Please excuse me if this is common knowledge in the U.S., but today I learned that Mr. Bean is a car racer and insightful contributor to the Guardian. Isn’t that cool?
Rowan Atkinson’s, the man who plays bean, latest column in the article is worth a read, if you have the time. Basically, the English comedy legend, who boasts a degree in electrical engineering and a masters in control systems, makes a convincing case for restraining our optimism for the EV. Here are some of the most poignant excerpts from the piece:
“As you may know, the government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different. In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last upwards of 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.”
Atkinson urges the conservation of more efficient use of existing cars while we wait for better alternatives to arrive:
“But let’s zoom out even further and consider the whole life cycle of an automobile. The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the commercial template of the car industry for decades. Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years. It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced. Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars.
We need also to acknowledge what a great asset we have in the cars that currently exist (there are nearly 1.5bn of them worldwide). In terms of manufacture, these cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect. Fairly obviously, we could use them less. As an environmentalist once said to me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible.”
Atkinson’s points aren’t novel, but they certainly aren’t common knowledge at this point. And, even among people who pay closer attention to the subject, I think many of us look over the negatives of EVs thanks to cognitive dissonance.
While, Atkinson makes a strong case against an unrestrained EV embrace, he fails to highlight the problems EVs could pose to the electric grid.
The threat posed by electric transportation depends a lot on context. Norway, for example, with swaths of hydro energy and no pre-existing power reliability problems, has absorbed the electric transition without hiccups. Sadly, America does not have the grid that Norway does. We’re struggling as it stands now. California is threatened by rolling blackouts every summer, it seems, and Texas has notoriously suffered catastrophic blackouts in the past couple years. Imagine how fair if suddenly everyone were driving electric Ford F-150s!
For a long time, many hoped an electric future would be made possible by swaths of new clean energy. However, about 10 years since we were promised that batteries would make renewables fully scalable, they still seem much too pesky to be trusted. Nuclear, although recent PR wins, is still not fully embraced by the public and is very expensive to build. What’s more, all new generation in our country is a huge headache to connect to the grid thanks to disastrous transmission regulations.
How can we hope to accommodate a rapid electric transportation revolution without loads of new generation? We simply can’t, so long as our electric transportation system is a mirror copy of our 20th century fossil fuel one.
Highway culture, Mom, dad and 16-year-old Billy all driving their own SUVs , buses being for poor people, etc. That needs to be changed. I understand it’s our culture, but some aspects of certain cultures are inferior to others. And it’s time to admit that the Dutch have us beat.
If our transportation sector is going electric, it must also become more efficient. Smaller vehicles, more ride sharing, more lanes, better sidewalks. All of this is in order.