Before you jump to conclusions about my meaning behind the above video, please bear with me. Even though I am a self proclaimed petrolhead, I like to think that I am generally open minded concerning new ideas and technology. I have several reasons why I don’t believe that electric cars are a good idea. Primary among those reasons are that they aren’t for everybody, meaning that there aren’t enough materials to make electric cars for everyone, and it is too time consuming to charge them.
Not Enough To Go Around
Electric cars, for the most part, are made out of the same materials as regular Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars, except for one major component really. That component is the battery. Electric cars require the use of Lithium Ion batteries, because of how much deeply they can be discharged and still maintain their usefulness. There are also various rare earth minerals like terbium and dysprosium that are used to insulate the magnets in the electric motors from deterioration when exposed to high temperatures under load. You can read more about sourcing rare earth metals in this article, and about lithium stores in this article. According to the latter article, if demand for batteries rises because of large numbers of electric vehicles, then we could run out of lithium reserves in less than 20 years.
While lead acid car batteries are not hard to come buy, it turns out partially because they have one of the highest rates of recycling of any product that can be recycled, the Li-ion batteries that are most commonly used in cars are much more difficult to manufacture and recycle ( see this paper on The future of automotive lithium-ion battery recycling ). The most viable method for recycling Li-ion battery involves simply rebuilding the cells from scrapped batteries, but there are doubts in the industry as to the efficacy of a recycled battery vs one that uses virgin cells, because there isn’t really any reconditioning of the cathode. We all understand this principle from using our cell phones, because the batteries do wear out as they are charged more and more times. Eventually, they just don’t last as long, and while technically the battery will often still hold a charge, the algorithm that predicts available power stores in the battery break down and you tend to get unexpected loss of power, when you expect to have 20% charge still in reserve.
Charging Your Electric Car
According to this article the 190.2 million light duty vehicles ( passenger cars and trucks ) drove about 1.94 trillion miles in 2012 consuming 1.24 gallons per day per car on average. If we were to convert all of that driving to a Tesla Model S and say that these cars would consume about .3kWh per mile, we come out with a power requirement of about 642 billion kWh per year. In 2014 the United States used 3.913 trillion kWh of electricity. That means that electric passenger cars would increase the requirements on our national grid by approximately 16.4% if everything went electric.
While that isn’t that much of an increase in electricity requirements on the power grid, there is the question of how to get that power into the cars. If you use a 240V circuit ( the most common type of high voltage available at your house ) to charge a Tesla, according to this article, you can regain 31 miles worth of charge per hour. To put that in terms of an ICE vehicle, that is like taking 1 hour to pump 1.5 gallons of gas into the average vehicle. That same Tesla takes just under 10 hours to get to a full charge given those conditions. If you only have access to a 110V circuit ( most wall sockets in the US ), then you only regain about 5 miles of range per hour, or more than 2 days to a full charge. This is like taking a little over 4 hours to pump a single gallon of gas.
Compared to the time expense of re-energizing your ICE, it is extremely expensive to refuel an electric car. This expense, which is orders of magnitude higher results in a condition called range anxiety. Everyone that I know who drives an electric car suffers from this, whether they admit it or not. There really aren’t that many places that you can charge your electric car, especially if you cannot afford to purchase a Tesla, which can use their super charging stations. This is enough to make you nervous about incidental trips. Going out to lunch instead of eating at the office and/or stopping at a store on the way home may be enough to make it so that you cannot get home at the end of the day. When running out of power means getting your car stuck somewhere for hours, there is a very real fear that drives you to constantly look for opportunities to plug in your car.
What about the Power Wheels?
The video at the beginning of this article is of my kids pushing their little electric car back to the garage to plug it in. They had wanted to ride it to the nearby park so that they could play. At first it seemed like it had enough of a charge, but when we got about 2 blocks away, the power level dropped off steeply and the little car could barely move itself. The cost of charging this particular electric car being approximately 18 hours, it takes more prior planning than my kids are generally capable of. As a result this car usually sits, because it isn’t able to support their spur-of-the-moment activities. They ended up taking their bikes, because as much fun as it is to ride in the electric car, even if you can afford it, why would you want it to rule your life instead of it being a tool to let you do what you want to do?