Abstract: The promotion of electric vehicles (EVs) can effectively reduce tailpipe emissions or even achieve zero emissions, but the essence is the transfer of pollution emissions to the power generation side. In recent years, the policy-driven development of China’s EV market has achieved a great success, which has drawn increasing attention to carbon emission transfer behind the large-scale electricity consumption of EVs. Based on the perspective of inter-regional electricity trade, this study builds a quantitative model to measure the carbon emission transfer of EVs under several scenarios, and summarizes the spatial distribution of carbon emission transfer. Furthermore, we analyze the environmental benefits/costs of the large-scale application of EVs. Results showed that the development of electric vehicles will intensify the flow of carbon emissions among regions, and the carbon emissions transfer of EVs under the blocked development scenario, the baseline scenario and the rapid development scenario reach 5.85×10⁶ tons, 9.37×10⁶ tons and 23.43×10⁶ tons CO₂ equivalent respectively. Main path of carbon emissions transfer is the export of carbon emissions from the economically developed coastal regions to the less developed central and western regions, and there is also a large amount of carbon emissions transfer between provinces within the North China and East China power grids. In addition to the direct transfer of carbon emissions from power importers to power exporters, emissions also flow to other regions through power hubs indirectly, resulting in indirect carbon emissions transfer. The amount of indirect carbon emissions transfer in Beijing and Shanghai even exceed 15% of the total carbon emissions transfer. The inter-regional electricity trade has considerable environmental value for the large-scale application of EVs, which is conducive to enhance the overall environmental benefits of the country. Therefore, in the process of rational distribution of the development scale and priorities of EVs, except for paying attention to the overall environmental benefits of EVs, the environmental pressure on the power exporting regions should also be alleviated as much as possible.