Many believe that one day, soon in fact, that EVs or Electric Vehicles will be the way everyone gets around. Personally, I have my doubts, and it’s not that EVs do not offer some great advantages, it’s just that for wide spread adoption, they also have a number of disadvantages especially if we are talking about everyone owning an electric automobile instead of gas driven. Let’s talk shall we?
Here are 5-major points of contention and disadvantages to electric cars:
1). Battery Life: Proponents say battery life is getting better for electric vehicles, whereas this is true, and the advances remarkable, the low-hanging fruit has been picked and it will be harder in the future to continue this incredible trend of battery-life for volume size and cost – and yet, we need better extended life now to help compete against other power systems available.
2). Why Switch to Batteries if Hydrogen Fuel is Our Future: Proponents say that EV technologies are here now, are efficient and better than fossil fueled engines and we should rapidly expand the number of EVs on the road. Well soon Hydrogen Fuel will be viable as new storage materials come to fruition, and to market. There are big breakthroughs for this, now being proven. Will the EV revolution be short-lived, disrupt and destroy fossil fuel vehicles only to be up-ended in 2030 by hydrogen fueled? If so, why bother? All we do is have massive amounts of batteries in our landfills.
3). Bolivia and China have large deposits of Lithium that is easy to get to, and in the US our lithium is harder to get to, requires more work and thus, more costly to extract. If we buy from Bolivia, we are propping up a socialist dictatorship type government that doesn’t like the US. If we buy from China, they will do the same thing they did with REEs before, and make their EVs cheaper and sell them into our markets – that hurts the US Automakers and will cost jobs – something that is problematic on the political spectrum – meaning headwinds for the industry. Being held for ransom by China or Bolivia isn’t wise.
4). Extracting Lithium at 2000 feet below the ground as we are doing in the desert of CA and near the San Andreas fault using fracking methods may not be such a wise thing to do, considering the nearby Earthquake faults.
5). Electric Vehicle owners have enjoyed such things as “Diamond Lane” hi-occupancy highway or freeway lane benefits in many states even when only one person is in the vehicle. As more people buy EVs those benefits disappear along with incentives to buy an EV to save traffic congestion and time during commutes.
There are many more disadvantages, but these are a few we ought to be considering before we are sold on this mode of transportation as our mainstay. Think on it.
