China and India both aspire to embrace electric cars to cut petroleum dependence over the next decade. But there?s a big reality check: Electric cars are only as clean as the power sources that charge them. So far, in both of these rapidly changing markets, the electrical grids are quite dirty.
Both China and India fall into a group of nations in which EVs aren?t much better for carbon emissions than some of the more efficient gasoline-powered cars. Based on new calculations from Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the University of Michigan, a gasoline car in India needs to get almost 36 mpg to achieve lower carbon emissions than a typical battery-electric vehicle. In China, the figure is 40 mpg.
In other countries, by and large, figures favor the EV in a much more promising way. On a global average, you?d need to get 52 mpg to rival plugging in, while on average in the United States, a gasoline-powered car would need to get 55 mpg to be cleaner than EVs charged from the grid. Among the 12 nations in the world with the largest economies, France stands out as having the lowest emissions associated with plugging in?a gas car would need to get the equivalent of 525 mpg to match an average battery-electric vehicle there?while Canada and Brazil follow with the equivalent of more than 150 mpg. Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Russia all weighed in above the global average, while Japan, India, and South Korea were all below the global average.
The researchers behi...