Darker side of electric cars in spotlight – by Angela Jameson (The National – November 19, 2017)

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While EV emissions are good news for the planet the materials used to produce them are rasing concerns

Momentum is fast building behind electric vehicles as countries round the world move to reduce use of petrol and diesel for transport. This summer France and the UK said they would ban combustion engines by 2040 and China has said it is studying such a move.

Volvo, now a Swedish-Chinese company, says every car it launches from 2019 will be either fully or partly electric. Volvo’s announcement this year was greeted as the first serious challenge to Tesla, the Californian electric car maker, from mainstream marques.

Analysts at UBS expect global sales of electric vehicles in 2025 to reach 14.2 million units, or 13.7 per cent of the total, compared with under 1 million units, or less than 1 per cent, in 2017.

This month, Germany’s BMW, Daimler and VW joined up with Ford to form a joint venture to open 400 charging stations across Europe. Such a charging network would reduce a lot of the anxiety that consumers have about buying electric cars.But the push to electrification is causing some concern. There is a dark side to the electric vehicle revolution.

Every electric vehicle (EV) will have a significant environmental impact in production – often greater than the impact of making a car with a combustion engine, experts say. In particular, EVs will require a huge rise in the raw materials needed to create the batteries and related hardware.

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