EVs are expensive because many of their parts are expensive, particularly batteries. To make EVs appear affordable, governments subsidize their purchase, the subsidy being paid by everyone in the tax base. Charging stations are likewise subsidized both as to their construction and installation as well as the actual rate per kilowatt-hour.
In contrast, fossil-fueled vehicles (FVs) are currently relatively expensive to operate because fossil-fuels are heavily taxed, the opposite of a subsidy. Governments use the revenue from fossil-fuels to maintain the roads, but over time, that revenue will disappear as EVs displace FVs, and it will have to be made up from some other source, likely EVs and electricity. At some point in the future, we can expect that all vehicles will be EVs, and their fuel, electricity, will have to be taxed at rates similar to that currently for fossil-fuels. In other words, electricity is going to become very expensive.
Complicating that is the current push for 'renewable energy': wind and solar. Barring some near-miraculous technological leap, it is clear to everyone who studies the available data that all renewable energy sources combined cannot supply enough energy to support even a 20th-century 1st-world civilization. Failing to develop nuclear power, our standard of living is going to devolve drastically, perhaps to a standard that George Washington would find tolerable. 21st-century Americans will not like being pushed back 200 years.
So, if renewable energy can't handle even today's demand, where is all this electricity we're currently using coming from? In large part, it's coming from coal and other similarly dirty fuels. It may be that EVs are actually more polluting than FVs.
There is also the issue of facility availability. People who own homes will have the option of having their own personal charging station, but renters, especially apartment dwellers, will probably not. They will be forced to rely on public charging stations, paying a surcharge for the use of the facility and dealing with either long waiting lines or appointments. While FVs 'recharge' in 5 minutes, EVs take hours. This will also play heavily into the economics of 'road trips'. Drive 6 hours, recharge for 3 hours. That's a whole day of travel for some people. A coast-to-coast road trip will take 10 days, 9 overnight stays in hotels along the way. As of right now, long road trips are too expensive for EV owners, put aside the fact that recharging facilities may not be available where and when needed for such an adventure.
One proposed solution to the problem of "recharge time" is to make batteries easily swappable. When an EV arrives at a recharge station, its battery is measured for charge, pulled, replaced with a fully-charged battery, and the driver pays the difference between charge levels, possibly with a fixed fee for labor to do the swap. If the swap can be done reasonably quickly (less than 20 minutes) it gives the travelers time to visit the restroom, grab something to eat/drink, and get back to their car. For this to be feasible, all cars will have to share a single interface to their battery. There may be many manufacturers or brands of battery, but they all have to fit into the same space and connect the same way.
Along the way from here to there, we will have to maintain parallel service facilities, one for EVs and another for FVs. The chain of gas stations we today take for granted took 120 years to develop, but we need the same thing for our EVs to be ready tomorrow.
Not going to happen. It's especially not going to happen when the ordinary consumer realizes how much this is all going to cost. EVs are going to prove to be economically unfeasible.
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Update 6/26/23: It's starting.
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Whether EVs can scale up to becoming the primary model is questionable. Or at least how long it would take them to do so is.
ReplyDeleteBut that's not the same thing as them being "economically unfeasible." A product does not have to become the only thing in a whole sector to be profitable/useful. The primary condiment is probably ketchup or mustard, yet makers of sriracha also manage to operate profitably in niche markets.
My "daily driver" is a cheap electric bicycle. I'm thinking of upgrading, and haven't decided whether to stick with something like that, or something with longer range (a gas scooter or motorcycle). But it does do the job I bought it for, and for the price it was a decent deal (I didn't take a tax credit or anything). When I'm out alone rather than with family, it gets me to/from/around town on a single charge. And in traffic, it gets me most places as fast as, or faster than, a car would. Of course, I live in Florida where weather is generally good for that kind of transportation. I wouldn't want to be an electric bike rider in Buffalo right now.
Ditto for electric cars -- some people who don't do "road trips" and can charge at home will buy and use them for their daily commutes, etc.
I see that some rental car outfits are investing in large numbers of EVs. Presumably they'll need to rent them for either short range-travel or come up with plans to e.g. exchange the vehicles or batteries along long-distance routes since people don't want to sit around for hours every day while driving from Miami to San Francisco. Other local "fleets" may find them attractive, especially ones that operate X hours a day over a short range and can charge the vehicles overnight.
I don't see any government-backed "drive to all-electric" being successful, especially in the short term, but the market probably has a number of profitable niches for these vehicles even if the subsidies go away (as they should).