In just a few short years we will all be driving Electric Powered vehicles, or so we are told by the media. Sheep like we will all ditch our beloved V8’s and straight six’s for the bland-as-hell electric powered vehicle. To hell with the lack of minerals to produce these vehicles, to hell with the lack of electricity to power these soulless-beasties, you WILL all do what you are told fall into line at your local dealership and save the planet one vehicle at a time.
In the US alone sales of EV’s grew from 65,000 vehicles in 2017 to 800,000 in 2022, which by any count is pretty impressive. But the public seems to have grown weary at least sceptical of the promise of a greener cleaner future and now sales growth has taken a sharp U-turn and has fallen dramatically.
The poster child of the EV world, Tesla, who accounted for 50% of all EV’s sold over the pond in Americaland reported their lowest quarterly earning for three years. GM has announced that they are pulling away from the 400,000 EV’s per year production target as they find it hard to find homes for their current production runs and Ford are shelving their plan for another battery factory, at least for the time being. What is it that is stopping global consumers from adopting what is supposed to be the future of battery powered vehicles.
The first barrier seems to be affordability. Even with massive tax breaks and improved supply chain efficiency driving the prices down EV’s are still much more expensive than an ICE equivalent. The cost of an EV is actually going up and not down when you adjust for inflation. When you do the comparison there is between a USD15,000 to USD20,000 difference between an equivalent ICE and EV vehicle. With increased interest prices around the world, it is pretty as to which one the average buyer will choice and why.
In a lot of countries there is actually a tax subsidy if you purchase an EV, this only covers about 50% of the difference and heck it is only a matter of time before governments miss the taxes they used to pull in from new car sales and walk back the subsidies. There is also the small matter of the current offering of EV’s being at the expensive, luxury end of the market where few of us dare to tread.
Then there is the insufferable subscription fees that you have to pay to get full service from your EV, to get all of the optional extras to work as described. True servicing and maintenance is cheaper but you still have to pay on the never-never to get you vehicle to work as you want it to.
Charging is still a challenge. If you are lucky enough to have off-street parking and can afford to have your own charging station then great, but having space to put a charger is a challenge for most. Sure you still have to fill the tank of an ICE vehicle but there are filling stations aplenty and all you do is pull-up, fill-up and you are on the way in 5 minutes. Even the fastest eV’s still take up to an hour to top up on electrons and that is the sort of time that most people do not have in a busy day.
Creating a robust a ubiquitous charging infrastructure is a must but few governments are doing it anywhere nearly fast enough. Stations are still scarce and pretty much non-existent in low-income areas. Where they do exist, they are often unreliable.
Then there is an undeniable truth. EV’s in most households were a supplement and not a replacement. The boom was led by early adopters so EV salesmen had it easy the buyer was already in buy-EV-Mode when the entered the dealership. Statistics coming out of the US though indicate that just about 100% of EV owners also have an ICE at home, a behaviour known as ‘complementing’ and not ‘Substitution’. All buyers are doing is increasing the number of cars in their personal inventory.
Personally, I do not think EV’s are the answer to global warming. Persuading kids to walk to school and for families to not have air-conditioners in summer and turning the heat down in winter and making the choice to just eat seasonal available local fruit and vegetables would probably go further, but hey I like having strawberries on my cereal 52 weeks a year, and heck I ain’t sleeping without air-con!
