Battery and range stagnation
The status quo of electric cars: better batteries, same range.
If today’s supporters of EV’s would dig into the specifications and the sales brochures of early 20th century electric “horseless carriages”, their enthusiasm would quickly disappear. Fast-charged batteries (to 80% capacity in 10 minutes), automated battery swapping stations, public charging poles, load balancing, the entire business plan of Better Place, in-wheel motors, regenerative braking it was all there in the late 1800s or the early 1900s. It did not help. Most surprisingly, however, is the seemingly non-existent progress of battery technology.
The Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, two electric cars to be introduced on the market in 2010, have exactly the same range as the 1908 Fritchle Model A Victoria: 100 miles (160 kilometres) on a single charge.(5) The “100mile Fritchle” was a progressive engineering feat for its time, but it was not the only early electric that boasted a 100 mile range. I have only chosen it because its specifications are most complete, and because its range was certified.
In fact, the range of the Nissan Leaf or the Mitsubishi i-MiEV may be far worse than that of the 1908 Fritchle. The range of the latter was (officially) recorded during an 1800 mile (2,900 km) race over a period of 21 driving days in the winter of 1908. The stock vehicle was driven in varied weather, terrain and road conditions (often bad and muddy roads). The average range on a single charge was 90 miles, the maximum range recorded was 108 miles. (sources: 1/2).
The range of the Mitsibushi i-MiEV and the Nissan Leaf was tested in a very different manner. On rollers instead of on actual roads, and in a protected environment, but that’s not all. Both manufacturers advertise the US “EPA city” range, a test that supposes a 22 minutes drive cycle at an average speed of 19.59 mph (31.5 km/h), including one acceleration to 40 mph (64 km/h) during no more than 100 seconds.
Critics blame today’s manufacturers for not displaying the “EPA combined cycle” range, which also includes trips on the motorway (the “EPA highway cycle”). Contrary to vehicles with an internal combustion engine, electric cars are more fuel efficient in cities than at steady speed on a highway- an electric motor uses no energy when it is idling, and regenerative braking works best in city traffic. Darryl Siry, former CMO of Tesla, estimates that the correct range of the Nissan (and other modern electric cars) will be around 70% of the advertised range. That would bring the range of today’s electrics to the same level as the 1901 Krieger Electrolette (68 miles).
Vehicle weight
These paradoxes have dominated the use of the combustion engine carbon car. As vehicles got smaller with better mileage, what did the industry do? It invented the SUV, a heavier and more carbon-intensive vehicle. Any gains made by vehicles with higher mileage were cancelled by the multiplication of more energy-intensive SUVs. And yes, industry now plans to make electric SUVS with bigger and bigger batteries.
A similar scenario is now playing out in jurisdictions with lots of hydro dams and electric cars. Norway, a wealthy petro state with low population density, leads Europe with EV sales of 62 per cent thanks to high subsidies and lots of taxes on combustion vehicles. To date the evidence from Norway suggests electric cars are making a dent in emissions, but not a big one. In that country, emissions dropped 3.5 per cent in 2020, the year the pandemic cut into driving miles. Curiously, two-thirds of Norwegian families have merely supplemented their conventional vehicles with an EV instead of abandoning the combustion vehicle altogether. About 60 per cent of all miles navigated in that mountainous country are still driven by ICEs while EVs perform the rest of “mobility consumption.” Nordic owners of electric cars — just like the ride-hailers — also tend to use public transit and bicycles less. Do EV users tend to drive fewer miles because of range anxiety or because they treat their EV as an additional virtuous vehicle? No one has a good answer to the question yet in Norway or anywhere else.
Environmental impact
The wider question, however, is whether electric cars will ultimately help to save the planet or even make the slightest contribution to doing so. Environmentalists point out that, first of all, they are still cars, with a lot of embedded carbon involved in the manufacture. The batteries, which are mainly lithium-ion, rather than the lead ones still used in conventional cars, not only require a lot of energy to produce, but are a really difficult to dispose of.
Currently there is no economic way of extracting the very expensive lithium which, instead, has to be mined in a complex process involving some 500,000 gallons of water to produce a ton of lithium. Despite demand growing rapidly, Lithium found mainly in western South America, Australia and China is relatively plentiful but cobalt, another metal required for battery production is principally only located in the inaptly named Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the cobalt rich region of Katanga, it is mined either by big companies with little regard for the environment or taken from small ‘artisanal’ mines owned by smallholders who use child labour. Of course reducing tailpipe emissions is only part of the story as the key is the method of production of the electricity. China is by far the biggest user of electric vehicles and has the world’s largest solar energy programme but also still uses vast amounts of coal. In the UK, only 28 per cent of energy is from renewable sources."
The picture darkens. According to Mining Watch Canada, base metals such as nickel and copper generate 20 to 200 tonnes of solid waste for every tonne of metal extracted. Rare earth minerals such as platinum make a million tonnes of waste for every tonne extracted. As things now stand, says Mining Watch, Canada’s influential mining industry “generates over 30 times the volumes of solid waste that all citizens, municipalities and industries combined produce on a yearly basis.”
Unfortunately, the ecological consequences of rare mineral mining will only get worse over time. We have largely mined the richest and easiest veins to access. As ore quality declines, industry will spend more fossil fuel energy to move more rock to gather fewer minerals with greater waste volumes. A group of British geologists recently looked at the global situation for lithium and here’s what they concluded: “The lower grade and higher impurity
Recycling trouble
Recycling lithium is a great idea, but to date it is still more economic to mine more of the stuff than to grind old battery packs and sort out their rare earth ingredients. Although material specialists are working on battery designs that use fewer rare minerals or are easier to recycle, EV battery construction remains dependent on energy-intensive minerals. Only five per cent of electric car batteries are currently recycled. Yet by 2030, the electric car industry will be discarding 11 million tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries with few places to recycle them.
Congestion
“For the foreseeable future, electric cars will be bit part players. While there are some environmental benefits, they do nothing to address the key problem of road transport, congestion in urban areas and on major routes. The resistance of consumers together with the various technical and practical difficulties makes it difficult to see how the ambitious targets set in various parts of the world for the replacement of conventional cars can be achieved.
The auto manufacturers have also made the mistake of conflating the development of driverless and electric vehicles. Driverlessness, as I have written previously (Prospect, January 2017) is technically much further away than electric and quite possibly will never be achieved as the main mode of driving. Electric may be the future but just as horses were still on the roads in my youth, the combustion engine will be around for far longer than policy makers expectand environmentalist would like.”
Political impact
About 90 per cent of the world’s rare earth minerals come from antidemocratic states such as China or impoverished states such as the Congo and Bolivia. Experts expect the demand for minerals to grow so wildly that the potential for the cartelization of producers” is inevitable.
In other words, don’t expect the politics of rare earth mining to be any more wholesome than those of petro states.(5) About half of the globe’s lithium and copper deposits are concentrated in geographies experiencing high water stress. Just like fracked natural gas.