I love electric vehicles – and I was an early adopter. But more and more I feel cheated.
Unfortunately, it may be better to keep your old gas-powered car than to buy an electric vehicle. There are good environmental reasons not to jump just yet.
Electric motorization is, in theory, a subject I should know something about. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, followed by a master’s degree in control systems.
Combine this perhaps surprising academic background with a lifelong passion for automobiles, and you’ll see why I was drawn to the early adoption of electric vehicles.
I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (despite our poor electric charging infrastructure) thoroughly enjoyed my time with both.
Rowan Atkinson with his 1952 Jaguar MkVII at the Goodwood Motor Circuit in West Sussex in 2002
Electric motorization is, in theory, a subject I should know something about. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, followed by a master’s degree in control systems
Electric vehicles may be a little soulless, but they are wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to operate. But more and more, I feel a little fooled. When you start digging into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem like quite the environmental panacea that it claims to be.
As you may know, the government has proposed to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it appears to be based largely on findings from only one part of a car’s life: comes out of the tailpipe.
Electric cars, of course, emit zero tailpipe emissions, which is a welcome development, especially when it comes to air quality in city centers. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a larger image that includes the car’s manufacture, the picture is quite different.
Ahead of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions when producing an electric car are almost 70% higher than when manufacturing an electric car. a gasoline car.
How? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries that now power almost all electric vehicles: they are absurdly heavy, enormous amounts of energy are required to manufacture them, and they are estimated to only last more than ten years.
It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to wage the automotive fight against the climate crisis.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort goes into finding something better.
New so-called solid-state batteries are being developed which should charge faster and could weigh around a third of the weight of current batteries – but they’re years away from being on sale, by which time of course , we’re going to have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolete batteries.
Hydrogen appears to be an interesting alternative fuel, even if we are slow to develop a truly “green” way to manufacture it. It can be used in two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has invested a lot of money in the development of these.
Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refueled with hydrogen at a gas station as quickly as gasoline.
While the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised about their use in heavy trucks for long distance transportation due to weight; an alternative is to inject hydrogen into a new type of piston engine.
JCB, the company that makes the yellow shovels, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to bring them into production within the next two years.
Unfortunately, it may be better to keep your old gas-powered car than to buy an electric vehicle (file image)
JCB, the company that makes yellow shovels, has made huge progress with hydrogen engines and hopes to bring them into production within the next two years
If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks — and therefore every gas station stocks it — it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars.
But let’s zoom out even further and consider the entire life cycle of an automobile.
The biggest problem we need to tackle in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the automotive industry’s business model for decades.
Currently, we only keep our new cars for an average of three years before selling them, mainly thanks to the ubiquitous three-year leasing model.
That seems like an outrageously lavish use of the planet’s natural resources when you consider the condition a three-year-old car is in.
When I was a kid, any five-year-old car was a bucket of rust and halfway to the junkyard door. No longer. Now you can make a car for £15,000 that, with loving care, will last 30 years.
It is distressing to think that if the first owners of new cars kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, car production and the CO2 emissions associated with them would be considerably reduced.
Still, we’d enjoy the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars.
We also need to recognize what a great asset we have in the cars that currently exist (there are almost 1.5 billion worldwide).
In terms of manufacturing, these cars have paid their environmental dues, and while it makes sense to reduce our reliance on them, it seems right to look carefully at ways to conserve them while reducing their polluting effect. Obviously enough, we could use them less.
As an environmentalist once told me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible.
A sensible thing to do would be to accelerate the development of synthetic fuel, which is already used in motor racing; it’s a product based on two simple notions: first, the environmental problem with a gasoline engine is the gasoline, not the engine, and second, there’s nothing in a barrel of oil that can’t be reproduced by other ways.
Formula 1 will use synthetic fuel from 2026. There are many interpretations of the idea, but German automaker Porsche is developing a fuel in Chile that uses wind to power a process whose main ingredients are water and carbon. carbon dioxide.
With further development, it should be usable in all gasoline engine cars, making their use virtually CO2 neutral.
More and more, I feel like our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s not a bad thing: we realize that a wider range of options needs to be explored if we are to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the automobile has created.
We must continue to develop hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels to avoid the scrapping of older cars which still have so much to offer, while at the same time promoting an entirely different business model for the automotive industry, in which we keep our new vehicles longer, acknowledging their amazing but little-known longevity.
Eco-conscious friends often ask me, as a motorist, if they should buy an electric car. I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they drive around town a lot, they should consider a change.
But if not, hold the fire for now. Electric propulsion will one day bring real benefit to the global environment, but that day has not yet come.
- First published in The Guardian
