Electric Vehicles Work Fine… Except For The Battery Part

Electric vehicles (EVs) were invented in the nineteenth century. They were enormously popular in the early 1900s. As late as 1910, most of the taxicabs in New York City were EVs. As late as the 1950s, the East German postal system used EVs to deliver the mail.

Most golf carts are mini-EVs; they work fine. With this pedigree, why have EVs never caught on in a big way? Why is it taking billions of dollars of investment by Elon Musk in Tesla and many billions more of government subsidies to get do a point where Americans have only adopted EVs in single-digit percentages?

The answer, in a word, is batteries.

EV batteries are heavy in comparison to the vehicle and much of the battery power is needed just to move the battery itself around. The batteries are made from rare earths and other hard to mine minerals such as cobalt, nickel, lithium, and copper.

There are relatively few charging stations around the country. More could be built (with subsidies), but even the fastest chargers take 30 minutes or more to produce an 80% charge on the batteries. That’s if there’s no line at the station; lines of even a few vehicles can push the wait time to several hours.

Be sure to pack a meal. Even under ideal conditions (which are rare), the range of the battery-powered EV between charges is perhaps 180 miles, often less. This won’t change soon.

There’s a lot of battery-related research underway and some improvements can be expected, but none that change the fundamental conditions. Substituting one mineral for another in battery composition might help, but it won’t change the fundamental ratio of input weights versus output and range.

This article is a sobering reminder of the challenges facing EV battery manufacturers. It tells the story of A123, a pioneer EV battery maker that was spun out of an MIT research project in 2001, went public, achieved a high valuation, but ultimately went bankrupt. The remnants were purchased out of bankruptcy by a Chinese company that quickly seized the technology.

The article is from Bloomberg and the story line is that A123 might have survived if only the U.S. government (that means taxpayers) had showered millions of dollars more in subsidies on the company. The real story is that battery technology and EVs broadly are non-economical compared to internal combustion engines (ICE) and will never survive without the subsidies.

The truth is that there is no climate crisis, gasoline is one of the most efficient fuels (by weight) ever discovered, and ICE vehicles are here to stay for the foreseeable future. No amount of wasteful taxpayer subsidies will change that.

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