Driving electric is cheaper than combustion engine powered car, but is it also more ecological? While the on the road emissions are much less (depending on the source of the electricity) there is a lot of debate whether this is enough to offset the bigger environmental impact of producing electric cars. Especially making of the batteries is producing substantial amounts of emissions.
Our drives last year would have required 2000 liters of gasoline. Just burning all that gas would have put about 4,6 tonnes of CO2! We have an electeicity contract at home which provides us 100% renewable electricity, so all that CO2 was saved.
The emissions of the battery production are harder to come by. There are many factors that affect it and it also depends on the manufacturing method. Estimates of pure CO2 emissions producing a 37,5kW battery that our car has vary from 1200 kg up to 8000 kg. Even taking the upper bound out car already offset over half of it's (additional compared to ICE car) production emissions.
Of course things aren't that simple. There is for example the additional environmental impact from mining lithium and other rare earth minerals that are needed for the battery. But on the other hand the potential of recycling those materials for future car generations can also hugely offset that impact.