Thursday, April 04, 2024

Right

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares points out that for electric vehicles to be environmentally friendly, the weight of  the battery needs to drop by about half.  The problem with that is that we're already using the lightest metal (lithium) for the battery, and the other major component of a lithium ion battery is nickel or cobalt.  If you look at a periodic table of the elements, you will see that there are no lighter transition metals than nickel and cobalt.

In other words, batteries are rapidly approaching a dead end in terms of energy per weight, and that imposes a dead end for electrics.  

Which really isn't that sad.  When you correct mpg-e values by the efficiency of a power plant--typically an upper bound of about 35%--the 94mpg-e for a Tesla becomes about 31-32mpg, which is only marginally better than a Chevy Malibu or similar midsize car.  Moreover, the Malibu is a hefty 700 lbs lighter than the Tesla Model 3, refuels in five minutes, retails for $15000 less, and battery replacements cost hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.

There are great ways to help the environment, but electric cars are not among them.  The cost in terms of rare earth mining (and accompanying implicit subsidy of Communist China), particulate contamination, heating to be able to charge them north of the Mason-Dixon, and more is far too high.

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