Decision-support tool · Comparison
Electric and combustion vehicles
This interactive tool lets you see and compare the ecological impact of electric, combustion and plug-in hybrid vehicles, adjusting every assumption yourself.
The verdict
Over its full lifetime, the electric vehicle is the better choice, ecologically, financially and socially.
The carbon debt of manufacturing the battery is quickly repaid, and carbon is not the whole story. A few thousand kilometres erase it, a fraction of the vehicle's life; beyond that point the gap widens in its favour with every trip. Widen the view to the ecological and social themes, and the advantage grows sharper still: the combustion vehicle exerts far more pressure.
On the money side, the electric vehicle is clearly ahead. The higher purchase price is recovered through fuel and maintenance savings well before the end of the vehicle's life, as the cost calculator shows.
The best ecological choice remains not buying a vehicle at all. See the last question in the FAQ.
Everything below recalculates on this choice. You can also set every assumption yourself: mileage, battery chemistry, grid intensity, crude origin.
Wallet
Environment
Social
Social and ecological impacts committed by one vehicle
The impact of a vehicle and of its energy source reaches well beyond greenhouse gases: it also commits water, metals, land, marine ecosystems, human health and democratic institutions. Here are ten themes, scored from 1 (low pressure) to 5 (high pressure). Their categories draw on those used in the work cited in the references, in frameworks such as IMPACT World+ and social life-cycle assessment, and in the divergences catalogued by TranSensus LCA. We have added two blind spots of the life-cycle assessment literature: democratic health and societal robustness.
The ten themes side by side
The ten pressure scores from the table below, from 1 at the centre to 5 at the edge. The larger the surface, the stronger the ecological and social pressure. The axes respond to the settings and to the weights you choose in the table. Careful: the area of such a chart depends on the order of the axes, which is arbitrary. Read it axis by axis, not as an overall measure. The combined score in the table is the only aggregate.
The ten themes in detailEach theme's score, what it covers, and the weight you give it in the combined score.
| Theme | Electric vehicle · Electricity chain | Gasoline vehicle · Oil chain |
|---|
Climate in detail: the carbon debt and the kilometre where it clears
Every chain counted, well to wheel on one side, dam to wheel on the other, manufacturing and infrastructure included. All of these figures are adjustable below.
At kilometre zero: both vehicles start with a carbon debt
The myth assumes the combustion vehicle leaves the factory with a clean slate. It does not: to drive at all, it needs platforms, pipelines, tankers, refineries and filling stations, all already built and already amortizable against it. That debt exists; it is simply filed outside the vehicle's balance sheet. Here are the two starting debts: only what is genuinely paid before the first kilometre, on both sides.
Breakdown over the vehicle's life
The left-hand bar is a plug-in hybrid. The four orange bands are its oil chain, pro rata of the kilometres it does not drive electric.
Cumulative emissions, kilometre by kilometre
An outside benchmark: 17,000 km. The ICCT ran this same exercise for the European Union in 2025 and puts the crossover at about 17,000 km (one to two years of driving), even though manufacturing the electric car emits about 40 % more. Two differences from our curve, both pulling the same way: Europe's grid is far more carbon-intensive than Quebec's, and the ICCT does not charge the oil chain with its amortized infrastructure as we do. Their 17,000 km is therefore an upper bound: here the crossover comes sooner. The figure that matters most is another one: their 2025 estimate is 24 % lower than the one they published in 2021, because the grid is decarbonizing faster than expected. A life-cycle analysis ages, and only in one direction. ICCT, 2025
Carbon balance over the vehicle's whole life
The wallet: does the electric car's higher price pay for itself?
This calculator reuses the lifetime mileage and the two consumption figures, adjustable below just as they are in the settings, and adds the values you can change here. The default choice sets two dominant market archetypes against each other: the mainstream combustion benchmark and the most widely sold all-electric vehicle. Enter the prices actually paid, taxes and government rebates included. Maintenance is estimated automatically.
These three settings are the ones the calculation below depends on; they are the same as at the top of the page and each follows the other. The remaining assumptions, battery chemistry, grid intensity and crude origin, live in the settings.
fields specific to the electric vehicle · fields specific to the combustion vehicle · the down payment and the loan term apply to both.
The kilometre where the higher price is paid back
Both lines add everything up: purchase price, interest, energy and maintenance. Where they cross, the electric vehicle has finished paying back its higher purchase price; past that point, the gap between the two curves is money kept.
Did you know? A compatible charger can pay you back a few cents per kilowatt-hour. The federal Clean Fuel Regulations create a credit market that some charger makers monetize on behalf of their customers: the Grizzl-E program pays 3 to 5¢ per kWh to start and up to 10¢ past 5,000 kWh accumulated, by monthly transfer, through 2034. It is taxable income, limited to the chargers of the maker offering it, and the amounts are published by a retailer that sells those chargers. The calculation above does not account for it: lower the electricity price accordingly if you sign up. Roulez électrique, May 2026
Maintenance. A synthetic oil change at $145 every 8,000 km for the combustion vehicle, none for the electric one. A brake replacement at $700 every 60,000 km for the combustion vehicle against every 150,000 km for the electric one, regenerative braking sparing the pads. Several other items that also favour the electric vehicle are deliberately ignored, among them spark plugs, the exhaust system, the timing belt, the transmission and the filters: the estimate therefore stays conservative.
Financing. Interest is calculated on a level-payment loan against the balance, that is the price minus the down payment. The down payment is assumed identical for both vehicles, since it reflects the money the buyer has rather than the vehicle chosen. Enter 0 as the term, 0 as the rate, or a down payment equal to the price to simulate a cash purchase. Both rates default to the same value, so that the comparison is about the vehicle alone; adjust them if the terms you are offered differ.
What stays outside the calculation. Insurance (FAQ 3), registration, the additional registration fees some provinces impose on electric vehicles, and resale value (FAQ 4).
Settings
Each slider shows its documented range. Any change feeds straight through to everything above it: the verdict, the impacts table, the charts and the wallet.
Vehicle use
Advanced settingselectricity chain, oil chain and accounting conventions
Electricity chain
Peiseler et al. give, at the 5th, 50th and 95th percentiles: LFP 54, 62 and 69 kg CO₂e/kWh; NMC 811: 59, 74 and 115. The NMC's long upper tail comes from lateritic nickel. Careful: these figures model operating costs and exclude investment in plants and equipment. Hence the next slider. This value adjusts itself if you select a cathode made from recycled materials. Peiseler et al., Nature Communications, 2024 · Lai et al., J. Cleaner Production, 2022
At the level of the complete battery pack. A life-cycle assessment published in March 2026, built on operating data from 46 facilities covering roughly half of world recycling capacity, puts the gain at 11 % for an LFP chemistry and 24 % for an NMC 811. That is the value the tool applies, because it covers the same thing as the rest of this page.
At the level of the material alone, the gain is far larger. A study in Nature Communications finds that turning end-of-life batteries into battery-grade materials cuts impacts by at least 58 % compared with the mining route. The gap between the two figures is not a contradiction: the cathode is only part of the pack, the rest coming from the anode, the casing and above all the electricity used to make the cells.
Effect on the other themes. Turning this option on also eases the pressure on metals, on water and on manufacturing energy, since primary extraction is largely displaced. Those effects are derived from recovery rates rather than taken directly from the two studies.
Industrial LCA, March 2026 · Nature Communications, 2025
Oil chain
The crude intensity set just above assumes, as the original publication does, that methane accounts for about one third of upstream emissions. This slider lets you contest that share. Leaving it at 33 % reproduces the published value. Raising it increases the total, since methane is then added to an unchanged non-methane component: that is what the IEA's satellite measurements suggest, finding leaks above the averages used in life-cycle assessments. The two buttons then choose the horizon, and only the methane share responds. IEA, Global Methane Tracker 2026
Accounting conventions
Environment and Climate Change Canada uses C$275 a tonne for 2026, in constant 2021 dollars: that is the default here. Its trajectory rises to $294 in 2030. Rennert et al., Nature, 2022, converge: US$185 a tonne, a range of $44 to $413 between the 5th and 95th percentiles in 2020 dollars, or about C$250, which is where the slider's $59 to $554 range comes from. Rennert et al., Nature · ECCC, social cost of GHGs
Notes on the calculationsmethod, assumptions and how the infrastructure items are modelled
Three items are covered by no published life-cycle assessment, precisely because they fall in the blind spot this tool sets out to light up. They have been modelled here following standard LCA conventions, from published and verifiable aggregates. Here is the chain of reasoning, at a high level.
- Battery industrial infrastructure
- An item added for symmetry, and for a specific reason: the reference we use for the battery footprint models operating costs: electricity, reagents, on-site and off-site transport. Its authors state that transport costs were converted into diesel purchases because that category does not include capital expenditure on vehicles and infrastructure, and that depreciation is among the costs left outside the calculation base. The cell manufacturing stage draws on ecoinvent, which covers infrastructure only partly, with the well-known truncation of process-based LCA. The 54 to 69 kg CO₂e/kWh are therefore essentially direct emissions. Our calculation: investment per gigawatt-hour of annual cell-plant capacity, amortized over its cumulative output, converted into emissions through the carbon intensity of a dollar of industrial construction, then increased by the capital of the mines and material refineries. The result, a few kilograms of CO₂e per kilowatt-hour, matches 5 to 15 % of the direct footprint, the order of magnitude the literature attributes to omitted capital goods. Peiseler et al., Nature Communications, 2024
- Amortized oil infrastructure
- A hybrid input-output route, applied to the entire stock still in operation. The world stock breaks down roughly as follows: upstream (wells, platforms, gathering) $11–14 trillion; transport and storage (pipelines, tankers, terminals) $2–3 trillion; refining, about 825 active plants, $2.5–4 trillion; retail distribution (depots, tanker trucks, filling stations) $0.5–1.5 trillion. Total on the order of $19 trillion. Set against world throughput of about 5,800 billion litres of refined product a year and an average asset life of about 25 years, that gives roughly $0.13 of capital per litre. Converted through the carbon intensity of a dollar of heavy construction, 0.4 to 0.9 kg CO₂e, we get 50 to 120 g CO₂e per litre, or 0.7 to 1.5 t for the litres consumed over the vehicle's life. A cross-check through flows gives the same result: the IEA's $570 billion of annual upstream investment, increased by the rest of the chain, divided by annual throughput. This figure looks small against the immensity of the oil estate, and that is precisely the lesson: the denominator is colossal too. This page's argument therefore rests not on capital, which weighs about a tonne, but on flows, which weigh nearly forty.
- Charging and grid infrastructure
- The electric counterpart to oil infrastructure, so that each chain carries its own infrastructure. This item covers only equipment specific to the vehicle: home charger and connection, about 50 kg CO₂e; a share of the public charging network amortized over the fleet it serves, about 20 kg; marginal reinforcement of the distribution grid, about 30 kg. Total on the order of 0.1 t, or roughly 2 % of the electric vehicle's total footprint. Electricity generation and transmission are excluded for two reasons. First, a risk of double counting: dams, lines and wind farms are already inside the 34.5 g CO₂e/kWh published by Hydro-Québec and used above. Second, the nature of the capital: the 2035 Action Plan foresees $155–185 billion of investment, of which $90–110 billion to meet demand growth, but that demand comes from every use. Electrifying 5.1 million vehicles would account for only about ten per cent of the 150 to 200 additional TWh targeted by 2050; the rest serves heating, industry, greenhouses, exports. A dam would exist without electric vehicles, which connect to it at marginal cost, and it supplies sectors unrelated to mobility. A refinery and a pipeline serve nothing but oil. Their outlets are not fuels alone, since petrochemicals take about 15 % and the rest goes to aviation, shipping, lubricants and asphalt, but all belong to the same system. Amortizing per litre of refined product does spread the capital across all of those outlets, petrochemicals included. Oil infrastructure is dedicated, electric infrastructure is shared, and the gap between the two amounts reflects a real difference rather than an omission. One caveat to keep in mind, and it is a real one. This reasoning holds for one additional vehicle today, connecting to a grid that already exists. It does not hold for an entire fleet: the share of electric infrastructure attributable to mobility grows with the rate of electrification, and Hydro-Québec already puts the capacity need tied to charging at 2,922 MW in 2035, a third of the capacity it plans to add. Oil infrastructure stays dedicated and electric infrastructure stays shared, but the gap between the two narrows as the fleet electrifies. The tool models a marginal vehicle, not a fleet-wide transition. See question 8 of the FAQ. Hydro-Québec, 2035 Action Plan
Limits to own up to. Grid and crude carbon intensities change over time; check the linked sources before quoting a figure. The three items above are the only ones calculated in house, and two frequent objections are addressed in the FAQ.
The status of these figures. They are defensible orders of magnitude, not measurements, and they have not been peer reviewed. Each rests on world aggregates whose sources are linked, and on allocations that remain choices. That is why all of them are adjustable: if you find an allocation too generous, pull the slider back. The overall conclusion depends on none of these items taken alone.
FAQ
1. Does the battery outlive the vehicle?
Yes, in the great majority of cases. The debate now turns on slow wear: how much range is left in year fifteen?
Worth a grain of salt. Degradation studies cover batteries put on the road several years ago; chemistry, thermal management and charging have improved a great deal since, and the vehicles sold today should age better than these figures suggest.
What the fleets measure
Failure has become rare. Across about 15,000 vehicles from 2011 to 2023, recalls excluded, Recurrent measures a replacement rate of 7.5 % for 2011 models, then a drop of an order of magnitude from 2016 on, down to 0.3 % for vehicles from 2022 and later. Stories of batteries dying at 100,000 km describe a technology that has not been sold for ten years.
The loss is concentrated early. P3 and Aviloo measured more than 7,000 vehicles from every manufacturer, some beyond 300,000 km: about 95 % of capacity at 30,000 km, 90 % at 100,000 km, then a plateau around 87 % between 200,000 and 300,000 km. The curve flattens instead of collapsing.
How you charge matters more than age. Geotab, across more than 22,700 vehicles and 21 models, puts the average at 2.3 % loss a year. But that average covers opposite uses: 1.5 % for those who rarely fast-charge, against 3 % for frequent use of chargers above 100 kW. That is the variable the owner controls.
What we use: 80 %. The two readings bracket the result. At 1.5 % a year compounded over fifteen years, about 80 % of capacity remains; following P3's mileage curve out to 300,000 km, about 87 %. The gap comes from the fact that calendar ageing and use-related ageing do not simply add up. We take the cautious bound, knowing that it probably understates real capacity. Either way, we stay well above the 70 % warranty threshold.
Why the old numbers frighten people. Geotab measures 4.2 % annual loss on an air-cooled 2015 Nissan Leaf, against 2.3 % on a liquid-cooled Tesla Model S of the same year: the early studies describe the absence of thermal management more than they describe a battery. The laboratory itself is pessimistic, as Nature Energy showed in 2024: constant-current cycling understates lifetime by as much as 38 % compared with real driving.
A concrete case. The ADAC drove a VW ID.3 for 160,000 km over four years, with more than 40 % of charging on DC fast chargers and long stays parked at full charge, exactly the practices that are advised against. Remaining capacity: 91 %.
And 80 % is not a failure: it is a fifth less range, on batteries whose size grew by 167 % between 2015 and 2024. The remaining uncertainty leans the right way, since the LFP batteries sold today are too recent to appear in this data.
Recurrent, replacement rates · P3 and Aviloo, ageing in real use · Geotab, 22,700 vehicles · Geslin et al., Nature Energy, 2024 · ADAC, long-term ID.3 test
2. What if I keep my old combustion vehicle instead of buying a new electric one?
Three things to remember
Do not wait for the combustion vehicle to die. Three independent analyses, on three different grids, reach the same conclusion. On the Quebec grid, manufacturing the electric vehicle is paid back in about a year of normal driving.
The more you drive, the clearer the gain. High-mileage drivers should switch first. That is where each battery built delivers the most, and it is also where the arithmetic is kindest to the wallet.
Below roughly 2,000 km a year, keep the combustion vehicle. At that rate, the battery ages faster than it pays back its manufacturing. Between 2,000 and 6,000 km a year, the gain exists but stays modest. Above that, it is decisive.
This tool compares two new vehicles, which is not most people's situation. Many already own a gasoline vehicle and wonder whether to make it last. That question is a different one, and harder.
Making an object last avoids building another one, which is almost always the right ecological reflex.
The combustion car is one of the rare exceptions to that rule, along with the gas furnace, because its use phase dwarfs its manufacturing phase: every additional kilometre costs more than building a replacement would cost once.
Campbell and Geyer put a number on that exception in Science in August 2026, across the entire US fleet. Retiring a still-running combustion vehicle to replace it with an electric one reduces emissions in 92 % of the configurations examined, including when the combustion vehicle is new.
Two caveats on that result. It assumes the combustion vehicle is taken off the road. If it is resold, the balance depends on who buys it: it is a gain if it saves the buyer from buying new, if it replaces an older and dirtier vehicle, or if it goes to someone who drives less than you, the vehicle then burning less fuel per year; it is a loss if it puts someone behind a wheel who had no vehicle at all. Campbell and Geyer model only that last case and conclude that the gain disappears beyond 65 % of shift toward car use, on an average grid. Second caveat: none of this speaks about money. Scrapping a working vehicle remains economically irrational without a buy-back program, as the authors also point out.
Le Réveilleur devoted an entire video to this question, with its full sources. We recommend it for the long version. It is in French.
Campbell and Geyer, Science, 2026 · Keeping your old combustion car: greener, really? (in French) · Source page
3. Does an electric vehicle cost more to insure than a combustion vehicle of the same price?
No, and on some models it costs less. An electric vehicle does insure for more on average, but that is because it sells for more: a premium is calculated on the value of the vehicle. At a comparable price, the drivetrain changes almost nothing.
The myth was true, ten years ago
The purchase price gap was enormous. In 2016 an electric vehicle sold for nearly 80% more than its gasoline twin, and the Highway Loss Data Institute measured a collision bill 63.5% higher for the Tesla Model S than for comparable luxury sedans. The premium followed the price, as it always does.
Insurers and body shops had no experience. Unable to diagnose a battery that had taken a knock, they preferred to write the vehicle off rather than carry the risk. In 2013 an electric vehicle declared a total loss cost its insurer US$13,963 more than an equivalent combustion one.
The same body measured the gap disappearing. In 2020, comparing the same models in both of their drivetrains, the HLDI found 20% fewer crashes and 19% less cost to the insurer; when a crash does happen, the bill is higher by just 1%, too little to be told apart from chance. And the trade has learned: Thatcham Research puts at 10.7% the fall in the cost of repairing an electric vehicle as workshops gain experience.
One item really does cost more: repair. After a knock, the body shop bill is steeper for an electric vehicle: C$6,645 on average in Canada against C$5,411 for a combustion one in the second quarter of 2026, according to Mitchell, a gap of C$1,234. Two reasons: the parts almost always come from the manufacturer, 85% of the parts bill in North America against 61% for a combustion vehicle, and the cameras and radars of the driver assistance systems have to be recalibrated after the slightest impact. It is nonetheless the smallest gap Mitchell has ever measured on repairable vehicles, in Canada as in the United States.
In plain terms. If you are choosing between two vehicles of comparable price, insurance should not tip the balance. Ask for a quote on each: the difference will come from the model and the insurer far more than from the engine. Five insurers active in Quebec advertise an electric vehicle discount on top of that, of 10 to 20% depending on the insurer as of August 2026; these are advertised maximums, to be checked with your own. It is also why insurance stays outside the wallet calculator: it varies too much from case to case for an average to be honest.
Highway Loss Data Institute, bulletin 33-04, 2016 · Highway Loss Data Institute, bulletin 37-25, 2020 · Thatcham Research, EV Blueprint, 2026 · Mitchell, Plugged-In, Q2 2026 · Ratehub, model-by-model comparison, 2026 · CAA-Québec, insuring an electric vehicle
4. Does an electric vehicle lose its value faster than a combustion vehicle?
Complicated: yes, but the figures describe an era that is over. Electric vehicles from 2011 to 2022 absorbed three shocks at once: a technology that kept making them obsolete, manufacturers who slashed their prices, and governments that cut their rebates without notice. None of the three weighs the same way today.
Two eras, not one curve
| What changes | 2011-2022 · volatility | since 2023 · stabilization |
|---|---|---|
| Value retained Tesla Model 3, US market | 51 % after four years (2022 model year) | 62 % after three years (2023), 66 % after two years (2024) |
| Technical maturity | Range rising fast, air thermal management and optional heat pumps still common | Median range of 470 km, liquid thermal management throughout, and heat pumps across nearly the whole offering |
| New-vehicle price | Unilateral manufacturer cuts, up to $15,000 at a stroke | Occasional adjustments, no major cut since spring 2023 |
| Provincial rebate | $7,000, then $4,000, then two months of suspension | $2,000 in 2026, program ending December 31, 2026 |
| Federal rebate | Uncertainty: $5,000, closed January 12, 2025, then thirteen months with no program at all | Predictability: new program since February 16, 2026, trajectory published through 2031 |
What the first row does not say. Those three rates do not cover the same age, and an older vehicle necessarily loses more. The important point lies elsewhere: the list price of those three model years went from US$46,990 to $42,490 and then $38,990. The 2022 owner is measured against a benchmark that melted by $8,000 under their feet.
The manufacturer did more damage than wear. In January 2023 Tesla cut its Canadian prices overnight: the Model Y went from $85,000 to $69,990. Anyone who had bought six months earlier watched the benchmark value of their vehicle collapse without driving another kilometre. With Tesla dominating the fleet, the drop pulled the whole used market down with it.
Governments went back and forth. Quebec cut Roulez vert from $7,000 to $4,000 on January 1, 2025, then suspended the program for two months: vehicles registered during that window got nothing at all. Ottawa did worse. The announcement of a coming suspension, with no date attached, triggered a rush that emptied the iZEV program envelope in two days, and it took thirteen months for a new federal program to take over.
The rebate distorts the calculation too. Depreciation is measured against the list price, not the price paid. An electric vehicle listed at $45,000, bought for $38,000 after rebates and resold at $20,000, will show 56 % depreciation where its owner actually took 47 %. The more generous the rebate, the harsher the statistic looks. And removing a rebate supports resale value, against intuition: after the US federal credit expired in September 2025, used electric vehicle prices rose 3.5 % while combustion vehicle prices fell 2.0 %.
What decides the rest is perception. A wave of lease returns is arriving, concentrated on the 2023 and 2024 model years. What absorbs that supply depends less on the condition of the vehicles than on what buyers believe about them: non-Tesla electric vehicles were already taking 60.1 days to sell, against 32.4 days for a Tesla, a gap no technical difference explains. What car columnists and everyday conversation carry about electric vehicles therefore weighs directly on that market. A reputation damaged by misinformation is paid for in desirability, and desirability is paid for in resale value.
What we take from this. The three-to-four-year range offers the best value: the initial drop has been absorbed, and ten years of useful battery life remain. Ask for a state-of-health report, the way you would ask for a history report. If you own an electric vehicle from 2011 to 2022, the loss is already taken: keep it, its battery is doing fine.
Why resale value stays out of the calculator. It is too volatile for an average to be honest in the wallet. But leaving it out does not cut the way people assume: an electric vehicle loses a larger percentage of a higher purchase price, so it can hand back more dollars at resale than a combustion vehicle. Until the item is modelled, nobody can settle it, ourselves included.
A caveat worth knowing. As with the battery, the available data covers the first cohort. No public source publishes depreciation rates specific to Quebec; Canadian Black Book holds the Canadian data without releasing it. The retention rates cited come from a commercial aggregator monetized through affiliate links, which compiles CarEdge, iSeeCars, Recurrent and KBB for the US market, with a single model year per age point. The price cuts, for their part, are documented in Canadian dollars.
The Charge Port, retention model by model · iSeeCars, 950,000 five-year-old vehicles, 2026 · iSeeCars, the end of the US federal credit · iSeeCars, days to sell in the first quarter of 2026 · RPM, the cut across the whole Tesla range, January 2023 · Quebec.ca, Roulez vert financial assistance · Radio-Canada, the suspension of Roulez vert · Electric Autonomy, the closure of the iZEV program · Transport Canada, the federal program and its trajectory · Recurrent, the wave of lease returns
5. That’s all very well, but I have particular needs that mean I need a combustion vehicle
It all turns on the gap between a need and a desire. Three cases hide behind the same objection.
- The real and frequent need. The offer already covers it: ranges comfortably exceed daily mileage, and a plug at home refills the vehicle overnight. The plug-in hybrid fills a few niche cases, with the reservation set out in question 9.
- The real but occasional need. Fast chargers cover the long trip; for moving furniture or towing a boat, renting costs less than carrying the oversized vehicle all year.
- The desire. “But what about the Labrador highway in winter?” A use pictured more often than it is lived is not a need. Advertising has spent decades selling a vehicle capable of anything, on roads almost no buyer will ever see, because it returns more than a smaller one. That is one of the reasons its regulation is being called for, as the Beyond the vehicle section sets out.
What the figures show
Range is no longer what decides. Natural Resources Canada publishes the range of every model sold in the country. In 2016 the median was 377 km and you could still buy an electric car rated at 100 km; for 2026 models the median reaches 470 km, and the least enduring of the 239 versions on offer manages 227. Against that, people in Quebec drive about 15,000 km a year, or some forty kilometres a day. Recurrent, which tracks more than 18,000 vehicles in real conditions, confirms it from the other end: its drivers use only 8 to 16% of their range in a day.
Buying for the rare case is paid for every day. Oversizing costs on every trip: this tool’s default setting takes 6.8 L/100 km, the rating of a compact sedan, where a real-world SUV often exceeds 9 L and the Quebec fleet average reaches 9.2 L. On the electric side, a large battery is a heavier manufacturing debt; the capacity slider under settings shows the effect directly.
What we take from this. Do the honest count for last year: how many days did you drive beyond the range of an electric vehicle, with no fast charger anywhere along the way? If the answer fits on one hand, size the purchase on ordinary use and rent for the exception. That is not a fallback: it is what frees you to choose a smaller electric vehicle, cheaper to buy, less thirsty, and lighter to manufacture.
Natural Resources Canada, 2026 · Recurrent, 2024 · Miotti and Trancik, Environmental Research Letters, 2026
6. What about winter range?
Yes, you lose some. But the battery is not the main culprit. Two thirds of that loss goes to heating a cabin designed to leak heat like a sieve.
And combustion vehicles lose too, which we forget. The US environmental agency puts the cold-weather fuel penalty of a gasoline vehicle at 10 to 30%. The winter penalty is universal in motoring; it is simply more visible when the gauge is a battery read to the kilometre.
What the tests measure
In Canada, 14 to 39% below the official rating. The CAA’s winter drive took fourteen models from Ottawa to Mont-Tremblant at −7 to −15 °C, to a full discharge. On charging, about a hundred kilometres of range recovered in fifteen minutes on a fast charger. Vehicles with a heat pump hold nearly 10 points more.
At −32 °C, not one failed. The NAF’s El Prix test put twenty-four models through the Norwegian deep freeze: an average loss of 38% against WLTP, from 29% for the best to 46% for the last. All of them drove.
These figures do not compare with one another. The CAA measures the gap against Natural Resources Canada ratings, the NAF against WLTP, Recurrent against mild-weather use, and the AAA against 24 °C on a dynamometer. A loss percentage means nothing without its temperature and its reference point.
Why cold costs so much: the cabin, not the battery. A car is barely insulated: thin sheet metal, single glazing, air renewed continuously; a room with the same properties would fail any building code. The combustion engine could live with it, because it wastes most of its fuel as heat: warming you cost it nothing, it simply diverted what it was throwing out through the radiator. The electric motor turns almost everything into motion. It has little waste left to recycle and must manufacture much of its heat, 1.8 to 3.7 kW continuously, taken from the battery. The engineering proof follows: insulating the cabin cuts heating demand by about 20% at 0 °C and nearly 30% at −10 °C.
In this tool, move both sliders, not one. If you raise electric consumption from 16 to 22 kWh/100 km to represent a Quebec winter, raise gasoline from 6.8 to 7.8 L/100 km as well. Moving only the first skews the comparison in favour of combustion. And remember these settings apply to the whole year: winter lasts four to five months here, so the annual average sits between the two seasons.
What we take from this. Winter takes off roughly a third of the advertised range. Four habits win most of it back:
- Preheat the cabin and the battery while the vehicle is still plugged in, since that heat then comes from the grid.
- Use the heated seats and steering wheel, which warm the person rather than the volume of air.
- Choose a model with a heat pump.
- Trigger battery preconditioning before a fast charge, without which the charger will deliver only a fraction of its power.
Norway, whose winters are much like ours, registered 98% fully electric vehicles in March 2026. The right question is not whether an electric vehicle gets through winter, but being aware of the range it loses in the cold, particularly when planning long trips.
CAA winter drive · Recurrent, 30,000 vehicles · NAF, El Prix 2026 · AAA, 2026 · US Department of Energy and Argonne · Gellai et al., World Electric Vehicle Journal, 2025 · La Presse, 2025: a winter range figure on the label (in French)
7. I live in an apartment or a condominium: where do I charge?
Somewhere other than home, and it is less constraining than it sounds. The overnight plug is no longer the only model. Charging moves to wherever the vehicle is already sitting still: at work, at the grocery store, at a neighbourhood charger. Households with no plug at home are known as charging orphans; there are many of them, and they drive.
Four steps, in this order.
- First, count what you actually drive. At about forty kilometres a day and 15.3 kWh/100 km (this tool’s default setting), a vehicle uses a little over 6 kWh, more than 8 in winter. The 64 kWh battery taken by default therefore covers seven to ten days depending on the season. You do not need a plug every night: you need a charge every five or six days. That is a weekly logistics constraint, not a daily one, and it is what makes the rest workable.
- Look to your workplace. Eight hours parked on a level 2 charger covers several days of driving, often at no cost to the employee. Quebec already counted 9,734 workplace chargers. It is the closest thing to home charging, and the least often explored: ask your employer before doing anything else.
- Take the case to your building, with the right programme. The classic mistake is to ask for a charger for yourself. Without enough capacity in the garage, individual chargers end up blocking one another. Écorecharge separately funds the building’s electrical upgrade, up to $120,000 and half of eligible costs, a stream addressed to the owner or the syndicate. That is the one to bring to the general meeting, file in hand.
- Write to your municipality. It holds the lever for overnight curbside charging, and it has the money: since 2021, Hydro-Québec has funded up to $12,000 per charger for installations on streets and in municipal lots, with a target of 4,500 chargers by 2028, explicitly meant for neighbourhoods where people cannot charge at home. In Montreal, the modelling reported by the Conseil régional de l’environnement ranges from 2,800 chargers in 2030 if nothing changes to 14,000 if the fleet really does electrify. The gap between those two numbers is a decision, and part of it is taken at city council.
Three brief notes
You are not an isolated case. Natural Resources Canada estimates that at least a third of the Canadian population lives in a multi-unit building or in a dwelling with no driveway or garage. In Quebec, more than three million people live in a multi-unit residential building.
The public network has kept up. More than 9,600 public chargers across about 4,200 sites as of summer 2024, 5,600 of them on the Circuit électrique, a number of fast chargers that more than tripled between 2019 and 2023, and a network judged sufficient at the time for the 270,000 electric vehicles on the road.
The fast charger is a top-up. The newest units reach 320 kW and advertise 25 to 30 minutes. A stop of that kind once a week replaces the overnight plug. Making it your daily routine, on the other hand, has a price: frequent use of chargers above 100 kW is associated with more pronounced battery wear, as question 1 explains. If you intend to make it your main method, choose an LFP chemistry: iron phosphate takes fast charging far better than NMC or NCA. In a test published in the Journal of Power Sources in 2025, the harshest regime (more than 90% fast charges, across the full voltage range) required no pack replacement at all on LFP, against three on NMC and twenty on NCA. The cells were passively cooled, so harder used than a real vehicle pack: what counts is the gap between chemistries, not the absolute figure. LFP is, as it happens, the chemistry taken by default in the settings.
What we take from this. Do not try to reproduce the bungalow’s plug: look for the hours when your vehicle is already sitting still, and target those times and places to charge. And if the count still does not add up, in a dense, well-served neighbourhood the best answer may be to own no car at all, which is the subject of question 10.
Radio-Canada, Quebec’s public charging network, 2024 · Natural Resources Canada, charging in multi-unit buildings · Circuit électrique, 320 kW fast charger · Journal of Power Sources, fast charging across chemistries, 2025 · Écorecharge, financial assistance · Hydro-Québec, 4,500 chargers for urban centres · CRE-Montréal, public charging stations, 2024
8. Can the grid cope if everyone switches to electric?
Yes for the energy, no if everyone plugs in at 6 p.m. The objection is a fair one, but it is aimed at the wrong quantity: what is scarce is not the amount of electricity, it is the ability to deliver all of it at once, four hours an evening, in January.
What the numbers say
The energy fits inside existing plans. Electrifying Quebec's roughly 5.1 million passenger vehicles would call for something like 18 TWh a year, a range of 15 to 22 depending on mileage and vehicle size, about 10 % of Hydro-Québec's current sales, and less than a third of the 60 TWh of growth already planned by 2035. Those same vehicles burn 7.3 billion litres of gasoline today, or 65 TWh of chemical energy, most of it dissipated as heat. Electrification does not move demand from one network to another: it removes three quarters of it.
Peak demand, on the other hand, is a real problem. Hydro-Québec filed its own figure with the Régie de l'énergie: of the 9,000 MW of additional capacity planned by 2035, 2,922 MW would come from vehicle charging alone, a third of the capacity added, for a fleet that is still only partly electric. Scaled to the whole fleet, the need would land between 5 and 7 GW, against an all-time record of 43,124 MW on 3 February 2023. And the curves stack instead of cancelling out: Hydro-Québec observes that owners charge mostly between 6 and 8 p.m., exactly when heating can account for as much as 80 % of a household's daily consumption. Charging climbs for the same physical reason that heating is needed.
But that load can be moved, unlike heating. An average vehicle covers about forty kilometres a day, roughly 9 kWh, or 75 minutes on a 7.2 kW home charger. The need takes up 5 % of the day and can wait. The levers are already measured: for the winter of 2024-2025, Hydro-Québec counted on 1,615 MW of load shedding from its business and industrial customers, plus some 330 MW shaved off by households on the Flex D rate or the winter credit, close to 2,000 MW in all, the order of magnitude of a generating station like La Grande-2-A. Bidirectional charging will add to that, and Hydro-Québec is considering it as a peak-management tool.
What we take from this. The question "can the grid hold?" is the wrong one. The right one is "will charging be managed or left free?", and the gap between the two answers runs to thousands of megawatts. A fleet whose charging is shifted by a few hours is an asset to the grid; the same fleet plugged in at 6 p.m. becomes its main source of strain. That said, what electrification asks of the grid is not nil: see the notes on the calculations regarding the treatment of electric infrastructure.
One caveat to keep in mind. The 18 TWh and the 5 to 7 GW are our own calculations, not published figures: Hydro-Québec has released no full-electrification scenario. They rest on an average annual mileage of 15,000 km (whose last reliable Quebec measurement dates from 2009, the Canadian Vehicle Survey having been discontinued since) and on real-world consumption of about 22 kWh/100 km, charging losses and winter included. That figure sits above the 15.3 kWh of the combined rating set under settings, precisely because it is an annual average across an entire fleet, SUVs and pickups included, rather than the rating of a compact sedan. At 13,000 km, the total falls below 16 TWh.
Hydro-Québec, 2035 Action Plan · Radio-Canada: the 2,922 MW of charging filed with the Régie (in French) · Régie de l'énergie, supply plan progress report (in French) · Radio-Canada: the 43,124 MW record (in French) · Hydro-Québec, peak-shaving results history · Flex D rate · Statistique Québec, vehicles on the road (in French) · SAAQ, statistics 1978–2024: 5,085,603 passenger vehicles (in French) · Statistics Canada, Canadian Vehicle Survey · HEC Montréal, Quebec's vehicle fleet (in French)
9. Which plug-in vehicles are sold in Canada?
Équiterre maintains a catalogue of every plug-in vehicle sold in Canada, fully electric and plug-in hybrid alike, with their ranges and prices.
Our recommendation: choose fully electric over plug-in hybrid. European data from the ICCT, drawn from the on-board meters of more than 800,000 vehicles, shows that plug-in hybrids emit up to five times more in real conditions than their type-approval values, and that the gap widened from 265 % in 2021 to 400 % in 2023.
Three causes for that gap. Drivers plug in less often than the test assumes. The combustion engine fires alongside the electric motor rather than leaving it to run alone. And carrying two drivetrains makes the vehicle heavier. The European Commission duly revised its utility factor in 2025, with a further adjustment due in 2027.
In Quebec the argument carries a local edge: the plug-in hybrid keeps burning imported gasoline where the fully electric vehicle runs on hydroelectricity produced here.
10. Am I an environmentalist if I drive electric?
Being an environmentalist means recognizing that human activity depends fundamentally on the biophysical balances of the Earth and aligning one's behaviour, whether individual, collective or political, out of a concern for preserving the habitability of the living world.
By that definition you are changing your behaviour, so yes, but you are acting on only one of the three levers of mobility. The IPCC's sixth assessment report sorts mobility levers by what they act on: the need, the mode, or the machine.
- Avoid: act on the need to travel in order to reduce it, by bringing housing, jobs, schools and services closer together.
- Shift: act on the mode, moving the trip to walking, cycling or public transit.
- Improve: act on the machine, making the vehicle emit less.
This tool measures only that third lever, and it finds it powerful: about 90 % fewer emissions over the life of the vehicle, and lower pressure on nine of the ten themes, mineral resources excepted.
Improving works, then, and works well. But this lever removes not one kilometre driven, not one vehicle on the road, not one share of the land that planning hands over to the car: a fully electrified fleet would still exert pressure across every theme.
What we take from this. Real change takes all three levers at once: cutting car dependence with the first two, and electrifying 100 % of the fleet that remains. That is what sustainable mobility means.
The greenest car is still the one that is never built: no battery, no oil infrastructure, no kilowatt-hour. Walking, cycling or taking transit erases most of the balance sheet instead of shrinking it.
Those modes bring what carbon does not measure. Active mobility is associated with better cardiovascular health indicators. And owning a vehicle is expensive: about $1,310 a month in Montreal according to a study cited by L'actualité, close to $16,000 a year that can be cut sharply by changing modes.
Intermediate solutions exist. For trips an ordinary bicycle cannot cover, Équiterre points out that the value of an electric-assist bicycle is not that it replaces walking or the bus, but that it replaces driving alone. For occasional needs, car sharing makes going without a personal vehicle realistic where the service exists.
One pressure the carbon balance does not capture: every vehicle, whatever its drivetrain, demands space. On-street and surface parking, garages, widened lanes, minimum parking requirements per dwelling: all of it shapes cities that are more sprawling, more paved and hotter, at the expense of housing, trees and public space. Replacing an engine frees up not one square metre.
And one condition the individual does not control. These choices are only available if governments fund the transit, the bike lanes and the planning that make them practical, which makes mobility a civic question as much as a consumer choice.
And if a personal vehicle remains indispensable, then yes, the electric vehicle clearly beats the combustion vehicle, financially and ecologically, over its whole life.
IPCC, AR6 Working Group III, chapter 5 · Milovanoff et al., Nature Climate Change · Point tournant, episode 6 (in French) · L'actualité, cost of ownership (in French) · La Presse, paying less to get around (in French) · PubMed, active transport and health · Équiterre, electric-assist bicycles (in French)
Beyond the vehicle
What comes before is measured; what follows is not. Two extensions fall outside the calculator's scope, one economic, the other political. These are positions held by Pareto, backed by sources, not outputs of the tool.
What gasoline costs the Quebec economy
This tool counts environmental impacts only. One is missing, purely economic but structural in Quebec: every litre of fuel is imported, every kilowatt-hour is produced here.
Quebec extracts no oil. Its refineries process crude from Western Canada and the United States. According to the Chair in Energy Sector Management at HEC Montréal, consumption of petroleum products reached 20.2 billion litres in 2024, up 2.1 %. The transition has not yet bent the curve.
Every dollar spent at the pump largely leaves the Quebec economy, whereas a dollar of electricity stays in it, as Hydro-Québec revenue, royalties and jobs.
There is also a question of reliability and societal robustness. Oil comes from far away, by pipeline and by ship, at the end of a chain exposed to conflict, sanctions, tariffs and the decisions of a few producing countries. Its price follows those shocks: it can move by half in a few months, with nothing Quebec can do about it. Quebec electricity is produced here, its rates are set through a public process and move slowly. Travelling on electricity therefore means trading a volatile, imported expense for a stable, local one, which matters as much for a household budget as for the resilience of an economy.
A case study. Quebec has just weakened its zero-emission vehicle standard, and its own ministry has put numbers on what that does.
Winners and losers of the weakening of Quebec's ZEV standard, 2026 to 2035
Each bar is one actor's net position over the ten years, in billions of dollars discounted to 2025, for this one regulatory decision. All are drawn from the ministry's impact analysis, whose own ledger stops at $17 billion in net cost: the items it counts there are marked. The first bar, hatched, follows from its figures without the document publishing it.
The winners are the oil industry and some automakers, at the expense of everyone else in society. The weakening of the standard sells 7.2 billion more litres of gasoline by 2035. Households will pay $9.6 billion for them before taxes, of which $2.7 billion stays in Quebec, in the margins of the two refineries, the wholesalers and the service stations, while $6.9 billion goes to buying the oil and bringing it here, outside Quebec. Automakers that fell behind on the standard take in $3.4 billion more by selling hybrids in place of electrics, while those that had already invested in electrification lose $4.2 billion. On the other side, households lose $10.3 billion once the vehicle purchase and maintenance are counted, climate and health cost $9.4 billion, and Hydro-Québec does not sell 19,770 GWh produced here. The ministry itself puts the balance at $17.0 billion in net cost to society as a whole.
The government says so itself. The notice published in the Gazette officielle du Québec on 23 June 2026, repealing the ban on selling combustion vehicles, announces "benefits for businesses in the oil sector and relief for automakers", then "drawbacks for consumers, who would bear additional energy costs, as well as social costs tied to rising emissions". It is the only source that names automakers among the winners. Not all of them are: the impact analysis describes, without ever quantifying it, the opposite fate of those that had already invested in electrification and counted on reselling their surplus credits.
The oil bar is a deduction, not a ministry figure. The analysis publishes no barrel price: those $6.9 billion are the fuel bill minus the Quebec margins. Per litre, the pre-tax bill comes to $1.33, of which $0.37 is margins earned here and $0.96 goes to the oil and its delivery; at US$100 a barrel, the crude alone is worth $0.87. The 7,215.2 million litres amount to roughly 45 million barrels, or 12,400 barrels a day for ten years. Quebec's two refineries import their crude, mainly from the United States.
Automakers, both lines. The volumes are the 2035 fleet gap between the ministry's two scenarios, 1,433,000 fewer electric vehicles and 1,164,000 more gasoline hybrids (table 3, page 11), which approximates the cumulative sales gap since a light vehicle lasts twelve years and almost nothing sold from 2026 on is scrapped before 2035. Each is valued at the net profit per vehicle of the most profitable electric maker, Tesla at US$2,140, and of the most profitable hybrid maker, Toyota at US$2,104, fiscal 2025 per Nikkei Asia, converted at C$1.38 to US$1.
Climate and health. The social cost of carbon and of air pollutants.
Hydro-Québec. Its lost sales are revenue, not profit, and the same $2.0 billion shows up in the ministry's ledger as a saving for households.
Taxes are not shown here. The household figure is the ministry's, which excludes the excise tax, the fuel tax and the GST and QST. At the pump, households therefore pay more, and the two levels of government collect close to 29 cents on every extra litre sold, roughly $2.1 billion over ten years, an estimate by Pareto.
Regulatory impact analysis of the ZEV standard easing, Quebec ministry of the Environment (in French) · Gazette officielle du Québec, 23 June 2026 (in French) · Journal de Montréal (in French) · La Presse, column by Francis Vailles (in French) · Carscoops, automakers' profit per vehicle, fiscal 2025 · État de l'énergie au Québec 2026, HEC Montréal (in French)
What is missing on the policy side
A scrappage program is missing, and it ought to be ambitious. California has run one for years, Clean Cars 4 All: a lower-income household that scraps a 2006 or older vehicle receives US$5,500 to $9,500, up to $12,000 depending on region and income, to buy a zero-emission vehicle or, if it prefers, a transit pass and an electric-assist bicycle. Campbell and Geyer cite that program as the model to follow, while pointing to its limit: current amounts make only the scrapping of old vehicles attractive, whereas the climate arithmetic justifies going much further up the fleet's age range.
And above all, new combustion vehicles should no longer be sold. Every combustion vehicle sold today will run for fifteen years and burn gasoline until 2041. None of the measures below solves the problem on its own. The first three name the act for what it is (a fifteen-year emissions commitment) at the precise moment it is made; the fourth acts upstream, on what manufacturers are required to bring to market.
- A symbolic surcharge on the purchase of a new combustion vehicle. The amount matters less than the signal sent at the moment of signing. Quebec already has the lever: the additional registration fee hits vehicles of 4 litres of displacement or more, from $36.75 to $161 a year. The criterion is obsolete, displacement having ceased to be a good indicator of consumption since small turbocharged engines became the norm. Basing that surcharge on the model year's fuel consumption rating, which Natural Resources Canada already publishes for every vehicle sold, would make it both fair and legible.
- A mandatory statement on the bill of sale and in advertising, on the model of the warnings printed on cigarette packs. France has required it since 1 March 2022: every motor vehicle advertisement must carry a message in favour of active or shared mobility, along with the emissions class label, from A to G. Équiterre has been asking for the same here since June 2024: a Canadian automotive advertising code that would make disclosure of environmental effects and safety risks mandatory, explicitly modelled on tobacco regulation. For now the industry self-regulates.
- A ban on advertising for vehicles that burn gasoline. France passed one in its climate and resilience act: from 1 January 2028, no advertising at all for a passenger car emitting more than 123 g of CO₂ per kilometre. Several cities go further and target all fossil-fuel vehicle advertising. Amsterdam has banned it since 1 May 2026 across all of its public spaces, transit included, making it the first capital to write it into its bylaws. Edinburgh did so back in May 2024 on the advertising space it owns, SUVs included. In Quebec, Équiterre is calling for a full ban on gasoline vehicle advertising by 2030, five years before the 2035 deadline then set for the end of their sale.
- Strengthen the zero-emission vehicle standard rather than dismantle it. It is the standard, not the purchase rebate, that sets the share of electric vehicles each manufacturer must bring to market. Quebec has been dismantling it in stages since 2025, at the explicit request of manufacturers who did not keep up with the market. Ottawa is on the same path and is repealing its electric vehicle sales mandate, which required 20 % of sales this year and 100 % in 2035, with the stricter emissions standard promised in its place not even out for consultation.
Clean Cars 4 All, California Air Resources Board · The bonus-malus, an unavoidable solution, Roulez électrique (in French) · Équiterre wants to apply "the same recipe" as tobacco, La Presse (in French) · Amsterdam, fossil advertising ban · Edinburgh, ban on SUV and airline ads · Rules on motor vehicle advertising, French ministry for the Ecological Transition (in French) · Advertising and vehicles: obligations and prohibitions, service-public.fr (in French) · ZEV standard, Quebec ministry of the Environment (in French) · Le Devoir, repeal of the federal sales mandate (in French) · Gazette officielle du Québec, draft regulation repealing the 2034-2035 prohibitions (in French)
Sources
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- Highway Loss Data Institute. (2020). Insurance losses of electric vehicles and their conventional counterparts while adjusting for mileage (Bulletin vol. 37, n° 25).
- Husmann, J., Northey, S., Beylot, A., Blömeke, S., & Herrmann, C. (2025). Inconsistencies in handling of multifunctionality in the environmental footprint of electric vehicle batteries: a cross-industry analysis. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 30, 1560-1578. How industries handle multifunctionality differently in battery footprints, recycling in particular: the same battery can carry widely separated results depending on the convention chosen.
- Hydro-Québec. (2021). 4 500 nouvelles bornes pour faciliter la recharge des véhicules électriques dans les centres urbains. Press release. A programme for municipalities: up to $12,000 per charger for curbside and municipal-lot charging, 4,500 chargers by 2028, aimed at overnight charging in neighbourhoods where residents cannot charge at home.
- Hydro-Québec. (2023). Plan d'action 2035 : Plus de réseau, plus d'énergie, une meilleure qualité de service (2035 Action Plan).
- Hydro-Québec. (2025). Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions.
- Hydro-Québec. (2025). Les gaz à effet de serre et les réservoirs (Greenhouse gases and reservoirs). Emissions peak two to four years after impoundment, then return within less than ten years to the level of surrounding lakes.
- Hydro-Québec. (2025). Taux d'émission de GES associés à l'électricité (GHG emission rates associated with electricity). A Hydro-Québec explainer, which attributes the creation of reservoirs to land-use change. The 34.5 g rate itself comes from Levasseur et al., whose whole purpose is to quantify reservoir emissions and fold them in.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation. Chapter 5 of the Working Group III contribution to the sixth assessment report. Source of the Avoid–Shift–Improve framework used in question 10.
- Hydro-Québec. ([no date]). Results history. Winter-by-winter record of peak demand shaved from residential customers.
- Hydro-Québec. ([no date]). Prix de l'électricité (in French). Residential Rate D: the price of both consumption blocks and the system access charge.
- Hydro-Québec. ([no date]). Rate Flex D. Variable-price residential rate: a discount off peak, a higher price during winter peak events.
- IMPACT World+. ([no date]). IMPACT World+. A globally regionalized life cycle impact assessment method, developed by CIRAIG and its partners. It provides the frame for the impact categories used here.
- International Council on Clean Transportation. (2026). Real-world usage and emissions of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in Europe.
- International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation. (2025). Oil tanker spill statistics 2025. ITOPF.
- iSeeCars. (2026). The top 25 cars that hold their value best, and the 25 worst. More than 950,000 transactions of five-year-old vehicles in the United States, from March 2025 to February 2026. Electric vehicles lose 57.2 % of their value, against 41.8 % for the fleet as a whole and 35.4 % for hybrids.
- iSeeCars. (2026). Tesla prices climb as the rest of the EV market falls. Since the US federal tax credit ended on September 30, 2025, used electric vehicle prices have risen 3.5 % while combustion vehicle prices fell 2.0 %.
- iSeeCars. (2026). Used hybrid demand up 41.8 % as non-Tesla EV prices plunge. In the first quarter of 2026, a non-Tesla electric vehicle took 60.1 days to sell, against 32.4 days for a Tesla, 54.1 for a combustion vehicle and 54.4 for a hybrid.
- IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. (2019). New report on climate impact of electric car batteries (Report No. C444).
- Jing, L., El-Houjeiri, H. M., Monfort, J.-C., Brandt, A. R., Masnadi, M. S., Gordon, D., & Bergerson, J. A. (2020). Carbon intensity of global crude oil refining. Nature Climate Change, 10(6), 526–532.
- Journal de Montréal. (2026). Un répit de 17 milliards pour les pollueurs : les Québécois paient encore (in French).
- L'actualité. (2024). Posséder une voiture coûterait en moyenne 1 310 $ par mois à Montréal (Owning a car reportedly costs an average of $1,310 a month in Montreal).
- La Presse. (2025). Une autonomie d'hiver pour mieux informer les acheteurs de véhicules électriques (A winter range figure to better inform electric vehicle buyers).
- La Presse. (2024). Publicités automobiles : Équiterre veut appliquer « la même recette » que le tabagisme (Car advertising: Équiterre wants to apply "the same recipe" as tobacco). Équiterre recommends that Quebec and Ottawa adopt a Canadian automotive advertising code making disclosure of environmental effects and safety risks mandatory, on the model of tobacco regulation, and calls for a full ban on gasoline vehicle advertising by 2030.
- La Presse. (2026). Comment payer moins pour se déplacer (in French).
- La Presse. (2026). Vailles, F. Quotas sur les véhicules électriques : appauvrir les citoyens, soulager l'industrie [Column, in French].
- Lai, X., Yuan, M., Tang, X., Zheng, Y., & Ouyang, M. (2022). Life cycle assessment of lithium-ion battery production in China. Journal of Cleaner Production, 378, Article 134589.
- Le Devoir. (2026). 1 318 rencontres entre l'industrie fossile et le gouvernement fédéral en un an (1,318 meetings between the fossil fuel industry and the federal government in one year).
- Le Devoir. (2026). Ottawa s'apprête à abroger l'obligation de vente de véhicules électriques (in French). The federal mandate required electric vehicles to make up 20 % of sales for the year and 100 % by 2035; the stricter emissions standard announced in its place is not yet out for consultation.
- Le Réveilleur. (2026). Garder sa vieille voiture thermique, plus écolo… vraiment ? (Keeping your old combustion car: greener, really?) [Video]. YouTube. Source page (in French).
- Levasseur, A., Mercier-Blais, S., Prairie, Y. T., Tremblay, A., & Turpin, C. (2021). Improving the accuracy of electricity carbon footprint: Estimation of hydroelectric reservoir greenhouse gas emissions. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 136, 110433. This is where the 34.5 g CO₂eq/kWh figure comes from: it estimates hydroelectric reservoir emissions and combines them with ecoinvent data for electricity distributed in Quebec in 2017.
- Lei, T., Chen, X., Ma, S., Jing, L., & Guan, D. (2025). A global inventory of methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells and possible mitigation pathways. National Science Review, 12(7), nwaf184. An inventory of 4.5 million abandoned wells in 127 countries; 90 % of leaks come from unplugged wells. The IEA, for its part, uses about 3.5 Mt of methane a year, which illustrates the uncertainty that remains.
- Liu, M. et al. (2026). Real-world life-cycle assessment of industrial-scale lithium-ion-battery hydrometallurgical recycling. Environmental Science & Technology, 60(8), 6203–6214. Operating data from 46 Chinese recycling plants, about half of global capacity in 2023: hydrometallurgy recovering precursors and cathodes directly cuts up to 61 % of emissions compared with the mining route.
- Machala, M. et al. (2025). Life cycle comparison of industrial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling and mining supply chains. Nature Communications, 16, 988. An industrial-scale comparison of the recycling route with the mining route: recycling wins on greenhouse gases, on water and on manufacturing energy.
- Masnadi, M. S., El-Houjeiri, H. M., Schunack, D., Li, Y., Englander, J. G., Badahdah, A., Monfort, J.-C., Anderson, J. E., Wallington, T. J., Bergerson, J. A., Gordon, D., Koomey, J., Przesmitzki, S., Aalund, S., & Brandt, A. R. (2018). Global carbon intensity of crude oil production. Science, 361(6405), 851–853.
- Meng, K. C., & Rode, A. (2019). The social cost of lobbying on climate policy. Nature Climate Change, 9(6), 472–476.
- Milovanoff, A., Posen, I. D., & MacLean, H. L. (2020). Electrification of light-duty vehicle fleet alone will not meet mitigation targets. Nature Climate Change, 10(12), 1102–1107. Closing the gap with a 2 °C-compatible trajectory would take more than 350 million electric vehicles on United States roads by 2050, 90 % of the fleet and half of national electricity demand: electrification alone does not get there.
- Ministry of the Environment, the Fight against Climate Change, Wildlife and Parks (Quebec). (2026). Analyse d'impact réglementaire de l'allègement de la norme véhicules zéro émission (VZE) [PDF, in French]. June 2026. Puts the total net cost of weakening the standard at $17.0 billion through 2035: $2.7 billion in savings for service stations, wholesalers and refineries, $10.3 billion in net costs for consumers and $9.4 billion in social costs from greenhouse gases and air pollutants. The electric fleet expected in 2030 drops from 2 million to 1.2 million vehicles, and 7.2 billion additional litres of fuel are sold through 2035. Its general assumptions, in section 4.3, take a light vehicle driving about 16,500 km a year over an average life of 12 years, or 198,000 km, and average consumption of 7.5 L/100 km for cars and 9.2 L/100 km for light trucks running on gasoline.
- Ministry of the Environment, the Fight against Climate Change, Wildlife and Parks (Quebec). ([no date]). Norme véhicules zéro émission (VZE) (in French). Credit targets imposed on manufacturers, model year by model year, and how they are computed. Targets revised in June 2026: 30 % in 2027, 51 % in 2030 and 80 % in 2035, instead of 45 %, 85 % and 100 %.
- Miotti, M., & Trancik, J. E. (2026). Determinants of electric vehicle emissions savings and costs across locations and individuals. Environmental Research Letters, 21(9), Article 094021.
- Mitchell International. (2026). Plugged-In: EV collision insights, second quarter 2026
- Mueller, N. et al. (2015). Health impact assessment of active transportation: A systematic review. Preventive Medicine, 76, 103–114. Thirty assessments of a modal shift toward walking and cycling: the benefits of physical activity clearly outweigh the risks of collision and pollution exposure, with a median benefit-risk ratio of 9.
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2022). Oil in the sea IV: Inputs, fates, and effects. The National Academies Press.
- Natural Resources Canada. (2026). Fuel consumption ratings [Open dataset].
- Natural Resources Canada. ([n.d.]). Zero-Emission Vehicle Charging in MURBs and Garage-Orphans. Drawing on work by Pollution Probe and the Delphi Group: at least a third of Canadians live in a multi-unit residential building or a dwelling with no driveway or garage.
- Norges Automobil-Forbund, & Motor. (2026). El Prix winter test 2026. Twenty-four models tested down to −32 °C; average loss of 38% against WLTP.
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD due diligence guidance for responsible supply chains of minerals from conflict-affected and high-risk areas.
- P3 group, & Aviloo. (2024). Battery aging in practice. More than 7,000 vehicles from every manufacturer, some beyond 300,000 km: about 95 % of capacity at 30,000 km, 90 % at 100,000 km, then a plateau around 87 % between 200,000 and 300,000 km.
- Peiseler, L., Bauer, C., & Gebhardt, P. (2024). Carbon footprint distributions of lithium-ion batteries and their materials. Nature Communications, 15, Article 9812.
- United Nations Environment Programme. (2020). Guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products and organisations 2020. A French version is offered on the same page, and the document is also deposited in the UNEP document repository. Forty methodological sheets across six stakeholder categories, including the "society" category.
- Quantifying the degradation cost of frequent fast charging across multiple electric vehicle battery chemistries. (2025). Journal of Power Sources. Cells cycled for up to 16 months under five regimes mixing slow and fast charging, passively cooled. In the harshest scenario, no pack replacement on LFP, against three on NMC and twenty on NCA.
- Radio-Canada. (2024). Y a-t-il assez de bornes de recharge au Québec ? More than 9,600 public chargers across some 4,200 sites, 5,600 of them on the Circuit électrique; 9,734 workplace chargers as of 31 March 2024; more than 3.2 million Quebecers live in a multi-unit building.
- Radio-Canada. (2024). La puissance d'Hydro-Québec menacée par le poids des véhicules électriques (Hydro-Québec's capacity threatened by the weight of electric vehicles; in French). Of the 9,000 MW of additional capacity planned by 2035, 2,922 MW would be attributable to vehicle charging alone.
- Radio-Canada. (2024). Grand froid : le jour où Hydro-Québec a atteint sa pointe de frayeur (Deep cold: the day Hydro-Québec hit its peak of fear; in French). On 3 February 2023 demand peaked at 43,124 MW; internal documents show substations called on up to 45 % beyond forecast.
- Radio-Canada. (2025). Quebec suspends the Roulez vert program as of February 1, 2025. The provincial rebate fell from $7,000 to $4,000 on January 1, 2025, then the program was suspended until March 31 for lack of funds. Vehicles registered during that window got nothing at all.
- Radio-Canada. ([no date]). Tableau de bord des prix de l'essence au Québec (in French). Average pump prices collected daily, region by region.
- Ratehub.ca. (2026). Are electric cars more expensive to insure than gas cars?. Ten pairs of 2026 models compared in both of their drivetrains.
- Régie de l'énergie du Québec. (2024). État d'avancement 2024 du Plan d'approvisionnement 2023-2032 (2024 progress report on the 2023-2032 supply plan; in French). Hydro-Québec expects 1,615 MW of load shedding from business and industrial customers for the winter of 2024-2025.
- Recurrent. (2024). EV range by state. Analysis of more than 18,000 electric vehicles.
- Recurrent. ([n.d.]). How long do electric car batteries last? About 15,000 vehicles from 2011 to 2023, recalls excluded: the replacement rate falls from 7.5 % for 2011 models to 0.3 % for those from 2022 on. Average battery size grew by 167 % between 2015 and 2024.
- Recurrent. (2026). Best EV for winter and cold weather range. Telematics from more than 30,000 vehicles: 78% of range kept at 0 °C, 70% at −7 °C.
- Recurrent. (2026). Used electric car prices and market report. The state of the used electric vehicle market and the wave of lease returns, concentrated on the 2023 and 2024 model years.
- Rennert, K., Errickson, F., Cropper, M. L., Muller, N. Z., Pizer, W. A., Kingdon, C., & Anthoff, D. (2022). Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO2. Nature, 610(7933), 687–692.
- Roulez électrique. ([n.d.]). Le bonus-malus, une solution incontournable (The bonus-malus, an unavoidable solution). Quebec's additional registration fee targets engine displacements of 4 litres and more, from $36.75 to $161 a year. The author shows that displacement is a poor criterion and proposes basing the surcharge on fuel consumption and the emissions that follow from it.
- Roulez électrique. (2026). Et si votre borne de recharge vous payait ? Ce n'est pas une arnaque, c'est la réalité [in French]. Describes Club Grizzl-E, run by the manufacturer United Chargers, which monetizes Clean Fuel Regulations credits on behalf of its customers: 3 to 5¢ per kWh to start, up to 10¢ after 5,000 kWh accumulated, paid monthly through 2034, and taxable. To be read knowing that the publisher sells the eligible chargers.
- Roulez électrique. (2026). Nouveau Code de construction : les bornes de recharge deviennent obligatoires au Québec. Chapter V, Electricity, in force 26 March 2026: level 2 infrastructure at every space in new buildings of five units or more. Existing buildings are not subject to it.
- RPM. (2023). Baisse de prix pour tous les modèles Tesla. In January 2023 Tesla cut its Canadian prices overnight: the Model Y, previously sold for up to $85,000, now started at $69,990, the largest cut in the range. In French.
- S&P Global. ([no date]). Canadian oil sands GHG intensity continues 17-year decline. Tracking the greenhouse gas intensity of Canadian oil sands production.
- Service-public.fr (France). ([no date]). Publicités incitant à des pratiques ayant un impact excessif sur l'environnement (in French). Obligations and prohibitions applying to motor vehicle advertising.
- Shaikh, F. (2020). Analysis of Canadian vehicle scrappage programs. International Council on Clean Transportation.
- Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec. (2026). Statistiques de la Société de 1978 à 2024 [PDF, in French]. Companion volume to the 2024 annual management report: 5,085,603 passenger vehicles registered in Quebec.
- Statistics Canada. ([survey discontinued]). Canadian Vehicle Survey. The last reliable source of annual mileage per vehicle in Quebec; its discontinuation after 2009 leaves FAQ 6 without an up-to-date measurement.
- Statistique Québec. (2025). Véhicules en circulation (Vehicles on the road; in French). Fleet registered with the SAAQ as of 31 December each year.
- Stockholm Environment Institute. (2026). Oil-price shocks as a transport crisis: a turning point for fossil dependence. Analyses oil shocks as a transport crisis, and the role of electrification in dampening volatility.
- Thatcham Research. (2026). Electric vehicle blueprint. A 10.7% fall in repair cost as workshops gain experience.
- The Charge Port. (2026). Best EV resale value 2026: 80 EVs ranked. Retention model by model on the US market. The Tesla Model 3 keeps 51.1 % of its value after four years (2022 model year, US$46,990 list price), 62.4 % after three years (2023, $42,490) and 66.2 % after two years (2024, $38,990). A commercial aggregator monetized through affiliate links, compiling CarEdge, iSeeCars, Recurrent and KBB, with a single model year per age point.
- TranSensus LCA. (2025). Towards a European-wide harmonised, transport specific LCA approach. A Horizon Europe project coordinated by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, from January 2023 to June 2025, bringing industry and research together to settle a common life-cycle assessment method for zero-emission road vehicles, across environmental, economic and social dimensions.
- Transport Canada. (2026). Electric Vehicle Affordability Program. The new federal program, in force since February 16, 2026 and running to March 31, 2031 or until funds run out, thirteen months after the previous one closed.
- U.S. Department of Energy, & Argonne National Laboratory. (2024). Impact of cold ambient temperatures and extreme conditions on BEV performance. Cabin heating draws 1.8 to 3.7 kW depending on the technology.
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2026). The EPA automotive trends report. The detailed model-year 2024 file gives, version by version, the vehicle class, the inertia weight used for certification and the production volume. Averages weighted by those volumes, curb weight obtained by removing the 300 lb added to the inertia weight: car 1,520 kg, SUV 1,915 kg, pickup 2,263 kg, minivan 2,044 kg. The SUV comes out within 1 % of the 1,935 kg the ICCT publishes for 2019 from the same source.
- Vera, M. L., Torres, W. R., Galli, C. I., Chagas, C. A., & Flexer, V. (2023). Environmental impact of lithium extraction and refining from salt lake brines. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 4(2), 83–99.