Is Driving an EV a Next Step for You?

by Fred Horch, Principal Advisor, Sustainable Practice.

Get 132 MPGe (25 kWh/100 miles) in a fully electric car — much better fuel economy than any hybrid.

In 2022, the United States crossed the tipping point of 5% of sales leading to mass adoption of fully battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Within ten years, not driving electric will be odd. Electric vehicles may really take off after 2025 when price parity occurs between BEV and fuel-burning internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Despite the high costs of today’s electric vehicles, 18% (nearly one in five) of the vehicles sold globally in 2023 will be electric, predicts the International Energy Agency.

In 2023, the Tesla Model Y became the best-selling vehicle in the world. It was the first fully electric vehicle to achieve that sales record.

Bad weather, the need for speed, long distances, heavy or bulky loads, or multiple passengers make it impractical to walk, cycle, or ride electric micro-vehicles everywhere we need to go, although those are very sustainable ways to move. To stop burning fossil fuel to get around, some of us need to take the next step and drive electric. Will you be an early adopter and buy or lease a fully electric passenger vehicle soon, or wait until better battery technologies are ready?

Passenger Vehicle Drive Trains

It used to be that manual versus automatic transmission or gas versus diesel mattered for fuel economy. Nowadays, vehicle electrification matters most. All passenger vehicles have a battery and electric motors. Some have a fuel tank and an engine in addition. From most sustainable to least, the four major drive trains available today are

1. Battery electric vehicles. This is the simplest and most sustainable drivetrain. These vehicles have a plug to recharge their battery which powers electric motors that move the vehicle. When they brake, slowing down their motors recharges their battery (a technology called “regenerative braking”). Once “solid state” batteries arrive — expected between 2025 and 2035 — BEVs will become much more affordable and capable. Most of the energy supplied to a BEV is used beneficially, yielding a fuel economy equivalent to 130 miles or more per gallon.
2. Plug-in hybrid vehicles. These vehicles have a fuel tank and an engine in addition to a battery and electric motors. You can charge the battery using a plug, which allows these vehicles to use less gas. Usually, the electric motor moves the vehicle, and the fuel tank and engine extend the range of the vehicle. They typically have regenerative braking.
3. Hybrid vehicles. These vehicles, like the original Toyota Prius, have no plug, but they do have a battery, electric motors, a fuel tank, and an engine. The fuel tank and engine are used to charge the battery. The electric motor, the fuel engine, or a combination of both move the vehicle. These vehicles sometimes have regenerative braking.
4. Internal combustion engine vehicles. These vehicles have a battery and an electric motor to start the fuel-burning engine, but only the fuel-burning engine can move the vehicle. These vehicles have no plug and no regenerative braking. Most of the energy supplied to an ICE vehicle is wasted as excess heat.

Adding a fuel tank and engine adds complexity and expense to the basic design of a vehicle. The inherent simplicity and efficiency of electric vehicles is the main reason analysts expect that by 2027 BEVs will become much cheaper to manufacture and service than any sort of hybrid or fuel-burning vehicle.

Are BEVs Better for Sustainability?

Yes, BEVs are more sustainable than ICE vehicles, even hybrids. Careful analysis shows that BEVs can be manufactured and charged more sustainably than any ICE vehicle can be manufactured and fueled. But predictably there is a backlash and debate about the environmental merits of this generation of BEVs. Because a large amount of energy storage is required for high-speed, long-range passenger vehicles, reasonable people who are concerned about resource constraints can disagree about how quickly they think manufacturers can build BEVs.

If you own a fuel-burning car, especially a hybrid with good fuel economy, a sustainable step is to sell it to someone who opposes BEVs on philosophical or political grounds. By selling them your old car, you help them save money, buy used instead of new, and get value out of the remaining useful life of your car — and that’s a win-win-win for sustainability. You can use the proceeds to offset some of the cost for a new, fully electric, fun-to-drive vehicle for yourself that helps transition our global vehicle fleet from 99.3% fuel-burning to 100% electric.

What’s the Deal with Toyota?

After pioneering the Prius, Toyota seems to have lost its way on the pathway to sustainability. In April 2023 they released a memo to their dealer network that noted: “The amount of raw materials in one long-range battery electric vehicle could instead be used to make … 90 hybrid electric vehicles. … The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle” [emphasis in original]. This claim has been widely cited, stands up to close scrutiny, but is widely misunderstood.

Does the fact that hybrid vehicles have much smaller batteries than BEVs mean that hybrids are better for the environment? No — hybrids are much worse.

Taking Toyota’s claim as accurate, 90 hybrids are only 37 times more effective than a single BEV in reducing carbon emissions over its lifetime. That means that each hybrid vehicle is only 41% as effective as each BEV (if a hybrid were equal to a BEV, 90 of them would be 90 times more effective than one BEV). So, you’d need to buy more than two hybrids to have the same carbon reduction as a single BEV. Or, to spin the fact the other way, if you buy a new hybrid today, over its lifetime you’ll emit more than twice as much carbon than if you buy a BEV today.

Once you are driving electric, choosing a clean, renewable source, such as solar power, for your electricity is the best step you can take to improve your sustainability. Multiple studies, including one by the IEA, show that the biggest impact of a BEV over its lifetime isn’t its battery but the electricity used to recharge the battery again and again. Batteries in a BEV can be charged and recharged 1,500 times.

The life-cycle impact of fuel is likewise by far the biggest impact of an ICE vehicle. It’s easy to overlook the fact that gasoline weighs six pounds per gallon. But over the useful life of a hybrid, the weight of the fuel you buy is much greater than the weight of the car. “Give away the razor and sell the blades” is a well-known business model. In many respects, cars are like razors, and fuel is like blades. To use a 3,000 pound car that burns gas, over its lifetime you need to buy 50,000 pounds of gasoline (and unfortunately, produce over 160,000 pounds of carbon dioxide pollution).

If you compare buying and driving a brand-new BEV — which you can charge from solar panels on your home — versus driving a fuel-burning vehicle you already own, the fact that you need to buy and burn so much more fossil fuel just to keep driving your aging ICE vehicle makes buying the BEV better for sustainability (especially if you sell your old car so someone can replace an even older car that gets worse gas mileage or buy your used fuel-burning car instead of new fuel-burning car).

And if you drive infrequently or only short distances, why own a passenger vehicle at all? As we’ve explored in previous action guides, walking, cycling, and riding electric micro-vehicles like e-bikes or e-mopeds is much more sustainable than driving. Selling your ICE passenger vehicle, then renting or borrowing for the few times you need one, makes wise use of material and money.

Building Better Batteries

Batteries are the single most important technology in a BEV. The cost and performance of a BEV depend largely on the chemistry of the electrodes in the cells of its battery pack.

Electric cars have been around since the 1800s when lead acid batteries were developed. That same lead acid technology is still used for the starter batteries in ICE vehicles today. In the 1990s, General Motors paired a lead acid battery with a nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery for its ill-fated EV1 electric car. At about the same time, Toyota used NiMH in combination with fuel-burning engines to produce the Prius hybrid. Toyota is still selling hybrids with NiMH batteries in them in 2023.

In the 2010s, lithium ion batteries ushered in a new generation of electric vehicles, including the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Model S. For this generation, the positive electrode of the battery was a chemical cocktail containing lithium and manganese (“LMO”); nickel, manganese, and cobalt (“NMC”); or nickel, cobalt, and aluminum (“NCA”). The negative electrode was graphite. Between electrodes was a flammable liquid electrolyte; in a battery fire, the electrolyte is usually what burns.

Electrode materials and the electrolyte allow lithium cations to shuttle back and forth between positive and negative sides of the cell when the battery is charging or discharging. By the 2020s, the nickel, manganese, and cobalt in the positive electrodes of many batteries had been replaced by a cheaper and more plentiful iron phosphate engineered material (called “LFP”) which came off patent protection in 2022.

Other battery chemistries are under development, including sodium ion batteries — sodium is even more affordable and abundant than lithium (which itself is very abundant and not that expensive). Of all the battery technologies being pursued, solid-state batteries are often held up as having the most promise. The idea is to replace the flammable liquid electrolyte with a non-flammable solid material that can electrically separate the positive and negative electrodes yet still allow ions to move back and forth. This would reduce battery fire risk, battery weight, and recharge time.

No one knows when solid state batteries will be perfected (they are working in labs now), but once they are manufactured at scale, they will give BEVs lower prices and longer ranges. At that point it will be extremely difficult for ICE vehicles to compete with BEVs on price or performance. Until then, BEVs are much more expensive than comparable ICE vehicles. Even so, many people are concluding the large sustainability benefits (and the fun electric experience!) are worth paying a premium to start driving electric now rather than waiting for prices to come down.

Recycling Batteries

First, the good news about battery recycling. Lead is one of the most recycled materials on the planet, so we have a very good historical track record when it comes to recycling toxic metal from batteries.

The first generation of practical electric cars reached drivers around 2010, so those vehicles will not end their useful lives for another decade or more. By 2035 or so, significant numbers of BEV batteries may become available to the recycling market. Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla leader JB Straubel, is the most famous of the companies gearing up to recycle batteries from BEVs.

The fact that all of the material in the battery remains in the vehicle throughout its lifecycle is another reason BEVs are much more sustainable than ICE vehicles. If, in twenty years, there is a market for lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, iron, phosphorus, graphite, and the other materials found in today’s batteries, we’ll know exactly where to find them. But there’s also a good chance that progress in battery technology will accelerate over the next decade due to increases in funding, advances in basic material science, and applications of artificial intelligence to the search for fundamentally better electrodes and electrolytes.

Cobalt has already been engineered out of most battery designs, and graphite might be next. It’s hard to predict what materials we’ll need in twenty years and whether it will make more sense to recycle or landfill today’s batteries. But it’s easy to predict that we’ll be using abundant and affordable materials to make batteries. If any particular material, such as lithium, cobalt, or graphite, becomes a bottleneck, battery makers will choose another material, such as sodium, iron phosphate, or silicon. One thing global capitalism is really good at is finding ways to make things. Experienced engineers are forever complaining that what inexperienced ones are trying to do is impossible, forgetting that when they were novice young engineers themselves, doing the impossible was the most exciting and motivating challenge of all.

What’s Still Ahead on the Pathway…

Walking, cycling, or riding a micro EV are still our best first steps on the pathway to sustainable movement, but when we need more power and protection from the elements, a BEV is a good next step. Next we’ll consider how to move farther, faster, or more fantastically than possible in a ground-bound EV — travel by planes, trains, boats, and more. Buckle up!

Once we’ve explored the full pathway to sustainable movement, we’ll start on the related pathway to sustainable energy. As we move away from burning fossil fuel to move, what energy sources are we moving toward? I hope you’ll stay with us on the journey to sustainability and take action to have a positive impact on the world.

Questions? Comments?

I’d love to know what you’ve discovered on the pathway to sustainable movement. Are you knowledgeable about electric vehicles? What should other people understand about them? What has worked well — and what hasn’t been that great — for you? What could help you, your family, or your organization take practical action steps to become meaningfully and measurably and superbly sustainable?

References and Further Reading

• US Crosses the Electric-Car Tipping Point for Mass Adoption, Bloomberg
• Volvo CEO’s bold prediction: EV-ICE price parity by 2025, Automotive News
• Trends in electric light-duty vehicles, International Energy Agency
• A Brief on Bicycling, One Step This Week
• Embracing E-Bikes, One Step This Week
• Leasing vs. Buying an Electric Car: How to Compare, Nerdwallet
• Here’s Every New Electric Vehicle Model for Sale in the U.S. for 2023, Car and Driver
• What’s next for batteries, MIT Technology Review
• Regenerative Brakes: How Do They Work?, Kelley Blue Book
• Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars, The Guardian
• 2023 Tesla Model 3 RWD, fueleconomy.gov
• Advanced Combustion Engines, Christopher Goldenstein
• Electric cars ‘will be cheaper to produce than fossil fuel vehicles by 2027’, The Guardian
• Are electric vehicles definitely better for the climate than gas-powered cars?, MIT Climate Portal
• Electric Vehicle Myths, EPA
• Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute
• More and more Americans don’t want electric cars, Business Insider
• Electric Vehicles Expected to Comprise 31% of the Global Fleet by 2050, Global Fleet Management
• This Is Why Toyota Isn’t Rushing to Sell You an Electric Vehicle, Jalopnik
• A Climate Hawk’s Issues With Electric Vehicles, The New York Times
• Hybrids are 14 times better than battery electric vehicles at reducing real-world carbon dioxide emissions, Emissions Analytics
• Electric Vehicles vs. Hybrids, The American Prospect
• Comparative life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of a mid-size BEV and ICE vehicle, International Energy Agency
• How long does a Tesla battery last?, EnergySage
• How Much Does Gasoline Weigh Per Gallon?, J.D. Power
• Driving on Sunshine, Fred Horch