The 2 real problems for the electric car and why it is the future

Electric cars are cool. Tesla (rather Elon Musk) singlehandedly made it so and now every millennial wants one. Every time I hear people claim how they bought Tesla stock because electric cars will obviously replace gasoline cars just like how cars replaced horses, I do a mental face palm. It’s not that simple.

1. Specific energy of batteries

Everything you ever need to know about why electric cars are not currently widespread can be summarized in the simple energy density/specific energy graph above. Electric drive trains powering electric cars were actually invented before the internal combustion engine (ICE) and are vastly superior to the ICE in terms of performance. Electric cars have fewer moving parts, have much lesser weight and require less maintenance compared to a traditional car. Most people also do not realize that the internal combustion engines (ICE) are only about 25% efficient while electric engines are about 75% efficient in converting stored energy into useful motion.
But the problem is that even now the specific energy or energy per unit mass of the well-known Lithium Ion battery is between 0.36–0.95 MJ/Kg while gasoline has 44.4 MJ/Kg. This means that gasoline has a 2 orders of magnitude advantage in energy storage compared to and that is why internal combustion engines can get away with lower efficiencies.

2. Electricity generation and Infrastructure

Electric cars are awesome because they have zero emissions. WRONG! That’s only when the electricity used to charge the batteries is from nuclear, solar, wind or other form of zero emission energy generation. Otherwise you are simply transferring the emissions from point of energy usage to energy generation (Granted power plants are far more efficient than internal combustion engines). If electric cars are to become ubiquitous we still need a lot more solar and wind power plants before we can call them truly zero emission vehicles. Besides the issue on the generation side, the electric grid especially in developing countries is not robust enough to handle the large increase in load from charging electric cars on a large scale. This means that for electric cars to succeed there needs to be enormous political and public will to invest and improve infrastructure

But then why are electric cars the future?

Because it is the easiest way to reduce greenhouse emissions substantially without reducing consumption worldwide. Almost 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions is from transportation and in the US it is almost 30%. Electric vehicles are a great way to eliminate this 13% if we move to more clean energy generation. Good news is that there is a worldwide trend to increase renewable energy generation which is growing at 5% annually and more solar/wind power plants are coming online every year. (If you are a climate change non-believer, I respect your views but please do some googling right now!)
I also think that some form of carbon taxing system worldwide is inevitable when sensible people around the world finally make themselves heard. If and when this happens, the case for the electric car becomes much stronger. Meanwhile battery technology has also been improving steadily and energy density doubled in the last ten years. Every university in the world has a professor working on inventing a holy grail of energy storage. With momentum and market demand like that, it is only a matter of time before someone wins a Nobel Prize.
However all this is not going to be easy or obvious and that is why I feel the over-optimism about electric cars right now is unfounded. Electric cars might have cool, niche market appeal and personally I think the work that companies like Tesla are doing to advance the electric car is great, worthy and simply awesome. But the mass market will still be dominated by gasoline cars until there is an energy storage breakthrough or punitive carbon taxes. Once that happens the downfall of the internal combustion engine is inevitable.

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