One of the common criticisms of electric vehicles is that, because they generally require more carbon to make than gas cars, they aren't really "greener." Well, here's a chart from Bloomberg that looks at lifetime emissions per vehicle for both gas cars and EVs:

The orange bars represent carbon emitted during manufacturing and scrapping (i.e., the dismantling of the car and the safe disposal of the battery). These processes are carbon-intensive. But it's during the driving/fueling phase where EVs shine.

The above chart assumes a vehicle life of 200,000 kilometres. Over longer mileage periods, this chart of course looks even better. At the same time, companies are actively working to reduce the orange bars. Polestar is targeting a net-zero car by 2035.

Importantly, this isn't going to be done through offsets. It's being done by greening their supply chain, which they record on a blockchain for transparency and finality. Each and every car comes with a Life Cycle Assessment.

My current car is over 8 years old, and I remember thinking when I bought it that it would be the last gas car I ever owned. That's right.

Cover photo by Kenny Leys on Unsplash

Chart from Bloomberg

If you do a search for the number of electric vehicle charging stations in the US, you'll likely get a number somewhere around 160,000. But to better understand what this means, you'll probably want to ask a few follow-up questions:

• Are these individual charging ports (for a single vehicle) or are these stations (locations with multiple charging ports)?

• How many of these chargers are private versus publicly-accessible?

• And how many of these are DC fast, versus just level 2? Level 2 is what most people have at home (I think), whereas DC charging is what you need if you're stopping on the side of the road and need to supercharge your car in 20-30 minutes.

Usually the biggest fear with EVs is range anxiety. We have come to expect that we'll be able to find a gas station when we need it, but, for the most part, we don't yet feel that way about EV charging stations.

So for this concern, the more precise question would be: How many publicly-accessible DC-fast charging stations are there in the US? This is the filter that gives you stations that would be most comparable to how gas stations function today.

The answer, according to the US Department of Energy, is about 10,597 stations and 44,160 charging ports. And according to Bloomberg Green, this puts the US on track to have public fast-charging sites outnumber gas stations in about 8 years.

Of course, it's probably safe to assume that the pace of EV adoption will only increase. And that means that this flip could happen well before 8 years. In my mind, that's soon.

According to this recent New York Times article, California is set to put into effect a new mandate that would require 100% of passenger vehicle sales in the state to be fully electric by 2035. Included within this mandate are also interim targets: 35% of all sales by 2026 and 68% of all sales by 2030.

When I first read the article, my first thought was: "Isn't 2035 kind of far away? Can't we do this sooner?" And this is usually how my mind works when I see some date in the future. But then I remembered that EV sales last year in the US only totaled somewhere around 5% of all sales.

So there is work to be done, and mandates like this will certainly help. As I understand it, this will be the first mandate of its kind in the US and also one of the strictest in the world. A lot of other countries have simply set targets, rather than all-out bans.

This is what it means to lead. You do things before others.