The Inconvenient Truth About New Electric Vehicles

The one thing everyone seems to be overlooking when it comes to EV's is the simple fact that this is at its core, just another profit driven industry.

EV's are not here to solve the climate crisis, we can’t solve one crisis by starting or exacerbating another. The damage that is being done to the environment as mining giants scramble to meet the demand for the rare earth metals necessary to produce modern batteries needs to be talked about. There is no denying the fact that the internal combustion engine (ICE) in its current form has indeed run its course, but it seems like we have reached a point where that problem’s purported solution is rapidly being solved with a separate, equally disturbing problem.

Big companies and countries alike are now so heavily invested in this “solution” that any suggestion that there might be another way, or an alternative solution, is not only met with scorn but even derided and considered “ignorant” by staunch EV supporters. There are other ways to be “sustainable,” ways that absolutely do not include supporting an industry that simply doesn’t care about the long term welfare of this planet.

The Electric Revolution

Although EV's have been around since the invention of the ICE it has long since played a bit-part in transportation because of the limitation of battery technology… up until now that is.

After several decades worth of research lithium ion batteries finally showed the world that electrified transportation could be a reality. It was indeed touted as the future as early as the 90s but it took some time before the necessary R&D was accomplished to get feasible products to market. We say feasible, because some less strict countries were quite ok to rush the odd micro-car to market… employing older battery thermal protection in some cases, which had a tendency to cause the occasional fire.

Those kinds of fires are a rarity now with several failsafes in place, they do still happen, as GM will gladly tell you, but not nearly as much as it did in the past with those more experimental vehicles. For the most part any argument against EV's in terms of fire safety doesn’t hold much water (pun intended) because any ICE vehicle is essentially a rolling bomb… just varying in size depending on how much gas is in the tank. By and large all those teething issues have been engineered out.

What does not yet have an engineering solution is what goes into making an effective battery, and we start with nickel. Nickel mines (feature image) are open-pit mines, open-pit mining is extremely destructive to the environment. Huge amounts of energy is exerted in getting this metal out of the ground and even more energy is then required to transport it around the world. Next on the list is cobalt (pictured above), which also involves open pit mining but the more concerning issue with cobalt mining is the human toll. A whopping 70% of all cobalt came out of the DRC in 2019, a country in a constant state of flux rolling from one uprising to another. Safety standards for miners are non-existent and there have even been accusations that the mines employ both slave labor and child labor. If that wasn’t bad enough then there is the sudden surge of the highly profitable lithium mining in regions that already don’t have the best access to water. And guess what, the extraction process involves the use of a lot of water, all of which is getting contaminated, effectively poisoning the water supply for the local communities. All this in the name of progress…

Battery technology in its current state is categorically not sustainable, it requires the use of a list of non-renewables that all involve harmful processes that do just as much harm to the environment as the oil and gas industry. As it stands we can’t even properly recycle lithium-ion batteries, which is a whole other problem. By going electric, we are just transferring the problem. But, as soon as anyone stands up and says something about this issue it seems to fall on deaf ears, and that isn’t just down to who is invested in this tech. It is also down to what people believe to be a genuinely viable solution to our transport needs, needs, which are only growing. Once we see something that looks like the answer, we tend to bury our heads in the sand as soon as somebody points out that something is wrong with our idea. It happened before (we are looking at you, diesel), it is happening now and it will happen again.

Hybrid Theory

To help wean people off our addiction to all things combustible, we now have the perfect vehicle to bridge the gap, the hybrid. Heralded as the best thing to hit the automotive industry since crumple zones, automakers will have you believe these vehicles offer the best of both worlds.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Hybrid vehicles are only marginally more efficient than their ICE equivalent, small ICE cars are often still more efficient than compact hybrid SUVs, and small ICE motorcycles are more efficient than any hybrid motorcycle powerful enough to lug around all the extra weight. Hybrid vehicles also introduce incredible complexity to a vehicle, maintenance costs as a result go up and any issue with the hybrid drivetrain down the line will necessitate an expensive repair. Most early adopters who bought the second generation Toyota Prius (over 1 million people did) will verify this. The replacement battery packs were so expensive owners effectively got saddled with a very slow, inefficient small car once the battery degraded.

This is in fact the best case scenario, as Toyota have a stellar reliability record and as far as they are concerned all these cars were well past their service life once the problem arose. Other manufacturers, with slightly less fancied reliability records will effectively be selling you a disposable vehicle, which is the very antithesis of sustainability.

We live in an age of planned obsolescence and the automotive industry has been party to it since at least the 1930s when manufacturers started restyling their vehicles each model year. This later graduated to a production of inferior products that were made on the cheap, something that reached its zenith by the 1970s with cars often only getting a meagre 5 year service life… Anyone who says “they don’t make them like they used to” is clearly not referring to any vehicle from this period because even Japanese vehicles that were perceived to have superior build quality barely made it to 10 years before summarily returning to the earth in the form of iron oxide. Our understanding of rustproofing has improved no end, one look at a decade old car or motorcycle today will paint a very clear picture of just how much more durable modern vehicles are, but, sadly planned obsolescence still exists. Certain components are designed to fail after a predetermined period of time, usually in the name of "safety." A buzz-word all too often used to cover up blatant cost-cutting. None more so than in the case of modern hybrid vehicles with more components (which makes them expensive to build) and more failure points than any other type of vehicle.

The Hydrogen Bombshell

Ever since Stanley Meyer promised the world a water powered car back in the 90s, we have all hoped to see hydrogen used as a fuel. Slowly that dream has become a reality, just not in the way we initially thought.

A water powered car promised free fuel, but in reality it just doesn’t work like that. Although most still believe there was some kind of conspiracy theory behind Meyer’s untimely death, his patents have since expired and reached the public domain, but, unsurprisingly nobody has made use of them. In reality what he had was nothing more than a regulation electrolysis cell and burning hydrogen still produces oxides of nitrogen, arguably worse than carbon dioxide.

His high school experiment did capture the imagination though, and it certainly has its merits in some applications. The energy created from electrolysis is worth the effort if we are able to produce it using clean energy, known as green hydrogen, and if we use green hydrogen to power commercial vehicles that are by their very nature large enough to make use of robust safety measures, it is all worthwhile. Blue and grey hydrogen are essentially useless to all concerned.

When it comes to hydrogen, safety is paramount. Instead of rolling around in molotov cocktails like we do today, hydrogen powered vehicles really are, well, rolling hydrogen bombs. A head-on collision between two hydrogen cars could result in a pretty spectacular event, not only endangering the lives of the occupants, but also the lives of many road users around them. Once again Toyota bet on hydrogen, believing in their fuel cell EV's, but public scepticism has forced them to rethink that strategy and it isn’t by accident that we see them producing ever more hybrids today, seeing as though it is tech that people are already comfortable with.

Once again, down the line we could see an invention that changes all of this, but for now the effort put into making hydrogen fuel cell equipped vehicles safe makes them significantly more expensive. A cost that is tolerable for large fleet owners, but less so for the average Joe.

Simple Moderation

Night ride — Photo by Duncan Adler on Unsplash

Although it is great to look at the glass half full all the time, we need to approach any industry with a degree of caution. At its core, an industry needs consumers to survive, it needs people to believe that whatever solution they have come up with is “the silver bullet.”

When it comes to the very complex issue of reducing our carbon footprint, there is no silver bullet. No matter which direction you want to go in, every purported solution has its detractors, and it is very important to be aware of that. It is also important to be aware of the very simple fact that we, as consumers, need to be more responsible in the way we go about making decisions. Although the various industries are responsible for causing the most damage to the environment, we are driving the market for their products.

If we stop buying, they will stop making, it really is as simple as that. If we absolutely need to buy something new, then it should be from a manufacturer that has at least put some effort into pushing towards carbon neutrality. A simpler, altogether more affordable approach would be to buy used. No matter what used vehicle you buy, it will always have a smaller carbon footprint than a new vehicle of any type. Keeping an older vehicle on the road is a way of maximising the resources we have already taken from the earth. Telling somebody to trade in their perfectly good ICE car or bike for a new EV is the single biggest misconception. It is a bald face lie that takes advantage of our consumer mentality, our ingrained desire for “that new thing.”

In reality, if we are even thinking of buying a new vehicle we are already extremely fortunate. With a large proportion of the world living under the poverty line, the least we can do is hold on to that 5 year old car or bike for another 5 years… or maybe longer if you are serious about making a difference.