Opinion: a new reason for buying an EV? Altruism. Kind of

One of the big ideas behind electric vehicles has always been altruism. Sure, you had manufacturers like Tesla and Rivian showing the practical benefits of electric power, but that’s always sat on a firm bedrock of being the civic-minded choice. Don’t fill the air with smog, don’t support the petroleum industry, get more bang for your energy buck by doing away with the bang in the first place. The usual stuff you’ve heard hundreds of times before.

So for us to say that a new reason for buying an electric car is actually altruism does seem a bit like an opinion from 2012 rather than 2022. But hear us out.

You’ll likely be aware that the economically developing world takes a considerable proportion of the vast fleet of cars and pick-ups that the developed world is done with. And you’ll more than likely be aware of the environmental (and ethical) problems of taking old cars, made for old emissions standards, and shipping them off to poorer parts of the world – especially after they’ve had a decade or so for tolerances and emissions controls to loosen up or go completely.

By now, you might be wondering what the scale of the problem might be. Well, an October 2020 report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)... erm, ‘Sheds light on the problem’ feels almost too anodyne a descriptor, so we’ll try again. Remember that bit in Shaun of the Dead when he accidentally turns the lights on outside the Winchester, only to find that they’re surrounded by zombies and about to be overrun? Yeah, that’s closer.

According to UNEP, the global fleet of cars, pick-ups and the like will double by 2050, driven primarily by growth in "low and middle-income countries". And this growth isn’t going to be brand-new cars, either – we’re talking about properly old, generally arthritic buckets with all the environmental credentials of a burning oil field.

Between 2015 and 2018, the first world exported 14 million used cars, with more than 50 per cent of that number coming from Europe, more than 25 per cent from Japan and nearly 20 per cent from the USA. So as our air gets steadily cleaner, all we’re really doing is shifting the problem onto someone else’s shoulders.

So how does buying an EV help? If we all buy an EV for our next car, we get all the clean-air benefits where we live, and our old cars still end up in Africa. So far, so good for our end of the stick. But that’s before we consider the knock-on effects.

In 2021 alone, buyers in the UK and the US (incidentally where most of TopGear.com’s readers live) bought nearly 17 million new cars. The more each market moves to electric cars, the less damage each successive generation of cars does to the people of the country it winds up in.

UNEP has four key concerns for old cars in developing countries – just how safe (and in what nick) these old bangers are, what they spit from the tailpipe, how much energy they take to move and how much a mostly broken old thing costs to run. And EVs, by their very nature, don’t have tailpipes, are energy-efficient (better than 95 per cent for your average EV motor) and have the tiniest fraction of parts to maintain and replace compared to even the simplest internal-combustion car. As for safety? Well, most EVs are quite new, which means they have to pass the most stringent crash tests.

So buying EVs won’t help now, but it will help soon – the more we pick electric when it’s time to upgrade, the more we help our neighbours in the future. And when somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent of the growth in the worldwide car fleet’s going to be driven by developing markets, buying electric now also means sidestepping one hell of a quagmire.

In 10 years or so, when we’re all trying to keep the ocean from turning to acid and overrunning the coast, who among us wants to tell those at the other end that we can’t let them drive our old cars because the emissions are too high? Choosing an EV now means not having to choose between the fate of the natural world and the development of a developing country.

So maybe altruism isn’t the exact right word here, but this world has never seemed like the exact right place for it either. So if you manage to help others and help yourself in the bargain, use whichever word you feel like. You’ve earned it.