Are Electric Cars Really Better for the Environment?

If you’re looking to leave behind gasoline power and give your Garfield Township travels a boost, consider upgrading to an electric vehicle! Electric vehicles, or EVs, used to be niche, expensive, and hard to find, but these days they’re more available than ever. Volvo offers a wide variety of hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and pure electric vehicles in its current lineup, from the C40 Recharge to the S90 PHEV.

There are a lot of benefits to driving an electric car, from near-instantaneous acceleration to potential tax breaks, but one question we get a lot is: are electric cars better for the environment than gas-powered cars? This question may seem like an easy one to answer since electric cars don’t produce emissions the way that internal combustion engines do, but there’s actually some complexity to it. Serra Volvo Cars of Traverse City has more details on the environmental benefits of electric cars below!

Environmental Benefits of Electric Cars

While electric cars were immediately praised as being more environmentally friendly than their gasoline counterparts, discourse in recent years has called those environmental benefits into question. In fact, some organizations have claimed that electric cars are actually worse for the environment because their motors draw power from nonrenewable resources like coal and natural gas. It also takes a lot of carbon to build an EV battery, despite claims that EVs offer zero carbon emissions.

Let’s address this issue with help from the Environmental Protection Agency, which recently weighed in on the matter. First: discounting the production of batteries, EVs do generate zero carbon emissions on the Interlochen roads, which balances out the fact that some chargers draw power from natural gas and coal. Some EVs also use renewable resources like wind, solar power, and hydropower to recharge their batteries, decreasing their environmental footprint even further. When everything is weighed evenly, the environmental benefits of electric cars are phenomenal!

Second: the matter of the batteries. It’s true that it costs a lot of carbon to produce an electric vehicle’s battery, but EPA experts have crunched the numbers and found that the lack of CO2 emissions produced by the vehicle offsets the increased carbon used to make the batteries! So, based on this data, the answer is yes, EVs are better for the environment than gas-powered cars-and as electric technology continues to advance, those environmental benefits are only increasing.

Find Your Next EV at Serra Volvo Cars of Traverse City!

If you’re interested in seeing how any of our Volvo EVs handle on the Kalkaska roads for yourself, contact our office to set up a test drive! We’ll take care of everything and get you behind the wheel in no time. You can also head to our model research hub to learn more about the hybrids and EVs in our current lineup.