Why electric cars will not take over sooner than you think

An article appeared on the BBC website last week that I couldn’t help but read since EVs are a big interest of mine. I read it fascinated as what began as an enthusiastic feature on the evolution of the electric vehicle turned into an ode to batteries and their cost. So, here’s why the article’s wrong.

The chief argument the author makes is that EVs will kill the internal combustion engine because of what appears to be the natural order of technological advancement or the so-called S-curve. Like the internet, he says, EVs will go from slow and reluctant adoption to something everyone is using. This will be thanks to falling costs, which will prompt exponential growth in sales – the long part of the S-curve – and eventually market saturation with EVs dominating the market.

To say that comparing the internet to EVs is like comparing apples and oranges is to put things mildly. The internet offered a whole range of communication, education, and information options to people. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it opened up a whole new world. What EVs offer is a quiet car that does not emit exhaust fumes as it moves. True, it needs less servicing than an ICE vehicle because of the much fewer moving parts but it has a weak spot and this is the battery. When the battery dies, the EV dies.

Batteries are, unsurprisingly, another argument in favour of the EV revolution that shall sweep ICE cars away into obsolescence. Costs are falling and the technology is improving, the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt writes. Both of these are facts. The problem is they are not the only facts about EV batteries that are relevant to the narrative of a revolution.

For one thing, despite the falling costs of batteries, EVs are yet to achieve price parity with ICE cars. But parity will not be enough. EVs need to be a lot cheaper than ICE cars to see mass adoption. And, if we are being rational, they’d better get cheaper on their own because subsidies are just a cost mask, after all, and it’s the taxpayers who pick up the tab, effectively paying for the EVs the government is supporting.

For another thing, batteries are vulnerable. While science has recently seen breakthroughs in batteries’ lifespan, extending them to up to 1 million miles, these batteries are still far from the mass market, not to mention they would not be cheap. Most batteries in the EVs sold now will not last a million miles. Most will last a lot less and that’s only one of the problems buyers have with EVs and their batteries. Another is spontaneous combustion of the battery, ironically sometimes linked to charging.

As the BBC’s Rowlatt accurately points out, virtually every carmaker worth their salt is planning to become an EV maker in the not too distant future. Some, like Jaguar and GM, have plans in place for an all-electric future and others, like VW, are a bit more guarded, planning to still be producing some ICE cars ten years from now. This is perhaps the riskiest bet the carmaking industry has ever made.

There is a lot – really a lot – of talk about how fast the costs of making an electric vehicle are falling and how much better EVs are than ICE cars. The technology is progressing in leaps and bounds, and before too long, making an EV will be much cheaper than making an ICE car, and they will charge in five minutes, so nothing can hold the EV revolution back, the narrative goes. Except buyers.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal published an article aptly titled Electric Vehicles Are the U.S. Auto Industry’s Future—if Dealers Can Figure Out How to Sell Them. It had an even more apt subtitle: Car dealers say they are struggling to square the industry’s enthusiasm with shoppers’ reality.

The title of the WSJ article captures a discrepancy few are talking about because it does not fit in with the S-curve and all-electric future narrative. What fits with the narrative are the fast-rising sales of EVs—true—and the carmakers’ plans.

It is a fact that global EV sales are rising. Last year was particularly successful because while total car sales globally were down, EV sales were up. Yet this does not mean they rose equally in all markets. In Europe, EV sales grew the most last year and this is hardly surprising, given the generous subsidies EU states offer people to buy an EV. In the U.S., conversely, EV sales last year rose just a little on 2019.

But let’s turn to the total number of cars sold. In Europe, these were 1.395 million, versus 589,000 a year earlier. In China, 1,337 million EVs were sold last year, versus 1.169 million in 2019. And in the United States, last year saw 328,000 in EV sales versus 316,000 a year earlier.

How about total car sales for context? According to Knoema data, total car sales in China stood at 20.178 million last year. In the United States, total sales stood at 3.4 million and in Germany, the EU’s biggest economy, car sales totalled some 2.91 million. All these figures were lower than the total for 2019 and yet EV sales, for all the government support and advertising, still made a tiny portion of the total.

According to the BBC’s Rowlatt and carmakers, this is about to change and it will change fast. It may be true but the sales number will only change as fast as EV charging gets.

Range anxiety is what has caused the discrepancy between carmakers expectations and buyers’ reality. Range anxiety is the biggest risk for the EV revolution. And range anxiety is currently going nowhere. Let’s look at the latest EV release: Ford’s F-150. The truck is packed with features including capabilities to power your home for up to three days (if you don’t consume more than 30 kWh per day, which is the average consumption for a U.S. household). And it takes 8 hours to charge with Ford’s proprietary charging station the company is offering F-150 buyers as standard equipment.

One might say that this is not too bad – you get home in the evening and plug in the car to be all nice and juiced up for next morning. This makes the truck perfect for people with strict schedules. The problem is, not everyone is on such a strict schedule. Also, not everyone lives in a house.

A lot of EV advertising focuses on the convenience of having a car you can simply plug into your garage’s outlet and have it full for next day’s driving adventures. But millions of people both in the United States and in Europe live in apartment blocks and not every apartment has a garage to go with it so you can charge your EV in peace. This means that the EV revolution needs charging points and it needs a lot of them. It also needs charging schedules for cities with millions of people living in them.

The magnitude of the charging station offensive that would need to be launched if we are all to go electric is difficult to describe but I’ll try. Let’s take the apartment block I live in. It has 26 apartments in total. Of these, maybe 20 have access to a garage, which means 20 EV drivers could charge their cars in their garages. The building opposite ours has only half a dozen garages for twice that many apartments. This means EV owners from that building would need to find a charging point nearby or throw cables out of their windows to charge their EVs.

I won’t go into the issue of electricity demand spikes in the context of mass EV charging but imagine the queues at charging stations made by drivers who simply have no access to their own charging point. Drivers don’t like queues. What they like even less is spending a lot of time in queues, which would be unavoidable because mass chargers charge more slowly than Tesla’s Supercharger and Ford’s charge station. Now imagine how a charging station for freight trucks by the highway would look. Incidentally, charging time was the main reason cited by EV drivers who switched back to petrol cars in California. These made up 18% of all EV drivers in the state.

This is why car dealers are having a hard time selling EVs. For all the benefits of EVs – and they are substantial – the drawback of having to wait for hours to get a full charge is a major put-off. Just how major it will remain and for how long we have yet to see but I’d venture a guess it will take more than a decade to bring EV charging times on par with filling a truck’s tank with petrol. I’d venture an even bolder guess that it might never happen. This fact may not kill the EV revolution – all that government support will make sure it continues – but it will certainly affect its progress. Just how bad the impact would be should become clear over the next five years.

P.S. Facts are beginning to trickle into the media stream. This report appeared in the AP yesterday. Besides the obvious — range anxiety is holding back the EV boom — the report also notes an interesting technical discrepancy. New EVs have the capability to charge faster. Charging stations are yet to catch up with those capabilities.