Updated: October 22, 2024
I love all (well, most) things automotive. I've been an avid fan of cars and associated vehicular gadgetry since the tender age of four or so. Even then, I could tell different vehicles apart just by the sound of their engine (perhaps this is not something I should brag about). I've read and collected hundreds of car magazine issues in four different languages. Track days, car reviews, almost daily driving in car simulators, you name it. And then, recently I've read a whole bunch of articles talking about the overall decline in EV sales, particularly in Europe, where regulations be important ...
Also recently, I've been rewatching old Top Gear seasons. In particular, Season 12 Episode 7 got stuck in my mind. It was when James May drove a hydrogen-powered Honda Clarity, and talked about the future of electric vehicles. This was 16 years back, and here we are, in a world where electric vehicles do not look like the cars of today, and based on the market readings, they don't seem to be the future, either. I decided to explore this topic a bit more, and share my opinion.
What do you think of electric vehicles?
Before we dive in, I must answer this question. My stance is: neutral. In reality, it does not matter what kind of propulsion your vehicle has. Well, since I love cars, I am keenly interested in the fine technological aspects of the whole thing, but practically, it makes no difference. Petrol, diesel, two-stroke, four-stroke, rotary, gas turbine, Otto cycle, Stirling cycle, electric, steam, it doesn't matter.
Cars can be exciting - or not. There are boring petrols, with awful looks, handling and performance. Then, there are super-exciting petrols. There are dull, slow diesels. And then, there are spaceship-class diesels with more torque than most supercars. Like operating systems or programming languages - there's nothing that says every C program is good or every Python program is bad. It's all in the (correct) implementation of the idea, and the type of engine does not guarantee results any which way.
Electric motors can be cool and practical. The near-instantaneous delivery of torque is extremely impressive. I once had a light, temporary case of whiplash when a Tesla Model S (the top range one) driver, in whose car I was a passenger, decided to do a 0-100 run without telling me. He slammed the accelerator, and my head slammed into the headrest, and less than 3 seconds later, we were in the three-digit speed zone. Beautiful.
Then, there's indoor use. In fact, this is something I've not mentioned before, but I was certified on a 2-ton electric forklift! Don't be jelly. That thing had massive lead-acid batteries, and had to be charged every couple of hours, but I got to use it and operate it, and feel the awesome, torquey motor power through my hands.
Now, the downsides ...
Put the "eco" factor aside, and what do you have?
Technological solutions are supposed to, well, solve certain problems. However, when there isn't a problem per se, more of a future threat of a problem, you need to be a true believer to embrace technology, or the implementation thereof, whose benefits aren't certain - or not immediately available.
Indeed, if you're not keen on the whole climate thing, you may struggle accepting the frenzy around the modern-generation EVs, and how they are being marketed. After all, cars have many purposes, and saving the planet isn't one of them, or at best, it may be only one of many factors. The question is, how well do EVs fare here? P.S. Hybrids are not EVs, not matter how often they get bundled into charts and all sorts of statistics. If it uses hydrocarbons in any way, it's not a pure electric vehicle. Anyway:
- Electric cars are quite expensive. Scratch that. ALL cars are quite expensive. The price of a typical vehicle has gone up 50-70% in the past 2-3 years. However, EVs have a higher starting cost in comparison to equivalent ICE cars, and with many government subsidies slowly being phased out, the cost difference is even greater.
- Range and recharging - This is the single biggest issue with EVs. Even the most advanced EVs, as they are currently implemented (using lithium battery packs), have a lower range than equivalent petrols or diesels. The difference is huge. A typical 2.0/3.0-liter diesel can easily do 1,000+ km on a single fuel tank, whereas EVs can usually only do half that, at best. Then, when you need to recharge, it takes roughly 40 minutes to fast-charge an EV (usually from 10-20% to 80%), otherwise you're facing 8-16-hour recharging times.
- Flaky infrastructure - Even in highly developed countries, the EV charging infrastructure is barely adequate. It's completely missing elsewhere. As I've noted in my EV-only goal by 2035 article, there are monumental practical hurdles preventing any sort of timely or reasonable deployment of the necessary facilities to make EV charging ubiquitous. As it is, and has been for quite a while now, if you wish to go about in an EV outside the confines of a developed urban area, you have to carefully plan your journey, as though trekking in the Namibian desert. The hassle, the stress and the inconvenience make adoption extremely difficult, except for true believers.
- Running costs - Short term, it depends - I will address that soon. Long term, there simply isn't enough data to tell us how EVs will fare in the future. I know the MBAs would love people to constantly buy, buy, buy new cars, and "refresh" their vehicles every three or four years. Practically, this cannot and is not going to happen, and eventually, there will be a second-hand EV market. The question is then, what will be the resale value of EVs? Or their long-term viability, mostly as the battery packs cannot last forever. We know that a well-kept ICE car can stay on the road for 20-30 years easily. Furthermore, throughout 2000-2020, car reliability has improved massively, across the board, making the process of buying a new vehicle more of a luxurious perk than a necessity. Much like computers - back in the day, you had to upgrade your hardware every few years to stay relevant, but now, pretty much any computer made since 2012-2013 is good enough for most tasks. The same with cars. Once, the oil change service was done every 3,000 km or so. Today, you can go up to two years on the original volume of oil. EVs? Question mark.
- Ergonomic regressions - Until recently, car manufacturers would pride themselves on making smaller, lighter cars. Save 150 kg on this or that, great! The car is now nimbler, easier to drive, handles better, needs fewer materials (saves the planet), uses less fuel (saves the planet). And then, you get battery-powered cars, which easily weigh 2 tons or more, most of them anyway. There's some weight parity as you go into the mega-SUV class, but then, regardless of the engine type, those big cars are pointless anyway.
When you combine all these things together, you come to a sad conclusion ...
Electric vehicles are designed for rich people (sadly)
Let's start this section with the running cost part. A friend of mine lives in a Nordic country, ergo one of the richest, most developed parts of the world. He happens to own an EV, a 400HP variety. His car "drinks" 16-17 KW of electricity per 100 km in urban conditions and about 21-22 KW on the highway. Interestingly, this is in contrast to ICE cars, where out-of-city consumption is usually lower. The numbers above also do not take into account winter conditions. EV range drops drastically when it's super cold, or the very least, you need more frequent charging. Even with ICE cars, there can be some variation in fuel consumption, depending on the outside temperature and whether your car has a turbocharger, but it's roughly 10% compared to summer driving. With the EVs, the variation can be as much as 20-30%.
Friend's EV car: ~3,500 km average charge usage.
Now, we know how many electrons my friend's vehicle needs ...
The question is, how expensive are those electrons?
And this is where the whole story gets wild. Based on what my friend told me - and please take these numbers with a grain of salt, or at least check them independently if you will - the charging prices range from 0.13 Euro per KW for a private home owner with a private charger and you do it overnight to as much as 0.69 Euro per KW if you use a fast charger station on the highway.
Now, petrol and diesel fuel prices also vary, but never by a factor of 5x. Never. On top of that, there's a whole range of proprietary (and mutually incompatible) chargers, and of course, you need an "app" to use many of them, because too many executives perceive EVs as phones on wheels.
If you compare the electricity cost to a typical 2.0/3.0 diesel with the typical consumption of about 6-7 liters per 100 km in outer urban conditions, you get the following numbers: With diesel, the cost is 7-9 EUR/100 km. With electricity, the cost is 3-15 EUR/100 km.
A recent diesel example: ~400 km on less than 1/3rd of a fuel tank.
Therefore, IF you have a private charger, your EV running costs are waaaay less than diesel. EVs win big time here. Great. Amazing. But if you don't, then the electricity bills comes in at as much as 50% more! For my friend, who uses a mix of communal charging (he is still a peasant after all and not a posh git who owns a private home) and some highway charging, the overall electricity-to-fuel cost is identical. In addition, his range is only about 300 km or so, while the aforementioned diesel(s) can do 3x more.
In other words, EV cars make great sense for urban use, for people who mostly do light/short commuting, and can afford private home charging, with the lowest available electricity cost. Due to their short(er) range and infrastructure limitations (and cost), EVs simply aren't intended for long drives, like going abroad or on vacation.
Now, let's briefly touch on the ownership cost, too.
I've been looking at the prices of small urban cars, standard petrol vs. EV - you can do it yourself, just go to your desired car website and check the numbers. As a general rule for the EU, on average, for example, Peugeot 208 GT petrol costs ~23,000 Euros. The EV version costs ~38-40,000 Euros. Renault Clio espirit Alpine version is 22,500 Euros for the petrol and 28,500 for the hybrid (not the proper EV version). The new electric Renault 4, which I guess would be the Clio equivalent, is expected to cost "under" 30,000 Euros.
Opel Corsa GS trim level, about 24,000 for ordinary petrol, about 26,000 for the "mild" hybrid, and then 34-36,000 for the EV version. There does not seem to be Ford Fiesta anymore. VW Polo starts at around 20,000 Euros - I remember, only a few years back, low 20s gave you a fully equipped VW Polo GTI. Indeed, a few years back, a bit over 30,000 Euros could afford you a nice Audi S3 or BMW M135i. The new car prices are insane, electric or not.
Then, there's no electric Polo, but the smallest VW EV, which seems to be ID.3 starts at 41,500 Euros. Honda Jazz hybrid starts at 28,000 Euros. Fiat 500X hybrid starts at 22,500 Euros, while Fiat 500e (electric obviously) starts at around 29,000 Euros. I'm not quite sure with the last one, as checking the manufacturer's websites in different countries gives a wide range of prices, some well into the 30s. Funnily, Fiat Panda hybrid seems to be the most reasonable priced small vehicle that I could find, at "only" around 15,000 Euros.
Worse, you also cannot find "proper" small petrol (not hybrid) cars anymore, like Peugeot 108 or Renault Twingo, which are ideal for urban use, but the last time I looked at the latter, the petrol version was circa 15,000 Euros while the electric one costs almost 30,000 Euros. Double.
Who can afford these things then? Rich people, of course.
Paradoxically, with higher class vehicles, the price differences are less, because 1) there's a nominal minimal upfront price for EV technology that is independent of the platform 2) people who can afford more expensive cars don't really care about the price so much.
But overall, for small cars, which ought to be "affordable" for the common user - and are ideal for urban commuting - the price difference is about 12,000 to 15,000 Euros more. But let's round it down to "just" 10,000 Euros. It's an expensive premium - who can afford so much extra money? Well, all of the EV owners I know are either 1) tech nerds (well off) 2) executives (also well off). Anecdotal? Perhaps.
Going back to the small petrols, with the average consumption of 6-7 liters/100 km, and monthly commute of around 1,000 km, the fuel price is around 80 Euros per month. Add the annual servicing, and the overall "cost" of a small ICE comes down to roughly 1,000-1,100 Euros per year. You're not expected to see any breakages with modern, new cars for at least 5-7 years. Insurance and annual inspection apply to all cars, regardless of the powerplant. So, let's say 1,000 Euros per year.
As another anecdote, even with rigorous autobahn driving, one 2.0-liter diesel X3 used only 7 liters/100 km.
This means, if electricity costs are ZERO, it will still take 10 years for an EV owner of an average small car to break even in comparison to an ICE owner, given the conditions outlined above. Of course, you could drive more or less, you might get a tax or sale discount, your car might break down, and there's the big unknown factor of electricity cost. But whatever it is, it's more than zero, which means the average middle-class human will need to be able to afford to invest roughly 5-15 years worth of car usage if they want to use an EV.
When I reviewed a Tesla Model S 70D, my friend (a different one than the Nordic fella) did a whole bunch of diligent, careful calculations on the overall long-term cost. His conclusions were rather similar to what I've outlined above, and this was almost a decade ago. It's in the article linked earlier, if you missed it.
All that goes back to my earlier claim. If you have a private house, with your own private charger, you're already quite well off. If you don't, that probably means you live in a residential building, you're not "rich" enough to own your own home, and then, you also have to pay more for electricity, if you decide to buy and own an EV.
At best, you will break even, financially - without taking into account the upstart cost or the everyday rituals of inconvenience in operating an electric car, the constant fretting around range and charging, especially if you need to share the infrastructure with other residents.
Of course, remember, my Viking friend's story is just one story. My brief and marginally scientific market research is just one quick research. Limited information, personal experience, opinion, etc. But even if there's a big level of approximation here, it still highlights a lot of problematic trends that cannot be ignored. Certain things stand, regardless. Like the data coming in from all sorts of publications, showing the decline in EV sales (excluding the hybrids and alike added into the mix, which paint a somewhat rosier picture).
Worse yet, in lots of scenarios, even if people want to have an EV, they simply CANNOT, because there is NO infrastructure that allows them to do that! Their power grid cannot sustain it! Just go to southern Europe and watch the circuit breakers trip when people try to boil water and use the washing machine at the same time. You think this is a joke? Just go to any house in Greece, Portugal, Montenegro, or Italy (south) built before 1970-80, and enjoy the show. And even if you can charge and want to do it, there's no private parking or chargers available. In many cases, it would translate to something like: the only way you could do it would be to stretch a 20m cable from your power socket in your apartment on the 3rd floor or something all the way down to your car, parked on the side of the street.
So why bother?
Combine higher first-purchase cost, low resale value, impracticality for long-range driving, and it comes down to a simple, cruel formula: EVs are usually bought by people who have money, as a second car, they don't care about the margins, and they can afford the luxury of private charging, and/or their lives are convenient enough to invest time and energy in caring about the future generations ... as opposed to poorer people, who have to worry about feeding their current generation.
Basic human needs
Altruism only exists when your basic needs are met. Access to clean water, food, shelter, security. Y'know, the basics. Until those needs are satisfied, no human on this planet will care about anything else. We're all animals four modern inconveniences removed from the nature - concrete homes, sanitation, heating, and sufficient nutrients. That's it.
Being concerned about the environment is a noble thing, but it can only happen (if ever) once you have the whole gamut of basic needs happily satisfied. Practically, this reduces the story of EVs to maybe 30 countries in the world. Practically, it's parts of North America, Northern Europe, maybe an odd country elsewhere. That's it.
Don't believe me? Let me illustrate. Remember the toilet paper "rush" early in the pandemic, just a few years ago?
It didn't take much for "civilized" societies to become a ruthless me-above-everyone-else dystopia. Just the "fear" was enough to make everyone selfish and pathologically stockpile on bog rolls. No one seemed to care about the trees and polar bears back then. And we didn't even lose one of the four pillars of modern life! It was just excess toilet paper!
Now imagine a society with spotty electricity supply, high corruption, insufficient safety, inadequate water sources, meager food. There's your 90% of the planet. It's very easy to be noble and caring when you're rich, sated, warm, and comfortable. Not so otherwise, I'm afraid. Maybe 30 countries can afford altruism. Maybe.
But even in these highly developed countries, there's a slowdown in the EV sales. Massive double-digit percentage decline. It's very simple. If some poor schmuck out there has a choice of spending their money on an after-school activity for their kids TODAY or buying a car that is more expensive, has lower range, longer refueling (recharging) times, and dubious future compared to the current stock of polluters so they can "protect" the next generation of people 50-70 years from now, you know what the choice is going to be. Basic needs. Sad, but c'est la vie.
Technological revolutions (and evolutions) are hard
And they take a long time. The transition from horse to car took about 50 years, even though it was "aided" by the rapid industrialization and innovation of two world wars. The transition from piston to jet took about 20 years. The timescale of decades applies for most if not all major changes. The big difference is, they usually bring immediate and tangible benefits (just read about the horror of horse transportation in the city of New York City at the beginning of the 20th century to get a basic understanding of the scale of sanitary, safety, logistics, and cost problems associated with it). With the current crop of EVs, the (immediate) benefits are difficult to perceive. Most people cannot wait 50-70 years for doomsday predictions to happen (or not) to feel vindicated about their life choices today. Selfish? Yes, that's humanity.
My mind keeps going back to that Top Gear season. A drive from Basil, Switzerland to Blackpool, UK, in frugal diesels. A Jaguar that can do some 1,600 km on a single tank. A Polo that drinks 2-3 liters per 100 km. Instant refueling. Spending hours topping up electrons is, paraphrasing James May, a big step backwards.
The pressure on the common humanoid is massive, and it's quite annoying. The implications of guilt being thrown at the consumer. Oh my. First, there's the carbon tax, then the pointless Start/Stop system so you can pretend to be ecological at the traffic light, small cars are being axed but hey, everyone drives crossovers, because they're cool, even though they're heavier, bigger, less aerodynamic, and eat more fuel.
The "messaging" from the overloads is confusing and contradictory. In Europe, you have the arbitrary EV-only dates, but the infrastructure won't be ready by then (not even close). Car manufacturers will be penalized, but they can "buy" credits from "green" companies, as if that reduces actual pollution or changes anything in any way. Governments (in Europe) want you to buy electric, but then remove subsidies and introduce tariffs on foreigns imports (justified or not). No wonder diesel outsold electric by a factor of 5x just in August this year.
Then, the 2020-2021 pandemic showed us a very simple trick on how to minimize pollution - everyone works from home, pollution goes down! Golly.
But hey, micromanagers want you back in the office, five days a week, so they can feel important and assert control over you. Even so, if you remove all of the cars in the world off the roads, right now, it would still amount to a reduction of only a relatively humble fraction of overall air pollution, as the bulk of it, a good 80% or so, at least, is heavy industry. But remember, peasant, in the end, it's ALL your fault.
On a completely side note, as it happens, coincidentally, because of their "modern" "minimalistic" nature, EVs were also the harbingers of the massively stupid smartphone-like trend of removing buttons from the car interior. I hate this so much, and so, whenever I talk about EVs, I must make sure I separate my general love for car stuff from my absolute disdain and loathing for monkey stuff like touch interfaces. I must remember a lot of contemporary petrol and diesel cars also come with touch-only interfaces designed for clueless dolts and people who don't care about driving (and therefore shouldn't drive), and remind myself to never ever buy a car that doesn't offer a sane, conventional driver's layout. Perhaps my next car will be a 1990s Panda 4x4. Now, that should be cool, and ultimately, ecological.
Conclusion
Some twenty years ago, when the whole carbon drama became fashionable, the small person, the end consumer was promised many wondrous things. It would get better, they said. There was that magical phrase: economy of scale. As EV market share grew, the cars should get cheaper, the infrastructure would get better, the electricity would get cheaper. Fast forward to 2024, and none of that holds true. EV cars are more expensive, hell, ALL cars are more expensive, the infrastructure is abysmal even in ultra-developed countries, and the electricity prices are sky-high. It doesn't take a genius in demographics or statistics to figure out why.
I don't have a good answer on how to remedy this. But the way I see it, with the current technology, i.e., lots of little batteries glued together, charging very slowly, we're not going to sway the masses and make our world happy and green. It's not going to happen. Of course, no government in the world will admit they made a mistake, and so at best, timetables will silently change, or the regulations will get sidelined and ignored. But forcing entire "classes" of people to buy what they cannot afford or "take the bus" will not work. Such blunt approaches have never gone down well in history. The only sensible solution is ... to make future cars more like the cars we have today. James May's message from 16 years ago still resonates true.
Cheers.