Its a perfect example of how the government puts ideas into gullible minds. Comparing current cars on the road to new electric cars is comparing apples and oranges. It underlines my point perfectly. Dare them to compare new efficient ICE cars to EVs and you'll get an entirely different picture like I already proved mathematically over and over again. Even better, ask them why bio-fuel isn't mentioned at all.
You didn't read the site.
They
do take biofuels into account. Their model for car emissions uses the GREET model (
http://greet.es.anl.gov/) which (from their site) "GREET includes more than 100 fuel pathways including petroleum fuels, natural gas fuels, biofuels...". Furthermore, the average efficiency of vehicles on the roadways has not significantly improved in the past 20 years, and the average age of vehicles here is 11 years old. So the argument that new cars are producing drastically less CO2 is just not true.
The simple fact is that EV's pollute a lot less in general, with the only exceptions being extremely efficient combustion cars, which are not comparable in amenities and trim level to the EV's you compare them against, or specific areas that have high emissions for electricity production, which is a small minority of the whole, and which also is a trend that is changing drastically in favor of EV's.
You can download the car fuel data right from the relevant UK gov't site
http://carfueldata.dft.gov.uk/downloads/download.aspx?rg=aug2013edit: if you scroll down you see a list of CO2 emissions per type of car. If I plug in the numbers of my own 14 year old car (a compact sedan) then I get to 56lb of CO2 for a 100mile trip including 12% well-to-gas station losses.
56lb = 25.4kg, or 25,400grams
100 miles = 160km
25400g/160km = 158.75g/km
If 12% of that is well-station, that's about 140g/km.
According to this site (
http://www.electricityinfo.org/carboncalculator.php)
In the UK, the average is 1551kg of CO2 for 3300kWh of electricity. The Chevrolet Volt will consume 13kW to charge, and give a 64km range from that. So if you are in the UK, that would be 6.11kg of CO2. Or 95g/km. So you are polluting 67% more than a guy in the UK driving a Volt.
In California, average emissions is 1047kg for the same 3300kWh, or 64.5g/km. In the whole USA, the average is 2040kg/3300kWh, 8kg of CO2 per charge, or 126g/km.
EV's pollute less. A lot less. Look at the UK gov't data I posted a link to. The most efficient combustion car listed is the Renault Clio dCi 90 ECO. Hardly comparable to the cars above it on the list, like the Volt. There are also more efficient EV's than the Volt, like the Smart EV which is 17% more efficient than the Volt.
That is easely solved with mandatory annual vehicle emission testing. Over here the emissions limits of cars are very strict and tested at regular intervals (depending on the age of the car). Besides that cars have a much shorter life cycle than power plants so stricter emission limits have an effect quickly. Upgrading a power plant means tearing it down prematurely and rebuilding it. Do you want to see your electricity bill doubled or tripled?
"Easily solved" must be a euphimism for "hugely complicated, expensive and burdensome". Are you really suggesting that it's easier to implement, monitor, test and legislate emissions testing for tens or hundreds of millions of individual vehicles owned by private citizens compared to doing the same for a few dozen heavily regulated power stations? Nonsense. And you don't need to tear down a power plant to improve emissions. They are constantly being updated and upgraded already. And what do you think is more expensive... several tens of millions of cars at a few tens of thousands of $$ each, or several tens of power plants? It's not even close to being close.
A coal or gas based power plant really isn't that much more efficient than an efficient ICE because both need to burn fossil fuel and convert heat into motion. Again, the CO2 emissions give you a clear answer on how bad the efficiency is and when it makes sense to buy an EV or when its better to buy an efficient ICE based car.
Nonsense. Coal or gas power plants are MUCH more efficient than a combustion engine. At this point, you're just making stuff up.