Home, Home on the Range

Wall Street Journal 6/2/23

Home, Home on the Range

Or ‘Your Mileage May Vary’

It’s downright ugly out there. An entire American political party is hell-bent on marginalizing the ravages of fossil fuel-driven climate change damage, pushing us back to coal and petroleum as our energy drivers, pretending that this is only a short-term necessity while slorping at the campaign contribution trough of Big Oil. W. Va Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, a fossil fuel champion, apparently isn’t anti-alternative energy enough as he slides woefully behind his main 2024 GOP challenger. Getting a W. Va. oil pipeline as a condition of raising the debt ceiling wasn’t enough, apparently.

To the number two GOP presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, says pushing electric cars and alternative energy is “woke” and a threat to our rather recent surge in oil production. Meanwhile, his state, Florida, is one of the major victims of climate change disasters. From coastal flooding and erosion to water-heavy tropical storms. Oh, and that surge in oil production has been enabled by hydraulic fracking, pumping harsh chemicals (exempted from EPA controls) into older oil fields to force oil out. The contamination lingers. And Donald Trump, who failed miserably during his term as president in preserving coal mining and coal driven energy production jobs, still believes that we can up existing oil production to meet our needs for a very long time.

But those pushing electric vehicles are hardly blameless in their proselytizing and marketing efforts. They still insist that car buyers’ demands for “more range” are out of step with the relatively short routes that dominate their driving patterns. “They don’t need it.” But the mere thought of long charging times or an inability to take that occasional road trip are still major barriers to breaking open the EV marketplace. When will corporate executives get over telling consumers what they should want over what they do want? Indeed, the above chart lets you know just how woefully short on range current affordable EVs really are. Not to mention the high car insurance costs because batteries are so expensive to replace.

We also see charging station hording, where carmakers (mostly Tesla) lock out EVs from competitors. See also my January 18th My Brand Only or Preferred Charging Stations blog. It’s true that Tesla is about to allow some carmakers (like Ford) to have their vehicles access those stations, but we are way, way short of the needed stations. What’s worse, those Level 3 stations (high voltage) are very expensive to install, and not all EVs can handle the higher voltage. We surely cannot count on a gridlocked Congress to alter existing reality (we need far more than the recent Infrastructure Act provides), unless there is a massive shift in 2024 away from GOP candidates.

So, with all these barriers, what does the future of electric cars look like. Will charging stations be replaced by toll lanes on our highways offering subsurface electromagnetic induction auto-charging? A car just needs to drive over the road to be recharged. Eventually, probably. Short term, not likely. I’ve blogged about the expected battery changes on the horizon – particularly a new technology that literally doubles the range of lithium-ion batteries (with a massive discovery of lithium deposits in and around California’s Salton Sea) – but I find it is always noteworthy to view expensive existing solutions to technology issues. Such “new” becomes the affordable “standard” sooner or later.

And yes, I have drooled looking at the poster-car for extraordinary range, the Lucid, above even the range most expensive Tesla models. Still, even in the lower reaches of a six-figure price tag to get the high-range model, it is a bit expensive. But, as Christopher Mims, writing for the June 2nd Wall Street Journal points out, this is our next generation of EV across the board: “If you want to experience the future of fully electrified transportation today, all you have to do is buy a $138,000 electric vehicle, be flexible about where you park it at night—and exercise some patience.

“Those are a few of the things I learned on a 1,000-mile road trip in an EV in which I never had to stop just to recharge. In a Lucid Air Grand Touring, I was able to go from New York City to Montreal and back while only charging overnight. Because my itinerary allowed it, I was able to do so on the kind of slower, widely-available chargers that are increasingly plentiful in the U.S., and seemingly ubiquitous in EV-obsessed Canada…

“A road trip with this itinerary, and no daytime stops to charge, would have been impossible before last year. That’s when a new class of ultralong-range EVs debuted, including the Tesla Model S Long Range, which reached an Environmental Protection Agency-estimated range of 405 miles, and the Lucid Air Dream Edition, with an EPA range of 520 miles (the model I drove is rated at 516 miles). For perspective, even an efficient conventional auto like the Honda Civic has an EPA estimated city/highway combined range of about 450 miles on a tank of gas.

“For now, this kind of charging stop-free road trip is solely the privilege of those able to pay for it—even the less expensive long-range Tesla starts at around $89,000… In part, this is because ultralong-range electric vehicles currently require both relatively big (and expensive) batteries, and extreme measures for making the vehicle aerodynamic and lightweight. But that won’t always be the case, say the engineers I spoke with, many of whom are designing future generations of advanced EVs…

“Once perfected and available in the mainstream, these ultraefficient EVs could eliminate range anxiety—the fear of running out of juice before reaching the next charger—that has prevented many drivers from going electric. They could also reduce the need for charging stops for all but the longest road trips. The tech that makes long-range EVs possible could also be used in vehicles with much more modest range, allowing their batteries—traditionally the most expensive part of an EV—to be much smaller. In turn, this might finally make most EVs cheaper to own and operate than gasoline vehicles.

“Operators of fleet vehicles like delivery vans, taxis and Ubers, could refuel when drivers go off-shift. The ultralong range EVs might be a solution for commuters who don’t have a garage to park them in at night, and only fast-charge them once every couple of weeks… Here, Lucid is the champion, with a 924-volt electrical system. This system, combined with tech enabling batteries to accept all that electricity, means that the Lucid Air Grand Touring can charge fast enough to regain up to 300 miles of range in as little as 20 minutes—but only if it is connected to the right kind of charger, called a DC fast charger. Those remain rare in the U.S. and Canada, but there are efforts to address the problem.” Thousand-mile range is currently possible but very costly with very heavy battery arrays. Currently, most charging is through very modestly priced systems that require an overnight plug-in. A temporary problem!!!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if the nay-sayers and those reliant on the cash-filled troughs of Big Oil political contributions can be shoved out of the way, we can and must shift our efforts to the vastly more efficient electric motors that should power all American vehicles.