Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something.
My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.
Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into the early adoption of electric vehicles.
I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago, and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) I have enjoyed my time with both very much.
Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run.
But increasingly, I feel a little duped.
When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.
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 largely 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 the situation is very different if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture.
In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during the production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one.
Sadly, keeping your old petrol car may be better than buying an EV. There are sound environmental reasons not to jump just yet.
How so?
The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all-electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of 10 years.
It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better.
New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones – but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries.
Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slowly developing a truly “green” way of manufacturing it.
It can be used in one of two ways.
It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these.
Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol.
If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised over their use in heavy trucks for long-distance haulage because of the weight; an alternative is injecting hydrogen into a new kind of piston engine.
JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years.
If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks – and as a result, every filling station stocks it – it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars. Continue reading