Electric bikes and scooters are making a bigger difference to global emissions than electric cars.
That might seem counter-intuitive to readers in the UK, where there is lots of attention on EVs and the infrastructure for them. It would be less of a surprise to people in countries where scooters and motorbikes play a bigger role in transport – take this Saturday evening street scene in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
China leads the way here with 201 million electric two-wheelers, most of them mopeds, which have become a very popular form of cheap urban transport. Add in the growing number of electric three-wheelers that I’ve discussed before, in India in particular, and the numbers considerably outweigh the impact of electric passenger cars so far.
According to Bloomberg’s Electric Vehicle Outlook, just under half of all electric vehicles sold are two or three wheelers. Add them all together and you have a global fleet of 292 million vehicles on the world’s roads. That’s ten times more than the number of electric passenger cars, which is nearer 26.5 million.
Smaller electric vehicles are also more efficient. When CREDS calculated the lifetime emissions of an e-bike, including the battery, it came out at around 22 grams of CO2 per passenger kilometre. That’s a lot cleaner than the 104 grams per km produced by a Nissan Leaf electric car.
Put the greater efficiency and higher fleet numbers together, and two and three-wheeled electric vehicles are currently cutting far more emissions than electric cars. This graph from Bloomberg shows how they are displacing four times more oil than passenger EVs – almost a million barrels a day, or 1% of global oil demand.
Given that e-bikes and scooters are also cheaper and help to reduce traffic, can we get a bit more attention on smaller electric vehicles?
- HT Akshat Rathi on the Zero podcast
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