Overlooked Detail in Government's Electric Vehicle Scheme Could Have Seismic Effect on Our Environment

Those wonderful electric cars we’re supposed to be driving have an environmental downside besides the dirty batteries.

It seems human behavior has gotten in the way of 💻Technology. Electric car advocates are pointing out a problem apparently nobody thought of: Tax breaks to buy electric cars will increase emissions.

You read that right.

Here’s the situation, according to recent peer-reviewed research published in Nature Sustainability.

People will take advantage of tax subsidies to buy electric vehicles. However, an electric vehicle needs to travel a certain number of miles in its lifetime — 28,069 to 68,160 — to provide enough emissions savings to offset the substantial environmental costs of its production.

The human behavior issue, the researchers wrote, is that the emerging pattern is for people to buy an electric vehicle as a second car. And households tend to put more mileage on their primary car.

So the electric vehicle grabs its tax break but languishes as a garage queen, unable to pay for its planet damage while the internal combustion primary car continues on its smoky way.

“It’s important to understand that federal EV subsidies as they exist today reward the purchase of electric cars, not the use of electric cars,” Dr. Ashley Nunes, lead author of the study, told Streets Blog