Electric cars – a huge boom and trend in the automotive industry. Everybody knows that. Everybody began hating internal combustion engines. Everybody wants to switch to EV.
But this whole trend has some flaws.
The first issue with electric cars are the batteries. an average lifespan of such a battery is more or less 10 years. After that time they need to be recycled. But unfortunately recycling of such equipment is far from perfect. Matter of fact, there is yet no perfect solution for recycling them so far. And as we know, battery decomposition is highly pollutive for earth’s environment.
Another issue connected to the batteries is the fabrication process – making of the battery is very pollutive as well. Study found that in order to compensate the use of a tradititional gas car with an electric car, the EV needs to be used for over 10 years. This is a big problem, because nowadays people are living a very consumable lifestyle. Also, most of the cars nowadays are not owned by it’s users, but they are leased – this leads to a car change of every 3 years. So every 3 years a new car has to be made for a customer that is already bored with his “old” 3 year old car and needs to get himself a new one. It’s not hard to figure out that manufacturing a new car is a very bad move in terms of being eco-friendly. And EV’s are all about being eco-friendly, aren’t they?
I’m not saying that electric transport is bad or has no future, without a doubt it is a good alternative, but the worlds is not ready for it yet. The infrastructure needed to run this business is not ready for it yet, so is the mindset of it’s users who are easily misled with whatever car makers feed them with.
We definitely need more sources of alternative energy, electric cars don’t make much sense when we have to burn coal all the time to get electricity.
That’s a good point. We need a full transfer to renewable sources of energy in order to claim that electrical energy in cars is more sustainable, however the question of what we do with batteries stays. For now, the EV is a minority on the roads but what will we do when it will become a majority and when those hundreds of millions of vehicles overcome 10 years of age? Another environmental disaster? Btw I don’t agree that everyone wants an electric vehicle, it is rather the opposite, people tend to see all those problems with electric vehicles that are not limited to battery recycling and electricity production. There is also a problem with the time that it takes to charge up an EV which is large compared to usual engines. Also, the network of charging stations is massively smaller than gas stations. If you would like to travel somewhere on EV you risk spending way more time on the way and also a problem with station scarcity. Another vast problem is that batteries lose their capacity under cold temperatures. If on a warm day your EV could overcome 500 km if you are lucky, then on a day when it’s -10 degrees Celcius you would hardly be able to go 130km on a full charge which is super problematic.