SAE Update - August 2021 - 6

FOCUS:
ELECTRIFIED VEHICLES
The long & winding road to zero
explore this question. If we could
wave a magic wand, what would
we want? Zero emissions, of
course. But what does zero
emissions actually mean in
transportation? Well, the obvious
place to look is the tailpipe. In a
conventional car powered by an
internal combustion engine, this
is where you find the majority of
the vehicle's emissions. Battery
electric vehicles, on the other
hand, have no tailpipe. Problem
solved, right? Maybe not-let's
dig a bit deeper.
Before you can drive a car, any
car, it must be built. To build it,
resources must be extracted,
transported, and refined. On the
other side, once your car has
reached its end-of-life, it needs
to be disposed of in some way.
And in between, how are you
powering your vehicle? Liquid
fuel? Electricity? How is that
electricity being generated? All
of these processes produce
emissions, and you can see how
quickly these emissions add up
and how complicated the picture
becomes. If we are to truly reach
our goal of zero emissions, we
must decarbonize all of these
processes. The road to zero,
therefore, is not a simple straight
line. The road ahead is a
6
August 2021
We are here
Zero
emissions
We are here
Zero
emissions
Two potential paths from where we are now to zero transportation
emissions. The paths illustrate hype (top line) versus reality (bottom
curve). How we navigate this path is the subject of the new book Racing
Toward Zero.
complicated path rife with twists and turns.
How, then, do we navigate this long and winding
road to zero? I recently wrote a book that explores
this very topic with my good friend and colleague
Felix Leach (Associate Professor, University of Oxford)
called Racing Toward Zero: The Untold Story of Driving
Green. Without too many spoilers, I'll outline some of
the main takeaways from our book.
First, let's start with a few key concepts:
We must rethink emissions and move past the idea
that pollution is from the tailpipe only. As I just
outlined, there are many other sources of emissions
associated with a vehicle's creation, use, and
destruction. For electric vehicles, manufacturing the
batteries and generating the electricity to charge the
cars can produce significant amounts of pollution,
rivaling that of conventional vehicles. The bottom line
is that zero emissions vehicles do not exist today, even
if electric vehicles are sometimes labeled that way.
There is no silver bullet. All propulsion technologies
UPDATE
https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/r-501/ https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/r-501/
SAE Update - August 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SAE Update - August 2021
