Battery electric vehicles have been the ray of hope for automotive sales during the pandemic, rising to 4.7% of the market in the UK. In Europe, JATO figures put the percentage of BEVs, Hybrid EVs and Plug-in Hybrid EVs at 18% of total registrations in July. But despite the burgeoning sales, as I discussed a few weeks ago, there’s a lot of negativity about EVs, fueled by fear of change and possibly by those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Huge arguments ensue online about EVs, so here are four of the most frequent themes, and why they are missing the mark by an electric mile.
EVs Are Made with Polluting Minerals Mined by Children
This image is often used to show how horrible lithium mining is – except that it’s actually the … [+]
Hearing this argument from anyone proposing that vehicles running on oil-based fuel are more eco-friendly than EVs makes you wonder whether they ever watch the news. The atrocious spill in Mauritius is just the latest in a very long list of disasters caused by the oil industry, any of which are far worse than the lithium mine image that is regularly trotted out as it if proves once and for all that EVs are EV-il. Except that the picture isn’t even a lithium mine – it’s a copper mine.
However, there’s no need to resort to “whataboutery” when addressing this criticism. There are two main sources of lithium, and mines are only one of them. The other is brine water. In other words, the sea. The vast majority (87%) of lithium comes from this source, which involves a lengthy evaporation process that doesn’t involve child labor at all. There is absolutely loads of lithium around, with vast reserves in Chile, Australia and China, so we’re unlikely to run out. And you can bet none of these people complaining about the lithium in EVs have complained about its use in the over six billion mobile phones in ownership in the world today, nor the over a billion laptops.
Cobalt is the other rare mineral that gets people wound up about EVs, and there are some valid concerns about its extraction in DR Congo in particular. However, Cobalt has been used in most lithium ion batteries for decades, so as argued above, if you’re going to criticize EVs, stop using a mobile phone or a laptop first. However, there’s a solid financial reason why EV makers are reducing and eventually hope to eliminate cobalt from their batteries – it’s hugely expensive, and one of the main contributors to the comparatively high purchase price of EVs (see below). Tesla
EVs Are A Fire Hazard
No, EVs are not more likely to catch fire than fossil fuel cars – they’re actually much LESS likely … [+]
A recent recall of the Ford Kuga PHEV due to battery fire risk has really stoked the myth that EVs are too flammable – if you’ll forgive the pun. Another popular follow-up is mentioning the infamous crashing of a Rimac Concept_One electric hypercar by TV presenter Richard Hammond during an episode of The Grand Tour. This rather misses the point that he didn’t crash because it was an EV, but because he wasn’t sufficiently good a driver to control the vehicle. He was driving again a month later, anyway, but could well have been dead if it was a petrol vehicle, which would have gone down in a ball of flames rather than the slower burning of an EV.
It is true that lithium ion batteries have very different fire characteristics to fossil fuel engines. Lithium ion batteries do produce quite poisonous fluoride gases when on fire, but they take much longer to get going, giving the driver a considerably better chance of getting clear before the conflagration really gets going. They do burn for a long time, and are hard to put out, requiring special training for firefighters. The real question, however, is how often EVs really catch fire. The isolated cases of Teslas burning spontaneously in California make for inflammatory photos, but they prove nothing.
Let’s look at the figures. China has ordered more EV safety checks, but that was after only 40 EV fires in 2018. This was across a fleet of 1.2 million EVs in China in 2018, ie one fire for every 30,000 vehicles. Putting that in perspective, in the US, from 2014 to 2016 there was an average of 171,500 highway vehicle fires according to a report by FEMA. There were around 269 million cars in the USA in 2016, meaning that one in 1,569 fossil fuel cars caught fire in 2016 – nearly 20x as many as EVs in China in 2018. There were also 2.9 deaths per 1,000 highway fires, so fossil fuel cars are not only far more likely to catch fire than EVs, they’re far more likely to kill you as a result too.
EV Batteries Only Last A Few Years
EV battery packs are likely to last much longer than the mileage of an average fossil fuel car. … [+]
This is one of the most prevalent myths and one of the easiest to debunk. Yes, your smartphone battery degrades considerably after a couple of years. But you charge that every day, and the average driver will only charge their EV a few times a month. EVs also charge in a much smarter fashion, only replenishing depleted cells, which distributes the load across many thousands of cells that make up the whole pack. Data gleaned from lots of Tesla owners has shown a mere 10% average battery degradation after over 160,000 miles. Most fossil cars are on the scrap heap long before that kind of mileage.
Tesla’s 2019 impact report showed that the majority of Model S and X cars had more than 90% battery … [+]
This is why the majority of manufacturers now offer a battery warranty that’s usually around 100,000 miles or eight years for 70% capacity. They wouldn’t do that if they seriously thought many batteries wouldn’t last that long – it would cost them a fortune. So, no, an EV that’s a few years old will have almost the range it had when new, and there won’t be a huge problem recycling a load of dead EV batteries either. Most EVs will still be going strong decades from now.
EVs Are Too Expensive
Electric vehicles are more expensive to buy than fossil fuel cars, but much cheaper running costs … [+]
I’ve left this one until last, because a lot of people will come back to it when all else fails. On the one hand, it’s true. With EV batteries still taking up around 30% of the cost of an EV, and not being a component that a fossil fuel car even has, EVs are more expensive. They’re usually at least £10,000 ($13,000) more than an equivalent fossil fuel car, and it’s even worse in the second-hand market, because EVs hold their value much better. This is a myth for another time – that EVs are worth nothing used because the batteries are shot, when in fact the opposite is the case. The Tesla Model S has the highest residual value of any used car in Germany, for example, retaining 9% more value after three years than any other brand, with a whopping 58.5% retention. As a result, since decent EVs have only been around for less than a decade, the cheapest end of the second-hand market doesn’t even exist yet.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand – the cost when new. It’s missing the key factor. EVs are coming down in price as batteries get cheaper, but even before that reduction you have to take into account the much lower running costs. Charged at home, a decent EV will cost 3-4p (4-5c) a mile in electricity, whereas even a really frugal fossil fuel car capable of 60 miles per (British) gallon will be more like 10p (13c) a mile, and we all know that about town the fuel consumption is a lot worse, where EVs are actually better. Obviously in some countries like the US, gasoline is a lot cheaper, but cars are generally less economical to match. The average car in the UK does 7,000 miles a year, so you will be saving hundreds in fuel alone every year, and thousands if you drive more than average. Then there are the savings from far simpler or even unnecessary servicing, lower company car tax (in the UK, it’s zero for the first year), lower vehicle tax (again, zero in the UK), and reduced need for brake pads and discs because of regenerative braking. So you will pay more up front, but you will save loads after that, and when it comes time to sell, you’ll get more second hand value back than a fossil fuel car. In other words, EVs might be more expensive to buy, but they could well be cheaper over 3-4 years of ownership.
These are just a selection of favorites from a massive list of arguments you will be involved in if you get into conversations about EVs on virtually any social media platform – Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. It would be possible to write a weekly article on this subject alone. There’s even a satirical bingo card floating around social media sending up the common clichés. So this is definitely a subject to return to in a future week. Watch this space.
