  A comprehensive analysis of energy requirements and emissions associated with
electric vehicles, ranging from mining and making the rare-earth magnets
required in electric motor to assembling the Li-ion battery, including charging
and regular running of the electric vehicles has been performed. A simple,
analytical procedure is used to determine the embodied energy and emissions.
The objective is to assess the potential of electric cars to reduce green house
gases emission to limit global warming to < 1.5 degrees C by the Year 2050 as
per IPCC recommendations and also to compare them with conventional fuel driven
cars. The combined embodied energy for Nd- and Dy-metals production which are
required in electric motors and battery assembly for 150 million cars,
projected to be on the road in the year 2050 is ~ 1500 TWh and the CO2
emissions is found to be > 600 MT. The emissions includes carbon intensity of
electrical energy required to run these electric vehicles. The projected
emissions due to fossil fuels, gasoline production as well as burning it in
combustion engines however is only 412 MT, far less than that due to electric
vehicles. The main contributor to emissions from electric vehicles is the
battery assembling process which releases ~ 379 MT of CO2-e gases. The
emissions from both electric vehicles as well as combustion engine vehicles
scale linearly with the number of vehicles, indicating that a breakeven is not
possible with the currently available manufacturing technologies. These results
clearly show that significant technological developments have to take place in
electric vehicles so that they become environmentally better placed compared to
combustion engine based cars.
