Can EVs Do the Job?

 The difficulty with electric cars is energy density of the battery:

 Material      Energy content    Conversion    Energy      

                        (watt-hrs/lb)        Efficiency    available to             

                                                                             move vehicle  

                                                                                 (wh/lb)

Gasoline           6,000                 20%-                     1,200-
Ethanol             4,000                 30%+                    1,200+
Li ion batt            120                  80%+                        96+

Ethanol is a powerful motor fuel  in its own right and, if used in an engine optimized for ethanol, has slightly better available energy than gasoline.

Lithium ion batteries provide at the most 120 watt-hours/lb of  available energy to move the car which is why EV's weigh a lot and cost a lot of money. The Chevy Bolt can go  259 miles on a single charge, but at the cost of weight (3600 lb vehicle). The battery alone in a Chevy Bolt weights 960 lbs and you can't even buy the car with a power seat!

If you add even more batteries to get more more power and mileage, the weight of the vehicle increases and efficiency drops even  more. The battery in the GMC Hummer EV weighs 2,923 lbs, a third of the total vehicle weight which is why it costs so much and gets horrible mileage - 64 KWHrs to go 100 miles. 

Gasoline electric hybrids have a longer  range, but they still burn the problem - gasoline.

For batteries to be competitive with gasoline or ethanol the energy density will have to jump from 120 to 1500 watt-hrs/lb. There is nothing on the horizon to indicate this is going to be possible on any sort of near term time scale.

Additionally,

Number of  light  duty (LD) vehicles in U.S.    ~280,000,000

Number of EV's sold in USA 1st Qtr 2024                 268,909*

Total LD vehicles sold in USA 1st Qtr 2024             3,774,691*

*Coxautoinc.com (KBB.com)

In summary, for the 1st Qtr 2024 the market share of EVs was 7.1% with ~50% of all those being Tesla (140,187). The market share was 7.3% for the 1st Qtr of 2023 which means a slight decrease from 2023 to 2024.

These sales volumes are not good considering massive government subsidies, advertising, rebates, HOV lane stickers and free recharging stations. The fact that market share is so low for these vehicles indicates that these vehicles simply do not provide much value to the consumer.

Assuming we sell 15,000,000 new vehicles in 2024, and let's say a miracle happens and we sell 2,000,000 EVs by the end of 2024, we are still going to be putting 13,000,000 new gasoline engines into service.

Bottom line: Trying to lower CO2 emissions by going to EVs is equivalent to trying to empty a lake at one end by taking a 1,000 gallons of water out at one end and putting 10,000 gallons in at the other end. You have to stop the input. 

To make a difference in the amount of  gasoline used,  we  have to replace millions of vehicles per year, not just thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands.

If a decision were made to ban new gasoline powered vehicles, we could easily replace our LD fleet with a mix of EVs, H2Vs, and EtOHVs over the next 20 years. This would truly make a significant dent in the amount of CO2 emitted and reduce global warming.

E100 engines would use the same infrastructure we currently have for gasoline. Customers would pull up to the pump and in 5 minutes or so just go on their way for another 300 - 400 miles just like they do with gasoline. No change in lifestyle as there is with EVs. 

Electric cars are great technology, exciting to work on, and fun to drive, but, as the numbers and costs show, are simply  not a viable strategy for significantly reducing CO2 emissions or for making us independent of the price of oil on any sort of reasonable time schedule.