+1 to cities needing to be less car friendly regardless of how they're manufactured, but the reality is that large parts of the world (especially the US), there's just huge, huge, huge amounts of investment in a (yes, broken) model of urban planning that requires cars. Undoing that will be really hard and I don't think we can afford to wait – we should take every solution we can find, even if it's partial.
We can't go around saying "Everyone go EV to solve climate change!" because it's not a solution, it's an iterative step to a mid-point towards a carbon neutral society.
What we need to be saying is "Walk, bike, or ride the bus if you can. If you can't, look at your community and figure out why you can't, then work to change your community so you can. And in the mean time, drive an EV if you can afford it, or a fuel efficent used ICE if you can't."
Given how efficient even something like a coal power plant is compared to vehicle engine (with a transmission, and stopping and going at traffic lights every so often), this is incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible in realistic conditions.
Where are you getting those numbers?
But actually, I probably should have said "highly efficient ICE or hybrid" rather than reasonably efficient. It's been a while since I ran those numbers and the piece of info my brain stored was "Don't get an EV until I can charge it from solar". Either way, my overall point stands - EVs don't actually lead to the major emissions cuts advertised in most real world scenarios.
How many crossovers do you see on the market get >66mpg?
Also, this is entirely ignoring the transmission factors, this is purely a gallon of gas on its own being burned compared to the production at the plant. In reality you'd need to add a significant amount more emissions to the gas as there's tons of trucks having to drive that fuel to local fuel stations all over the place, meanwhile transmission of the electrical energy is pretty darn efficient in comparison.
https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...
https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php?m...
I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago, and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a full lifecycle analysis.
And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture, most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.