The cars don't pollute, but odds are that the electricity they run on came from burning coal, and lithium batteries aren't exactly environmentally friendly to manufacture or recycle. The rare elements required for the electric motors and batteries aren't earth-friendly to mine or refine, either.
But the car itself doesn't obviously emit any of this, so the public image it presents is great, hence their popularity. For me, wake me up when we have a diesel electric hybrid, since that's actually a very efficient tech which doesn't necessarily require any batteries and has been around for over 100 years (popular on ships / submarines / trains).
I don't disagree but I wasn't making a statement about the eco-friendlyness of electric cars, rather about a law defeating a technological improvement. Cars are by a large margin the largest source of nuisance in a city and for two reasons: noise and pollution. Electric cars are solving both.
Is that true? Tesla, for example, claims that their cars contain no rare earth elements. Lithium batteries are fairly benign in terms of the materials they use, and AC induction motors are not much more than clever arrangements of copper.
But the car itself doesn't obviously emit any of this, so the public image it presents is great, hence their popularity. For me, wake me up when we have a diesel electric hybrid, since that's actually a very efficient tech which doesn't necessarily require any batteries and has been around for over 100 years (popular on ships / submarines / trains).