I Hate to Say This: Current EV Goals are Unrealistic

We have to be practical about what's achievable

Don’t get me wrong; I want to reduce CO2 emissions. And quickly. But I also prefer to do it economically and by incentivizing people to make smart decisions by making the green decision the cheaper, better decision. I absolutely do not believe in forcing sub-par and more expensive products on a populace in the name of reducing a tiny overall percentage of worldwide emissions at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Count me out.

Yet that’s exactly what we are doing with electric vehicles.

My ex-wife and I went to buy a car in March of 2021. Remember this was at the height of when vehicles were scarce and prices were high. My lease ran out a month later, so we did not have much time. We went skiing frequently, so we wanted an SUV. Our trips were long (4-6 hours) and we had well over a thousand pounds of cargo between all our skis, luggage, supplies, passengers, and (cute) dog.

Quite simply, I checked and there was no EV on the market that was even capable of handling our payload capacity at the time. So before it even got off the ground, the idea of getting an EV was off the table.

And that was before everything else that disqualified them. Our new condo we had just bought had outdoor parking spots with no electrical source anywhere near them, nor any public or private chargers. So, installing a charger would have required digging up the parking lot and running heavy wiring all the way to our meter on the other side of the building. The mere thought made my wallet significantly lighter. And then, there was the potential cost of an EV. The only EV that came anywhere close to offering what we needed was a Tesla Model X, which started north of six figures. Once again, this was out of the question.

So we went to the Ford dealership, found a Ford Explorer we liked for about half that, which could handle a lot more cargo, has a much longer range, and required no charging infrastructure. It was one of the easiest decisions we’d ever made.

At no point did buying an EV made economical or practical sense. Since then, a few more EVs have entered the market, and I frequently reconsider my purchase decision. The calculus still has not changed. I don’t see it changing any time soon.

Yet federal and state governments seem hell-bent on, pardon me, shoving electric vehicles down our collective throats over the next decade or so.

Now, the average American only travels a short distance every day. So for many of them, EVs work in theory. But that discounts so many people who travel long distances, regularly go on road trips like we did, live in rural areas, or need to tow or haul heavier things. This is a rather large percentage of the population, even if only on occasion.

While the EV is a more advanced product in many ways compared to an ICE vehicle, it is not all-encompassing as many would like us to believe. It also fails against ICE in many categories. Additionally, until physics is reinvented, it will continue to fail for the foreseeable future. It’s unrealistic to think that every car and truck in America can be made electric. It simply won’t work. Not to mention the fact that they are more expensive! The parts and raw materials are more complex. And, as demand goes up, the cost of the raw materials will increase as well. The price of many EVs has, in fact, been increasing, not decreasing. This is the opposite of what would be needed to get mass adoption.

Suffice it to say, for these reasons alone, EVs have a long way to go before mass adoption.

And then there are the other issues, including a long litany of problems.

First of all, where are we going to get the power to charge all of these cars? It’s well-known that our power generation system and grid is already in terrible shape. Just look at how much difficulty we’re having at keeping houses powered in Texas and California. Now, you’re saying you want to dump all this added demand onto an already-stressed system?

A study showed that preparing California’s distribution assets and power grid for EVs and electric heaters would cost about $50 billion by 2035. Now, guess who’s going to pay for that? The people of California, via higher electric bills, will. That doesn’t sound pleasant or desirable.

And that’s just one state…out of 50.

We are nowhere near ready if 2035 is the goal. And neither are the cars.

Then comes this brilliant WSJ article. Remember how Toyota led the environmental car charge with hybrids? Well, it turns out they don’t buy into the electric car goals, and they’re getting slammed for it.

Except, well, Toyota has a point. Let’s examine it.

A Toyota memo to auto dealers in April explained the challenges to full electrification. For instance, “most public chargers can take anywhere from 8-30 hours to charge. To meet the federal [zero-emissions vehicle] sales targets, 1.2M public chargers are needed by 2030. That amounts to approximately 400 new chargers per day.” The U.S. isn’t close to meeting that goal.

That’s a really good point. If you’ve noticed, the Federal government loves mandating things without any basis in the reality of how anyone is actually supposed to meet said goal. This is a perfect example. And Toyota is calling out BS for being complete BS. The US absolutely cannot meet its federally mandated goals it has pushed upon automakers, at their expense, for electric vehicles. Building 400 chargers a day? Who is paying for that? How are you going to obtain permits for them that fast in this modern environment? According to EVAdoption, we added 4,200 chargers in all of 2022. That’s 11 per day…not 400.

Houston, we have a problem.

Unless we all want to sit for eight hours waiting for a charger, this alone makes mass adoption of EVs completely unrealistic. Just DOA.

And then, there’s the raw materials that make up EV batteries. It’s an extremely inefficient use of materials currently to make one EV, and the environmental disasters that are these mines is a topic EV lovers love to ignore.

Well, Toyota has a few things to say about that too:

Toyota also noted that “more than 300 new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035,” and they could take decades to develop. “The amount of raw materials in one long-range battery electric vehicle could instead be used to make 6 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or 90 hybrid electric vehicles.”

And here’s the real kicker: modern plug-in and regular hybrid electric vehicles are so efficient compared to EVs that they have nearly the same reduction in CO2 emissions. Furthermore, they are significantly cheaper and a dramatically better and less wasteful use of finite raw materials.

So, let’s just all agree that Toyota has a point.

On the greater scale, mass EV adoption has a lot of problems yet to be solved. Government so frequently likes to think it can wave a magic wand through legislation and change the world via fiat. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works.

I would love to see mass EV adoption but I want to see it by making EVs the better choice for consumers. Until that day, I just don’t see it happening.

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Author’s Note: There’s a good comment below. I should note that I fully believe in EVs, just not on the promised or mandated timelines.