The production of electric cars has become a hot potato in recent years.
Supporters say electric vehicles help the environment through reduced carbon emissions, while opponents claim that obstacles such as low battery life and prohibitively high prices cannot be overcome so the project is doomed to failure.
I say let’s stop pretending that electric cars are not the future. They contain the best and most energy-efficient technology available on the market. Therefore, it’s no longer a question of whether electric cars will be mass-produced; it’s about how many years will pass until it happens.
Incentives to invest in new CO2-reducing technologies are currently flourishing for the automotive industry. The market receives massive political backing from leaders within the EU, the USA and China, who all recognize that emissions from the transport sector will need to decrease dramatically to combat global warming; in the EU by more than 50% before 2050.
Today, there are around 1 billion cars on the world’s roads and electric vehicles represent less than 1% of them.
Unfortunately, some people advocate that investment in this area is wasted because the complicated technology makes the vehicles expensive. Well, if we were about to develop an internal combustion engine today, gasoline cars would only be for the filthy rich.
However, engineers have spent years and years optimizing the best engines and therefore cars can be sold at affordable prices today. Electric cars would also be priced competitively if they had been through the same development process.
Another common argument against the development of electric vehicles is that they can’t claim to be ‘emission-free’ when they run on electricity generated from power plants that burn fossil fuels. This is simply not correct. Gasoline burned directly from an internal combustion engine emits higher levels of CO2 than do power plants when they produce electricity.
Besides, I imagine that a great number of electric car batteries will be charged by electricity generated from wind and solar power due to current global investments in renewable energy sources.
In fact, a large number of electric vehicles (EV) fitted with Lithium-ion batteries would represent a significant storage capacity for electricity, helping to even out the fluctuations in supply and demand that are inevitable as the world increasingly adopts sustainable, but unpredictable, energy sources like the wind and the sun.
With a strong focus on research and technology development, I am certain that we are soon to see cars with better batteries and lower prices. Of course this initiative alone cannot solve the global climate problems but the environmental impact will be significant and is one way forward to reducing carbon emissions.
How do you perceive the future of electric cars? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.