Electric cars: the shocking truth
MARKETING experts call them ‘early adopters’. They are the people who must have the latest thing, whether it be technology, cars or anything else for that matter. It would be fair to say that I am not among this group. In fact, at the opposite end of this scale are the ‘laggards’ who are the last people to take up new stuff. Some of them never do. I think I might well be a laggard when it comes to electric vehicles. I don’t really see myself taking them seriously until I know I could drive my regular journeys to the Hebrides and the west coast of Ireland on a single charge. But I do know an early adopter. He ordered as his company car an example of the world’s best-selling electric vehicle when it first appeared in the UK some years ago. He’s a very aware sort of guy and a passionate believer in the need to do something about climate change, which often leads to some spirited discussions about my gas-guzzling V8 and primitive dieselpowered Land Rovers.
My first line of defence is always the same: far more pollution is created in building a new car, even a ‘clean’ electric one, than I will ever cause by driving around in my old Land Rovers. And my second line of defence is the issue of range and the availability of charging points. But he has stuck to his guns and when the time came to replace his company wheels he ordered another EV, telling me how much better it was than the first, and how its range had been considerably extended. This second car was due to be replaced this summer.
I bumped into him a month ago and when I asked whether he was now on his third, he rather sheepishly told me he’d gone back to petrol. The reason was simple: he’d had one too many (and there have been very many) breakdowns when the car ran out of volts and left him stranded. He’d also grown tired of having to make massive additions to his journey times to allow for charging, and sometimes he’s had to wait for hours to get access to a charging point.
The other thing we’ve often debated is what, to me, is no more than ill-informed gesture politics and political grandstanding. I’m referring, of course, to the grandiose and foolhardy statements made by a certain Michael Gove that the UK will ban the sale of all fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2040. Others have since argued that this is not ambitious enough and the ban should be brought forward to 2032.
My friend thinks this is all wonderful, because he believes that government should impose aggressive targets to force the car manufacturers to up their game on battery and drive unit development. This is fine, as long as government has taken the trouble to gather some underlying science that reassures us that it is even remotely feasible.
I was therefore very interested to be sent a copy of a letter signed by eight of the UK’S leading geologists, geoscientists and mineralogists that was delivered to the Committee on Climate Change. It contains some startling facts that ought to cause our politicians to think hard about the targets they set, and indeed whether the headlong rush to embrace electric vehicles is actually the right answer.
According to these experts, to meet the targets set by the government for the UK we would ‘need to produce just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, threequarters of the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production’. And remember, that’s just to transition the UK to electric cars and excludes light and heavy goods vehicles, never mind the resource requirements to deliver electric vehicles to the rest of the world. As if that isn’t enough, the report also states that ‘a 20 per cent increase in UKgenerated electricity would be required to charge the current 252.5 billion miles to be driven by UK cars’.
This has huge implications for the world’s natural resources, not only to produce green technologies like electric cars, but to keep them charged. The scientists added that if the numbers are extrapolated to the current estimate of two billion cars worldwide, ‘annual production would have to increase for neodymium and dysprosium by 70 per cent, copper output would need to more than double and cobalt output would need to increase at least three and a half times for the entire period from now until 2050 to satisfy the demand’. And then there’s the vast energy requirement to extract all these raw materials, assuming there are enough to dig up anyway, process them and then ship them around the world.
As I was digesting this, I received another communication from someone high up in the power industry who’d also read the letter from the geologists. He says there aren’t enough cables in the ground nor generators at the end of them to produce the power required, and the UK would have to embark on a massive and expensive programme of supply infrastructure and nuclear power station construction. Most importantly, his view is that electric cars are a dead end and the future is all about hydrogen, either in internal combustion engines or fuel cells.
Maybe right now a laggard is exactly the thing to be.
“Someone in the power industry told me EVS are a dead end and the future is about hydrogen, either in engines or fuel cells”
■ Gary Pusey is co-author of Range Rover The First Fifty, trustee of The Dunsfold Collection and a lifelong Land Rover enthusiast. What this man doesn’t know, isn’t worth knowing!