5 Ugly Truths and 5 Dirty Lies about Electric Cars

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Electric cars are more efficient, cleaner, and certainly a lot quieter. Yet, for every positive thing about them, there is a big pile of disinformation floating around the internet aimed at torpedoing their inevitable rise. You can believe some of it, but an awful lot of it is fake, wrapped in particular politics and perpetuated by those with vested interests in the status quo. Or sometimes its fed just by someone retweeting a meme they liked. Here are just some of the truths and lies about electric cars.

THE UGLY TRUTHS

EVs are not as much fun to drive

Well, the hypercars are fun, but only in a straight line. In a straight line, electric hypercars are downright thrilling.

Get in a Rimac Nevera, a Pininfarina Battista, or a Lucid Air Sapphire, floor the accelerator, and your entire brain will be compressed to the size of a walnut as your vision blurs and all your guts are pressed against the back of the seat while a little voice from somewhere inside your head that you didn’t even know you had starts saying in a squeaky meter, “heeeellllpppp meeeeee!”

Apart from the hypercars in a straight line, the rest of the time electric cars are far less engaging to drive. Go around a corner and you’re just going around a corner.

In a gas car with a manual transmission and a hearty exhaust burble, you’re anticipating the entry, easing on the brakes, operating the clutch, matching the revs, downshifting, divebombing the apex, and smoothly and confidently powering out.

So, until they figure that out, like making kale and hummus taste good, you’re going to have to fake it.

Cobalt is sourced unethically, sometimes

Cobalt is an element used on the cathode of a battery, the positive terminal. If you don’t include cobalt in the cathode, it could overheat or even catch fire.

Mining cobalt is often done with lower-than-OSHA standards however, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they’re not as strict about who does the work.

CHILD LABOR

The non-partisan government think tank The Wilson Center says Congo has more than half the world’s cobalt and is where 70 percent of cobalt mining takes place. Of 255,000 miners in the DRC, 40,000 are children, the Wilson Center said.

Companies like BMW, Volkswagen, and Samsung are part of a group called Cobalt for Development formed “to support ethical and safer practices in the DRC’s cobalt mining industry.” Tesla joined a group called the Fair Cobalt Alliance, which has many of the same goals. Other EV makers are still working toward ethical minerals. So the problem is being addressed.

And while child labor is something all nations must fight to eliminate, the sad reality is it is used to produce everything from bamboo and bricks to cabbages, carpets, cashews, cattle, and chocolate all over the world, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Child labor is also used to mine coal in at least five countries, including China. So the problem—and it is a big problem—is not confined to just cobalt mining.

EVs take longer to charge, at least they do now

While great strides are being made in fast-charging—take Nyobolt’s six-minute charge we wrote about last month—across the board it still takes some planning to go on a long drive in an electric car.

For regular EV use, you can just plug in at home when you get there and unplug the next morning when you head off to work. Rates can be lower overnight, so it makes economical sense.

But the public electric fast-charging network as it stands now is kind of a mess (with the exception of the Tesla Supercharger network which everyone seems to love, but which not everyone can access yet). Most public chargers are owned by different companies that all want you to download their app, sign up for life, and never use anyone else’s plugs for as long as you own your car.

OUT OF ORDER

Good luck calling those 800 numbers, too. Anecdotal experience suggests roughly half the public chargers in any given metropolitan area aren’t working for one reason or another.

A recent JD Power survey on EV charging concurs: “…charging station availability is a top barrier to the greater adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) as perceived by US consumers today,” the study said.

But there weren’t a lot of public gas stations at the dawn of the internal combustion vehicle, either. Things are getting better all the time.

Range Anxiety

Like most anxieties, range is based on fear.

Write down how many miles you actually drive each day. The average in the U.S. is 37 miles, according to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation. You could recoup that every night with the same plain-old 120-volt wall plug that’s powering the very computer on which you’re reading this.

But that doesn’t stop the anxiety. That problem is real. “Yeah, but what about when I want to drive to Vegas, man???” There are chargers available for that. Some even work. The public charging network is flawed at the moment but getting better.

Affordability

We sit here and write about how great the Rolls-Royce Spectre is, but it costs over $250,000. That Remac Nevera mentioned up above is $2.4 million. So yes, many EVs are expensive.

Nonetheless, the Chevy Bolt EV starts at $26,500, and the Nissan Leaf for $28,040. And some electric cars qualify for a $7500 Federal tax credit. So maybe this one belongs in the Lies section, below…

THE DIRTY LIES

All you’re doing is changing where the pollution is coming from

One of the favorite talking points of EV slanderers is that, while there are no tailpipe emissions coming from EVs, the pollution is coming from coal-fired powerplants just a few miles away that produce the electricity needed to operate them, thus making EV drivers flaming hypocrites!