The silent dangers of electric vehicles

I’m scared of electric cars. But that’s not why I worry about them.

As a runner on Connecticut’s roads and trails, I’m constantly aware of the dangers posed by cars. And while looking both ways is a staple you learn before kindergarten, it’s the ears, not the eyes, that provide the best defense. Cars are loud. When emerging from a trail onto a road, the vast majority of motor vehicles are detectable from far away thanks to their internal combustion engines. If all you have is sight, you’re likely to be on top of a car, or vice versa, by the time you know it’s there.

Electric cars don’t have any of the same moving parts inside, and so can noiselessly sneak up on unsuspecting pedestrians. This is a bigger problem for the visually impaired, which has prompted a push for some kind of audible alert system to let blind people know a car is coming. Even still, as a runner it’s a relief that electric cars are rare on the roads where I live. I don’t want to get hit.

But all that is only part of the reason to be concerned about them.

Connecticut had a long-running debate about the future of electric cars in recent legislative sessions with most of the focus on the question of dealerships. Tesla, the best-known electric car maker, wanted to sell cars directly to people, which sounds reasonable enough, but the dealership lobby objected, saying we have a system in place that has worked well for years and should not be scrapped. You don’t buy a car directly from faraway GM, you buy it from someone local, which makes the dealer more accessible and accountable through your years of ownership, or so the argument goes.

The issue became moot for Connecticut when Tesla went to online-only sales, but the overall questions on the efficacy of electric vehicles haven’t changed. And even with clear environmental benefits over traditional cars (no more gas stations, ever), there’s reason to wonder whether a mass movement in their direction could be harmful.

For starters, electric vehicle emissions aren’t zero. The power to run them comes from something, and in Connecticut it’s likely from natural gas in a power plant that is transmitted to your house via power lines. Despite years of misleading statements about the environmental benefits of natural gas, the gains from using it vs. oil and coal are not nearly as robust as once thought, and fracking is only one problem.

More than that, a solution to global warming doesn’t mean driving different cars; it means driving less. If the coronavirus is a precursor to what we may face from climate change — and rising temperatures will make future pandemics more likely, not less — it makes sense that some of the solutions we’ve used the past few months could have salience in the longerterm struggle to limit emissions. That doesn’t mean permanently slowing activity to current levels, but experts agree it will require changing consumption patterns.

But it shouldn’t rest solely on individual choices; we need better policies. Our patterns of home construction are mostly static, and people still need to get around. Given options, many are likely to find they prefer mass transit to car ownership under certain circumstances, but they need to have the choice, and that means more of an opportunity to get around without driving. (We could start locally by reactivating for regular use the miles of train tracks that line existing Connecticut rail beds but have fallen out of use over the years.)

The danger is that environmentally conscious people will think an electric car is a climate change solution, rather than a stopgap. We need a revised infrastructure that our politics doesn’t currently allow for but that looming global catastrophes demand. Electric cars are best thought of as something of a halfway point on the way to better transportation and lower emissions that still leaves plenty to be desired. They’re sort of like what came between regular mail that takes days and instant messaging that takes fractions of a second — electric cars as rolling fax machines.

But the comparison only goes so far. To the best of my knowledge, the technology in fax machines never threatened pedestrians with bodily harm.