Why electric cars are not the future

How-To Geek

Electric vehicles have often been touted as a way to make personal transport viable while decreasing carbon emissions. An eco-friendly technological miracle that will allow us to continue our lifestyles without any guilt. But in reality, they may not be the solution to our climate woes.

Even if they aren't the only transportation method on the market, electric cars (and other electric vehicles) will almost certainly be a major part of personal transportation in the future. They've been backed by governments worldwide, with tax incentives, infrastructure projects, and laws set to ban the sale of "gas-powered" vehicles across several countries. Almost all major automotive manufacturers are also on board with the concept. For example, Ford has begun producing electric versions of its more famous gas-guzzling models -- like the F150 pickup truck and the Mustang. But if you read between the lines, the likes of Ford are hedging their bets. Ford isn't aiming to go "all-electric" in Europe from 2035, though its electric vehicle output is undoubtedly part of the plan. The company wants its vehicle output to only involve "zero emissions" vehicles, which could mean a few things.

But EVs aren't a golden bullet, they have some glaring issues that mean they may not be the green transport solution we're actually looking for.

Infrastructure is Improving, But Not Enough

There is currently a huge drive to improve EV infrastructure in the United States, with the government and private businessescommitting billions of dollars to various projects. One of those projects involves installing thousands of charging stations across the country. The technology that goes into those chargers, and the batteries they're powering, is also massively improving. Some commercially available electric vehicles can now go over 500 miles on a single chargeand pack in a few hundred miles of range from half an hour of charging time. Humanity hasn't hit the wall on any of those technologies, and they will continue to improve at the top end while things like the 500 mile range will trickle down from extremely high-end vehicles to those within an average person's price bracket.

From an environmental perspective, there's also the question of where the electricity powering EVs comes from. If you live in the US, over 60% of it is from fossil fuels. Coupled with the vehicle's batteries, which are an environmental nightmare to manufacture, EVs are far less green than they first appear.

Then there are other infrastructure issues, like the strain EVs would put on the power grid if everyone bought and had to repeatedly charge one. The adoption of EVs is a gradual thing, not everyone is going to head out and buy one tomorrow and even if they wanted to -- that many cars would take years to manufacture. So there is time to get the power grid ready to take on the extra demand. However, this would involve politicians working together and doing something for the good of the country, so don't hold your breath there.

Some of the Skeptics Will be Hard to Win Over

There will always be some limitations inherent to any technology. With electric vehicles, running out of juice is a significant problem. In an extreme case involving a regular car, you can walk to a gas station, fill a gas can, walk back, and put enough fuel in the vehicle to get it started and drive it to the gas pump. The same scenario in an EV will leave the driver waiting by the roadside until a recharging service shows up to put some juice into their vehicle. This issue isn't too common, it accounts for roughly 4% of EV breakdowns, but that's still a few thousand cases per year as things stand and will only grow as more people get EVs.

Then there's the charging infrastructure itself. A level three charger will give you a few hundred miles of range in around half an hour. Couple that with the argument that a driver should be taking a 30-minute rest every few hundred miles anyway, and a long road trip in an EV suddenly becomes more than feasible. However, that's a level three charger, and despite current EV infrastructure plans being very ambitious, many of the chargers that will be installed are Level Two. Those take far longer to charge a vehicle. Not everyone goes on road trips often, but range and charging times are two significant concerns EV skeptics repeatedly bring up. Even with the improvements in technology and infrastructure, many people will be looking for alternatives. And those alternatives already exist.

What about Hydrogen?

Hydrogen fuel cells, capable of turning the universe's most abundant element into a clean fuel source, were arguably in the same bracket as nuclear fusion. Always five to ten years away and the perfect solution to one of the world's biggest problems. But they aren't five years away; they're here andthey're here, and they work as advertised. The cells work by combining hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen, which as anyone who has done even the most basic science class will know, creates water.

The process also generates electricity, which charges a battery, which then powers the vehicle. This is around three times more efficient than burning gas and has zero emissions beyond water vapor. Refueling takes around the same amount of time as filling a car with gas, and if you break down, a canister of hydrogen would be all you need to get moving again.

Unfortunately, Hydrogen runs into some of the same issues EVs do, and in the case of infrastructure those issues are on a more extreme level. The US has fewer than 50 hydrogen fuel stations, and almost all of those are in the state of California. This lack of infrastructure prevents people from buying one of the few hydrogen cars available, as there's no point in buying something you can't fuel. This, in turn makes manufacturers say there is little demand and refrain from producing hydrogen cars.

Then there's the hydrogen itself. Although it's the most common element in existence, getting pure gas can be tricky. Most of it comes from subjecting natural gas to a high temperature in a process known as "steam reforming."The process is energy-intensive, and the gas then needs to be captured and stored so it doesn't float off into the upper atmosphere. Filling a hydrogen-powered car's tank costs around $65, and that can get you anywhere up to 400 miles. Hydrogen cars are relatively expensive, but tax incentives can drop costs to around $35,000. There is also a chance vehicle and fuel costs would drop sharply if hydrogen became popular.

Biofuel Could Be a Greener Option

The majority of gasoline is made from oil, a fossil fuel. When fossil fuels are burned, a whole host of gases are released into the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) gets the most press but isn't the only "greenhouse gas" released when you burn fossil fuel. Your car's catalytic converter deals with most of them, but no oil-based fuels are particularly gentle on the environment. The difference between biofuel and a fossil fuel can be staggering, with some burning 86% cleaner than regular gas.

The case for biofuels may get even better whenconsider that some scientists claim the fuels are de facto carbon neutral. Those scientists argue that the CO2 released when you burn a biofuel was already present in the atmosphere before the plant used to create the biofuel was growing. It is stored in the plant, and then the fuel, for a relatively short time before being released back into the air. If we used nothing but biofuel, there would be no transport-related impact on atmospheric CO2 levels. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, gained their carbon thousands of years ago when the atmosphere was quite different. That carbon was removed from the equation and buried deep underground. The fact we're drilling for it, then releasing it, is why gas adds to CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

You're also more than likely filling your tank with some form of biofuel already. Most gas you'll buy in the US contains around 10% ethanol, most of which comes from corn. Ethanol burns hotter than gas, so you couldn't just fill your car with pure biofuel and be on your way as things stand, but you can convert an engine to run on fuel with a high ethanol content if you want to. Couple this with the fact manufacturing a car is incredibly energy intensive, and we have an out-of-the-box solution to climate change. With current manufacturing methods and logistics, it takes around two years before the average EV is more climate friendly than a regular car. Suppose you remove the manufacturing process for a standard car entirely by converting an existing vehicle to run on a highly efficient biofuel. In that case, there's a chance it might be the greener solution over a vehicle's lifetime.

Biofuels aren't a total no-brainer, though. They tend to be made from things we eat, things that we feed to animals we eat or at least things that use farmland we could be growing food on. As a result, the amount we could produce without damaging food production is limited. However, combining biofuels with another popular vehicle could make them go a lot further and increase their level of practicality.

There is Another Option

There is a type of vehicle that isn't affected by the issues facing both EVs and hydrogen cars, and has also been available for a long time. With a hybrid, youget many of the positives of EVs, but with a gas tank to back you up if charging isn't an option for whatever reason. You can even use a plug-in hybrid the same way you would use an electric vehicle. Okay, the range on a plug in isn't as impressive, but it's usually more than you need for everyday use.

While some people will argue hybrids aren't a "zero emissions" vehicles, they are a compromise, and they do make up for almost every shortcoming an electric vehicle has. From an environmental standpoint, driving a hybrid is still far better than even the most economical gas-powered cars. And there are ways to make a hybrid even greener.

Even if you don't want to keep a car on the road, biofuel could be a way to make hybrids the environmental golden child of the vehicle world. One of the shortcomings of biofuel is its reduced range compared with pure gasoline, and limits on the overall availability. A gallon of gas will move your car further than a gallon of ethanol. An average hybrid will more than balance this out.

Electric cars are not the future

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Think of a city you know, and try to picture it five years from now. Will its streets be full of electric cars, some of them self-driving? If so, then the current travails of electric vehicles (EVs) will have been a mere speed bump. US sales have slowed well below the governments target, EVs share of the British market has stopped growing and only 1.2 per cent of European passenger cars in 2022 were battery-powered.

We know that some vehicle is going to replace the combustion-engine car. The EU, UK, California and several other US states will ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035, with the phasing out starting much earlier. So what will most drivers shift to? Will they take up electric cars in effect, just a cleaner version of what they already had or switch modes of transport altogether? My bet is that, in cities at least, the e-car wont be the vehicle of the future. I suspect it will keep falling further behind e-bikes, e-mopeds and e-scooters.

Electric cars biggest downside is the upfront price currently 30 or 40 per cent higher than for combustion vehicles. EVs may simply be too expensive to expose to the daily vicissitudes of city streets. (The car rental agency Hertz is selling a third of its electric fleet partly because of high damage costs.)

EVs also emit more carbon over their life cycle than any form of urban transport except petrol cars. They are still worthwhile for people in sprawling suburbs, who drive long distances every day and who will earn back the emissions and the financial outlay by never buying gas again. Heavily used communal vehicles, such as buses and taxis, should go electric, too.

But an electric car doesnt make sense for individual urbanites. Few of them drive enough. European car mileage has been falling since 2000. In Britain, 57 per cent of cars are driven less than 100 miles a week, calculates the consultancy Field Dynamics. Even in the US, about half of car journeys in the busiest cities are less than three miles. Many urbanites now probably drive a car because they have a car. But if they can find a way not to pay $50,000 for an EV (or in some places, to buy just one rather than two) they will slash their cost of living.

EVs face many other obstacles. Cities are reclaiming space from cars. Paris, where I live, is holding a referendum on February 4 on a special parking tax for heavier SUVs. In a few years, mayors might start tackling self-driving cars. These are so convenient that if they ever became affordable for the mass market, almost everyone would buy one, and they would clog up cities.

Then theres the problem of charging EVs. Suburbanites with home garages can install chargers, but the lack of public chargers on city streets hasnt become a major issue yet only because so few people own EVs. (The same goes for the shortage of lithium for batteries.) Even if you find an urban charger that works, charging can take hours.

Crucially, too, most of the worlds EVs are made in China, so there wont be an aggressive western lobby easing their way. On the contrary, governments may well raise tariffs to block them rather than let China devastate yet another western industry.

For a city-dweller ditching a petrol car, the calculation then becomes: instead of an EV, can I buy a much cheaper, health-giving e-bike that I can charge in my flat, and supplement with the odd taxi ride? That is the trend. European and US car sales peaked in 2019. About 5.5 million e-bikes were sold in the EU in 2022, against just two million electric cars. Many car-owners now use bikes for short trips. E-bikes are even making the self-preserving leap tostatus symbol, with Lamborghini and Maserati producing fancy models, and Porsche developing bike motors, batteries and software.

Bikes are also becoming a cultural urban norm. I see this in Paris, where only one in three households now owns a car, and cycle paths are full even in January, something that I used to be told would never happen. Bikes move faster in Paris than cars, city halls statistics show.

Then there are all the other electrical options. Worldwide, according to Bloomberg, there are 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers compared with just 20 million passenger EVs. Looking back in five years, we may conclude that electric cars were made for American suburbia and for almost nowhere else.

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Letters in response to this article:

Analysis of Norway EVs overlooks its hydro riches/From Phillip Hawley, La Jolla, CA, US

No stopping Norways embrace of electric vehicles / From Harald N Rstvik, Professor Emeritus, Sustainable City Planning, University of Stavanger, Norway