Even if the CO2 balance would be a close call right now - one needs to take into respect that over the lifetime of an electric car, the electricity production in most places is going to have a much reduced carbon footprint. And of course, electric cars don't produce local pollution and create much less noise. Finally, electrical cars are an important step in producing batteries cheap enough for energy storage applications.
Indeed. When everyone has a combustion engine, the problem is completely decentralised and hard to solve. When everyone has an electric engine, the problem is centralised (the power plants).
On the other hand, cars have a much shorter lifespan than power plants. The average age of a European car is 10 years. What's the average age of a power plant?
Furthermore, adding more EVs on the roads means more EVs on home charging stations at night and when parked at work during the day. In turn this means more opportunities to develop large scale demand side management for the power grid and therefore make it easier / cheaper to integrate a larger fraction of cheap and low carbon but intermittent renewable energies such as wind and solar.
