I’ll concede from the off that I don’t much like electric cars (EVs). As I drive up the slip road onto the major trunk road which is just a mile from our home, I’m often followed by one, identifiable by the false grill and a green flash on the number plate. It may be a BMW, a Mercedes or a Tesla, but one thing I know for sure is that as soon as we are on the dual carriageway, the driver is going to pull out and streak past to demonstrate the blistering acceleration these vehicles possess, as if to raise a finger at us saurian internal combustion engine (ICE) drivers. When I’m in town, I have come to loathe the humming sound they make to alert pedestrians to their presence.
I will admit I have driven one on a couple of occasions when my car was being serviced and I was given one as a loan car, so I concede they are nice and easy to drive. However, they feature touch screens for most ancillary functions which I don’t think is a great idea. Would I buy one? Or even lease one? The answer is a resounding ‘No’. Not only ‘No’, but ‘Hell, no’ and, furthermore, don’t ask me again.
The reasons are simple from a practical point of view. First and foremost, they are simply too expensive to buy.
Second, their range is too short. When they became to be a ‘thing’ about a dozen years ago, I was driving a 2-litre BMW diesel. On one tank of fuel, it would take me from home in the South of England to John O’Groats and the Pentland Firth, 660 miles or so, without having to stop to refuel and still have a reserve on arrival, should I ever have wished to do such a thing. Who wants to do a long journey and have to stop one, two or even three times to re-charge for an hour depending on the time of day and the season? In winter, the more you have to use lights and heating, the shorter the range and the battery performance is degraded in the cold.
Third, the batteries degrade over time, don’t last for ever and the cost of replacing a battery is eye-watering - £15k on some Mercedes models, I’ve heard. Eight years seems to be the average battery life with average usage. On top of that, if you have a shunt or a bump, such as a grounding which damages the battery, it must be replaced no matter how new it is.
Fourth, they are considerably heavier than ICE cars so they would wear out tyres more quickly. Also, I’m sure we’ve all read the newspaper stories about collapsed multi-storey car parks when there were a lot of EVs parked on floors that weren’t stressed to take their collective weight.
Fifth, if there is an electrical failure or they run out of power the things stop dead, and you can’t easily push them or tow them. Imagine that on a ‘smart’ motorway with no hard shoulder and you are just past a ‘refuge’ area when the failure occurs - no coasting or limping to the next one. They have to be lifted onto a flatbed recovery vehicle.
Sixth, their propensity to burst into flames. Again, there have been plenty of news reports about fires. Lithium battery fires spread very rapidly and can’t be extinguished. Some ferry companies refuse to take electric cars on board, and we’ve read the reports of cargo ships on fire because of them. Some insurance companies refuse to insure them and those that do charge a premium.
Seventh, due to numbers 2 to 6 above, they have a very poor resale value, well down on their original showroom prices. Car rental fleets have been dumping them and there have been stories of owners trading them in to go back to ICE cars.
Eight, their appearance in the automotive marketplace is as a direct result of the climate scare and the demonisation of carbon dioxide. Since I am a confirmed climate realist who is satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that the scare of anthropogenic climate change linked to carbon dioxide is a lie, a fraud and a scam, and that all government climate measures are the policy blunders of the millennium, there is no way that I could possibly entertain having one.
But there is more about them that people should be aware of. Much more.
The vision of the future which is being mandated for us in the UK is that there will be no new petrol or diesel cars sold from 2030. In the EU that’s 2035.In the USA, President Trump has rescinded such a mandate at the Federal level, but some twelve states still have it in place. At least twelve other countries around the world also have an EV-only mandate for new cars coming into force in the 2030s. This is not going to last; the reasons why boil down to money and politics on the one hand and physics and engineering on the other.
Taking the money/politics issue first and looking at the USA, the Biden administration’s ill-named Inflation Reduction Act is in fact the largest climate policy measure in US history. This means it is the largest energy policy in US history because essentially all the programmes in the Act are directed at the energy sector to the tune of $3 Trillion. EVs are at the centre of this with somewhere between $23,000 and $32,000 to be spent per car! There will also be an estimated additional $3 Trillion of induced expenditure caused by the need to expand and upgrade the infrastructure to support the expected number of EVs on the road.
In the UK, exact EV subsidy figures are unknown, but we do know that, with EV sales falling, the government will fine motor manufacturers up to £15,000 for every non-compliant car sold. The manufacturers have been given EV sales targets and the number of vehicles they fall short by will determine the fines. There may not be many companies which have to pay the fines but that is only because they have had to slash prices to generate enough sales to get anywhere near their mandated targets. This is unsustainable for the industry.
However, it is on the resources, physics and engineering side that a reality check is going to be delivered. Reality is something that, when you stop believing in it or try to pretend that it doesn’t exist, simply refuses to go away.
There have been recent huge losses at Ford, General Motors and VW which have all squandered money in the rush to build EVs for all. The growth rate of EV sales in the USA and Europe fell by 20% in 2024. This is causing a great deal of consternation because factories have to be altered this year or next at the latest to meet an EV mandate in early 2030s. Despite the trend for EV sales falling, the politics of the enviro-zealots’ so-called ‘EV Revolution’ presses on regardless. They love to call it a revolution, but it isn’t.
Let’s go back a century or so to when motor cars were in their infancy, to when people began to give up their horses and buggies for motor cars. Horseless carriages were a revolution. One hundred and fifty years ago, if there had been a widespread change to a new type of horse food, would it have been a revolution? Not so much. Not at all, in fact. That is where we are. EVs are still cars in every respect. They have the same wheels, same axles and the same ‘infotainment’ systems (which is how some people decide which car to buy). All we have done is change the fuel.
The idea that EVs are going to disrupt the oil market and have any significant effect on oil exploration and usage is plain daft. Simple arithmetic tells us. Even if a half of all cars in the world were to be EVs it has been calculated that it would reduce the demand for oil by 10%, maybe less. To reach that point it would take a one-hundred-fold growth in EV ownership and usage compared to today. Ten years ago, EV’s were a tiny niche and while their numbers have grown to maybe 40 million worldwide today it hasn’t stopped the growth in oil consumption which reached a peak in 2024. All they’ll do is moderate the growth in demand for ICE cars.
If we assume their real purpose is to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions, they’re failing in that too. Their supporters claim they have cut 150 megatons of CO2 already. That’s just 0.4% of annual global man-made CO2 emissions. In Ukraine, the oil burning machines of war emit more CO2 in six months than all the world’s EVs combined have so far eliminated. No one knows how much CO2 is eliminated by driving an EV, but we do know how much is added to the atmosphere by driving an ICE car. However, for EVs the emissions don’t occur at a tailpipe, they occur elsewhere, in the electricity supplied to the charging network and upstream in the EV production process.
Next, the batteries. A typical EV battery weighs about 1,000lbs whereas an ICE car fuel tank might weigh 60 to 80lbs. Batteries are made up of a complex set of minerals. In order to build one 1,000lb battery it has been calculated that 500,000lbs of rock and soil have to be quarried or mined by heavy oil-burning plant. The raw materials are shipped by diesel-burning cargo vessels then put through crushers once again driven by oil-burning machines. Calculating how much CO2 is emitted per battery is very complicated but it is in the range of 100% to 300% of the CO2 ‘saved’ by driving an EV instead of an ICE car. The EV protagonists bat this off by claiming that future efficiencies will drastically change this, that EVs will become cheaper, and CO2 emitted during their manufacture will also be drastically reduced.
It is claimed that EVs are simpler and need less labour to build them. This is firmly in the category of disinformation. The truth is they are differently complicated. The complexities have been moved from under the bonnet and into the battery. An ICE car has an engine with thousands of individual components. The EV has a simpler motor and drive chain (no gearbox) but a battery with thousands of individual parts, thousands of welds, a cooling system, power electronics and a safety system. It is a very complex electro-chemical machine that is not easy to make and it also wears out. The labour input to construction is not easier and cheaper, it simply shifts from the power unit to the fuel unit. More labour hours are needed to make an EV versus an ICE car, not fewer. The total labour chain cost from mining the minerals to the showroom is 20% greater than for an ICE car.
Staying with the raw materials, the fundamental challenge facing the manufacturers is mining or buying enough of the raw materials – nickel, copper, aluminium, manganese, cobalt and lithium. To reach the point where half the world’s cars are EVs, the mining would have to increase by 7,000%. It takes 10 to 16 years to open a new mine and get it to economic production. Bear in mind that these minerals are also needed for solar panels and wind turbines so the price of them is going to go up significantly because there is no ability to supply them on time in the volume required. And I haven’t touched on the thorny question of child slave-labour in the countries where the essential minerals are mined.
I think we can see that an all-electric automotive near future (2030s-2040s) is a pipedream. Furthermore, the electricity hardware to move the energy – cables, pylons, transformers is five times more expensive than fleets of tankers. The existing grid in all Western countries is not up to the task; there simply aren’t enough transformers and there is an inevitable energy leakage from the cables the further away they are from the generation plant.
The EV adoption rate will therefore continue to fall until Western governments run out of money, raw materials, their public’s political tolerance or people run out of an appetite for buying things from China. Looking at automobile innovations in the past such as sports cars, convertibles and SUVs, the public’s take up rate was far in excess of the current falling take-up rate of EVs. While we’re on innovations, if the aim is to reduce oil consumption and CO2 emissions it would be far more effective to produce improved ICE engines. Some have already been built and tested which are twice as efficient as the ICE engines currently on the road. Of course, it won’t happen because the governments’ EV ‘revolution’ is being driven by eco-zealots.
This is the nub of it. The truth is that the EV lobby is fundamentally anti-car, anti-personal mobility. The real agenda is to take away cars or to make driving so inconvenient and/or expensive that fewer people will opt to own a car. They know that EVs will not, cannot, replace ICE cars one for one. They don’t care. In their literature they say that ‘behavioural intervention’ will be required. That’s an oily, weaselly phrase for they’re going to tell you how much you can drive a car or whether you can drive a car at all. They wish to increase the proportion of people world-wide who don’t own a car from 45% of all households to 70% in order to meet their emissions goals. The State of California (a den of leftist nut-jobs) has already passed a law which will soon require people to drive 25% fewer miles per year than they drove 30 years ago. Never before have governments put so much effort into degrading or banning people’s personal transport.
This plays straight into the UN Agenda 21 15-minute cities plan with its Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, convoluted one-way systems, bicycle lanes restricting traffic flow and cameras, cameras everywhere. The plan says the idea is that you can get anywhere you want or need to within your city or neighbourhood within 15 minutes whether on foot, by scooter or bike or by public transport. Note, no mention of cars. Another phrase used to describe this is ‘micro-mobility’ which involves the concept that no-one will own the method of their 15-minute transport – unless they’re on foot, of course. There should be ‘no burden of ownership’; everything will be rented.
As this is being constructed around us, cui bono? Data from the USA shows that 0.5% of commuting journeys are by bicycle but 70% are by single-occupant cars. Among those biking to work, they are generally aged 20 to 30, 70% male, 70% white and 80% graduate. That’s the demographic group who benefits. Just for them, New York City has added 600 miles of bike lanes, congesting the cars, vans and buses. The same has happened in London. The global saving in oil consumption from the move to bicycle commuting is reckoned to be about 70,000 barrels per day – 0.07% of the world’s total usage. China increases its oil consumption by that amount every three days.
If you wish to see what this means for us in Britain, just pop onto this page on the UK FIRES website. This organisation is where Absolute Zealotry can be found. They are not talking about Net Zero but Absolute Zero. They blithely talk of 40% fewer cars and a rapid contraction of the aviation industry. Want to be a pilot, young man? Forget it.
The good news is that the anti-car movement has a problem: Generation Z. The anti-car zealots see the grip of the motor car on the imaginations of people as a cypher for liberty – which it is. They view this as reprehensible and put it alongside the American attitude to firearms ownership as something to be overcome. The cultural attachment to the motor car that people have on both sides of the Atlantic runs deep and Generation Z has it too. The ‘Millennials’ are using cars at least as much as the ‘Baby Boomers’ and ‘Generation X’ and ‘Gen Z’ is buying cars at as fast a rate as ever as soon as they have enough money. They may not be able to buy a home but, by God, they are determined to be mobile and free to go places where and when they wish. They are not willing to live without them; across the West 70-90% of young people like their cars and are attached to them.
The UN Agenda 21 aim of containing a smaller population within urban areas with narrow transit corridors between them and the rest of the land off limits is not faring too well. There is in reality a de-urbanisation going on. This has been happening the USA since about 2010 and it accelerated during the fake public health emergency of 2020-2023. The same trend is occurring in Britain too, driven by as much by property prices as anything. That means even more people will be commuting into the cities. Many will be ‘super-commuters’, travelling more than 90 minutes to and from work. They may not use their cars for this, but they will need them to support their extra-urban lives. And they wish to own them, not rent them. We are human beings, we want our own stuff, not someone else’s.
The first three of the claimed advantages are very debatable and one is political. That leaves ‘operate silently’. The disadvantages are real and it’s not an exhaustive list. Agenda 21 and an all-EV future? I can’t see it. Can’t see it at all. What do you think?
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