Electric and combustion vehicles

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 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 · Arval, 24 000 certificates · Geslin et al., Nature Energy, 2024 · ADAC, long-term ID.3 test

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The other side of depreciation: buying used. The drop the first owner takes is the second owner's discount, and a used electric vehicle adds no manufacturing to the balance sheet: vehicle and battery are already paid for in carbon, only the electricity remains to be counted. On the wallet side, écoconso compared five models over five years at 15 000 km a year with the Brussels Region's cost calculator: the used electric comes out cheaper than the new gasoline version on four of the five, by up to €207 a month for a BMW X1, and that with electricity at €0.33 per kWh, more than four times the Quebec rate. Here the gap can only widen.

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.

Others settle it by convention. Clean Energy Canada applies the same depreciation rate to both powertrains, for lack of a method that commands consensus. It computes that rate on the list price, rebate not deducted. This convention assumes the used market does not take the rebate off the resale price, and it favours the electric vehicle. Yet the end of the US credit, above, shows the opposite: rebates weigh on used prices.

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 · écoconso, used electric at total cost (in French) · Clean Energy Canada, depreciation by convention, 2026

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?” The use we picture is not the one we live. A US survey by Strategic Vision shows it: nearly 90% of pickup buyers never use their truck for work, and nearly 40% drive it purely for pleasure at least once a week. What they buy, says the firm’s president, is the self they would like to be: behind the wheel, more confident, more capable, more secure. Psychologist Linda Steg adds social standing: a car also displays one’s position, and advertising plays on power, status and self-esteem. That is one of the reasons advertising regulation is being called for, as the Beyond the vehicle section sets out.

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 · Carscoops, the Strategic Vision survey, 2025 · Steg, Transportation Research Part A, 2005

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.

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:

1. Preheat the cabin and the battery while the vehicle is still plugged in, since that heat then comes from the grid.
2. Use the heated seats and steering wheel, which warm the person rather than the volume of air.
3. Choose a model with a heat pump.
4. 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)

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.

Five steps, in this order.

1. 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.
2. Look at the block heater outlet. An ordinary 120 V outlet gives back at least fifty or so kilometres a night, according to the Société d’habitation du Québec, which recommends starting from existing outlets. That is more than the forty or so driven each day. In Calgary, over a year of real trips, 120 V charging would have been enough for 29 % of the 129 vehicles followed, and only 18 % would have needed a fast charger twelve or more times a year. Three conditions. The outlet must stay powered, whereas a timer or thermostat often cuts block heater outlets. It should be alone on its circuit, with no extension cord. And the owner or the syndicate must agree, sometimes for a monthly flat fee. Québec.ca warns that this kind of charging may not be enough for a fully electric vehicle: true for those who drive a lot, less so for the average driver.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

What we take from this. Do not try to reproduce the bungalow’s charger: 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 · ChargeHub, charging station map · Société d’habitation du Québec, 120 V charging (in French) · Fried et al., level 1 charging in Calgary, 2024 · Hydro-Québec, charging in multi-unit buildings (in French) · CAA-Québec, charging on 120 volts, 2026 (in French) · Québec.ca, how to charge

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 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)

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 about 8 million new cars, shows that plug-in hybrids emit five times more in real conditions, on average, than their type-approval values. The gap widened from 265 % in 2021 to 400 % in 2023.

And it keeps widening. For the 220 000 plug-in hybrids registered in 2024 that the European Environment Agency tracks, Transport & Environment finds 145 g of CO₂ per kilometre on the road, against 24 g in official tests: six times more, on average. That is barely 14 % less than a conventional gasoline car.

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.

The wallet says the same. Clean Energy Canada compared the gasoline Toyota RAV4 with its hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions, and with the electric bZ, over ten years. The bZ saves $26 209 and the conventional hybrid $6 396. The RAV4 plug-in hybrid falls between the two, at $9 610 to $12 011, depending on its electric share, from 40 to 69 %. And it costs $2 760 more than the bZ to buy.

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.

And the conventional hybrid? Not being plug-in, it is a gasoline vehicle that burns less: pick it from the list of gasoline models, a Prius or a Corolla Hybrid for instance. Over its life cycle, a medium-sized conventional hybrid emits 21 % less than its gasoline equivalent, according to a 2022 European analysis.

Catalogue of plug-in vehicles, Équiterre · ICCT, 2026 · Transport & Environment, EEA data, 2026 · Clean Energy Canada, the RAV4 in four powertrains, 2026 · Transport & Environment, hybrid life cycle, 2022

Yes, for a third of the question. Going electric acts on only one of the three levers of mobility, the one this tool measures. The other two are within your reach, and the most important one does not rest on you alone.

Being an environmentalist means knowing that we are part of an Earth system we are throwing off balance, and working with others to keep the world habitable for the living of today and tomorrow, by changing the rules of the game first, not only one's own habits. Changing your vehicle is an individual act. A good one, but an individual act.

The IPCC's sixth assessment report sorts mobility levers by what they act on: the need, the mode or the machine.

• Avoid: reduce the need to travel, by bringing housing, jobs, schools and services closer together.
• Shift: change the mode, to walking, cycling or public transit.
• Improve: make the machine emit less.

This tool measures only the third lever, and it finds it powerful: more than five times fewer emissions over the life of the vehicle, and lower pressure on nine of the ten themes, mineral resources excepted. But this lever removes not one kilometre driven, not one vehicle on the road, not one square metre of city given over to the car. A fully electrified fleet would still exert pressure across every theme.

What the other two levers bring. 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, and what each of those modes costs society is priced in The choice of mode, before the choice of vehicle. These modes also give what carbon does not count: active mobility is associated with better cardiovascular health indicators, and going without a vehicle frees up a considerable budget, about $1 310 a month in Montreal according to a study cited by L'actualité, close to $16 000 a year.

A middle ground between owning a vehicle and doing without. The electric-assist bicycle replaces driving alone, not walking or the bus, Équiterre points out; and car sharing makes going without a vehicle realistic where the service exists. It also changes the balance sheet of those who drive little: below 5 000 km a year, and for the same distance travelled, a shared electric vehicle emits up to 89% less over its life cycle than a private one, a shared gasoline vehicle 63% less. It is the lifetime mileage slider seen from the other side: a car that is barely driven never amortises its manufacturing, whereas a shared vehicle spreads it over the kilometres of several households.

What 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.

What does not rest on you alone. Avoiding and shifting are only within reach where transit, bike lanes and planning make them practical. Those conditions are decided at city council, in the National Assembly and in infrastructure budgets. Being an environmentalist in mobility therefore plays out as much in voting, in public consultation and in support for transit projects as it does at the dealership.

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. And if a personal vehicle remains indispensable, 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) · Nong et al., Transportation Research Part D