Know The Myths Around Electric Cars
The main problem is not what runs the car but personal mobility itself. 1.6 tons of steel & electronics to move a 70kg human being is nonsense
I – Carbon Emissions
There are two types of energy sources. The clean one like nuclear, hydro, solar… And the heavily polluting ones like petrol or gas. Electric cars directly use the of the first type. By design, they have a huge ecological advantage.
They are slightly more polluting to produce - today – but are easier to recycle and require less maintenance. Contrary to popular belief there are no rear earths in batteries and India has abundant lithium reserves.
I say “today” because people tend to forget how technology works. They don’t remember what a phone was 15 years ago. We are just at the beginning of the EV era, the headroom to grow is immense. Having electric cars with a range of 700km, a 5mn recharge, less weight, and a cheaper price than petrol ones is just a matter of a few years.
The price per kilowatt-hour of a battery (roughly half the price of an EV) was 1400 USD in 2010, it is 139 today and will be under 100 in 2026. The density of batteries follows the same trend.
II – Geoeconomic & Geopolitics
India has a big trade deficit, a hole of 150 billion dollars per year. And if we look at the 700 billion dollars of imports, 210 of them are from Oil, LNG & LPG.
The rupee is kept low to favorize export, but it is a double edge sword that currently destroys the commercial balance of India. The easiest way to solve this problem is to reduce the use of fossil fuels and replace them by electricity produced on India ground. It will require some investment in clean energy production and distribution, but the reward is immense.
It would also make the future of India safe in case of major geopolitical crisis, hike of petrol prices, closure of commercial routes…
Atmanirbhar Bharat is an ambitious project, the first dependency to cut is on oil.
III – Air Quality
Carbon emissions will create major upcoming problems but today Indians die and get diseases due to horrible air quality. With no tailpipe emissions, a shift to electric mobility is one of the simplest pushes towards a breathable country.
IV – Practicability
The range anxiety is totally over-hyped. There is a famous cliché in the car industry. The guy who goes to the hills once a year with his family and in-laws and buys a 7-seater for that. Then will use it every day to go alone to the office. He now wants an EV with a range of 1000km to be sure he can go, without a stop, to a city he never visits. The huge majority of car movements are within a city and in India it is difficult to drive more than few hundreds km a day. Every night, B2B vehicles go back to a garage and B2C ones to a residency. The best places to recharge them.
The overall infra for electric cars are just electric plugs, something less difficult to install than the great internet fiber network that India deployed over the last 7 years.
For sure, the country needs more charging stations, but it is a typical chicken and egg problem. The demand will create the offer.
So, are electric cars perfect and the cornerstone of the future of mobility?
They are, in almost all aspects, far superior to petrol cars. They will solve some problems and are a necessary step but are unfortunately far from being perfect.
The main problem is not what runs the car but personal mobility itself. 1.6 tons of steel & electronics to move a 70kg human being is nonsense. Spending the second largest budget of a family who can afford it in a highly depreciating asset is also nonsense.
The solutions will come from better urban planning with real sidewalks, better public transportation and the real revolution is yet to come self-driven mobility. The rise of the AI era will make the electric transition look like a minor technological upgrade.
The author is theCSO & Co-Founder of Pravaig
