Real-world mileage and survival of electric vehicles in Britain and implications for lifecycle emissions

Abstract

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are typically estimated to have lower attributional lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. These estimates rely upon lower usage emissions outweighing higher manufacturing emissions, but limited data on electric vehicle mileage, and how long they last, casts uncertainty over comparisons. Here we use data for every electric vehicle in Britain to assess mileage and lifetime compared to conventional and hybrid vehicles, and the implications for attributional lifecycle emissions. We find that first-generation BEVs were driven less and have not lasted as long as conventional vehicles, yet still had lower lifecycle emissions. The annual mileage and lifetime of BEVs purchased in 2026 will equal conventional vehicles if recent trends continue. Training a transformer neural network on this data, we estimate that current BEVs have projected attributional lifecycle emissions of 88 g CO2e per kilometre, less than half the 254-270 g for conventional vehicles and 190 g for hybrid vehicles, based on real-world usage.