I feel that Rowan may be in the wrong about the facts in the end, but I'm not surprised that he feels "duped" since so much of marketing is about hiding the things they don't want you to know, and he found all that stuff out. And it was a lot.
In the end, though, I do think they're already a net positive and that's just getting better with time and effort.
I too would love an EV, but the problems are many:
- My current car cost €13k, and is a station wagon that comfortably fits 5 and their luggage for any occasion. It's luxurious and quite fast for what it is. The cheapest EV that matches this in my market is around €60k.
- Modern cars, and EVs especially, are usability nightmares. No more buttons, everything hidden in apps and behind touchscreens.
- Modern cars, and EVs especially, are privacy nightmares. They are always on computers, constantly reporting back to the mothership. Mozilla did a deep dive on their terms and conditions, and all of them are horrible. Multiple brands admit to collecting and sharing details about sexual activity, genetic and health information in these legal documents.
- Long term ownership and servicing is a hard proposition currently. Batteries need replacing after a number of years (let's say 10 years, some will last a little longer, but many will lose significant range before that point), and the cost of replacement currently exceeds the value of the vehicle (sometimes even exceeding the price of a new vehicle). This is not an accident. Tesla introduced the "structural battery pack" with the Model Y, and others are sure to follow their model. Ostensibly to increase efficiency and lower the astronomical weight of EVs, in reality this is a thinly veiled attempt at introducing more planned obsolescence.
- Charging infrastructure is woefully underdimensioned in many locations, even for the current adoption rate.
I'm honestly waiting for the market and charging networks to mature, so I can just pay a company to convert an older vehicle to EV and sidestep all the garbage the car industry is trying to push on us with the current crop of EVs.
> Modern cars, and EVs especially, are usability nightmares. No more buttons [...]
Depends on car. My Renault Megane e-Tech has buttons for most of the stuff I want[1], like AC controls, windscreen heater, media controls, seat adjustment and such.
> Batteries need replacing after a number of years (let's say 10 years [...]
My car has a guarantee of minimum 70% battery (SOH) after 8 years or 160000km. That's roughly 280 km range, so should be useful for many years after that.
That said, it's certainly a transition period, and it'll take a decade or two before things settle I think. It's like buying computers back in the 90's and 00's, the next processor was just that much better so it never felt like a good time to buy.
> That's roughly 280 km range, so should be useful for many years after that.
In ideal conditions though. Have you driven it in winter in a colder climate? My wife has an older EV with 270km range in summer, but it falls to close to 170km in winter, sometimes less, when fully charged.
I live in Oslo, Norway, we've got -12C and snow now. If I preheat the car using charger I get at least 250km range mixed driving, with AC at a quite comfortable 22C. If my SO isn't in the car I reduce the AC a bit and it gets closer to 280-290km.
We had -25C earlier this winter, it dropped a bit closer to 200km, again with a comfortable AC level.
So yeah, it drops a lot. We found we need at least 150km range for our car to be useful (we have an old Leaf with less for some time), and if things scale linearly we should still have about 175km effective winter range with 70% SOH.
Sure it's not winning any range contests, we knew that when we bought it.
Interesting, does Oslo have a lot of chargers? For my area, this is an option only for those who have the ability to charge at home to pre-heat the car / battery pack. I live in a dense city and street parking is the norm, so for us this is not an option.
When I'm driving on my own with my wife's car, I turn heating or AC off, and it makes a little difference, but not all that much.
> Sure it's not winning any range contests, we knew that when we bought it.
I mean, it is also far more affordable that a lot of the alternatives. I find that range is only useful up to a point. If you have enough range to meet your requirements, why spend so much more money just to get a bigger number?
We're fortunate to be able to charge at home thanks to our condo parking getting chargers. There's been tax incentives for this.
And the municipality is installing street chargers. While not enough currently due to the high % of EVs, they're going to install a lot more they say.
> If you have enough range to meet your requirements, why spend so much more money just to get a bigger number?
This was exactly our approach. We wanted 400km which we felt was sufficient for us. So we just eliminated cars with less and looked at other aspects to decide which one to pick.
I too have settled on 400km, which I think is a reasonable range for most European countries. After 400km, it's quite reasonable to take a 40min break or something anyway :)
Does it have a heat pump heater? I have an Ioniq5 with a heat pump, cold weather performance is basically the same as my mid-summer performance in the temp range the heat pumps covers (-15 C+). The batteries do benefit from pre-warming, but they're actively cooled in most evs anyway so once you start moving the ambient temperature is not much of a difference to the battery pack.
LOL, I just realized that I totally forgot we keep the car capped at 80% to protect the batteries. So yeah, ranges at 100% is better than what I wrote.
Yeah it has a heat pump[1], but physics is physics. SO wants a balmy 22C inside, regardless of outside temperature.
It uses the resistive heater when preheating from charger though, I can hear the heat pump kick in when I disconnect the charger while it's preheating.
Beyond the unnecessary spending right now (since our car is basically new), the charging infrastructure is our biggest worry. Even when places supposedly have charging spots, I keep hearing about how many are broken and how few are actually working. I don't want to sit still for even 1-2 hours, and I certainly don't want to sit and wait for one of the few working spots and then sit there charging, too.
I suspect some of that is overblown, but I'm not about to find out with a $50k investment.
My wife has had an EV company car since 2019. From her experience, I can say it pays to think ahead about what range you need and charge the car accordingly.
Fast chargers are convenient when available, but most of the time she uses slow chargers and charges the car overnight and/or seeks out a parking lot with chargers close to her destination.
She's upgrading to her second EV next week, which has bigger range (still not massive). For most trips with the kids however, we resort to my old fossil fuel wagon.
And how once you go for fast and non-subsidised charging how expensive does it get... Losing most of the savings on the way...
I'm not sure if non-home charging will ever be too cheap. At least on the scale needed, as the cost of charged will need to cover the hardware, the maintenance and the grid connection, plus of course the momentary price of electricity.
I second this. I was planning to buy a Tesla when this hit me: you need to change tires every 7-10k miles. My current Toyota I changed at 70k miles. This is creating a graveyard of old tires at 10x the rate.
My friend's EV just broke down in the moderate CA storm and had to be towed.
He didn't say anything that many, many people weren't already thinking. I too love electric vehicles but they just aren't there yet. I'm very happy driving a hybrid. One day the battery technology, range, and charging infrastructure and speed will be there but it simply is not today.
For those lucky enough to own homes, or have some other living situation in which they are able to charge their cars overnight, plug-in hybrids certainly seem like the best answer for many/most people.
Yes, they still have batteries, but much smaller than those of full electrics.
Yes, they still burn petroleum, but for many people the majority of their driving will fall into the all-electric range.
I have no desire to buy a Tesla. Every single one I have been in has been a disappointment. They are ugly, have no style or finesse, and are poorly made.
Atkinson's very first argument is just citing a Volvo report which has basic math errors in it.[0] Not a great start folks.
He then says (no citation) that EV batteries "last only upward of" 10 years, the strange phrasing because British tabloids are shy about actually telling a provable lie. Atkinson knows EV batteries last longer than 10 years, but he wants to make it sound like they don't.
He trots out the usual parade of distractions: solid state batteries, hydrogen, and (least practical of all) e-fuel. The obvious implication is that we shouldn't invest in workable EVs now, instead better to wait for some (supposedly) perfect technology someday in the future. Classic 'kick the can down the road.'
Using older cars longer sounds good, but eventually it's like an old fridge: more expensive to operate (and dirtier) than replacing it with a newer model. Atkinson never mentions the fraction of pollution that comes from operation vs manufacturing, conveniently pretending the manufacturing is all that matters.
He also gives an extremely silly argument that confuses using a car for three years and "selling it on" (ie reselling it used) with junking a car after three years.
All in all, I expected more from a nation-duping article.
> He then says (no citation) that EV batteries "last only upward of" 10 years, the strange phrasing because British tabloids are shy about actually telling provable lies. Atkinson knows EV batteries last longer than 10 years, but he wants to make it sound like they don't.
What's EV batteries secret sauce then? Extensive over-provisioning? I'm under the impression that pretty much all battery cells used in consumer stuff will wear out after a decade or less of use, and will be much diminished from rated capacity, even if they still technically function. And I'd imagine EV batteries are almost always stored rougher environment, not in a climate-controlled room like most people's stuff.
In reality it's the opposite. Laptop and phone batteries have limited temperature control, maybe a fan. EV batteries have active thermal control loops that heat and cool the whole battery evenly.
The 'exception that proves the rule' is the 1st gen Leaf, which had passive thermal control and poor longevity.
EV batteries are slightly over-provisioned (like most devices), but they also provide more tools to manage lifespan. I'm continually shocked how my Apple devices have no ability to limit charging to 80 or 90%. They're just constantly frying the battery.
Macs have automatic charge caps for frequent AC use, and iPhones have delayed full charging, so there is clearly some longevity engineering. A strict cap would be an improvement, but isn't completely necessary.
I think the strange phrasing is explained in the colophon: This article was amended on 5 June 2023 to describe lithium-ion batteries as lasting “upwards of 10 years”, rather than “about 10 years”
Yes I saw that, and it factored in. The "about 10 years" claim was evidently too potentially libelous for comfort, so instead we got that grammatical monstrosity.
It’s a thoughtful, nuanced take grounded in some reasonable (though imperfect) engineering and economics. He correctly points out that battery manufacturing isn’t an old growth forest and that longer lifecycles for manufactured goods are better for the environment.
That’s more complicated than “buy an electric car to save the planet!” but it’s less wrong.
His conclusion, in his words:
“Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created. We should keep developing hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels to save the scrapping of older cars which still have so much to give, while simultaneously promoting a quite different business model for the car industry, in which we keep our new vehicles for longer, acknowledging their amazing but overlooked longevity.”
I met him and Ben Elton when they were on some kind of Brits abroad | wife hunting trip in the antipodes - Elton found himself a Jam Tart [1], Atkinson was chasing bigger game whom he once shared an organ with [2] and lucked out.
Many conversations about dinner tables were had and at least one book resulted [3]
But this was all very much in the early 1980s pre mega stardom days - R.A was introduced to me as an engineer rather than as a comedian.
It mostly reads like a really bad article, disinformation actually, to me.
The complaints about the greenhouse emissions during production of an electric car without considering the emission over its lifespan are less than helpful.
Then the author claims that cars are "fast fashion" items and seems to not understand the difference between leasing (renting) and owning. Those 3 year old cars are not sent to the junkyard after the lease expires, which the author sort of acknowledges while still insisting that passing your usable car to someone else in order to drive a new one is a terrible thing.
Then the implicit suggestion that we should keep old internal combustion cars around in hopes that someone might someday develop a practical synthetic fuel sometime in the future is just weird, even if it might have some validity simply due to the environmental cost of building a new car, but is really just unsupported opinion.
It finally closes by recommending that people should simply continue driving their dirty old smoker cars unless "they do a lot of city centre motoring", but does not even mention public transit or bicycles.
I'm seeing all these articles about "slumping" EV sales, when the actual data is saying that growth is slowing (second derivative), not that sales are slowing. Worldwide sales are still increasing 30% year on year!
The crux of Atkinson's argument seems to be that the upfront emissions from the manufacturing process, and shorter lifespan of electric vehicles, does not make up for the reduction in tailpipe emissions.
Is this true? I know that the Tesla Impact report [0] refutes this, stating
> "While EVs today still emit more greenhouse gases during the manufacturing phase, including emissions from the supply chain, it takes less than two years' worth of driving before the total emissions from an EV fall below that of a comparable ICE vehicle."
We need better batteries before EV are viable
Mining Lithium is expensive, polluting and batteries don't last enough.
I refuse to believe governments and scientists of the world are so clueless to not understand this, so I assume they just want everyone to buy a lot of EV and throw them away in 10 years for the next green technology, whether that's better, green batteries or hydrogen.
The sad thing is that converting a petrol car to hydrogen is pretty doable so we could reuse our existing cars and save tons of money if hydrogen were the focus now.
But of course, car makers will lose billions as most people could just run with their existing cars instead of buying a new car.
>The sad thing is that converting a petrol car to hydrogen is pretty doable so we could reuse our existing cars and save tons of money if hydrogen were the focus now.
how so? aren't current hydrogen cars basically electric cars with hydrogen merely powering its generator?
He means to adapt for hydrogen gas combustion. Without the fuel cells used by the hydrogen electrical ones.
Although we are talking of different pressures, at first sight it sounds feasible, due to adapt motors for using butane gas combustion has been done for decades, they use the luggage space for to place the tanks.
So he points it would have been more practical to wait for the needed tech in electric batteries and motors, using those hydrogen conversions by the moment as a transition (hydrogen would be obtained mainly from oil extraction, if I remember well, as the electrolysis tech is not there yet).
I'm not sure if the recharge points would accept to cross through two transitions in such short range of time (petrol towards hydrogen towards electrical), but more important is that I don't know where all the electrical energy that is going to be needed is going to come from.
I've driven electric cars and really think they are superior to petrol ones in almost every way. The thing that is not there yet is the whole ecosystem around them. From the Closed loop Supply Chain to get the batteries made and recycled to the recharging points.
Having said that I don't think any of those will evolve if we don't invest on electric cars, because demand drives the supply. So it isn't "f*ck EVs, I'll keep my petrol car" and more like, we have these gaps that we need to think how to solve.
It is not an unsolvable problem, there are just deep pocketed players fighting for us to solve them reeeeal slow...
Full disclosure, I have a Tesla and I love it. I have access to superchargers and home charging, and it has not really increased my utility bill. We should all want emissions free driving, I don’t think that is the issue, but to get there the quality of the vehicle, charging networks, and driving behavior will have to change. I am ok with having both ICE and EVs, let people choose, but I also believe in the long run emissions free will win out. Today it’s EVs but who knows where we might go.
But if this actor bloke can tank car sales in the whole UK, with just an article in some newspaper...shouldn't News Corp be fawning over and toadying up to him? After all, he might write another article, telling all their advertisers to take their marketing budgets elsewhere.
We have an average annual household income of something like £30k, and most electric cars (that you’d actually want) cost much more than that right now.
Haha it’s like the Apple Vision Pro - seems like the time to buy one is in 2-3 years, where in North America we’ll have non-Tesla cars with Tesla/NACS plugs, a few more charging stations, and manufacturers will have brought back more buttons and worked out some other issues with gen1 models. And hopefully GE and Hyundai will figure out wireless CarPlay is a good idea, and the new Toyota CEO will have them making true Toyota-quality BEV platform.
But I notice that the article claims his article was "roundly debunked", but fails to actually link to any of that debunking.
Here's an article that does that. It's on the same site as Atkinson's article, even.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/08/fact-che...
I feel that Rowan may be in the wrong about the facts in the end, but I'm not surprised that he feels "duped" since so much of marketing is about hiding the things they don't want you to know, and he found all that stuff out. And it was a lot.
In the end, though, I do think they're already a net positive and that's just getting better with time and effort.