It’s always a pleasure to see Mr. Bean and his pranks on screen. But after his last joke, in which he claimed electric vehicles weren’t any better for the environment than petrol vehicles, we kind of wished he’d stuck to his jokes.
Actor Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean) is the latest to fall prey to the misleading notion that electric vehicles are more polluting than petrol vehicles. He expressed these concerns in an opinion piece published in the Guardian, in which he argued that pollution from mining and the production of electric vehicles is more harmful than pollution from petrol vehicles.
“Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they are wonderful machines: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run,” he wrote. “But I’m starting to feel a little betrayed. If you take a closer look at the facts, the electric motor doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it’s being made out to be.”
Regrettably, much of the evidence he wants to examine comes from pro-dirt energy groups that have a financial interest in keeping gas-powered vehicles going. The argument is often the same – the production of electric vehicles caused almost 70% more pollution than the production of conventional vehicles (this is a Volvo fact, by the way). It’s not wrong, but it’s heavily biased.
A 2020 Transport and Environment study found that the life-cycle emissions — or total pollution caused by an electric vehicle over its lifetime — are on average almost three times lower than that of a petrol-powered vehicle. That said, there’s been great strides in curbing manufacturing pollution that Atkinson is so passionate about.
Many electric vehicle companies are researching solid and semi-solid batteries. These batteries would significantly reduce this pollution.
But don’t just take it away from us. Auke Hoekstra, a program director at Eindhoven University of Technology and a passionate debunker of EV misinformation, took to Twitter explain in a long thread why Atkinson’s article is not very truthful.
The story goes on
“I love Rowan Atkinson the comedian and I believe he once studied electrical engineering, but I feel like this erroneous article on electric vehicles is misleading readers The guard and that’s starting to become a pattern,” he said tweeted. “Electric vehicles actually emit three times less CO2.”
Hoekstra said the points Atkinson made are often raised in the electric vehicle world and that things like the degradation of materials, the heavy weight of batteries and their high cost are all concerns of the electric vehicle industry, but also the industry on a daily basis Progress is being made to deal with this.
At the end of the day, Hoekstra rather summed up Mr. Bean’s opinion thorough.
“Atkinson is a great comedian but doesn’t understand the environmental impact of electric vehicles,” he wrote. “The Guardian’s quality control should have picked that up. Electric vehicles currently emit three times less CO2 over their lifetime. Electric vehicles sold in 2050 will emit ten times less emissions.”
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