A Realistic US Transport Electrification Plan, Part 1: The Challenges We Can’t Ignore

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Developed countries in Europe and Asia are making big strides in transportation electrification. Not only are charging stations standardized, but they’re everywhere. Norway’s auto sales are now 85% plugin vehicles, with 65% full EVs and 20% plugin hybrids, while the United States struggles to escape the single digits. Even the United States’ great rival, China, is kicking our butts.

Meanwhile, you’ll have an easier time finding a banjo to buy than a DC fast charging station in many parts of the country. Feel free to check this yourself on Google Maps and compare the results to Plugshare if you don’t believe me. We don’t need Jeff Foxworthy on stage to know that we might be rednecks.

Sure, there are some great plans out there to fix this, and not by banning banjos. Biden wants to put in 500,000 stations (probably mostly L2) as part of his infrastructure plan, and we regularly see awesome legislative wish lists like this here at CleanTechnica. Sadly, though, these are just bills, and they can’t seem to get through the legislative process and become actions.

Before we can come up with real plans that can make a difference, we need to look at what keeps things from happening in the United States, and then tailor a plan to the uniquely idiotic situation the US faces.

Barriers To Federal Electric Vehicle Action

Before we decide whose fault it is and proceed to sit and do nothing, let’s take a broader look at what the average person thinks of EVs. This tweet from a week or two ago is a good start:

okay should this question have been more obvious pic.twitter.com/lCbIIDedsg

— Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) July 5, 2021

I don’t watch enough TV to even know what gameshow this comes from (nor do I care much), but it shows us what people outside of the EV and Tesla fandom bubble actually know about the industry. I’d use the same measure K used in Men in Black: “precisely dick.” I’ve encountered many people who thought all EVs would switch to gas if the battery runs out. When I had a Kia Sorento Hybrid media car during a recent trip, a number of people in my extended family were surprised when I said it wasn’t a plugin car (they thought all hybrids had a plug).

In other words, the average person just doesn’t know much about electric cars themselves, let alone what the different models are by a manufacturer. That lack of knowledge leads to a lack of action because representatives and senators know that the topic just doesn’t matter that much to the average voter. It’s certainly not a hill most would be willing to die on.

Speaking of these senators and reps, let’s not forget that an Exxon lobbyist recently bragged that they have 11 senators in their pocket. The corruption is real, and we’ve been railing against that for decades, with no real progress against it. Why? Likely because we live in a culture that’s perfectly comfortable with lies as long as they tell us what we want to hear. The “Big Lie,” and that 1/3 of Americans apparently still believe it this month, isn’t that shocking when we consider that half of Americans believe in demons and ghosts, and 13% believe vampires exist.

There are simply too many gullible people ready to be told that climate change is a hoax, or that we actually need more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (as Elon Musk points out, this may be true, but only for slightly more carbon and not the insane amounts some Republicans claim would be acceptable).

These facts together make it pretty unlikely that we’ll see any serious federal government action on transportation electrification. Despite some minor technical issues (mostly confusing the Chevy Volt and Bolt), this video shows us just what a bottleneck that alone will put in EV adoption due to lack of charging stations and help building them.

The Lack of EV Policy Support Also Leads To Future US Battery Shortages

In an April podcast, our fearless leader Zach Shahan interviewed an expert on the battery industry. What they discussed shows just how much today’s policy choices affect the future of industry, especially when it comes to batteries.

Making a battery cell factory, while not easy, can happen relatively quickly. Only a year or two of foresight is needed to get those production numbers right. The same is true for cell components, like cathodes. The problem arises when we go to get the raw materials these facilities need. Lithium, nickel, and everything else needs to come from the ground, and mining is a much trickier business. To get a new mine up and running requires 5-7 years of lead time.

So, when European and Chinese authorities announce future gasoline car bans or strict emission limits that would require EVs to achieve, they’re not just virtue signaling. They’re giving industry a chance to get ready to make all those EVs in time. It’ll still be a huge challenge, for sure, but it won’t be impossible.

The United States isn’t doing that, and it leaves the whole industry, from mine to dealer, with uncertainty. Sure, the average CleanTechnica reader would scream to the mining industry, “Get going NOW! There will be lots of EVs to build in 2030!” The industry isn’t so sure of that as we are, though. If they put things in motion to open up all those mines and the US only wants half of the EVs we think they will, that would destroy the industry. They can’t invest all that money in mines if there’s much chance they’ll go unused.

Experts estimate that the price of EVs will drop to the point where they’ll naturally take over, no matter what the government does, in the late 2020s. A sudden spike in demand for them will catch the mining industry flat-footed, with all of the extra supply for cells already headed to Europe and Asia for their needs. Nobody knows for sure exactly how short the US will be for battery cells, but it seems pretty certain that there won’t be enough to go around.

Even worse, we’re going to need a lot more cells than Europe and Asia because we like big vehicles with lots of range. Moving something like a Cybertruck (200 kWh), Hummer EV (over 200 kWh), or a future 1-ton pickup truck towing a large trailer (300+ kWh) around means they’ll need 200+ kWh of cells. Even smaller cars need a lot more battery in the States because our infrastructure sucks, people don’t want to spend time charging, and we’re left having to make up for it with giant packs.

That leaves us in a really bad spot come 2030 if we don’t plan for this emerging problem.

Cultural Barriers Could Lead To “EV Revolts”

Americans love highways, with networks of them supporting seemingly endless sprawl in cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix. What some readers might not know is that there has been fierce resistance to them at times, especially when they came through an existing downtown area. Despite the Interstate Highway System starting construction in the 1950s, it took until the 1990s for some of them to be completed.

The big roadblock for Interstate 10 was downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Running highways through the deserts and mountains of Arizona? No problem! Design an ugly series of helical interchanges in downtown Phoenix? That’s where the voters decided they’d rather just not have a highway come through. It took several tries and redesigns, but voters finally approved hiding the freeway underground and putting a park on top of it, and that project completed in 1990 — decades later than the original architects of the Interstates anticipated.

And that’s just one of what historians now call “highway revolts,” and compared to many of the others, the Phoenix experience was a walk in the park. The United States is littered with abandoned freeway plans, often after construction was well underway. There are many partially completed freeways, stub freeways, strange long parks where a freeway was supposed to go, and ramps to nowhere that exist because political leaders didn’t anticipate opposition to their plans.

Had they checked around in the community before choosing a final plan, they could have made a much more coherent and successful highway system, often decades faster. Instead, they thought they knew it all, and forged ahead anyway, only to be stopped later.

If we don’t tailor an electrification plan for the United States, we can expect a lot of resistance to the overall plan that could have otherwise been avoided, and make meaningful impacts against climate change and pollution decades faster.

A recent article about the Mazda Miata gives us a good example of this. With EV mandates looming and Mazda announcing that an electrified Miata is coming at some point, enthusiasts are wondering how this can happen while keeping the character of the small and light vehicle. Adding any batteries to the vehicle would likely make for big changes to the handling and feel of the vehicle, and building a traditional skateboard would not only make it heavier, but push the driver several inches upward, which would completely change the vehicle’s character.

The “blunt political force” version of a future electrification transport plan would just ignore situations like this, and basically tell the Miata enthusiasts to get with the times and give their beloved car up. I can already hear Tesla enthusiasts cracking their knuckles in the comments, ready to tell me that the Model 3 is light enough and fun enough for anybody, so these horse-and-buggy people should just get over it, right?

The problem comes when you stiff enough small communities of enthusiasts to rack up some serious numbers and set off an “EV revolt” that sets the adoption of EVs back majorly, especially in red states that are itching for an excuse to kneecap EVs and prop the oil industry up just a little longer. A federal EV mandate (assuming that we got one passed years from now) would certainly have intense opposition in the courts if there weren’t some decent exceptions built in.

Worse, if a state does anything overly restrictive, expect a future Republican-led federal government to fight them on that. We already saw Trump do this over relatively minor emissions rules, so expect much more intense opposition to any state that wants to completely ban ICE vehicles. Once again, intelligently placing exceptions is key to avoiding the whole plan getting tied up in courts repeatedly for years when action is needed much faster.

Just like the beefheaded freeway planners of the 50s and 60s, we’d set the whole thing back by decades and leave big gaps if we don’t plan ahead for opposition and plan accordingly. What some of those limited exceptions should look like will have to wait for part 2 of this article.

Featured image: US Capitol building, home of US Congress. Photo by Wendy Maxwell from Pexels.