I understand why people buy into all the propaganda against EVs—it connects to things they already believe and people like to have their beliefs reinforced. What I don’t understand is how the propaganda is so persistent. Most of it isn’t even slightly logical—it doesn’t require a deep dive into the data to make it fall apart, just a little bit of skepticism. I’m not going to explain the engineering behind the debunking, that would make this video and post too long. But here are some quick answers that you can expand with some basic internet searching if you choose.
The grid won’t support all these EV’s
Actually, in short order, the grid will be more reliable, useful, and less wasteful because of EVs. Roughly 67 percent of the electricity generated in the USA is lost or wasted on the grid. Fifty percent of that loss is recoverable. EV charging is both schedule-able to off-peak hour and can reduce losses from other factors like phase unbalance. Beyond that, EV’s and batteries developed for EVs enable power generation and storage to be more reliable than the grid for use at the point of generation. Generation at the point of use eliminates even the unrecoverable transmission loss of the grid.
It’s just plain weird to hear people who tout their independence make these kind of claims. I can make my own electricity (and do) to power my EV. I can’t make my own gasoline. I briefly flirted with making my own diesel fuel from used cooking oil, but the supply of used cooking oil dried up when Biodiesel became a viable business. I use superchargers only for very long trips–mostly I just charge at home or at my shop. My home and shop chargers are 100% powered by the sun.
EV’s are powered by coal plants
Totally goofy. Of course whatever powers the grid powers EVs. You can’t change everything at once. From 2014 to 2018 the use of all fossil fuels for ALL energy use declined from 81.6% to 80.2% Solar and Wind increased by 122% and 46% respectively. No new coal plants are being built in the USA, and most of the existing construction projects have been canceled. Coal plants are being decommissioned at the highest rate in the last 100 years. Not because everyone became acolytes of Greta Thunberg but simply because it’s uneconomic. Natural gas plants are much cheaper and faster to build and operate, and wind generation and solar are proving to be effective alternatives. A lot more change is coming, but no matter how much you might like huge infrastructure changes to happen overnight, they don’t. Claiming EV’s do not offer environmental and sustainability benefits because today coal plants still exist incredibly stupid.
The energy content of gasoline is many times greater than a battery.
Internal combustion engines (ICE) are at most 40 percent efficient, and really more like 20%. Electric motors are about 95% efficient at converting power to motion. ICE engines mostly generate heat, moving down the road is more of a byproduct. And that means when they move down the road they have to shove a huge flat radiator in front of them, dramatically increasing drag and costing power. The reason electric cars offer 150 miles per gallon equivalent is simply that they are far more efficient. When you waste 80 percent of the energy content in waste heat and drag, what does the greater energy content buy you?
EV’s pollute more than ICE when you consider everything that goes into making them.
This is simply a lie. Propagandists trot out the mess of the worst Lithium mines (usually substituting pictures of open-pit copper mines), ignoring the staggering environmental damage of extracting, transporting, and using fossil fuels. They even claim lithium is rare though lithium is the 25th most abundant element on earth, more abundant than lead and many times more abundant that tin. The same people lie about recyle-ability, saying lithium batteries can’t be recycled. Absolute nonsense. Every component of an EV battery is recyclable—and it’s all present in a convenient package like a super-concentrated ore at the end of life. Nothing useful remains after burning the thousands of gallons of fuel an ICE uses in its lifetime. For the same reason that more than 95% of lead-acid battery components are recycled, close to 100% of lithium batteries will be recycled. This year (2025), recycled lithium is expected to account for 9% of the total lithium battery supply. The percentage is this low only because most electric vehicles (EVs) are still in their first lifecycle and will not reach end-of-life recycling stages until after 2040. Currently most lithium batteries from EVs get re-used since 75% capacity of a 100KWh battery may not deliver the range car owners want, but it’s marvelous for energy storage. There are a lot of cell towers and other industrial applications with reused Tesla car batteries as backup power. Even I reused some Tesla Model S modules to provide the house power in my stupid motorhome project.
There’s more nonsense of course. The stakes in the energy business are immense. Fuel for transportation in the USA alone is a $200 billion/year business—that’s for a country that constitutes less than 4 percent of the world’s population. Spending a few billion per year to delay the adoption of EVs is a trivial expense. If I were profiting at that level from delaying EV’s I’d be spreading lies like mad about it. I don’t assume these folks are substantially more moral than I am.