing CO2 emissions to help meet Net Zero targets. In addition, Government documents also mention as objectives reducing local pollution from transport, improving connectivity across Britain, growing the economy by enhancing the transport network and increasing the global impact of the UK to boost influence and maximise trade. However, these other objectives are not clearly prioritised, the costs and challenges of implementation are not specified and flagrant contradictions between these different aims are simply ignored.
The scale of the challenge of ‘decarbonising’ transport is very large. Transport accounts for 26% of total UK emissions, which is 0.27% of total global emissions. As a rough guide from Government statistics, the major contributing sectors to transport emissions are road transport (70%), aviation (20%) and marine (8%). In Great Britain, there are around 42 million registered road vehicles – 34 million cars, five million vans and 0.8 million heavy goods vehicles and buses. Of these vehicles, as of March 2025 only 1.5 million were pure battery electric vehicles. Cars and vans account for about half while heavy goods vehicles and buses account for 15% of total transport CO2.
In 2024, 28 billion litres of diesel and 18 billion litres of petrol were used on British roads. Alternative fuels like biofuels cannot fully replace such large volumes and have significant performance and environmental downsides. Being forced by regulations to ‘cut’ pure fuel with bio-ethanol adversely affects fuel power density and also allows algal growth in storage tanks. It perishes seals and can block pipes and filters unless powerful biocides are routinely added to stored fuel, as farmers are now obliged to do to protect their tractors. Growing crops for fuel is also an opportunity-cost against growing food. In short, imposing ‘bio-fuels’ is a functionally pointless and potentially dangerous vicious circle. If air pollution is actually the concern, running ICE (Internal Combustion Engines) on LPG is a much superior solution: super-clean with zero tail-pipe particulate. But empirically there seems to be a sly conspiracy by the regulatory bureaucrats to kill the LPG fuelling network because it competes with EVs – though these are inferior in efficiency and create more environmental harms.
The most common alternative technology for transport is electrification using batteries. Fuel cell vehicles running on hydrogen are very far away from practical implementation at scale. There are different degrees of electrification. Only pure battery electric vehicles do not have a petrol or diesel (internal combustion) engine, and all the motive energy comes from the electricity grid and is stored in the battery. A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle has a small battery which allows a limited range on stored electricity in the battery but also an internal combustion engine which will power the vehicle if the battery charge runs out. ‘Self-charging’ hybrid electric vehicles like the Toyota Prius get all their energy from their petrol engine, while partial electrification with a small battery enables the fuel energy to be used more efficiently. They also recover energy regeneratively that is normally lost on braking. This technology can reduce fuel consumption and hence CO2 emissions by up to 25%, particularly in stop-start city driving.
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The most visible central Government policy is the intention to ban the sale of new internal combustion engines from 2035. In addition, there are many anti-car local policies such as low emissions zones and low traffic neighbourhoods.
However, battery electric vehicles do not offer any significant benefit in terms of CO2 unless their use and manufacture are with energy that is CO2-free. If natural gas or coal is used to produce electricity, CO2 emissions from electricity production will be high. Even if wind, solar and nuclear provide a large share of the electricity, the extra electricity demand from electric vehicles has to be met with marginal (backup) electricity generation which is always available and can quickly respond to changing demand. In the UK it will be from natural gas and produce more CO2 emissions than the average for the renewable electricity grid.
Battery manufacture needs much more process energy and produces more emissions compared to the manufacture of internal combustion engines. A recent estimate for battery manufacture from China, where over 70% of the batteries are made, is an additional 125 kg CO2 per kWh of battery capacity. So, a Nissan Leaf, with a 40 kWh battery will start with a deficit of five tonnes of CO2 and would need to drive many thousands of miles on CO2-free electricity before it can have any benefit over an equivalent conventional vehicle in terms of CO2. In the UK, a small pure electric vehicle might be better than an equivalent conventional car for CO2 by about 30% over its lifetime but its emissions will not be zero. Bigger vehicles with bigger batteries will show much less lifetime benefit, if any. Furthermore, given that battery EV service life is much shorter than that of a well-made ICE vehicle (eight years as against 20 or more) the life-time EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) favours the well-maintained long-lived ICE vehicle, especially running on LPG.
On top of this, the impacts on human health, on water and high eco-toxicity associated with mining of metals needed for batteries are very significant. The net health impacts for EVs are estimated to be three to five times worse than for conventional ICE vehicles. These health and environmental impacts of battery electric vehicles are currently exported to where the mining takes place and materials are processed (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, China) where environmental controls are lax and child and slave labour are also of concern. The bigger the battery, the worse the impact. Mining also requires moving large quantities of earth and rock – on average 500 times the weight of the battery. Thus a 40 kWh battery, which weighs around 300 kg could require roughly 150 tons of rock and earth moved. The footprint of oil production to power ICE vehicles is very much lower.
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All technologies relevant to transport including manufacture and different fuels need to be honestly assessed over their full life EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) cycle, sensibly deployed and continuously improved. However, in a rigged market, research and development into further improving internal combustion engines will stop even though most transport will still be relying on that technology for decades to come. The British auto industry will be sacrificed on the altar of the green cult but will yield negligible reduction in global emissions; and in conflict with our authoritarian enemies, in the land of Net Zero, the man in the diesel tank is king. No wonder Mercedes and VW are defying the EV target mandate and Land Rover is following suit. Don’t Ministers know that setting production targets in the former USSR didn’t end well? Maybe they don’t. Worse. Maybe they do.
Professor Gautam Kalghatgi is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers. He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University and Imperial College London and is Chairman of the Academic Advisory Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.