Issues With Electric Cars
Electric cars have gotten a lot of press in recent years about how they are better than gas powered cars. With the push about lowering global emissions it is no wonder they have been pushed, especially online, onto people who have the ability to drive in developed countries unlike ever before. Should people be switching from gas to electrically powered cars?
Not too many people think about how the electric car is made. The batteries have to be replaced once every three to 10 years and electric car manufacturers produce far more emissions, 74 percent more, in order to just make the battery alone compared to the CO2 emitted by conventional cars. According to Industry Week, “just switching to renewable energy for manufacturing would slash emissions by 65%” (Bloomberg, 2018)
Charging an electric car up to 80 percent takes 30 minutes, a huge increase from a couple of minutes it takes to fill a gas-powered car. People can charge their vehicle at home, but it takes “upwards of eight hours to fully recharge a battery pack using normal outlets” (Sendy, 2020). Rural and suburban areas are a real challenge for electric vehicles as charging stations are not as common. A city facing power shortages are “not suitable for electric cars” as they require a lot of power.
The costs for electric cars are not cheap. A person will “have to pay $10,000 to $50,000 more for an EV than for a gas-powered car” (Sendy, 2020). The cost to charge the vehicle is something to think about. A person can use a charging station or charges their car at home but there will be a cost and sometimes the cost to charge it is not worth keeping the car.
Cold climates may create a challenge to own an electric vehicle. A test in Norway compared 20 of the country’s most popular electric vehicles and found they lost between 9–30 percent of their winter range depending on the model. Even without the cold the driving range of a gas powered car is higher than that of an electric vehicle, which is something to think about on a long trip. “Electric cars are limited by range and speed” (Rinkesh, 2020) . On average electric cars have a range of around 50 to 100 miles before needing to be recharged.
Other issues not many people think about are how silent electric cars are, the seating arrangements and the minerals needed to build the batteries. Electric cars are silent when they are in use, meaning the vehicle could have an issue and the person would never be aware until a major issue happened. Electric cars right now are small two seated vehicles so there is not much extra room. The batteries, which need to be made from copper, cobalt and rare earth minerals, are mined in countries such as China. These places often cause human rights violations and ecological devastation such as deforestation, polluted rivers and contaminated soil.
These are questions that will have to be answered in the future and before electric vehicles become normal and we have more issues to solve than we did with gas powered cars.
