I wonder what's the environmental cost of: producing and disposing of car batteries, and upgrading our power grid (as well as generation capacities) to produce the amounts of energy that switch to electric cars would require.
If you're really curious, this subject is of course extensively studied. I mostly follow EIA and NREL reports. Both organizations take an annual census of the state of involved technologies.
The environmental cost of switching to electric vehicles is quite low with the caveat that cobalt mining can produce concentrated heavy metal pollution. This is unlikely to be a problem as cobalt mining will diversify from third world countries, specifically Congo. There is a modest increase in manufacturing energy (~30% iirc) which is made up rapidly by electricity (within a year if powered by renewables- a car burns its own weight in gas in several years).
The cost of renewable plants is quite reasonable if you replace old plants, and grid scale batteries are now also cheap. A solar power plant with a 3 day battery backup now costs less than an equivalent nuclear plant. Natural gas is exceptionally cheap but it cant scale fully. Renewables get cheaper at scale. The grid itself will probably not need many upgrades, or even any upgrades. Power draw fluctuates 50%+ between day and night, and electric cars will charge overwhelmingly at night. If we switched all cars to electric it eould increase residential draw by 30-40% (11 kWh per day). The grid will sustain that easily except for specific locations with abnormal charging times or high distance driving.
