6 Minute English from BBC Learning English.com

Hello this is 6 minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil and I'm Beth. I had my first drive in an electric car

yesterday Neil. It was amazing. Electric cars are great in theory but who has the money to buy one?

It's true that electric vehicles or EVs, as they're also called, are expensive.

But in some parts of the world the switch to electric vehicles has been a major

success story in the fight against climate change and it's not just rich people

switching to electric. In India poorer workers are embracing

it too.

Yes in India it's the drivers of small vehicles like motorbikes, mopeds, scooters and rickshaws, known as two and three wheelers, who dominate

the road, and now over half of these are electric.

In this program, we'll be discussing the growing role of electric vehicles in the fight against climate change and as usual we'll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

Great, but first I have a question for you, Neil.

In India, many different vehicles use the road, but which country's car market is the biggest?

Is it A, the U.S. B China or C Japan? Well I'll guess it's the U.S.

that has the world's largest automobile market.

OK, Neil, I'll reveal the answer at the end of the program.

While electric vehicles score better than petrol or diesel cars in most environmental tests, there is some debate about exactly how green they are.

A lot depends on how the electricity is generated in the first place and in India more than three quarters of the

electricity used continues to be generated by coal.

Nevertheless in India the transition to green transport is well underway.

Here's Louise Reebay, head of the Climate Organization C40 Cities, explaining the appeal of EVs to

Greyer Jackson for BBC World Service Program the Climate

...