Electric Cars Are Not The Solution, They’re The Beginning Of The Next Problem

And the more I think about it, the more it worries me. Are people being sold a reality that simply cannot exist?

Save the whales! Save the bears! Save the forests while you’re at it. Save anything and everything, whenever, wherever and however you can, and however seems to have turned into an almost singular goal — more electric cars. Don’t for a second think I’m against saving the planet, or anything in it, although if you ask me, there are a few wankers who really don’t deserve it. But you gotta do it for those who do, the you and me, the average yet majority of this planet’s population. Because the planet deserves to breathe, and so do you and me, but I increasingly feel electric cars have very little to do with it.

Electric cars are sold as the vehicles to planetary regeneration. Pun intended.

Except, are they really? The EU parliament’s official data suggests a somewhat different picture. Just like planting trees all over the surface of the planet doesn’t make the world as green as people might believe, electric cars also just barely put a dent in CO2 emissions; that’s if everything goes right, so figures are probably just as optimistic as three-week lockdowns were at the beginning of COVID-19. While CO2 emissions of an electric motor are virtually none compared to ICE-powered cars, production of electric cars pollutes more than traditional ICE (internal combustion engine) ones. Batteries don’t come from thin air either, and while plenty of smart minds are working on coming up with better alternatives, advancements in technology that can be deployed at a worldwide scale have been few and far between.

Then of course you still need the fuel because a battery on its own is just a slab of heavy chemicals good for nothing other than pressing plants for your pretty pressed flower collection and tying your donkey to it after a catastrophic solar storm. That fuel — electricity — needs to be made somewhere somehow and looking at the current energy crisis, I fail to see how offloading all the energy required for 1.446 billion cars is feasible. I mean, it’s enough for just one dude — Putin — to get angry and turn the tap off, and you have an entire continent looking at rationing power to people and businesses. If we had all bought electric cars over the last two years, that would result in everyone staying at home… indefinitely. And we thought the 2020 lockdowns were bad…

Electric cars are passing the energy-generation from the individual vehicle to power-plants and their infrastructure, one that’s currently woefully inadequate for large-scale electric vehicle deployments.

But surely, I am not suggesting we give up on electric cars, right? Of course not. I like electric cars as much as the next tech-head, and I can’t wait for them to be self-driving. Having said that, I also lived very happily 36 years without a car, and still think having manual transmission and three pedals in a car for a two-legged driver is as bonkers as it gets, so I won’t be queuing for one anytime soon, if ever. But I also think we all should curb our enthusiasm. Not for electric cars. For any car.

Nonetheless, I guess I also have to be realistic and admit that having absolutely no cars on the roads is probably not immediately feasible or even desirable. However, no matter how appalled you might be by the idea, I’d like you to take an honest to God, objective step back and imagine your life without a car. What would that mean? I am certain for many it would instantly create problems like how will you get to work, how will your kids get to school and how will you shop? Then finally try to look back in time and remind yourself whether you got your car because you really needed it or because you wanted one because, well, everyone else has a car, you can’t not have one.

The most effective CO2 reduction strategy is not electric cars, but no cars.

I bet my entire week’s supply of boxer-shorts that about 50% of today’s car owners do not need a car, yet somehow nobody — and certainly not car manufacturers — is selling that message. The other 50% got a personal car because either there was no reliable public transportation available, it was sub-par, or they just fancied having a car and not travel with “them commoners” on public transport. Let’s ignore this last group, they’re just the wankers that go into the category of people who don’t deserve a breathable planet, but gotta save their cushy Alcantara and Hermes leather asses too because we’re all in the same boat speeding through space. Literally!

For the rest, all that’s really needed is good public transportation, and guess what? There are plenty of well-proven solutions for that, all contributing a lot less to pollution than our Beamers, Mercs and yes, even Teslas. Take 75% of cars off the road, and you suddenly have more space than necessary for cycling, walking, trams, trains and trolley-buses. All those multi-lane highways across the world? Sheer unsustainable madness. You keep adding lanes to improve traffic-flow, only for more cars to keep popping up, and electric cars won’t change that.

Electric cars have the worrying potential of exploding car-ownership.

And that’s exactly right because as bad as ICE cars are, their negative effect on the environment still kept plenty of folks away from owning more than one, or owning one at all. Start selling however “environmentally friendly” cars, however, and consumers will feel suddenly encouraged to hop on the individual car ownership bandwagon. It’s a very well-crafted marketing term — “environmentally friendly”. It makes people think they’re actually making the planet a better place by purchasing an electric car.

An electric car is about as friendly to the planet as Putin’s “special military operation” to Ukraine, as opposed to a full-scale war.

What very conveniently got left out of the sales pitch is that electric cars are still harmful to the environment, just a bit less, and we don’t exactly know yet how much less. It took us a century to see the negative impact of ICE cars, but I don’t think we’ll need that much to have data on the full-scale impact of electric cars. What happens to all the batteries? Oh, I know, the official line is, it all gets safely recycled, but of course, we all know that’s currently more bullshit than reality, as much of what we all recycle either never becomes anything else, or gets shipped off to some developing country and gets recycled in the most inefficient and toxic ways by the locals who then bear the consequences. That’s not recycling, that’s throwing our mismanaged garbage across the neighbour’s fence before the in-laws come to visit.

But we gotta start somewhere, don’t we?

Sure. A start is a start, but that doesn’t implicitly make it right. You can start running away from a moving train or towards one. It’s a start either way, but I’m sure you know how the second scenario ends. The point I am trying to make is that electric cars are seeing a suspiciously aggressive push across the world, and it’s not even environmentalists any more, but car manufacturers. It’s certainly a good way to get you to buy a new car, and — while I hate speculating — also a great way to improve on that planned obsolescence car companies came up with ages ago.

You see, the life of a battery is easy to calculate. As bad as ICE cars were, many of those engines lasted and still last a lot longer — 10, 20 times more — than their warranty. The story is a bit different with batteries. I used to be a Nissan Leaf Customer Support Representative for Hungary, and I can tell you — and it’s common enough knowledge — that once batteries get to their 70–80% capacity, manufacturers are hands-off, you’re on your own. And consumers will react to that percentage exactly as manufacturers hope — get another car, so it’s now almost guaranteed that customers will purchase at least two cars every decade. If you ask me, this does not sound like an environmentally clean start.

Electric cars are merely kicking the can further down the road, and 50–100 years from now we could be looking at an electric hell, powered by e-waste!

If humans want to actually take being environmentally friendly to heart and act like it, they need to get their shitty vehicles off the road as much as possible. 70% of most people’s journeys can be done without plopping their asses into a car, and many journeys don’t even have to be made. People laugh at me when I drag my shopping trolley to the store every weekend, heck, some of my friends are ashamed of me and call me granny, but I don’t put a single ounce of extra CO2 into the air.

Cities across the world are struggling with overpopulation, housing crisis, all the while the same cities are covered in parking lots and more cars on the side of the roads than trees and bushes. Houses being sold with two garages for millions in neighbourhoods that have perfectly capable public transport. Anyone who buys a car not to get wet in the occasional rain needs to move to the Sahara. Funny, how more people are worried about getting wet outside in the drier parts of the world than those living in areas with actual rainy seasons and monsoons, where raining cats and dogs is just another Tuesday.

Nobody needs retail parks. Whoever came up with that concept should be directly held responsible for attacking the environment. Somehow they managed to sell stupid consumerists the idea of travelling across an entire city, out in the middle of nowhere, to a place full of stuff they can ogle at and buy. Thank God we have a few retailers who realised how bad an idea that was, and like IKEA, they started focusing on city centres — you know — where all the people already are!

Numbers don’t lie. Radically fewer cars is exponentially better for the environment than 1.440 billion electric cars. It’s as simple as that!

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here!

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