China has traditionally had the opposite problem: cars had decent enough emission equipment while coal plants would frequently disable their own (coal contributed to more of Beijing’s problem than vehicle emissions, mainly because of poorly operated heating plants). With the crack down on pollution, that is changing, though the real clean up happens when they move off coal (to NG, renewables, and nuclear).
But it's on a downtrend. I believe it's a lot easier to clean up centralized sources of pollution (power plants) than diffused ones (vehicles).
I'm mostly worried about batteries and the politics and rare earth metals.