Scholarly record

CONTROVERSY ABOUT CAR POLLUTION: THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE OR THE CLASSIC VEHICLE?

Valentin Amorțilă

Abstract

The emergence and development of the automotive market for electric vehicles to the detriment of motor vehicles with internal combustion engines has generated a series of controversies regarding the environmental pollution. In response to the development of the electric vehicle and the increasingly restrictive pollution standards, manufacturers of classic cars have designed cars with increasingly lower emissions of toxic gases. The electric vehicle emerged from the need to minimize air pollution in major cities and developed with increasing driving autonomy. The classic process of manufacturing the batteries is an important polluting factor, starting from the extraction of the resources necessary to produce the batteries and to their charging. CO2 emissions differ greatly depending on the source of the materials, the logistics in the country in which they are assembled, the chemistry of the battery and especially on how "clean" the electrical network is in the country of manufacture. In the context where renewable energy is increasingly contributing to the electricity grid, it can be estimated that refueling electric car batteries decreases the level of pollution. The development of sustainable transport involves taking into account that electric car batteries become "hazardous waste" after 150,000 km or ten years.

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