Electric cars are a phenomenon. According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, sales of electric and Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs) increased by 131.8% and 13.8% respectively in the year to May 2020. This figure is expected to keep on going as infrastructure improves and battery technology becomes easier to manufacture, more efficient, and, most importantly, cheaper. Layla Moran MP also wrote to Rishi Sunak this week calling for electric vehicles to be exempted from VAT, which would help bring down prices and increase sales even further.
This is surely great news: no or little (in the case of PHEVs) tailpipe emissions means that we can reduce air pollution levels sufficiently and help bring about an end to the climate crisis. Presently, emissions from passenger vehicles make up 21% of all the UK’s CO2 emissions according to the latest figures from 2018 and have increased by 6% on average since 1990. Although road traffic increased by 28%, any increase is a worry and needs to be combated if we are to bring an end to the climate crisis.
Lockdown has also had a profound effect on emissions. In the UK, emissions dropped by 31% by mid-May, better than the global average of 26%. While this is welcome, and many people will have noticed the fresher air in urban areas, this is only temporary. A report by Rohit Chakraborty of the University of Sheffield found that emissions have risen by double digits in the first fortnight in June – in Bradford as much as 116%. Therefore, it is clear that lockdown is an outlier and a very brief dip in our ever-increasing carbon emissions.
So, this begs the question: why are electric cars not the cure-all they should be? Simple: the manufacturing process. Batteries for electric cars use a lot of precious and heavy metals and elements, such as lithium and cobalt. A report by the European Environment Agency in 2018 found that overall, emissions caused by the production of electric vehicles were higher than that of internal combustion engines. While the report found that the “estimates of the GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions from raw material extraction and processing for Li-ion (lithium-ion) batteries (commonly used in electric vehicles) vary widely, but recent LCAs suggest that it is responsible for around 20% of the total GHG emissions from battery production.”
Although this is worrying, the report also found that, in the main, electric vehicles are better for the environment than petrol or diesel. However, the benefit they bring is not enough to help end the climate crisis on its own. What would be more effective is a move towards sustainable rail travel, and the reopening of former “Beeching” lines such as the Waverley Route to Carlisle, and Portishead Line in Somerset, to name two. The UK can be a world leader in this, we just need to understand what works and what does not.
DISCLAIMER – I am not taking a side in this leadership election, and as such am not biased towards or against either candidate.
* Jack Clark is the former Chair of Scottish Young Liberals, and was candidate for Paisley & Renfrewshire South in 2019.
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The problem with electric cars is that they are cars. So we’re using 2 tonnes of complicated materials (albeit less moving parts than a fossil car) and 10 square metres of road space to move 1 human being. So that uses a lot more energy than it has to, esp as cars have got much heavier recently. Better would be to put the tax up on road fuel, put in quality cycle infrastructure, and do something about on-road parking. For trips of up to 5 miles – with the proper infrastructure – most people 8-80 could cycle, and do in Holland. Some will need power assistance – electric cycles. And some will still need cars for some trips, so I’m not suggesting getting rid of cars altogether. Again, in Holland, cars can safely get everywhere without problems. Many long trips would be better on trains.
A bicycle uses about 10-15 kg of materials to move a human, none of it particularly rare.
There are also the problems of congestion, road safety and noise and pollution from tyres and brakes, none of which are any less of a problem with electric cars. Better mass transit and cycling/walking infrastructure are the only way to fix these in cities.
That said, I agree that electric cars are really important as a practical step that will make a difference. Environmentalists are often far too keen to tell people that they must stop doing the things that they enjoy doing (e.g. driving). A far more positive approach is to find ways to minimise the damage done whilst letting people live their lives the way they want to. Electric cars are a good way of doing this.
I think EVs are a silver bullet.
PHEVs also very good so long as people actually plug them in.
Access to charging for people without drives where they can install a charge point is possibly the central transport challenge now.
It takes quite some time to charge an electric car battery, so I imagine long waits and lengthy queues at charging points. What is needed is to standardise the design of batteries and design cars so that batteries can be easily changed – so instead of plug-in rechagarging, people excahnge their used battery for a readily charged one.
What is needed is common sense and pragmatism and someone who could bring both of these into practice so that the majority of the population can be bought along with the changes to our present way of living. Changes have happened to our way of life constantly throughout the ages and people adapt much better when they are not being preached at all the time, in my experience anyway or is just me.
Dan Martin “….none of which are any less of a problem with electric cars”. I’ve been running electric cars since 2014 and I disagree. EV drivers are a small community in my part of the world, but the consensus among us is that: we cause slightly less congestion because we are more mindful of the environmental impacts of unessential car use; we drive differently (less aggressively) and slightly more safely in our EV’s; EV’s are definitely quieter than vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICE’s); pollution per mile from tyres will admittedly be the same; and pollution per mile from brakes will probably be less because EV’s employ regenerative braking (I use a BMW i3 as a shorter-range runabout and I can drive in urban and rural settings for miles without using the brakes, controlling my speed using just feathering the accelerator pedal).
I bought the first Renault Zoe and second EV in South Somerset 6 years ago and was taking a bit of an expensive gamble, but I haven’t looked back: I love driving my EV’s even though I rigorously limit my mileage, and as a bonus I get a smug feeling when I drive past the queues at petrol stations. I’ve invested in my own solar PV energy generation and battery storage system at home, so for most of the year I pay almost nothing to re-charge the EV’s.
I agree with Jack Clark’s point about the problems with the raw materials and manufacturing process used for EV’s, but two of the reasons I chose the BMW is that it is manufactured in what is claimed to be the world’s most eco-friendly car assembly plant, and it is designed for longevity (the body is built of recycled long-life materials, and the battery can be removed, re-used for energy storage banks, and replaced with an updated version utilising greater energy densification.
I learned to drive relatively late because I lived in cities as a young man and used cycling and public transport intensively to get around, but these are far less viable options in a rural area, and my farm vehicles can only be diesel-powered. EV’s are not perfect, but they are a significant improvement, and my conscience is eased slightly because of them.
What should we do with all the existing cars which use fossil fuels?
Jenny Barnes makes an important point about the weight of cars. A 1959 Mini weighs less than 650 kg and a 1970s family saloon rarely exceeded a tonne. Nowadays small petrol engined hatchbacks can weigh more than a tonne, and batteries make electric equivalents about 30% heavier. Physical car size is a significant problem. Most family garages were designed for something smaller, lots of cars struggle to squeeze into a ‘standard’ parking space and older roads are the same width as 50 years ago. Motorists are trying to fit bigger cars into the same amount of space, and nobody in government or the motor industry recognises that there is a problem.
As Jack Clark comments, some metals used for electric vehicles are in heavy demand. Copper and aluminium are not rare but copper prices have been increasing for decades and they aren’t going to decline. Lithium mining is a dirty industry; there is hope that the next generation of batteries after Li-ion will not depend on it.
Electric car charging points? I know that there is one contributor on LDV who understands the UK electricity supply well, so I hope that he will contribute. We have to note that the UK electricity supply has developed over many years, built in many places on assumptions which are no longer true. My house has a 100 amp or so fuse between it and the cable under the road outside. That means that I can consume between 14 and 17 kW before it trips — six or seven kettles and fan heaters. If I plug in a 13kW car charger, on top of my fridge, lighting, and other nightly loads, I won’t charge at the full rate. I could ask for a higher rated fuse to be fitted, but if all of my neighbours do the same thing, there still might not be enough power from the local substation to provide all of the homes and cars.
I’m not saying that it is an impossible problem to fix, but it needs serious thought.
Standardisation of vehicle design for battery swaps? Interesting but at the moment you’re talking about removing 300+ kg battery packs, which have to be mounted low in the vehicle. Slide them in and have them align with the interconnects on the other side? All possible
continued…
No real point to make here, just sharing experience as someone who’s just passed the five-year anniversary of driving a PHEV. Although they sometimes get stick from ‘real’ electric car drivers, if you’re only doing local trips you hardly ever have to fill up with petrol. With lower mileages and shorter trips during lockdown, I last filled up nearly 4 months ago! So long that the car was beginning to complain about the age of the petrol… it knew. What I do find unsatisfactory is the prohibitive cost of topping up at private charging stations in hotels and motorway services etc. Just because an enterprise is ‘green’ doesn’t mean it’s not a rip-off merchant…
My own ideas?
* Avoid double counting of surplus night time electricity power. We can use surplus night time electricity capacity to charge EVs or to fuel backup solutions or a bit of both. However it might be that there isn’t much night time surplus.
* Promote EV sharing schemes — co-operatives or commercial companies.
* Change annual tax on cars to something based on mass, width and length. CO2 based annual car licence taxes have failed in that manufacturers improve the efficiency of engines but cars get bigger. [CO2 taxation is covered by petrol and diesel duty. CO2 emissions are pretty much proportional to fuel consumption.]
* Keep your cattle excrement detector on full charge. EV manufacturers should be challenged for unusual claims. The diesel engine/NOx emission scandal arose because people who should have known better failed to challenge diesel engine manufacturers about unrealistic performance claims.
* There are different solutions for different places. Twenty years ago, Mongolia did not have any long metalled roads or petrol stations. The country now has a few of each.
Yeovil Yokel, I am delighted that you and your community have had so much success with electric vehicles, but I fear that a large part of that is down to the sort of people who have adopted them thus far. You bought the electric car because you are conscientious, it did not make you so. If we want EV usage to increase then we must accept that they will contribute towards congestion and some people will be run down by them. Sure, they would otherwise have been run down by a petrol car, but that’s likely to be of little comfort to them.
That said, you make a valid point about regenerative braking and I want to be clear that I am 100% in favour of electric cars. My point was in agreement with the original piece that EVs do not solve all problems but are a very welcome step in the right direction.
The logic of electric vehicles from a climate change perspective is pretty inescapable
1 Cars contribute very significantly to CO2
2 while it would be good from a number of perspectives if we used them a lot less, this is very hard to see happening at anything close to suffice to scale to make a difference
3 we therefore have to get to cars with very low/no CO2 emissions
4 a pretty clear path to this exists which in the long term will be largely self financing (the economics here are much more favourable than in many other areas of climate change)
5 there are of course a number of issues but they all look soluble
6 we need sufficient pump priming from the government to get critical mass
Some excellent points already mentioned here. I too envisage a future where standard batteries are leased and swapped out at motorway service stations in the same way people used to swap horses. We might struggle to swap an entire battery in one go, but if some smaller cells could be loaded in a way not dissimilar to modern toner cartridges on a big office printer, then your car could get a significant number of extra miles in the time it takes for you to nip to the loo and pick up a coffee. I’m assuming service stations would have dedicated personnel to do this correctly and safely.
It’s important to discuss the wider environmental impacts of batteries, but I think the air quality side of things has only been alluded to. When people talk about the reduction in exhaust pipe emissions, it means just that. Cars create fine particulate air pollution from the action of driving and braking. The best way to reduce vehicle pollution will always be to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. Electric vehicles, along with cleaner combustion engines will continue to contribute towards cleaner air quality as we adapt, but ultimately we need to encourage urban design that invests properly in cycle infrastructure and gives appropriate priority to pedestrians.
We need people to prefer cycling or walking for short journeys.
Lightweight ,small, fit into a garage. For short journeys a 3 wheeler , with stabilisers could be used on short journeys for a couple. Equally a conventional car can be made small,therefore smaller battery that can be charged up in the garage.. It is not beyond the bounds on innovation to build them. They have existed in the past Reliants. Equally it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that with larger batteries they can go further afield. We can go ‘back to the future’ .Old ideas can be updated for modern times.
So, what’s happened about getting most of us on to public transport? I guess with COVID-19 likely to be with us for quite some time, that mode is going to continue to be problematic. So the private motor car would seem to have a future after all!
The big problem with electric cars, besides their current cost, is recharging. I always wondered why they couldn’t have made batteries standard size etc and operated an exchange scheme similar to Calor gas. Or, alternatively, what happened to the hydrogen fuel cell? Certainly, for lorries and buses, where depots play a key rôle, liquid hydrogen gas might be the answer. The same could apply to some trains. The trouble is that hydrogen, while plentiful, can be dangerously volatile – remember the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.
Nonconformist radical: “What should we do with all the existing cars which use fossil fuels?”
Or, how do we utilise the fossil fuels which we have invested in an existing vehicle versus future emissions? There is a very complicated calculation to determine when to scrap a vehicle. Steel production in India or China? If we try to improve the European environmental performance of the vehicle, are we making a global difference?
I don’t know and I doubt that the right questions are being asked.
Kevin Langford: “The logic of electric vehicles from a climate change perspective is pretty inescapable”
It could turn out that massive strip mining for lithium has a global impact. It already has shocking consequences locally.
“3 we therefore have to get to cars with very low/no CO2 emissions”
Cute European built cars which meet our cultural standards are available. Where did the steel and other metals come from? Oil for plastics or to make GRP body panels? Cotton and natural rubber? Cars are made with so many elements.
“4 a pretty clear path to this exists which in the long term will be largely self financing (the economics here are much more favourable than in many other areas of climate change)”
There is no clear path to self financing green car manufacture. There is a clear path to obfuscation.
Folks – what do you propose to do with all the fossil-fuel cars currently in use?
@Nonconformistradical
The same thing we do with them now. Eventually most of them will be scrapped. Ideally as much as possible will be reused or recycled, though I imagine that’s decreased a lot with modern cars due to the increased use of plastics (I hope I can be corrected there).
Some will remain in use for many years. Those owned by people who aren’t bothered for replacing them, and also those owned by enthusiasts, but they will dwindle over time.
There aren’t so many 1970s cars on the roads these days. The ones that are around are owned by enthusiasts and represent a hobby. This is fine. The numbers will be small, and it would be a same to deny people their pleasure.
For anyone who is not an enthusiast, they will want a new car sooner or later and they will buy electric. Their old car will be sold on until it has no resale value, then it will be scrapped.
If the process needs to be sped up then a scrappage scheme can be introduced to incentivise the process.
@Dan Martin
According to government data from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vehicles-statistics
In 2019 there were approx. 18.8 million petrol cars, 12.2 million diesel cars and less than 800 thousand cars running on other stuff (hybrids, electrics, gas etc)
And 133K petrol light goods vehicles, 3.9 million diesel ones and less than 20 thousand others.
So around 34 million – give or take – fossil fuel cars and light vans to be disposed of….
Based on the data for year of first registration and taking a goodish year from the data say around 2.5 million cars and around 360 thousand light vans might normally be bought each year.
And we are told we are heading into the biggest recession since they started keeping tabs…
On the matter of how long it might take to get rid of all these fossil fuel vehicles – I’m not holding my breath…
For those talking about swapping out electric car batteries as an alternative to waiting for them to charge – they weigh around 200 to 500 Kgs, depending on the size of car and range.
The size of battery that the average person could safely and comfortably lift won’t get you very far.
@Nick Baird
What I was talking about was having a standard size and shape of battery, like the cylinders filled with calor gas, for example. There would be battery exchange stations, where you would drive your car onto a ramp, the battery would be removed from underneath and a fully recharged replacement fitted. Tge ‘flat battery could be recharged on site and used on another vehicle. When you first buy a calor gas cylinder you pay for the cylinder and the gas, after which you just pay for the gas when you exchange your empty cylinder. Likewise, you pay for your first battery and then only for the charge in your replacement battery.
Probably a bit pie in the sky; but I believe that, back in the 1980s, Varta Battery and a car manufacturer, possibly Daimler Benz, exhibited an electric powered lorry at the Stuttgart Motor Show that operated on this principle. For me, I still reckon that we should not be giving up on hydrogen fuel cell/electric propulsion. Could go with a bang (hopefully not that kind of bang, if you know what I mean!).
Just about everyone misses the point about EVs
1. The government plans that ALL new car sales after 2032 will be pur EV – no hybrids. Part of commitment to Paris Agreement
2. So they will be mainstream. And the issue is how to switch the delivery of energy to drive them from fossil fuels (the garage) to electricity charge points
3. So 10m EVs, need 10m charge points at our homes, in the street… and if you want to make a longer journey (say 100miles there and back) you are ging to need Rapid charging somewhere along the way. So we nee 2m Rapid points across our road network
EVs will never be a reality unless the government has a program to install 1m/year chargers for the next 10yrs. Now that is a “shovel ready” project.
@Antony Watts
“EVs will never be a reality unless the government has a program to install 1m/year chargers for the next 10yrs. ”
And to persuade/entice enough people to replace their existing fossil fuel vehicles alongside this…
Hw long is this coming recession going to be…?
There must be a lot more drivers, or would-be-drivers, about than there used to, after months of the government telling us public transport spreads the virus. I hope plenty of those commuters take up cycling or working from home on a permanent basis, because the comments above make it clear there’s no chance of EVs picking up the slack. For the forseeable, most daily-driver cars are going to keep on burning fossil fuels.
@John Marriott
Here is an organisation offering a three-minute battery swap as part of their offer:
https://www.nio.com/nio-power
They are a Shanghai-based company. If you can standardise on batteries for EVs then this approach is certainly possible, but there is a high charging demand on a battery-swapping station (~1 MW).
@Jenny Barnes, Phil Beesley,
One reason why cars have got larger and heavier, but not the only one, is the Euro NCAP crash standards. Crash protection is about increasing the dimensions of crumple zones which reduces the maximum deceleration when the vehicle hits a solid object. When you add side impact to front impact it makes the cars wider as you cannot move the occupants much closer together. I don’t think the small cars of the 1970s would pass any modern crash tests.
Sorry for a latish intervention, but I am very busy this week. As an electrical engineer, I am intensely interested in EVs and have owned a battery electric car (BEV) for the last two and a half years. It is now four and a half years old. I aimed to reduce local emissions. The EV has taken over most of the local journeys (up to 60 miles return) and the 150 mile return and some up to 400 miles return, leaving the diesel car to do the longest journeys (350 to 2000 miles return).
This is a rapidly evolving technology, so that the picture is changing all the time. Battery technology is improving and batteries are becoming cheaper and can have two and half times the capacity in the same casing compared to 5 years ago. This has made obsolete physically changing the battery for personal cars, although there may be a limited case for it for fleet vehicles.
Targeting particular segments, such as urban taxis, for replacement of diesels by EVs is very effective for emissions reduction, as is done in LibDem Watford.
We must do much more to encourage use of walking, cycling and, in due time, public transport, and reduce congestion in city centres. BEVs then have a place in reducing urban and suburban emissions. Hybrids, which are nearly twice as complex as BEVs, are an intermediate step; so called ‘self-charging hybrids’ are greenwashing. Charging infrastructure away from home is patchy, but improving.
I think if we are not careful we will fall into the same trap as the conservatives and assume one fuel type will solve all of our problems .We shouldn’t overlook other fuel solutions like hydrogen for example which is already being used in European rail systems and would be more viable for heavy goods and public transport systems ,The other problem with dependency on electric is that the energy efficiency infrastructure is not in place, and we haven’t made the most of local community generation . so lets ask those awkward questions and ask why we are not maximising all renewable energy sources for our transport systems . The best system of course is not to waste energy and create pollution in the first place by making home working the norm and not just something we do in a pandemic.
I bought my first electric car this year. They generate less noise and less pollution than petrol or diesel cars. This article seemed to assume that batteries couldn’t be reused or repurposed after the car has reached the end of its life. That assumption is incorrect. In addition, the range of electric cars has increased considerably over the last few years. Mine now does about 250 miles on a full charge, more if I’m being careful. I charge it at home using 100% renewable energy. Prior to this my diesel would pump out fumes with every journey that I made. The lack of fumes is a major positive. Equally the lack of noise helps to reduce noise pollution. It is great to try and persuade people onto public transport, but that’s not always possible. I drive to a park and ride then get the tram into work, but I’m able to do that. Not everyone is. Not every town has such good public transport and not every office is close to a tram stop! Moving people away from the internal combustion engine is a good thing, including into electric vehicles.
I wish I could buy an EV – but have no way to plug one in at home.
Manufacturing emissions are a tiny fraction of lifetime emissions for a fossil fuel car, so any excess in EV manufacture is quickly counter-balanced.
So-called self-charging hybrids should be banned from advertising themselves as eco-friendly in any way. They burn fossil fuels for all their power.
All existing EV batteries will be recycled 99.9% indefinitely precisely because the materials are rare. However, there are battery technologies in the pipeline that use only common materials that are cheap to produce (in both money and emissions terms) and every single EV ever manufactured can be upgraded to a new technology at any time during its lifetime.
Partly because of this, and because of the imminent transition to automated driving, eventually resulting in the pricing out of human drivers from the public road (“You want to insure yourself to do What!!!”), all new cars will be built to last, and to run for a million miles before being scrapped, rather than the 100,000 or so current models can manage. There will also be far fewer vehicles on the road because they will be shared and so many more people will be working from home.
So, I suggest we stop regurgitating the stale old arguments about EV emissions from 20 years ago and look to form policies that will accelerate this move towards a totally different transport future.