EV push won’t fix America’s bigger problem

I am starting to worry about the electric car.

Not the thing itself; I’ve found electric vehicles to be superior to their fossil-powered predecessors in just about every important way, and although I am a car-crazy Californian, I don’t expect to buy a pollutionspewing gas car ever again.

From General Motors’ Super Bowl ads to President Biden’s climate-change plans, plug-in cars are now being cast as a central player in America’s response to a warming future, turning a perfectly reasonable technological hope into hype.

The planet will be much better off if we switch to electric cars. But visions of the guiltfree highways of tomorrow could easily distract us from the larger problem with America’s transportation system.

That problem isn’t just gasfueled cars but car-fueled lives — a view of the world in which huge private automobiles are the default method of getting around. EVS represent a very American answer to climate change: To deal with an expensive, dangerous, extremely resource-intensive machine that has helped bring about the destruction of the planet, let’s all buy this new version, which runs on a different fuel.

But while we go about the project of building electric cars into tomorrow’s infrastructure — Biden has pledged to create 500,000 charging stations — let’s not overlook a more immediate menace on the roads. I refer to the millions of inefficient trucks and SUVS that are America’s favorite cars, each poisoning our atmosphere for years beyond any transition to EVS.

The promise of electric cars grants us leeway to party on in the gas-guzzling present — EVS offer a politically simple, onestop expiation for our unsustainable ways, so long as we ignore the Escalade in the room.

Fixing the problems caused by cars with improved cars and expensive new infrastructure just for cars illustrates why we’re in this mess in the first place — an entrenched culture of careless car dependency.

Liberation from car culture requires a more fundamental reimagining of how we get around, with investments in walkable and bikeable roadways, smarter zoning that lets people live closer to where they work, a much greater emphasis on public transportation and above all a recognition that urban space should belong to people, not vehicles. Policy changes that reduce the amount Americans drive could lead to far greater efficiency gains.

During his time as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, the new secretary of Transportation, advocated plans to reduce car dependency. But asking Americans to begin to imagine a future of fewer, smaller cars and less driving will be a great political heave. I can already imagine the Fox News segments pillorying Biden and Mayor Pete for their “war” on SUVS and pickup trucks.

There’s a chance I’m being overly cynical. To the car industry’s credit, the push for electric vehicles does appear to be real. Carmakers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to bring about the electric future, and in the next few years they plan to release dozens of electric models. Ford, for instance, is pumping electrons into its most iconic models — an electric Mustang, the Mach-e, was just introduced to positive reviews, and the F-150 pickup truck, for decades the bestselling vehicle in America, will be offered in an electric version next year.

It’s worth remembering that the electric future is still just a vision, not a certainty. The car industry’s electric dreams are fueled by a singular success: Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric-car juggernaut. In a pandemiccrushed market otherwise brutal for the car industry, Tesla shipped just shy of half a million vehicles in 2020, about a third more than it sold in 2019.

But no other carmaker has found much luck in electric vehicles and serious questions about the business still remain. Will EVS become cheap and convenient enough to attract a mainstream audience? Can carmakers that now rely on big pickups and SUVS for their profits make money on the electric models?

Then there are all the problems with cars that electric motors won’t fix. Cars have insatiable demand for roadway, capturing our cities for their near-exclusive use.

Can we fix these issues with more advanced tech? Perhaps, someday. But we’d make better progress if we identified the correct problem: Not gas, but cars.