EVs Are Now Lowest Carbon Option on Roads Everywhere

The lifetime climate footprint of an electric car is now smaller than that of any other type of car - no matter where you drive it in the United States.

Get your kicks in an EV

Now you can confidently rebuff the arguments of the nay sayers, thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from different vehicle types ever conducted. With transportation responsible for 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and 57 percent of those emissions coming from passenger cars and pickup trucks, this news will hopefully spur more American buyers to switch to an EV. Electric vehicles made up just over 2 percent of all vehicles on the road in the U.S. as of Q1 2025, with approximately 6.2 million EVs in operation.

As study team member Greg Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan says: “Car buyers can play a key role in reducing climate pollution by purchasing electric vehicles.”

In the new study, Keoleian and his collaborators conducted a life cycle analysis of the manufacture, use, and disposal of different kinds of 2025 model year vehicles. They analyzed 35 different combinations of vehicle class (pickups, SUVs, and passenger sedans) and technology (internal combustion engine, hybrid, plug-in hybrid with 35- or 50-mile battery range, and battery electric with 200-, 300-, or 400-mile range).

Remarkably, the researchers even drilled down to a county by county level as weather impacts vehicle performance (electric vehicles especially are less efficient in the cold), and the greenhouse gas emissions of electric vehicles depend on whether the local electric grid is powered mainly by coal, for example, or by renewables. The improvement in grid decarbonisation and increases in battery efficiency are an important factor in the study's findings, and the analysis is the first to show that battery electric vehicles have lower lifetime emissions than all other vehicle types in every county across the contiguous United States.