Age of Electric Cars Is Here ?

 

What They're Saying About Electric Cars Now

In all, 70-80% of all EV charging in the United States is done while the vehicle is parked anyway at home or work. The other 20-30% is at public chargers, and much of that required a special stop and wasted time. But it's such a small slice of the pie that the ICE cars still spend more total time pumping.

"You're screwed if the battery dies."

Sure, just as an ICE car is screwed if it runs out of gas. But who is ass enough to drive someplace where they don't have the range and where there aren't any gas stations? Whether you're an ass isn't determined by what kind of car you have, so EV owners are no stupider than ICE owners. So running out of power in the middle of nowhere simply doesn't happen, and isn't a part of the EV experience. This is a false and made-up objection.

On my same Whistle-stop Tour I mentioned, I spent a couple days on a long highway where charge stations were 150 miles apart, and I got to one and the whole town had its power knocked out by the storm. You can laugh at me and the two other Tesla drivers who were stranded for half the day, but you can also laugh at the two hundred ICE drivers who were lined up for a mile waiting for the gas stations' power to come back on so they could pump gas.

When the power came back on, I was on my way after 15 minutes, while the vast majority of those ICE cars hadn't even moved up in line yet. The idea that EVs are susceptible to some imaginary failure of the infrastructure from which ICE cars are shielded is simply false. Pumping gas requires electricity.

"The battery has to be replaced every few years and costs $40,000."

No, they don't. EV batteries last just as long as, and are far more reliable than, car engines. You're no more likely to need to replace an EV battery than you are your V8. And even if you did, federal law in the United States requires EV batteries to be warrantied for 8 years or 100,000 miles, though California and some other states extend that to 10 years and 150,000 miles, prompting some EV manufacturers to do the same for all 50 states.

The whole premise is also false. EVs don't turn out to be lemons any more or less often than ICE cars. With more than a decade of data, Nissan looked at 400,000 Leafs in Europe and concluded that the oldest batteries should last 22 years. In addition, Tesla — which has also had cars on the road for over a decade — found that once you hit that 50,000 mile mark, you're only likely to lose an average of 5% of your range over the next 200,000 miles.

"The batteries are an environmental and humanitarian disaster."

There is a lot of criticism over the mining of the elements needed to make EV batteries. Lithium, the largest component, is more an issue of supply and demand and cost. It creates ugly open-pit mines but is not particularly dirty or destructive. Most lithium mining is in Australia, which complies very well with environmental regulations.

Cobalt, which is a much smaller component, has historically had the biggest humanitarian impact. Much of the world's cobalt — about three quarters — comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and for most of history cobalt mining was done via manual labor with terrible pay — charitably referred to as artisanal mining — thus many of the workers were children, in conditions that met no imaginable international standards.

Over the past decade or so, the picture has changed dramatically. Demand has surged to the point where child laborers can no longer meet it. About half of Congolese cobalt mines are owned by well-financed Chinese companies, and the vast majority of Congolese cobalt (about 80%) is now produced in mechanized open-pit mines with heavy equipment and not a child laborer in sight. However, cobalt is still profitable even for small mines, and so about 20% of Congo's cobalt is produced by artisanal mines doing things the old way. About 40,000 Congolese cobalt miners today are children, paid some $2 a day. That's a massive improvement over 10 years ago, but it's still obviously a big problem.

It illustrates why it's important to check in on this frequently, because it's such a fluid situation. Most purchasers of cobalt will not accept product if children were employed, and supply chain auditing companies have investigators on the ground throughout Congo reporting instances of child labor. One such company, RCS Global, is contracted by a number of Chinese refineries. In 2018 they found and reported three mines with child labor; since then, they hadn't found any as of a couple years ago. But with 40,000 child miners still out there, it's still a lot of work for a lot of auditors. It's another stark example of what happens with a new industry. New problems have to be solved, and it takes time. We shouldn't expect everything to be perfect from day one; and we just have to work through these problems to get to where we want to be.

"EVs pollute more than gasoline."

To compare how much greenhouse gases are produced by EVs compared to ICE cars, you have to look at the entire product cycle. Everything from the mining, the emissions produced by the mining trucks, through the life of the vehicle, and the recycling of its components. There are countless threads you have to follow to make sure you're finding everything.

Before the first Tesla hit the road, this objection was true. An electric car like the GM Impact, or the earliest hybrids like the first generation Prius, did indeed produce more greenhouse gases than conventional ICE cars. But that was because we were still accepting the fact that we had to do things badly in order to learn to do them well. And when the first Tesla hit the road in 2008 — and began driving — the equation was turned upside down. And ever since then, this has been a false objection. We did a complete Skeptoid episode on this in 2019, titled "No, Electric Cars Don't Pollute More", which you can refer to if you want all the details. The bottom line is that the lifecycle of the average electric car generates half as much greenhouse gas as the average ICE car. Most of that difference comes from the power generation. Even though we still have fossil fuel power plants, the economies of scale from one gigantic generator compared to a million individual car engines is such that EVs are twice as clean. That episode is loaded with authoritative references and citations.

There really aren't any sound objections left to electric cars in general. It's true that they're not for everyone; anyone without the ability to charge at home is probably going to be happier with a dino burner. But like all the factors in these equations, even that one is rapidly moving in the right direction. Unless you object to mind-numbing acceleration and torque, unless you object to whisper-silent cruising, unless you object to a total absence of tailpipe exhaust, it's probably time to put your anti-EV arguments out to pasture.