This story has been co-published by Reasons to be Cheerful and the Outrider Foundation.
At the turn of the century Beijing had one million vehicles. By 2010, just a decade later, the Chinese capital had registered five times as many. And with this gigantic fossil fuel-burning fleet came great clouds of exhaust fumes and gridlocked roads.
In October 2010, a smog linked to vehicle emissions and coal-powered factories descended over the city, creating a spike in respiratory issues. Visibility was so poor that it caused traffic accidents in which at least 32 people died across the country’s northeast region. In November, levels of PM2.5, a tiny particulate matter emitted by combustion engines, soared 20 times higher than the guideline set by the World Health Organization – and led to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing infamously calling the air quality “crazy bad.”
That same year, according to scientific research, air pollution contributed to the premature deaths of more than 1.2 million people in China, many of them in Beijing, which at the time ranked as one of the cities with the dirtiest air on the planet. The wider health impacts of breathing polluted air are dizzying. It can lead to lower birth weights and a higher risk of chronic disease in babies, it can induce childhood asthma, and it can cause cancer, strokes and cardiovascular diseases among adults.
“You got up in the morning, and you’d see this smoggy, yellowish, dark thing,” says Wang Jue, a senior campaign specialist at Greenpeace East Asia based in Beijing. “I was super depressed and felt helpless. Air pollution was a humanitarian problem.”
But today, the skies of Beijing, a city of over 22 million residents, are unrecognizable — and often blue. According to the IQAir World Air Quality Report 2025, produced by a Swiss air quality technology company, Beijing has dropped to the 589th city globally in terms of air pollution, despite being the world’s fifth most populous. Separate analysis of nearly 100 cities around the world recently found that PM2.5 levels in Beijing fell by 48 percent between 2010 and 2024, the highest decrease of any city studied.
It represents a dramatic, world-leading U-turn, and one that ironically has been partly driven by cars, or, more precisely, electric vehicles (EVs).
In fact, a growing body of recent research is linking EVs to cleaner air in cities, showing that the electrification of passenger cars and other vehicles is not only slowing the heating of the planet but also making urban air more breathable.
No country illustrates this trend more clearly than China, which happens to be the world leader in the manufacture and sale of EVs. More than half of all cars sold in China in 2025 were electric.
According to a study published in the journal Nature Health in May, China’s shift to electric cars has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths. The researchers used high-resolution satellite data and machine learning analysis to track air pollution changes across 150 Chinese cities and found that the uptake of so-called “new energy vehicles” — which include battery-electric, hybrid and hydrogen-powered cars — has led to significantly cleaner air. Between 2013 and 2023, levels of PM2.5 pollution dropped by 23.8 percent; PM10, another particulate matter, by 15.06 percent and carbon monoxide by 23.8 percent — compared with a scenario in which all vehicles in these cities had conventional combustion engines. This, according to the researchers’ estimates, means approximately 337,000 non-accidental deaths were avoided.
Globally, outdoor air pollution causes more than four million premature deaths a year.
In other words: A clear public health argument for the adoption of EVs is emerging.
Meng Gao, a professor in the department of geography at Hong Kong Baptist University, and one of the Nature Health paper’s authors, says their research is the first to provide such real-world insight into the positive impact of EVs on cleaner air.
“This topic was previously explored by some studies, but these assumed some of the conditions, whereas we had real and more accurate data,” says Gao, whose team had access to Chinese vehicle registration records and a higher resolution of satellite imagery than is typically used to measure the air pollution.
China is far from the only place benefiting from cleaner air driven by EVs.
Throughout California, the leader for EVs in the U.S., the rapid adoption has also been associated with improved air quality. A recent study in The Lancet Planetary Health journal found that across 1,700 residential areas in the Golden State, for every 200 new “zero-emission vehicle” registrations between 2019 and 2023, nitrogen dioxide levels fell by 1.1 percent on average, and in some cases up to four percent.
“It’s an exciting time for us researchers,” says Sandrah Proctor Eckel, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
“We’re seeing that there really could be an end to tailpipe pollution [thanks to EVs]. It could really make a difference for our health, the health of our kids.”
And Eckel adds that her study data only ran up until 2023, when EVs accounted for five percent of all registered vehicles registered in California. Today, that has increased to about 7.5 percent.
Public health experts even argue that the improvements in air quality brought on by a shift towards “zero-emissions” vehicles could generate a massive economic boost to the U.S. A 2022 report by the American Lung Association, a nonprofit, estimated that a shift to 100 percent sales of zero-emission passenger vehicles by 2035, as well as medium- and heavy-duty trucks by 2040, would generate over $1.2 trillion in public health benefits between 2020 and 2050. It estimates that the shift would avoid over 13 million workdays otherwise lost due to dirty air, nearly three million asthma attacks and 110,000 premature deaths.
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“Clean air impacts people’s health, and we found that the cumulative health benefits are enormous,” says Laura Kate Bender, vice president of nationwide advocacy and public policy at the American Lung Association.
Yet Bender warns that the progress of EVs has recently hit roadblocks in California, which has historically been able to set stronger rules on gasoline-powered vehicles than federal regulations thanks to waivers. Congress has rescinded the state’s authority to outlaw traditional gasoline-powered vehicles after 2035, according to reports by Reuters.
“We know that these policies matter,” says Bender.
The American Lung Association, she adds, has long advocated for federal investment in the national build-out of EV charging stations, not just for passenger cars, but also for trucks, which would create the required infrastructure for long-term take-up.
Back in China, experts echo those sentiments, arguing that the huge leaps in air quality are also thanks to sustained political efforts and investment in EVs and infrastructure.
Beijing, for example, has built thousands of public EV charging stations — and there are now nearly five million nationwide. In 2017, Shenzhen became the world’s first megacity to electrify its entire, 16,359-strong bus fleet. Both cities have introduced subsidies for EVs and restrictions including years-long wait times for license plates for fossil fuel-powered cars, adding to the force of the estimated $29 billion that the Chinese government spent on relevant subsidies and tax breaks for EVs between 2009 and 2022.
“If we want to replace our old vehicle, we need to spend money,” says Professor Gao. “The government should compensate for this cost. It really depends on government policy.”
Other policies in Beijing have also had significant roles in cleaning up the air, including strict emissions controls on coal-fired power plants, the construction of a sophisticated three-dimensional air quality monitoring network and the rollout of public transit networks.
“While electrifying vehicles is one part of the solution, it is important to keep in mind active transport options which likely have even more benefits for reducing air pollution and improving health,” adds researcher Eckel.
Yet there are some causes for concern when it comes to EVs. One is the fact that there have been numerous reported cases of environmental damage and human rights abuses in EV supply chains, notably in the extraction of mineral resources used to make vehicle batteries and at EV manufacturing sites.
Another is that China’s electricity grid still relies significantly on coal, meaning that EVs aren’t necessarily being powered by green energy even if pollution is being cut.
China’s top-speed EV adoption has had its limits, too. Gao’s research found that the “largest improvements in air quality and health were concentrated in economically developed cities,” while less developed, lower-income regions were left behind.
“Outside Beijing, in the provinces, the progress has been slower,” adds Jue.
But that may not be the case for much longer.
Worldwide, more than 20 million EVs were sold in 2025, up a fifth from the year before. And as vehicles across the planet go electric as seen in Beijing, the air people breathe is getting cleaner, and there are likely to be bluer skies ahead.
“I have witnessed the change in my lifetime,” says Jue. “And I am very proud that I am part of it.”