Electric Vehicles Are Very Polluting

Why the current enthusiasm for EVs is the result of hype, not reality

Allan Milne Lees
5 min readJul 10, 2024
Image credit: Tesla Motors

Let me begin by saying that I really enjoy the driving experience with electric vehicles. Instant torque means instant acceleration. If you turn off the silly noise piped into the cabin via the sound system, EVs are somewhat quieter than internal combustion engine vehicles and I like things to be quiet. Plus, on the engineering side, EVs have fewer moving parts in the drivetrain and so there’s a lot less to go wrong: no valves and camshafts, no complex multi-geared transmission, no pistons and conrods. So I’m not one of the people who think that the only “real” automobiles are those that can belch fumes out of the tailpipe. That’s as silly as thinking the only “real” trains are pulled by steam engines or the only “real” airplanes must have propellers.

But I’m also not someone who is a sucker for marketing noise. I like to research topics and really understand things before I come to an opinion. When we research the reality of EVs rather than the “save the planet” nonsense that self-aggrandizing halfwits like Musk babble endlessly, we discover that far from being cleaner and greener than internal combusion engine vehicles, EVs are actually more polluting. EVs harm the planet, they aren’t saving it.

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.