Study stirs controversy: Are electric cars really climate-friendly?

A study from the Technical University of Munich has produced an awkward result for the debate over electric cars: depending on how the findings are read, battery-powered vehicles appear either less climate-friendly than expected or substantially cleaner than combustion-engine models.

The study examined emissions across a vehicle’s entire life cycle, from production to scrapping. Its white paper, titled “Defossilization, Not Decarbonization: Toward a Life Cycle-Based Standard for Automotive Greenhouse Gas Regulation,” draws on 19 studies and 47 modeled scenarios. The central finding is that battery-electric vehicles reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an average of 41% compared with combustion-engine cars.

That figure has become the focus of the dispute. Some see “only” a 41% reduction because electric cars are treated as climate-neutral under European Union policy. Others regard the reduction as considerable because it still represents a marked fall in carbon dioxide emissions.

The nine authors argue that EU regulation measures emissions mainly through vehicle exhaust. It does not count fossil carbon released during production, through the electricity used to operate a vehicle, or when materials are not recovered during recycling. The authors say this creates a serious misdirection in EU automotive climate policy, both economically and environmentally, because the rules overlook steps manufacturers and suppliers could take to make combustion-engine cars less carbon-intensive. They describe this as a “misallocation of efforts.”

The study has particular political relevance because the EU is expected to revisit implementation of its planned 2035 ban on new combustion-engine cars in the autumn. Exceptions to the strict ban are already being considered, but the dispute now also concerns how those exceptions should be defined.

“

A manufacturer that invests in almost CO2-free steel, a supplier that decarbonizes battery production, an energy producer that scales renewable fuels, and a recycling company that keeps critical raw materials in circulation: all these elements reduce the fossil carbon that a vehicle draws from long-term geological storage. None of them improves the metric used to assess compliance with the regulation.