Why Electric Cars Aren’t As Good

The range from natural gas to more and more popular electric cars. However electric cars date back to the 1830s. During the 1830s the electric cars were hand-cranked and had a very short range due to short battery life. Now that was a long time ago and things have improved since then for the better. I don’t believe electric cars ae that much of an improvement over internal combustion vehicles because of all of the things you have to do to keep them running the time waiting for them to charge.

Electric vehicles are not as good as people talk about them. They create pollution, they are ineffective, and they are very expensive.

Most people might think that electric cars run on batteries there can’t be any pollution, but that’s where they are wrong. Emissions or pollution from manufacturing these cars are at least 50 percent higher because batteries are made from certain materials such as lithium, and copper, which require much energy to be processed.

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Also, many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery. Which will be anywhere from 2 to 5 years depending on where you live due to climate. Once you include the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tons, which is a total of 35.7 tons compared with a total of 29.6 tons for a gas car. The” June 13th, 2011 article by Ed Morrissey called Electric cars not so green after all?” found out that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.

1 tons of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tones for a similar petrol car. Disposing of the battery also double the emissions it takes to produce it, because of pulling the metals out of the battery. Another reason for pollution is charging. Most of the electricity to charge the batteries are made from fossil fuels, and it takes several hours to charge them.

In the issue of September 14, 2011, article Electric Cars are an Extraordinarily bad idea by Louis Woodhill, they looked at the Nissan Leaf. They found that even though Nissan claimed the range to be about 100 miles and it actuality it only went 58 miles. The short distance was because the battery was either shortened by driving fast or the weather. Would you rather have to wait overnight before you can drive again or did you want to wait a few minutes and put gas in your car? While a few minutes spent at a gas station will give a modern gas car 300 to 400 miles of range. To put it in perspective it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from a 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut that time down to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car's batteries.

Once again looking back on the Nissan Leaf. It is priced at $35430. Compare this to the Nissan Versa. The leaf accelerates slower than a Versa and only has about 25% of the range. At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback would take more than 9 years. J.D Power and Associates conducted a study in February and included interviews with over 4,000 U.S. consumers planning to buy a new vehicle within one to five years. It estimates that alternative vehicles will make up less than 10 percent of the market by 2016. The reason was that consumers are not willing to pay extra money.

Electric motor vehicles create more pollutants than people think, their inability to go the full range of the battery and they are expensive to be made. Even though electric cars may sound like a good idea, in reality, they aren’t all they roll to be. 

Works cited

1. Morrissey, E. (2011, June 13). Electric cars not so green after all? Hot Air. https://hotair.com/archives/2011/06/13/electric-cars-not-so-green-after-all/
2. Woodhill, L. (2011, September 14). Electric cars are an extraordinarily bad idea. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2011/09/14/electric-cars-are-an-extraordinarily-bad-idea/?sh=57dd01a44453
3. U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2021). Electricity explained: Electricity in transportation. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-transportation.php
4. Sperling, D., & Cannon, J. S. (2015). The future of transportation and the potential of electric vehicles. Annual Review of Public Health, 36, 299-312. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031914-122957
5. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. (2021). Electric vehicles research. https://www.nrel.gov/transportation/electric-vehicles.html
6. Klippenstein, M. (2019). Life cycle analysis of electric vehicle battery recycling. Joule, 3(8), 1930-1943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2019.05.019
7. Berman, B. (2021). How long does it take to charge an electric car? Plug In America. https://pluginamerica.org/how-long-does-it-take-to-charge-an-electric-car/
8. U.S. Department of Energy. (2021). Electric vehicles: Tax credits and other incentives. https://www.energy.gov/eere/electricvehicles/electric-vehicles-tax-credits-and-other-incentives
9. Girardi, D. (2020). The environmental impact of electric cars. Visual Capitalist. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-environmental-impact-of-electric-cars/
10. Statista. (2021). Electric vehicle sales - worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1165384/global-electric-vehicle-sales-by-brand/