What Are the Benefits of Electric Vehicles for Climate, Air Pollution, and Health?

In the United States, plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) have been gaining ground on gasoline vehicles. The share of plug-in vehicle sales relative to all new vehicle sales has grown from close to zero to about five percent over the past 10 years. Some of the main factors that have been driving consumers to consider EVs are the climate and air-quality benefits of the vehicles. Policymakers and vehicle manufacturers say that these benefits underpin their desire to transition from gasoline vehicles to EVs in the coming years.

So, what are the climate and air-quality benefits of EVs? Existing research hasn’t yielded a clean answer to this question. Some studies indicate that, if you’ve been driving an EV instead of an efficient gasoline vehicle, then depending on where and when you charge the battery, you might be helping or harming air quality and climate stability, because the additional pollution from the power sector might be less or more than the avoided vehicle emissions. Other studies account for an expected shift away from fossil fuels in the power sector; these studies tend to conclude that EVs will reduce pollution compared to gasoline vehicles, though under certain assumptions in these studies, EVs might increase emissions.

In our newly released study, we investigate these questions about the benefits and costs of plug-in vehicles for climate, air pollution, and health. Our analysis includes all-electric vehicles, such as the Tesla Model 3, and plug-in hybrid vehicles, such as the plug-in version of the Ford Escape, which has a gasoline engine and a large battery that can be charged from an external power source. In our study, we model the effects of policies and market conditions that increase plug-in vehicle sales, and we find that adding plug-in vehicles to the US fleet would have large benefits for local air quality and climate over the lifetimes of the vehicles.