The Expert Podcast

Electric vehicles have been around for many years — five, six years depending upon when you start counting — and also hybrid vehicles were around before then. These vehicles are not being adopted at a high level and you might wonder why everybody wants you to buy one. The government will pay you thousands of dollars, sometimes ten thousand dollars, to buy one. Your local utility company will give you crazy incentives to buy 100, sometimes another couple thousand. Your state government might have you get incentive money for purchasing an electric vehicle. On top of that, gasoline prices are through the roof — five, six, seven dollars in some places.

So why aren't electric vehicles being purchased at a higher rate? It's less than two percent of new car sales that are electric vehicles. Think about it — two percent. It's a very small number. If any other product had thousands of dollars in incentives and a very large marketing campaign to push that product, and the alternative had a high expense like gasoline, you would think that product would sell like hotcakes.

But electric vehicles are not selling like hotcakes; they're selling very slowly. And you might guess the three reasons why. Here's an article that talks about this: even crazy gas prices can't convince Americans to buy EVs. Well, first of all, why do people need to be convinced if there are such great vehicles and such great options? What's the problem?

Well, the three things, as you are probably aware, and this may be the reason you don't have an electric vehicle, are:

The price — these vehicles are usually five to ten, sometimes fifteen thousand dollars more than a comparable gasoline vehicle.

Number two, the charging availability. Where are you going to charge it? Right? Every time you drive to work or the store, you drive by 10, 15 gas stations — sometimes every corner of an intersection has a gas station. There are some intersections where all four corners are gas stations. How often do you see an EV charging station? You see them maybe in the Target parking lot, maybe on the side of a rest stop, but you don't see them everywhere. Availability of charging is an obstacle.

Now of course, you may be able to charge at home, but many people don't want to go through all that because you have to install a charging station at your house. Maybe you don't have a place to do it, maybe you live in an apartment, maybe you park on the street at your house and you don't have availability to do it.

And the third, and probably the biggest reason that Americans are not convinced — and we'll talk about that word — is because of the range.

Fill up your car with gasoline and you can drive 400 miles. Fill up your car with electricity and you can drive maybe 100, 150. Not only that, but when it comes time to refill your car, you pull into a gas station — one or two minutes, you're out of there with another 400 miles. You pull into a charging station to recharge your EV to go another 100, 150 miles and you're going to be there for maybe an hour.

So that's a huge obstacle for many people: range. And the other two reasons are price of the car and the charging station availability.

So what can be done about that? Are any of these going to change? And why is there an effort to convince people to buy these cars?

With most products, you put a good product out in the marketplace and people buy them. Think about the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out, there were no smartphones with screens — everything was a flip phone, had buttons, or some other type of keyboard. Apple came out with an iPhone with the knowledge of human market needs that this would be a popular product. Nobody had to convince people to switch over to that model of a phone.

There were incentives on an iPhone? There weren't rebates on an iPhone. The iPhone wasn't any cheaper; matter of fact, it was more expensive. It wasn't harder to use an iPhone, to charge it, or to, you know, you didn't have to stop using it more frequently. And people bought them, and now every phone has that same form factor. Even other manufacturers besides Apple — all their phones look the same, have a big screen, no buttons.

Why are electric vehicles as a product that's not naturally being desired being pushed as the next product? Well, there's obviously forces behind the scenes wanting this to happen. Maybe it's environmentalism, maybe it is climate change, maybe there's other reasons. Maybe there's advantages for manufacturers or for government to have vehicles powered by electricity in the electric grid than by gasoline. Who knows? Doesn't matter what the reasons are. It's obvious that there's an effort to convince people to buy something that's not their natural go-to.

Electric vehicles have been out for, like we said, many years and there's only two percent of them being sold. Apple iPhone came out and within a year or two everybody bought that kind of phone. The adoption was quick.

Why is it that if a product is being that slow to be adopted by consumers and be desired by consumers, is it still being pushed? What are the advantages?

Well, let's look at another possible advantage or reason why in theory this happens. People want to eliminate the fumes from tailpipes from gasoline engines.

Well, it turns out that EV tires might be worse for the environment because these tires are creating particulates in the atmosphere just like gasoline tailpipes produce carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon emissions. Everyday driving particulate emissions from tires are 18 to 50 times greater than the equivalent of exhaust emissions.

So if part of the reason for people wanting an EV, electric vehicle, is to eliminate the ecological damage from tailpipe emissions, what about the tires? Is that going to be a problem? Are there other problems?

This is just one problem that has been discovered years in. There may be other problems that come up. We talked the other day about impacts on vehicles — is the battery going to be a problem to replace? It's one thing to get in a small crash and replace a fender. What if you have to replace the whole battery?

Speaking of the battery, the 1000 pounds of battery weight can result in tire emissions that are 400 times greater than real world tailpipe emissions. Everything else being equal.

So there's side effects that may not have yet been accounted for. I'm certain that even realizing this, that EVs aren't eco-friendly, the industry is not going to turn on a dime and say, "Just kidding, we stopped, let's go back to gas engines." That's not what's going to happen.

Gasoline vehicles are on the way out. In fact, several manufacturers have stopped completely engineering new developments for gasoline engines. They've stopped. There are no more gasoline engine developments. Whatever's in the pipeline is going to be used but no more gasoline engines will be produced.

Some states have gone to making gasoline engine car registrations illegal after a certain period of time. The state of Washington, after 2030, there will be no more gasoline engines allowed — not just to be sold, but to be registered, entitled in the state of Washington.

So it's inevitable. It's going to happen. But do people want this? Are there more problems created than are being solved?

Even the electric grid — it's unknown whether it can handle charging up all these vehicles.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't get one or you should get one. It's not a matter of opinion. We're not saying whether or not this shift shouldn't happen. It's just putting information out there for people to consider.

Put your comments below. Let us know what you think. Is this something which is a concern to you? Do you like the idea that electric vehicles will be the majority on the road at some point? Or do you see other problems that could come from this that are not being realized? Or maybe the problems are realized but that we're going ahead with this anyways as a country.