Electric vehicles are great progress towards the sustainability of the earth. If EVs replaced all the internal combustion engines on the street today, it would decrease the total greenhouse emissions by 27% (ignoring the emissions created while producing the electricity to charge those vehicles).
However, electric cars are still far away from substituting combustion engines any soon. Many problems will face these vehicles until they become the majority on the streets.
So what are these reasons, and how long will it take for EVs to become the majority of cars on the streets? I will discuss all these questions and more in this article.
What are the reasons that could prevent EVs from replacing combustion engine cars? Considering that gas is so expensive nowadays, EVs seem a great idea to save some money in the long term.
EVs Long Time Storage
Batteries are the main problem of EVs. We all know that batteries have a life span and can’t be stored for a long time.
On the other hand, you could keep an engine car in the garage for ten years, get into it, change some oils, do some service, and drive it. Is that available in EVs? These lithium batteries’ efficiency will decrease drastically over time, even if you are not driving the car.
Battery Replacements
At first, you might be happy daily driving your newly purchased EV without having to pay for gas anymore, especially nowadays when gas prices are surging. However, this happiness will soon come to an end. You will get frustrated when it gets to a time where you have to replace your EV’s batteries, which would cost you the price of a new car.
Yes, everyone is talking about the economy of EVs, but no one mentions the cost of replacing a battery which is a nightmare for an EV owner. You might argue that gas prices are increasing daily, but what about lithium battery prices? These battery prices are also increasing along with fuel prices, but why?
These ‘eco-friendly’ batteries need raw materials to be produced, including nickel and lithium. However, these materials are correlated with fuel prices, and their prices are skyrocketing now! This made Elon Musk tweet something nobody was expecting from him:
Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2022
Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.
Battery Degradation
Let’s face it. Nobody will buy a used EV! Why should anyone buy a car that will soon cost him up to $20,000 to replace its batteries? This is the real cost of EVs, and this is how these EV makers are making money by selling more and more batteries.
On the other hand, conventional cars with combustion engines are easily sold after being used. We all see daily many cars on the streets from the 90s, 80s, and even older than that!
The Grid Cannot Bear All This Load!
IF EVs became a thing, this means an additional 32 Amps (on average) of electricity for every home, taking about 15%-30% of the average modern home’s electrical power (100-200 Amps) and literally double the amount of electricity that an old house consumes. Can you imagine how countries will overcome this increase in electricity consumption?
Maybe by burning more oil to produce more solar panels and wind turbines to charge the EVs from a ‘clean’ power source!
Don’t Forget to Charge Your Car!
What is the most frustrating thing about having a mobile phone? Having a dead battery. Yes, that same thing applies to an EV. You have to charge your car, or its battery will die, and in the middle of the highway while you’re searching for a charging station, wait for at least an hour to recharge your car at a public station! That’s a lot of time compared to refueling a car with gas or even hydrogen.
You have another option to charge your EV. You could do this in your home-sweet-home! But get ready to wait for up to 8 hours on average for your EV to be charged!
Non-Eco-Friendly
Electric vehicles always appear as the planet saver and the ultimate eco-friendly vehicle, but that’s not true. Automakers are marketing their products as eco-friendly, not to mention the indirect cost to nature due to the production lines themselves and batteries that needs to be changed every 10 years or so, leaving the planet with a huge amount of lithium batteries waste that is hardly recycled!
EVs are not 100% eco-friendly; that’s the truth nobody mentions!
EVs and Hot weather
EVs are full of electronic parts much more than a regular petrol car, and the enemy of electronics is heating. That’s why we see a lot of reliability issues in hot weathers area. Even the most expensive part of the EVs (that’s the batteries if you don’t know) will suffer under these hot climate temperatures.
This is why we still don’t see a lot of EVs in hot regions of the world, like Dubai, for example. According to the latest Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) study, there are 5,107 electric vehicles in Dubai as of January 31, 2022. And as of September 6, 2021, Dubai has about 1.44 million vehicles on its streets. This means that electric vehicles in Dubai are less than 0.5% of the total vehicles (5,107 / 1,440,000 * 100% = 0.35%).
EVs are a Dream
Tesla is a good example of a successful story of a startup that became the most valuable automaker in the world with a $1 trillion market capitalization in 11 years. But what about other EV startups that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars in pre-orders and claiming mind-blowing car stats. And then, they just fail!
Simply these startups are selling a dream and nothing more than a dream.
Conclusion
With all these cons, how could EVs replace engine cars? However, electric cars will become more popular with time for many reasons that we could discuss later in the next article, but there’s no way it will be able to replace engine-powered cars.
Both types of cars will exist on the streets for many upcoming years until one proves to be better than the other!
So you’re saying EVs don’t have any future?
Well, it depends. If we continue to see this amount of billions of dollars of investment pushed towards EVs along with governmental support with incentives and policies, then they will definitely have a future along with combustion engine cars.
But maybe this will be an artificial future for EVs that one day might disappear!