Some challenges

Unfortunately, although EVs seem like a great solution so far, there are some inherent challenges that must be overcome in order to see their widespread adoption as a method of reducing resource consumption and CO₂ emissions. Some of these challenges apply wherever you are in the world whereas some are less of an issue depending on where you live.

In order to research these challenges, I spoke to dealerships, owners, EV forum users and of course I generally looked around on the internet. I’ve identified four main challenges as follows:

1. Purchasing Cost 
2. Range and Infrastructure
3. Electricity Infrastructure
4. It’s not globally viable at the moment

Let’s deal with them one at a time. 

Purchasing Cost

This one is pretty simple. At the moment, EVs are considered new-tech and like many new-tech products, manufacturers have to spend a lot on Research and Design. When the products go to market, they are often sold at a higher price than an equivalent ICE vehicle in order to recover these costs. Furthermore, the lithium batteries are extremely expensive to produce compared to an internal combustion engine.

This means that for some financially conscious buyers, unless they do enough driving to for the increased efficiency of EVs to reduce their operating cost, EVs maybe financially unviable. 

For example, the BMW i3 that I took for a test drive is available on the second-hand market for about £15,000. However, prices for a BMW 1-series, it’s ICE counterpart, are around £8,000 for a similar condition vehicle.

This becomes a vicious cycle- as there are fewer EVs purchased, the production cost remains high and manufacturers cannot benefit from economies of scale.

It’s not all bad news though, as the technology matures and production costs fall, EVs will become available to those with lower budgets. This will cause production costs to fall even further. 👍

Range and Infrastructure

Range and infrastructure go hand in hand. The range problem is that most electric cars today have a range that is far lower than most petrol cars (around 100 miles for the EV depending on how you drive it compared to 500 for many ICEVs, with the same caveat). 

The difference between an ICE vehicles and an EV though, is that you can stop at any petrol station and refill with a full tank in under 5 minutes. By comparison, with an EV you’d have to find an EV charging point and then wait for a minimum of 20 minutes to get you about 80% charged (those figures are for optimum conditions).

Here’s the thing, IF EV cars become the new norm we’d have a bit of an infrastructure problem as we couldn’t possibly create enough charging stations to accommodate them!

That being said, battery technology is improving all the time and therefore there are dramatic range improvements with every generation of electric vehicle. This should mean that we won’t need as many charging stations as batteries will be able to last the full day till the EVs are plugged in at night.

Electricity Infrastructure

Currently there are huge amounts of infrastructure dedicated to extracting and refining hydrocarbons for transportation needs. If we all started to use EVs overnight, we’d suddenly no longer need most of the petrol and diesel that we refine but would suddenly require a lot more electricity. 

As that demand currently doesn’t exist, there’s no infrastructure in place to generate and distribute this amount of electricity. That shift in generation from hydrocarbons to electricity can’t happen overnight and will need to be planned for and done over a period of time. 

It’s not globally viable at the moment

Once again, it comes down to infrastructure. As I discussed in my previous post, the amount of CO­₂ released from electricity generation for electric vehicles varies from location to location. The thing is, in a place like India, Wilson’s report estimated the amount of Carbon released to work out to 370 CO₂e/ km.

This chart shows the mpg of a petrol vehicle that accounted for the same carbon emissions as an EV powered by grid electricity in each country

 

The thing is, that sort of figure is equivalent to a petrol car that gets about 20 US MPG (24 UK MPG). That’s not actually very good, in fact it’s below average as can be seen on the chart above.

What that means, is that if you lived in any of the red nations in the map below, you’d actually be ‘responsible’ for a lower amount of Carbon emissions if you drove an efficient petrol vehicle than if you drove an electric car. Whilst there may of course be some other benefits such as lower direct pollution in cities, overall carbon emissions would be higher as a result of your choice to buy an EV. 

As the below map of the USA shows, even within a country there can be great variances in how your power is generated, and hence how efficient a petrol vehicle would need to be for its carbon emissions to be equivalent to an electric vehicle.

What that means is that it’s not a viable solution for all people in all places. In order for this to be the case, certain nations would need to overhaul their power generation methods and switch to some low-carbon options. Irrespective of that being a necessity for the viability of EVs, that’s just generally a good idea as it lowers the global CO₂ emissions!

N.B. There is one thing that the aforementioned studies seem to have skipped over. The statements I’ve made assume that you’re sourcing your electricity from the national grid. If you generate your own electricity (using renewable methods such as solar panels on the roof of your home), then it’s a whole different ball game as ‘your’ electricity generation resulted in virtually no carbon emissions (apart from the manufacturing emissions of the solar panels). 

This is something that we should think about for the future- I have a great mental image of a rural outback community in Australia where the electricity is carbon-high being able to be self-sufficient for their own transportation needs instead of relying on road delivered petrol!