"What electric vehicles do is they try to hide their sourcing on both ends," says Larry Behrens, the communications director for Power the Future.
When a customer brings that new electric vehicle home, Behrens explains, the process involved to drive if off the car lot negates the goal entirely because fossil fuels were required to manufacture it.
“More so than a comparable internal combustion car,” he says, “because an electric vehicle has six times the metal of an internal combustion car."
All of that standard metal has to be pulled out of the ground, processed, and mined to be put to use. Meanwhile, the electricity used to charge an EV and to keep it running most likely comes from traditional power company utilities that also require fossil fuels to operate.
"We've all seen the pictures of a diesel generator being used to recharge an electric vehicle," says Behrens. "It just goes to show that an electric vehicle, when compared to a similar internal combustion car is actually less environmentally sound until well after about 65,000-70,000 miles."
