Why is everyone switching to electric cars

Electric Cars Are Better for the Planet and Often Your Budget, Too

Electric vehicles are better for the climate than gas-powered cars, but many Americans are still reluctant to buy them. One reason: The larger upfront cost.

New data published Thursday shows that despite the higher sticker price, electric cars may actually save drivers money in the long-run.

To reach this conclusion, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated both the carbon dioxide emissions and full lifetime cost including purchase price, maintenance and fuel for nearly every new car model on the market.

They found electric cars were easily more climate friendly than gas-burning ones. Over a lifetime, they were often cheaper, too.

Average carbon dioxide emissions per mile

Traditional gas-powered cars span a range of prices and emissions.

Hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles are about the same price as traditional cars, but cut emissions roughly in half.

Electric cars have the lowest cost and emissions over time.

Purchase price, maintenance, fuel

Average carbon dioxide emissions per mile

Traditional gas-powered cars span a range of prices and emissions.

Hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles

Electric cars have the lowest cost and emissions over time.

Purchase price, maintenance, fuel

Average carbon dioxide emissions per mile

Traditional gas-powered cars span a range of prices and emissions.

Hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles are about the same price as traditional cars, but cut emissions roughly in half.

Electric cars have the lowest cost and emissions over time.

Purchase price, maintenance, fuel

Average carbon dioxide emissions per mile

Traditional gas-powered cars span a range of prices and emissions.

Hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles are about the same price as traditional cars, but cut emissions roughly in half.

Electric cars have the lowest cost and emissions over time.

Purchase price, maintenance, fuel

Source: carboncounter.com by the MIT Trancik Lab | Note: The chart shows data for new cars, SUVs and other models that retail for $55,000 or less. The most fuel efficient trim for each car is included and additional trim levels are shown for cars over $35,000 if they have a lower fuel economy rating than other trims shown (they are less efficient) by at least 4 miles per gallon.

Climate scientists say vehicle electrification is one of the best ways to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, the transportation sector is the largest source of emissions, most of which come from cars and trucks.

Jessika Trancik, an associate professor of energy studies at M.I.T. who led the research, said she hoped the data would help people learn about how those upfront costs are spread over the lifetime of the car.

For electric cars, lower maintenance costs and the lower costs of charging compared with gasoline prices tend to offset the higher upfront price over time. (Battery-electric engines have fewer moving parts that can break compared with gas-powered engines and they dont require oil changes. Electric vehicles also use regenerative braking, which reduces wear and tear.)

The cars are greener over time, too, despite the more emissions-intensive battery manufacturing process. Dr. Trancik estimates that an electric vehicles production emissions would be offset in anywhere from six to 18 months, depending on how clean the energy grid is where the car is charging.

The new data showed hybrid cars, which run on a combination of fuel and battery power, and can sometimes be plugged in, had more mixed results for both emissions and costs. Some hybrids were cheaper and spewed less planet-warming carbon dioxide than regular cars, but others were in the same emissions and cost range as gas-only vehicles.

Traditional gas-burning cars were usually the least climate friendly option, though long-term costs and emissions spanned a wide range. Compact cars were usually cheaper and more efficient, while gas-powered SUVs and luxury sedans landed on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Dr. Tranciks team released the data in an interactive online tool to help people quantify the true costs of their car-buying decisions both for the planet and their budget. The new estimates update a study published in 2016 and add to a growing body of research underscoring the potential lifetime savings of electric cars.

Comparing individual cars can be useful and sometimes surprising.

Toyota RAV4 XLE

Retail: $27,450

Average carbon dioxide

emissions per mile

Nissan Altima

Retail: $26,800

The hybrid is cheaper and has lower emissions over time, despite the higher price tag.

Toyota RAV4 LE Hybrid

Retail: $28,500

The electric Tesla and gas- powered Nissan end up costing about the same over time.

Tesla Model 3

Retail: $37,990

Purchase price, maintenance, fuel

Average carbon dioxide emissions per mile

Toyota RAV4 XLE

Retail: $27,450

Nissan Altima

Retail: $26,800

The hybrid is cheaper and has lower emissions over time, despite the higher price tag.

Toyota RAV4 LE Hybrid

Retail: $28,500

The electric Tesla and gas- powered Nissan end up costing about the same.

Tesla Model 3

Retail: $37,990

Purchase price, maintenance, fuel

Average carbon dioxide emissions per mile

Toyota RAV4 XLE

Retail: $27,450

Nissan Altima

Retail: $26,800

The hybrid is cheaper and has lower emissions over time, despite the higher price tag.

Toyota RAV4 LE Hybrid

Retail: $28,500

The electric Tesla and gas- powered Nissan end up costing about the same.

Tesla Model 3

Retail: $37,990

Purchase price, maintenance, fuel

Source: carboncounter.com by the M.I.T. Trancik Lab | Note: For their calculations, the M.I.T. researchers assumed each car would last 15 years and drive an average of 13,000 miles per year. The most closely comparable drivetrain and trim levels are shown in each vehicle pairing in this chart.

Take the Tesla Model 3, the most popular electric car in the United States. The M.I.T. team estimated the lifetime cost of the most basic model as comparable to a Nissan Altima that sells for $11,000 less upfront. (Thats even though Teslas federal tax incentive for electric vehicles has ended.)

Toyotas Hybrid RAV4 S.U.V. also ends up cheaper in the long run than a similar traditional RAV4, a national bestseller, despite a higher retail price.

The charts above use nationwide average prices for gasoline and electricity to estimate lifetime costs, but the results may shift depending on where potential buyers live. (The interactive tool allows users to input their local rates.)

Hawaii, Alaska and parts of New England have some of the highest average electricity costs, while parts of the Midwest, West and South tend to have lower rates. Gas prices are lower along the Gulf Coast and higher in California. But an analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists still found that charging a vehicle was more cost effective than filling up at the pump across 50 major American cities. We saw potential savings everywhere, said David Reichmuth, a senior engineer for the groups Clean Transportation Program.

Still, the upfront cost of an electric vehicle continues to be a barrier for many would-be owners.

The federal government offers a tax credit for some new electric vehicle purchases, but that does nothing to reduce the initial purchase price and does not apply to used cars. That means it disproportionately benefits wealthier Americans. Some states, like California, offer additional incentives. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pledged to offer rebates that help consumers swap inefficient, old cars for cleaner new ones, and to create 500,000 more electric vehicle charging stations, too.

Chris Gearhart, director of the Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said electric cars will become more price competitive in coming years as battery prices drop. At the same time, new technologies to reduce exhaust emissions are making traditional cars more expensive. With that trajectory, you can imagine that even immediately at the purchase price level, certain smaller sedans could reach purchase price parity in the next couple of years, Dr. Gearhart said.

What Will It Take to Transition to Electric Cars?

Q: How much impact can electric vehicles have in the overall effort to fight climate change?

They can be crucial. While it varies by country, transportation is usually a third or more of total carbon dioxide emissions. And for a long time, people thought that transportation would be one of the two hardest sectors to decarbonize, alongside industry. Electric vehicles are changing the equation; the door suddenly is wide open to decarbonizing light-duty transportation. Thats a huge shift in how we think about pathways forward.

Q: Beyond emissions, whats shaping electric vehicle adoption? Whats exciting about them? What hurdles remain?

Operating and maintenance costs are a lot lower for electric vehicles. They are very quiet and because they have amazing low-speed torque, theyre really fun to drive. All of thats exciting.

One of the biggest challenges is range anxiety. People feel uncomfortable getting an electric vehicle because theyre worried about finding charging stations and the time it takes to recharge.

In practice, this is not a concern for people in their daily commute; this is not a concern going on errands and picking up children from school. However, range anxiety is a real concern for longer trips, and people make buying decisions based on having the option to take longer trips.

This is slowly being overcome, both from a build out of charging stations and from longer range batteries hitting the market. If you have a 400-mile battery, which some of the offerings on the market today have, it becomes much easier to not worry. Its unusual to drive more than 400 miles in a day even on a long trip.

Q: Where do things stand with charging infrastructure?

Theres a technology piece. Typical charging stations take about 10 hours to fully charge long-range electric vehicles. Basically, the cars need to be plugged in overnight. But there are also DC fast-charging stations which draw at a higher voltage and fill up the battery much more quickly. In half an hour, some of the long-range electric vehicles will recharge to 75% or more. Its not as quick as filling up your tank with gasoline, but its pretty fast. It allows you to get a cup of coffee, relax a little bit.

There arent that many DC fast chargers in the country yet because they are much more costly to put in, and they require dedicated infrastructure. A bank of chargers, say on I-95, will draw from the electric grid in a substantial way.

From an economics perspective whats interesting is that this is a two-sided market with network effects. If you have more electric vehicles out there, more charging stations are going to be put in. If you have more charging stations, people are more likely to buy electric vehicles.

Tesla just went out and built charging infrastructure for their own cars. But if we really want to go from electric vehicles being 4% of the sales in the U.S. to 60%, were going to need a lot more charging stations.

That is a real challenge and its a challenge that the federal and state governments can play a role in facilitating, both through providing funding towards charging station infrastructure and by helping with permitting and expediting regulatory red tape.

Q: You mentioned electric vehicles reaching 60% of U.S. sales. Where does that number come from?

Many industry forecasts project that by 2035 to 2040, we are going to be at 60% given current regulations and technology trajectories. The Biden administration has a goal of 50% by 2030. And the state of California has a goal of phasing out new internal combustion engine vehicles entirely by 2035, which is pretty ambitious but other places have similar goals.

Q: Consumers dont necessarily know whether the electricity coming into their homes is from renewable or fossil-fuel-based sources. Does that play into the value of electric vehicles?

In terms of carbon intensity, electricity is generally coming from cleaner sources than burning gasoline. And thats only going to improve. Renewables are the largest new-generation sources coming on to replace sources that are being retired.

Everyone agrees that electricity is actually the easiest sector to decarbonize. We have reasonable and low-cost substitutes to fossil fuels. There will be challenges in going to high market shares of renewables, but we can do it. It will just take some time.

Q: What about the environmental impact of EV batteries?

I co-authored a paper in Nature Communication with Paul Wolfram, who was then a Yale School of the Environment PhD student and is now a postdoc at the Joint Global Change Research Institute. Looking at the full supply chains and all the indirect emissions, we compared the total environmental cost of electric and fossil-fuel powered vehicles.

Its true there are environmental impacts from mining metals for EV batteries and there are embodied emissions in creating batteries. Those are important factors that needs to be considered. But when we account for everything in EV supply chains and compare it to the supply chain of gasoline, as well as all the things that go into making a conventional internal combustion engine and the burning of gasoline, it turns out that electric vehicles are significantly better from an environmental perspective. This was not fully understood until our analysis incorporated all the components.

Q: Youve also looked at how consumers make a decision about whether to buy an electric vehicle.

My research tries to disentangle all the aspects of the consumer decision using data on all the purchases of vehicles in the U.S., as well as surveys and stated choice experiments. I also try to understand how those decisions have been changing over time as more electric vehicles are introduced and people have more information.

I found that network effects are powerful. An example of this would be, if your neighbor has an electric vehicle, talking to them and hearing how they like itthats effective in changing your perception of electric vehicles. Or if youre a Mustang person, when the Mustang Mach-E came out, youre going to say, Theres an electric version of the car I like. Maybe I should check it out. Even if you dont care about the environment, the low-speed torque, the quietness, the great feel of driving are all attributes of electric vehicles that people may not be aware of until they experience them firsthand. Those very real benefits can change how people perceive electric vehicles and can shift the calculus around range concerns.

Q: Another behavioral component that youve studied is total cost of ownership. Would you explain that?

People tend to substantially underestimate the running costs of a car. I have a paper in Nature that elicits consumer beliefs about the running costs a gasoline car. People do a decent job estimating how much they spend on fuel but then they underestimate the overall running costs by about 50% when you include all of the other costs.

Many of those costs would decline with electric vehicles, particularly maintenance costs. There is either a behavioral bias or an information gap; people systematically underestimate their running costs in a way would lead them to over-adopt gasoline vehicles relative to electric vehicles if they had full information.

Id make the case that total cost of ownership should be labeled on new vehicles. That would be very likely to increase sales of electric vehicles.

We have a very clear fuel economy label on every new vehicle. Id make the case that total cost of ownership should be labeled on new vehicles. That would be very likely to increase sales of electric vehicles.

Large segments of the consumer population who buy new cars dont care about climate change or emissions. But they do care about the amount of money that theyre spending, including total operating costs. Not having to bring their car to the shop as muchthat is a very appealing aspect of many electric vehicles thats not always accounted for.

If were going to be decarbonizing light-duty transportation, were going to need everyone eventually to be switching. It only makes sense to appeal to the various reasons they might want to do so.

Q: How much might electric vehicles change the future of how cars are used?

Electric vehicles are a natural segue into fully autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles.

For example, a few startups, including Electreon, are putting charging infrastructure in the roads to let vehicles recharge while they drive. The technology that connects a vehicle to the road could allow a whole set of other connections.

You dont necessarily have to have electric vehicles to have autonomous vehicles or connected vehicles. But new technologies can lead automakers and regulators to think about the world outside the box that weve been living in for a long time, in a way that could help us reimagine transportation more broadly.

Another direction might be resiliency benefits from vehicle batteries to the electric grid. The Ford F-150 Lightningan electric pickup that will come out later this yearcan, with some modification of your homes electric panel, keep at least some circuits of your house up and running during a power outage.

These battery-to-grid possibilities maybe a little oversold right now, but the potential is real. It could allow us to manage the grid with higher penetration of renewables. If youre really reliant on renewables and you hit a period when the suns not shining and the winds not blowing. maybe at some point you can also take advantage of the fact that half of the households in the country will have electric vehicles with stored electricity in batteries.

Its pretty exciting to think about the new innovations that are coming to our world in the next decade.

Q: Encouraging the transition to electric vehicles is part of a national, and global, argument about climate change. How do you frame the climate issues were facing?

Climate is among the most serious issues of our day. Theres no question about that. The science is incredibly clear that the impacts of climate change are going to be real and notable. While we cant entirely eliminate those impactssome are already happeningif we really start tackling climate change, there is time to reduce them.

It will cost us something, but by dealing with climate change we will get benefits long into the future and co-benefits today, including things like reduced air pollution, reduced asthma cases, and reduced hospital admissions.

From my perspective, theres also strong reason to implement prudent policies to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change. They can be seen like insurance policies.

Q: Are these policies we would implement at state, federal, or global level?

Its going to have to be all of the above. In an ideal world, all the national governments would get together and implement carbon prices that are sufficiently high to really push the needle. If that happened, I believe we could deal with climate change, in a substantive way, in a matter of a decade or two if everyone did it. But unfortunately, the politics dont appear to be pointing in that direction.