Best guess: Electric vehicles would find widespread acceptance once the problems attached to their adoption — many of them infrastructural, some of them technological— had been ironed out, even without the help of the highly coercive steps (most notably bans on sales of new internal-combustion-engine vehicles) planned in the next few years.
But climate policy-makers are an impatient bunch. It’s not much of a guess to suppose that forcing the take-up of EVs at the pace that is now envisaged is going to lead to significant problems, not to mention raise some environmental . . . issues.
These include the sources of the electricity that will be powering EVs. That’s a question here in the U.S., and, as for India, well . . .
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., the automaker that sells every other car on the nation’s roads, believes electric vehicles aren’t the answer to reducing carbon emissions in the world’s third-biggest releaser of greenhouse gases — at least not in the immediate future.
India’s largest automaker reckons that vehicles powered by hybrid technology, natural gas and biofuels present a better path toward a cleaner future than electric cars considering the nation generates about 75% of its electricity from dirty coal, Chairman R. C. Bhargava said in an interview.
“Talking about electric cars without looking at the greenness of the electricity generated in the country is an inadequate approach to this problem,” Bhargava said in an interview from his home in Delhi last week. “Until the time we have a cleaner grid power, it’s necessary to use all the available technologies like compressed natural gas, ethanol, hybrid and biogas, which will help reduce the carbon footprint and not push any one technology.”