Electric vehicles have been around for a long time now. In fact, their history points to them being around practically two decades now, but it hasn’t attracted too much attention until recent years, as cars powered by petroleum are relatively cheaper and mass-produced. In comparison, electric cars have not tapped onto the wider market yet. While they end up being much cheaper and more energy-efficient in the long run, the upfront price that one has to pay to get an electric car is extremely steep, more than double that of petroleum cars.
But that is slowly starting to change. With the advent of climate change and global warming becoming a more severe issue, people are starting to take more drastic measures to cut down pollution. Cars and trucks, for instance, account for nearly one-fifth of all emissions in the US alone, as they emit around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gas. People are looking for alternatives, which the electric car is slowly but steadily willing to provide.
But how can an electric car help the environment when compared to its gasoline counterparts?
Electric cars greatly reduce smoke emissions
Something that we have gotten accustomed to seeing from a vehicle is the smoke that it spews out from its tailpipe. After all, all that combustion from the chemical energy produced inside a car has to go somewhere, and if there is no place it can escape to, it can lead to a lot of problems down the line. Though for as much as we are used to them, they are still massive contributors to global warming. Plus, it just feels dirty when a car spews out a large amount of smoke in your face.
Electric cars, on the other hand, have no tailpipes because it does not need one. Chemical energy is still being stored inside a car, but it isn’t released via combustion. Thus, no carbon dioxide is exhaled from the vehicle. Air pollution is practically eliminated when you drive an electric car, leading to cleaner air all around. Even one electric car on the road can reduce as much as 1.5 million grams of carbon dioxide per year! That’s half the weight of an elephant!
Electric cars use renewable fuel sources
Fossil fuels in the most technical sense are “renewable”. Despite our consumption of it, the environment does slowly create fossil fuel over the time. However, the reason why it is considered as a nonrenewable fuel source by most people is due to the fact that fossil fuel takes way too long to be produced. To be specific, it takes millions of years to produce them. Unfortunately for us, we are burning through our fuel source much faster than mother nature can reproduce it, and as a result, we may eventually find ourselves running out of it. It does not help that having more vehicles that run on gasoline on the road exacerbates this problem.
This is where electric vehicles step in. As their name suggests, these vehicles run on electricity, not gasoline. They will not be consuming any of the limited fossil fuels that we have. Instead, these vehicles will be utilizing electricity that can be produced from renewable sources instead, such as wind, hydroelectric, and solar sources. While we still have other sources that contribute to pollution, like coal power plants, at the very least it is not the sole option any more, as there are a lot of more environmental-friendly ways to power an electric car than just with that.
Research is being done on batteries to make them renewable as well
One of the biggest roadblocks that electric vehicles currently have that makes people question how green they truly are is their production process. When the car rolls out and is bought by the customer and taken for a spin, the car emits little to no emissions at that point, but what about during its production?
There are studies that have shown that the batteries of these electric cars have to be made from certain rare earth metals, and that extraction and manipulation of these metals can lead to a lot of emissions. While this is true to an extent, research is ongoing to ensure that the batteries of these electric vehicles are built more efficiently with better infrastructure to reduce emissions. To further cut on that, there is ongoing research on the batteries of electric vehicles to be viable for recycling, as that way, it will be able to cut down on the materials extracted from the earth needed to create more batteries.
Conclusion
Electric vehicles have gone a long way and are now actually being considered as a viable alternative, or even the future of cars altogether.
Not only do they reduce emissions by a significant amount when compared to gasoline cars, research is still ongoing to ensure that electric vehicles continue to be more energy efficient while still cutting down on emissions as much as possible.
It is certainly true that there is a lack of charging stations all around, and that electric vehicles are considerably more expensive to purchase, but as technology advances with electric vehicles, they will eventually become cheaper and produce less emissions on their production.