I am not categorically opposed to the idea of electric vehicles. It is just another means of propulsion. Of course, it cannot ever replicate sound and feel of a powerful gasoline motor, and as a muscle car enthusiast that is important to me.
Despite that, I could see having an EV if the technology were advanced enough. However, I don’t think we are there yet. Even with this advance, and even if it cost the same as standard lithium batteries now cost, there are still a number of problems: first, there is a tremendous safety issue - when lithium catches fire, and it does quite easily, it is almost impossible to put it out. I have certain knowledge that fire departments around the country have a policy of just letting lithium fires burn out on their own, with their job being to clear people far enough away so that it is not an immediate danger to them - and the amount of toxins released into the atmosphere from a lithium fire are stunning and immensely harmful to health. Second, the charging time is still too high. You can fill a very large gas tank completely from just about empty in 10 minutes, not from 15% to 90% full in 18 minutes. Yes, that cuts the present gap by a lot, but it is still less than half as good as a gasoline or diesel motor. Third is the simple hypocrisy of many advocates for EVs as some kind of a solution to our environmental problems. Even this solid-state battery covered here has many highly toxic materials, materials that have to be mined in dirty and dangerous ways across the globe, the raw materials have to be shipped elsewhere to be refined, shipped somewhere else again to be fabricated, and likely shipped a third time to be assembled. Then there’s the issue of how do these parts get recycled? With a gasoline or diesel motor, that’s easy, you simply melt down the metal, and maybe do a little bit of refining to purify it a bit more - but lithium batteries simply cannot be recycled, they just get buried and end up, polluting the soil. Finally, there is the 800 pound gorilla of how do these things get the power? If it was all powered by wind and solar, the advocates might possibly have a case (though if you go down one more layer and see what it costs in both money and environmental damage to build windmills and solar panels, that’s a seriously negative factor), but we know that over 89% of electricity is produced using natural gas, coal , nuclear, and in some cases oil, so there really is a highly negative case for EVs from an environmental point of view.
Again, there is a place for EVs, and I’m not going to condemn somebody who buys one of them, but there are so many technological issues involved that they are just not for me, and they are certainly not the solution that so many ill linformed and highly biased people believe that it is.
Corrections and additions:
80%, not 89%.
I also left out the effect upon the national electric grid. We are simply not able to power that many more electric vehicles then we have on the road right now without compromising on the already shaky reliability of our antiquated and not-so-robust electrical grid. Looking at what happened in Spain and it’s immediate neighbors last week, I would say that, ensuring the reliability of our power grid should be a top priority, well above that of putting more EVs on the road.