Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

It's great to see a reduction in local pollution but it is worth remembering the electric vehicles ultimately have zero impact on climate change and petroleum consumption (which as continue to rise year-over-year).

Oil not used in ICE cars is just used someplace else.

Electric cars are great for the city/suburbs but don't really make a dent in the larger resource usage issues facing us.

No surprises.

No matter how we look at it, EVs are much friendlier and safer to the environment. Some people argue the source of electricty can be contested against because that involves fossil fuel burning again, but in today's world we are rapidly moving away from it and towards nuclear/hydel/wind methods for generating power.

I hope ICE cars completely become a thing of the past in the next couple of decades to come.

i moved to beijing in 2015.. and i have to buy a air purifier, prepare masks for winter. pepople talks about air polutions so much, it feels like we are struggle, not living a life. i remember one day, it was so bad, i have to wear gas mask to go outisde, i know it's rare, and people are staring, but yes, its that hard.

it's 2026 now, you barely see bad days in Beijing, most people wear mask only for the flu, not for the air pollutions. basically its only a few days in winter. and just wait for the wind, it all goes away.

shutdown factory and move them to other places sure helps, but nobody will deny that adopt ev contributes a lot. i remeber the sales data for 2024 is nearly 45%+ of new cars are EV, and 2025 is 51.8%. i'm sure the number will go up and reach nearly 100%.

I want the future to focus more on the brakes and tire dust, and the increase in cancers and other problems by people who live near busy roads or highways experience. Nobody studies this, and combustion or battery, everyone is affected by it. Even playgrounds are filled with shredded tires, which borders on biohazard.

You can already tell how much of a difference it makes in a city. Visiting Boracay after visiting other philipin island is heaven. I heard some Chinese cities are basically just EV, I can’t imagine how much nicer it could be to walk through New York without all that noise pollution

Anyone can argue ICE vs EV all night long but there's only 1 metric I care about, in favor of EV:

When I am going to take my son to school, he doesn't have to smell the gas and the fumes from the exhaust in the garage.

This study is about air quality in neighborhoods. So it would show the same thing even if EVs just moved pollution from where people use their cars to where power plants get placed, because that's not the question it's addressing.

But don’t they cause higher pm2.5 and pm10 pollution from braking due to the fact that EVs are heavier than vehicles powered by internal combustion ?

Having spent a significant amount of time in Bangkok - the city center (and many urban hubs) is an amazing walkable place with pedestrian walkways suspended above major roads, lots of frequent public transit (metro, skytrain) that honestly makes my home city of Sydney feel like a developing country.

The only downside is that traffic creates a lot of pollution, and the engine noise (not honking, there's very little of that) is so bad that you need to yell to a person standing next to you to have a conversation.

As a visitor, I can't claim to know how to fix the problems facing locals, however I can't help but feel that urban centers would be 1000x better with mass adoption of EVs (bikes, cars). I have seen a spike in the number of Chinese EVs across the city - however I'm aware that economic pressures prevent mass adoption by the majority of the road-users

Hmmm. Do we have to do a study of that? The AQI around LHR was 3 when I went there last year. Then realized all gas cars are banned at the airport.

Tires and brakes still contribute to a lot of particulate matter pollution even from EV's, but they're at least a step up. The best EV's are still eBikes though.

Something that needs to be pointed out, especially for those who want to push back against findings like this and essentially defend ICE vehicles:

Really step back and imagine a world where the modern EV [1] was first to market and a gasoline combustion engine was second.

Who would actually decide to switch from a modern EV to gasoline on purpose of their own choice?

The downsides of gasoline cars are actually pretty crazy: complicated engines and transmissions with heavy maintenance schedules, emissions, more NVH, worse interior space and packaging, need to wait for HVAC rather than it being ready ahead of time, need to go to a special gas station to add fuel, worse/slower performance.

You would have this laundry list of downsides and your only potential plus sides are faster fueling on road trips over 4 hours long, lower curb weight, and lower cost.

And those three minor down sides are very likely to be resolved sometime within the next 10-20 years.

[1] Not talking about Baker Electric type of stuff that was quickly surpassed by internal combustion of its day

I was out skating today. Everyone was having a fun time until a diesel truck simply drove down the nearby road. It stunk up and polluted the frozen lake air for a solid few minutes. I hate diesel trucks with a passion and if I live long enough to see it happen, I will celebrate the day they become defunct. Tesla's EV trucks need to deal the same hard kick to diesel trucks that they did to cars.

Has the study made an effort to exclude any other factors? For example, a reduction in commute during the covid years?

It also causes roads to be damaged/destroyed FAR faster due to the vehicales on average weighing significantly more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

It also simply moves the pollution to places like Africa where the extremely dirty lithium mining is externalized away from wealthy westerners.

Environmental externalization.