Zero tailpipe emissionsdoes not mean zero impact – but it matters a lot.

1. Tailpipe vs power plant: where the smoke shows up

I'm literally writing this from my apartment in Pune, looking at a main road where buses and trucks throw out black smoke all day. The exhaust pipe is exactly at the height where people walk, sit on two-wheelers, or run street shops. That is the difference between "tailpipe emissions" and emissions at a distant power plant.

India keeps showing up in global air pollution rankings. Recent air quality reports based on PM2.5 data say India has most of the world's worst polluted cities in a given year and Delhi remains one of the most polluted capitals on the planet. Many of the top 10 and top 20 most polluted cities globally are in India, especially across the Indo-Gangetic belt.

A big chunk of this comes from transport, construction dust and industry stacked on top of each other in the same urban basin. You cannot move factories and coal plants overnight, but you can at least stop burning fuel in front of every school gate, traffic signal and chaat stall.

2. Yes, EVs start with higher manufacturing emissions

The honest part first: building an EV, especially the battery, needs more energy and materials upfront than building a similar petrol or diesel car. Multiple life-cycle assessment studies find that production emissions for a battery electric car are roughly 30–40% higher than for a comparable ICE car of the same segment.

That is why you sometimes see hot takes saying "EVs pollute more than petrol cars". They usually stop at the factory gate. The point of an EV is not that manufacturing is zero-impact. The point is that once the car is built, you are not burning fuel in it for the next 10–15 years.

3. What the full life-cycle studies say (including India)

When you look at the full picture – production + use + fuel/electricity production – the maths flips. A big ICCT study that compared life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of petrol and electric cars across regions found that battery EVs already emit less CO₂ over their lifetime than petrol cars everywhere, even on coal-heavy grids.

• • For India, they estimate that BEVs registered today have around 19–34% lower life-cycle GHG emissions than new gasoline cars, using today's grid mix.
• • For cars registered around 2030, as the grid improves, the gap widens to roughly 30–56%.
• • In a fully renewable electricity scenario, life-cycle emissions of BEVs go to about 80% lower than gasoline cars (and that figure already includes building the extra solar and wind).

Other global work (IEA, peer-reviewed LCAs) keeps coming back to the same point: over 10–15 years of use, an electric car has the lowest total emissions of any mainstream option today, and the gap gets bigger as electricity gets cleaner.

4. “But India's grid is dirty” – fair point, incomplete story

Right now, a big share of India's electricity still comes from coal. Nobody is denying that. But two things are happening in parallel:

• • India has already crossed ~200 GW of installed renewable capacity and roughly half of total installed power capacity is now non-fossil.
• • The grid is expected to add huge amounts of solar and wind every year this decade, because it is now the cheapest new power in many places.

An EV you buy today will probably run for 10–15 years. That means its electricity footprint is not just today's grid – it is 10–15 years of a gradually cleaner grid. With a petrol car, the fuel is fossil from day one till scrap. With an EV, the "fuel" (electricity) slowly moves towards solar, wind and hydro without you changing the car.

5. Pollution where people actually breathe

There is also a boring but important spatial point. A diesel SUV stuck in FC Road traffic is pumping NO₂ and PM right into the lungs of people walking, street vendors, kids on scooties, and cyclists stuck behind it.

A coal power plant is still bad, but it is usually located outside dense residential cores and has tall stacks, dispersion and at least some control equipment. From a public health point of view, shifting combustion away from street level in the most crowded neighbourhoods is already a win, even before the grid gets properly clean.

India also happens to host a scary number of the world's most polluted cities in terms of PM2.5. So anything that reduces direct tailpipe emissions in city centres – more buses, cleaner fuels, better planning, and yes, more EVs – is just one piece of a long list of things we have to fix anyway.

6. So what is a fair way to think about EVs and tailpipe emissions?

• • EVs do have higher emissions when they are built, mainly due to the battery.
• • Over their full life, most decent studies show clearly lower total CO₂ than petrol and diesel cars, even in countries with coal-heavy grids like India.
• • They cut local tailpipe pollution to zero, which matters a lot in cities where AQI is in the "very unhealthy" zone half the winter.
• • Their climate benefit automatically grows as the grid cleans up – you don't have to change the car.

That doesn't mean EVs are the right answer for every use case or every segment today. But if your daily life is like a lot of us in Indian cities – see smoke outside your balcony, sit in peak hour traffic, drive a decent number of km every year – moving those km to zero tailpipe is one of the more direct things you can do alongside pushing for better buses, cycling space and cleaner power.