I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But I feel more and more cheated.
Unfortunately, it may be better to keep your old petrol car than to buy an electric car. There are good environmental reasons not to jump just yet.
In theory, electric driving is a subject I should know something about. My first university education was electrical engineering and electronics, followed by a master’s degree in control systems.
Combine this perhaps surprising academic path with a lifelong passion for the automobile, and you can understand why I was drawn to an early adoption of electric vehicles.
I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (despite our poor electric charging infrastructure) I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with both.
Unfortunately, it may be better to keep your old petrol car than to buy an electric car (file image)
I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But I feel more and more cheated, writes ROWAN ATKINSON (pictured)
Panacea
Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they are great mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But I feel more and more a little cheated. When you get down to the facts, electric driving doesn’t quite seem to be the panacea for the environment it claims to be.
As you may know, the government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it appears to be largely based on conclusions from only one part of a car’s lifespan: what comes out of the exhaust pipe.
Of course, electric cars have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, especially when it comes to air quality in city centers. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture, including the manufacturing of the car, the situation is very different.
Ahead of the 2021 Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions from producing an electric car are almost 70 percent higher than producing a petrol car.
How come? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries currently fitted to almost all electric vehicles: they are absurdly heavy, require enormous amounts of energy to make them, and are estimated to last only ten years.
It seems like a perverse choice of hardware to lead the car’s fight against the climate crisis.
It is not surprising that a lot of effort is put into finding something better.
New so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge faster and could be about a third the weight of current ones – but they’ll be years away from going on sale, by which time we’ll of course have millions of electric overweight cars made with rapidly aging batteries.
Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even if we are slow to develop a truly ‘green’ way to produce it. It can be used in two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has invested a lot of money in its development.
Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be filled with hydrogen at a filling station just as quickly as with petrol.
If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised about its use in heavy trucks for long-haul transportation due to its weight; an alternative is to inject hydrogen into a new type of piston engine.
JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made great strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to bring them into production in the coming years.
In theory, electric driving is a subject I should know something about. My first university education was electrical engineering and electronics, followed by a master’s degree in control systems. Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic path with a lifelong passion for the automobile, and you’ll understand why I was drawn to an early adoption of electric vehicles
JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to bring them into production in the coming years
If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks – and as a result every gas station stocks it – it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars.
But let’s zoom out even further and look at the whole life cycle of a car.
The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the commercial model of the auto industry for decades.
Currently, we only keep our new cars for an average of three years before reselling them, primarily driven by the ubiquitous three-year lease model.
This seems like an excessively wasteful use of the world’s natural resources when you consider the great condition a three-year-old car is in.
When I was a kid, every five-year-old car was a bucket of rust and halfway out the gate of the junkyard. No longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with loving care, will last 30 years.
To trust
It is sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars kept them for an average of five years, instead of the current three, car production and the associated CO2 emissions would be massively reduced.
Still, we’d enjoy the same mobility, just in slightly older cars.
We also have to recognize what a great asset we have in the cars that exist today (there are almost 1.5 billion worldwide).
Manufacturing-wise, these cars have paid their environmental dues, and while it’s prudent to reduce our dependence on them, it seems right to look carefully at ways to preserve them while reducing their polluting impact. Obviously we could use them less.
As an environmentalist once said to me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible.
It would be prudent to accelerate the development of synthetic fuel, which is already used in motorsport; it is a product based on two simple concepts: first, the environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine, and second, there is nothing in a barrel of oil that cannot be imitated in any other way.
Formula 1 will use synthetic fuel from 2026. There are many interpretations of the idea, but the German car company Porsche is developing a fuel in Chile that uses wind to power a process whose main ingredients are water and carbon dioxide.
Lifespan
With further development, it should be usable in all petrol engined cars, making its use virtually carbon neutral.
I increasingly feel that our honeymoon of electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s okay: we realize that a wider range of options need to be explored if we are to properly address the very serious environmental issue. problems caused by our use of the car.
We must continue to develop hydrogen and synthetic fuels to avoid scrapping older cars, which still have so much to offer, while at the same time promoting a very different business model for the automotive industry, where we keep our new vehicles longer, recognizing their amazing but overlooked longevity.
Friends with an environmental awareness often ask me, as a car enthusiast, if they should buy an electric car. I’m inclined to say that if their car is an old diesel and they drive a lot in the city center then they should consider a change.
But otherwise, hold the fire for now. Electric propulsion will one day deliver a real, global environmental benefit, but that day has yet to come.
- First published in The Guardian