Electric cars are being praised as being a very environmentally-friendly alternative to petrol. But are they better than petrol and diesel cars or are they just as bad? Let’s start with the environmental benefit:

Cleaner air

Electric cars don’t directly pump out pollution into the air, which is good for those living in cities and other places living near main roads. However, the majority of our electricity is made using oil, burning wood and from other non-renewable sources, all of which is bad for the environment.

Making the car

In order to make the electric car in the first place, they have to gather metals such as aluminum and copper as well as rare metals which have to be mined (for the battery.) And putting the car together gives off a lot of carbon dioxide which goes into the air. You can find out more what we should do about global warming here. So if we ditched our petrol cars for electric ones, we would actually increase our carbon footprint.

Where the electricity comes from

Most of our mains electricity comes from burning oil, coal, wood etc which does release carbon dioxide into the air. So, unless you’re entirely sure that your electricity company uses renewable sources of electricity (or you have a tonne of solar panels) it wouldn’t make a difference.