The rise in the use of electric vehicles represents a significant threat to the affordability of cars, their safety in collisions, and surprisingly, the sustainability of transportation in the United States (“Electric vehicles are not as bad as everyone says,” The Collegian, Sept. 22).
While last week’s article rightly pointed out the steady decrease in cost of electric vehicles, EVs remain far too expensive for the general public. According to Kelley Blue Book, the average cost of a new car has increased in 2022 to more than $47,000, and the average price for EVs is $62,000. That’s more than Michigan’s average household income of merely $59,000.
It is irresponsible to impose the higher cost of an electric vehicle on people who already struggle to afford new internal combustion engine vehicles, and the only solution to this crisis comes in government intervention. The decrease that has already taken place in EV costs can largely be attributed to massive government programs that are designed to take the consumer’s choice out of their car-buying decision. Further, these sprawling regulations incentivize heavier vehicles because of massive tax exemptions given to “light trucks.” These encourage automakers to build increasingly bigger, and thus more expensive vehicles, however this also contributes to an overall decline in vehicle safety in collisions.
Though vehicle fatalities continue to decline as a result of collision-mitigation technologies such as lane-assist, collision warning, and adaptive cruise control, it remains a fact that heavier vehicles cause immensely more damage when a collision does occur. According to Car and Driver, the average EV weighs in at 700 lbs more than its non-EV counterpart. At the average, this change is significant, but at the extremes, it becomes astronomical. The new GMC Hummer EV weighs in at more than 9,000 lbs without passengers in it. At this weight, the Hummer is 3,000 pounds too heavy to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. And when combined with a 1,000-horsepower motor that can rocket the truck from 0-60 in 3.0 seconds, this weight turns the vehicle into a cannonball that will annihilate anything that it comes into contact with. Though these EVs possess technologies to make collisions less likely, there is no avoiding the fact that my 3,000 lb. Ford Mustang will never win a confrontation with a modern EV, and that makes the road less safe for everyone. Most dangerously, modern fire and rescue is woefully unequipped to deal with EV collisions, as water spreads electrical fires and the toxic chemicals leached into nature by large lithium-ion batteries. The danger of these vehicles in crashes thus extends into environmental concerns, too.
The environmental impact of EVs remains their most dubious risk to the future. Though automakers tout their progress in battery recycling, it remains that most EVs use batteries that are not designed to be recycled, according to Science.org. This means that every 7-10 years, these vehicles will become completely unusable, and they will remain carcasses to be crushed—a process exceedingly dangerous for the environment. Even beyond the difficulty in manufacturing and maintaining these batteries, the vehicles’ chassis will represent billions or trillions of tons of wasted steel.
The only conclusion to be found from these premises is that EVs really are as bad as people say.