What will happen if we all switch to electric cars

By Isabella Storyclaire

last updated September 18, 2024

Contributions sourced from

What Will It Take to Transition to Electric Cars?

Q: How much impact can electric vehicles have in the overall effort to fight climate change?

They can be crucial. While it varies by country, transportation is usually a third or more of total carbon dioxide emissions. And for a long time, people thought that transportation would be one of the two hardest sectors to decarbonize, alongside industry. Electric vehicles are changing the equation; the door suddenly is wide open to decarbonizing light-duty transportation. Thats a huge shift in how we think about pathways forward.

Q: Beyond emissions, whats shaping electric vehicle adoption? Whats exciting about them? What hurdles remain?

Operating and maintenance costs are a lot lower for electric vehicles. They are very quiet and because they have amazing low-speed torque, theyre really fun to drive. All of thats exciting.

One of the biggest challenges is range anxiety. People feel uncomfortable getting an electric vehicle because theyre worried about finding charging stations and the time it takes to recharge.

In practice, this is not a concern for people in their daily commute; this is not a concern going on errands and picking up children from school. However, range anxiety is a real concern for longer trips, and people make buying decisions based on having the option to take longer trips.

This is slowly being overcome, both from a build out of charging stations and from longer range batteries hitting the market. If you have a 400-mile battery, which some of the offerings on the market today have, it becomes much easier to not worry. Its unusual to drive more than 400 miles in a day even on a long trip.

Q: Where do things stand with charging infrastructure?

Theres a technology piece. Typical charging stations take about 10 hours to fully charge long-range electric vehicles. Basically, the cars need to be plugged in overnight. But there are also DC fast-charging stations which draw at a higher voltage and fill up the battery much more quickly. In half an hour, some of the long-range electric vehicles will recharge to 75% or more. Its not as quick as filling up your tank with gasoline, but its pretty fast. It allows you to get a cup of coffee, relax a little bit.

There arent that many DC fast chargers in the country yet because they are much more costly to put in, and they require dedicated infrastructure. A bank of chargers, say on I-95, will draw from the electric grid in a substantial way.

From an economics perspective whats interesting is that this is a two-sided market with network effects. If you have more electric vehicles out there, more charging stations are going to be put in. If you have more charging stations, people are more likely to buy electric vehicles.

Tesla just went out and built charging infrastructure for their own cars. But if we really want to go from electric vehicles being 4% of the sales in the U.S. to 60%, were going to need a lot more charging stations.

That is a real challenge and its a challenge that the federal and state governments can play a role in facilitating, both through providing funding towards charging station infrastructure and by helping with permitting and expediting regulatory red tape.

Q: You mentioned electric vehicles reaching 60% of U.S. sales. Where does that number come from?

Many industry forecasts project that by 2035 to 2040, we are going to be at 60% given current regulations and technology trajectories. The Biden administration has a goal of 50% by 2030. And the state of California has a goal of phasing out new internal combustion engine vehicles entirely by 2035, which is pretty ambitious but other places have similar goals.

Q: Consumers dont necessarily know whether the electricity coming into their homes is from renewable or fossil-fuel-based sources. Does that play into the value of electric vehicles?

In terms of carbon intensity, electricity is generally coming from cleaner sources than burning gasoline. And thats only going to improve. Renewables are the largest new-generation sources coming on to replace sources that are being retired.

Everyone agrees that electricity is actually the easiest sector to decarbonize. We have reasonable and low-cost substitutes to fossil fuels. There will be challenges in going to high market shares of renewables, but we can do it. It will just take some time.

Q: What about the environmental impact of EV batteries?

I co-authored a paper in Nature Communication with Paul Wolfram, who was then a Yale School of the Environment PhD student and is now a postdoc at the Joint Global Change Research Institute. Looking at the full supply chains and all the indirect emissions, we compared the total environmental cost of electric and fossil-fuel powered vehicles.

Its true there are environmental impacts from mining metals for EV batteries and there are embodied emissions in creating batteries. Those are important factors that needs to be considered. But when we account for everything in EV supply chains and compare it to the supply chain of gasoline, as well as all the things that go into making a conventional internal combustion engine and the burning of gasoline, it turns out that electric vehicles are significantly better from an environmental perspective. This was not fully understood until our analysis incorporated all the components.

Q: Youve also looked at how consumers make a decision about whether to buy an electric vehicle.

My research tries to disentangle all the aspects of the consumer decision using data on all the purchases of vehicles in the U.S., as well as surveys and stated choice experiments. I also try to understand how those decisions have been changing over time as more electric vehicles are introduced and people have more information.

I found that network effects are powerful. An example of this would be, if your neighbor has an electric vehicle, talking to them and hearing how they like itthats effective in changing your perception of electric vehicles. Or if youre a Mustang person, when the Mustang Mach-E came out, youre going to say, Theres an electric version of the car I like. Maybe I should check it out. Even if you dont care about the environment, the low-speed torque, the quietness, the great feel of driving are all attributes of electric vehicles that people may not be aware of until they experience them firsthand. Those very real benefits can change how people perceive electric vehicles and can shift the calculus around range concerns.

Q: Another behavioral component that youve studied is total cost of ownership. Would you explain that?

People tend to substantially underestimate the running costs of a car. I have a paper in Nature that elicits consumer beliefs about the running costs a gasoline car. People do a decent job estimating how much they spend on fuel but then they underestimate the overall running costs by about 50% when you include all of the other costs.

Many of those costs would decline with electric vehicles, particularly maintenance costs. There is either a behavioral bias or an information gap; people systematically underestimate their running costs in a way would lead them to over-adopt gasoline vehicles relative to electric vehicles if they had full information.

Id make the case that total cost of ownership should be labeled on new vehicles. That would be very likely to increase sales of electric vehicles.

We have a very clear fuel economy label on every new vehicle. Id make the case that total cost of ownership should be labeled on new vehicles. That would be very likely to increase sales of electric vehicles.

Large segments of the consumer population who buy new cars dont care about climate change or emissions. But they do care about the amount of money that theyre spending, including total operating costs. Not having to bring their car to the shop as muchthat is a very appealing aspect of many electric vehicles thats not always accounted for.

If were going to be decarbonizing light-duty transportation, were going to need everyone eventually to be switching. It only makes sense to appeal to the various reasons they might want to do so.

Q: How much might electric vehicles change the future of how cars are used?

Electric vehicles are a natural segue into fully autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles.

For example, a few startups, including Electreon, are putting charging infrastructure in the roads to let vehicles recharge while they drive. The technology that connects a vehicle to the road could allow a whole set of other connections.

You dont necessarily have to have electric vehicles to have autonomous vehicles or connected vehicles. But new technologies can lead automakers and regulators to think about the world outside the box that weve been living in for a long time, in a way that could help us reimagine transportation more broadly.

Another direction might be resiliency benefits from vehicle batteries to the electric grid. The Ford F-150 Lightningan electric pickup that will come out later this yearcan, with some modification of your homes electric panel, keep at least some circuits of your house up and running during a power outage.

These battery-to-grid possibilities maybe a little oversold right now, but the potential is real. It could allow us to manage the grid with higher penetration of renewables. If youre really reliant on renewables and you hit a period when the suns not shining and the winds not blowing. maybe at some point you can also take advantage of the fact that half of the households in the country will have electric vehicles with stored electricity in batteries.

Its pretty exciting to think about the new innovations that are coming to our world in the next decade.

Q: Encouraging the transition to electric vehicles is part of a national, and global, argument about climate change. How do you frame the climate issues were facing?

Climate is among the most serious issues of our day. Theres no question about that. The science is incredibly clear that the impacts of climate change are going to be real and notable. While we cant entirely eliminate those impactssome are already happeningif we really start tackling climate change, there is time to reduce them.

It will cost us something, but by dealing with climate change we will get benefits long into the future and co-benefits today, including things like reduced air pollution, reduced asthma cases, and reduced hospital admissions.

From my perspective, theres also strong reason to implement prudent policies to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change. They can be seen like insurance policies.

Q: Are these policies we would implement at state, federal, or global level?

Its going to have to be all of the above. In an ideal world, all the national governments would get together and implement carbon prices that are sufficiently high to really push the needle. If that happened, I believe we could deal with climate change, in a substantive way, in a matter of a decade or two if everyone did it. But unfortunately, the politics dont appear to be pointing in that direction.

A Push for Electric Vehicles

President Biden yesterday set an ambitious goal for the transition to electric vehicles: By 2030, half of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. should be electric.

Executives from the three largest U.S. auto companies joined Biden at the White House, pledging that 40 to 50 percent of their new car sales would be electric by the end of the decade.

Electric vehicles are a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen, Biden said. The question is whether we will lead or fall behind in the race for the future.

Can an electric-car revolution happen in less than a decade? Today well explain the possibilities and potential pitfalls, with help from our colleague Coral Davenport, who covers climate change.

A major change

Electric vehicles are part of Bidens effort to address climate change. Gas-powered vehicles are the biggest single source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., producing more than a quarter of the countrys total emissions.

A rapid shift from fossil-fueled combustion engines to electric vehicles is an essential step toward mitigating climate change, Coral said. You cant solve climate change without getting rid of them. Biden is moving to strengthen auto mileage and pollution standards as well.

His electric-car push is also an attempt to keep American industry competitive. As our colleagues Jack Ewing and Neal Boudette report, Europe and China are using regulations and subsidies for automakers to bolster electric vehicles. Europe has proposed banning sales of gas-powered cars by 2035. Chinese automakers are expanding, with government help, into new markets around the world.

Reaching Bidens goal will require rapid change. In June, less than 4 percent of the new cars sold in the U.S. were electric or plug-in hybrids.

But the shift to electric vehicles has accelerated this year, beginning with General Motors announcement in January that it would phase out petroleum-powered cars by 2035. Other automakers followed suit, including Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Daimler, the worlds largest maker of heavy trucks. Ford introduced an electric version of its F-150 pickup truck, the best-selling vehicle in the U.S.

Experts and chief executives of major car companies think Bidens goal is reachable. Its feasible, technologically, to replace most cars already on the road with equally affordable and powerful electric models within the next decade, Coral said.

Will consumers bite?

As governments work to make electric vehicles more available, the biggest question is whether people will buy them.

The consumer in the middle of America just isnt there yet, one St. Louis-area car dealer told The Wall Street Journal this year. The long distances some people drive and the lack of widespread charging stations are obstacles to making the switch.

There are around 43,000 charging stations in the U.S. today. Biden has called for building a network of 500,000 chargers within the decade, though the latest version of his infrastructure bill includes just half of the $15 billion in funding he proposed.

Electric vehicles also tend to carry higher sticker prices than their gas counterparts. Europe and China have offered cash incentives to consumers, and more affordable options in the U.S. are becoming available. One M.I.T. study found that, factoring the costs of fuel and maintenance, electric cars may save drivers money.

Challenges ahead

Most experts say the countrys power grid can handle millions of new electric cars, but it will take careful planning, our colleague Brad Plumer has written. If every American drove an electric vehicle, the U.S. could end up using about 25 percent more electricity than it does today.

The wholesale conversion of the transportation system and electric power system are World War II-scale enterprises, and its just starting, Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer, told The Times.

Some labor unions have also expressed concerns about the shift, since electric vehicles require fewer workers to assemble than gasoline-powered cars or trucks. Biden hopes to offset any potential job losses by growing the countrys capacity to manufacture electric vehicle batteries, Coral told us.

But thats a big lift, she said. Most of the materials for making the batteries are found in Asia, and about 70 percent of the electric vehicle battery manufacturing business is already in China.

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In Cooking With Paris, on Netflix, Hilton prepares themed meals using glittering cooking utensils for famous friends like Kim Kardashian West and Saweetie. The show was inspired by a viral YouTube video of Hilton from last year, in which she made lasagna, and it plays into her heiress persona. Excuse me, sir, what do chives look like? she asks a worker in one episode. What do I do with it?

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