Electric Vehicles Are Bringing Out the Worst in Us

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/electric-vehicles-suv-
battery-climate-safety/672576/

American car executives keep insisting that there is no trade-off between
saving the planet and having a hell of a good time behind the wheel. “What
I find particularly gratifying,” Ford’s executive chair, Bill Ford, said
in April as he unveiled his company’s new electric truck, “is not only is
this a green F-150, but it’s a better F-150 … You’re actually gaining
things that the internal combustion engine doesn’t have.” Mary Barra, the
CEO of General Motors, sounded equally bullish in a recent social-media
post: “Once you’ve experienced an [electric vehicle] and all it has to
offer—the torque, handling, performance, capability—you’re in.”

The pitch is enticing, but it raises a few questions. Is the electric F-
150 Lightning “better” than the conventional F-150 if its added weight and
size deepen the country’s road-safety crisis? And how, exactly, are
electric-vehicle drivers going to use the extra power that companies are
handing them?

Robinson Meyer: Electric cars have hit an inflection point

Converting the transportation system from fossil fuels to electricity is
essential to addressing climate change. But automakers’ focus on large,
battery-powered SUVs and trucks reinforces a destructive American desire
to drive something bigger, faster, and heavier than everyone else.

In many ways, EVs reflect long-standing weaknesses in the design and
regulation of American automobiles. For decades, the car industry has
exploited a loophole in federal fuel-economy rules to replace sedans with
more profitable SUVs and trucks, which now account for four in five new
cars sold in the United States.

Meanwhile, SUVs and trucks have themselves grown more massive; their
weight increased by 7 percent and 32 percent, respectively, from 1990 to
2021. The 2023 Ford F-150 with a conventional engine, for instance, is up
to 7 inches taller and 800 pounds heavier than its 1991 counterpart. Each
purchase of a big truck or SUV pushes other people to buy one, too, in
order to avoid being at a disadvantage in a crash or when trying to see
over other cars on the highway.

This shift toward ever-larger trucks and SUVs has endangered everyone not
inside of one, especially those unprotected by tons of metal. A recent
study linked the growing popularity of SUVs in the United States to the
surging number of pedestrian deaths, which reached a 40-year high in 2021.
A particular problem is that the height of these vehicles expands their
blind spots. In a segment this summer, a Washington, D.C., television news
channel sat nine children in a line in front of an SUV; the driver could
see none of them, because nothing within 16 feet of the front of the
vehicle was visible to her.

Angie Schmitt: Big cars are killing Americans

Few car shoppers seem to care. For decades, Americans have shown little
inclination to consider how their vehicle affects the safety of
pedestrians, cyclists, or other motorists. (The federal government seems
similarly uninterested; the national crash-test-ratings program evaluates
only the risk to a car’s occupants.)

As large as gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks are, their electrified versions
are even heftier due to the addition of huge batteries. The forthcoming
electric Chevrolet Silverado EV, for example, will weigh about 8,000
pounds, 3,000 more than the current gas-powered version. And there will be
a lot of these behemoths: A recent study from the U.S. Department of
Energy shows that carmakers are rapidly shifting their EV lineups away
from sedans and toward SUVs and trucks, just as they did earlier with gas-
powered cars.

The danger rises further after accounting for EVs’ unprecedented power.
“This sucker is quick!” President Joe Biden exclaimed after taking a Ford
F-150 Lightning for a spin last year. He was right: The truck can
accelerate from zero to 60 miles an hour in under four seconds, about a
second faster than an F-150 running on gasoline.

Car buyers have used zero-to-60 speeds as a proxy for performance ever
since the car salesman and automotive journalist Tom McCahill began
measuring them after World War II. But the metric is dangerously ill-
suited for the faster propulsion of electric powertrains, which are more
efficient and contain fewer components than gas engines. The Tesla Plaid
Model S, for example, can reach 60 mph in 1.99 seconds, a new record for
production cars and far faster than even luxury gas-powered sports cars
such as the Porsche 911 (2.8 seconds).

At the risk of stating the obvious, such blistering acceleration serves no
practical purpose on a public road, where it can jeopardize everyone’s
safety. In Europe, an auto insurer recently linked EVs’ quick pickup
speeds to an uptick in crashes. Once again, the most vulnerable street
users bear particular risk: A 2018 study by the Insurance Institute for
Highway Safety found that hybrid vehicles, which, like EVs, can accelerate
more quickly than gas-powered cars, were 10 percent more likely to injure
a pedestrian than their gas-powered equivalents. Superfast acceleration
also compromises the efficiency of an electric battery, reducing its
range. Nevertheless, car companies are emphasizing acceleration rates in
their EV-marketing pitches, such as the Chevrolet Blazer’s “Wide Open
Watts Mode.”

Read: The challenges of an electric-vehicle revolution

As automakers design faster, bigger cars, they are squandering a chance to
make EVs safer than their predecessors. Without a gasoline engine under
its hood, the Ford F-150 Lightning could have been equipped with a sloping
front end that would have reduced danger to others in a crash. Instead,
Ford retained the high hood of its F-150, declaring the now vacant space
beneath it a “frunk.” That decision was a missed opportunity for roadway
safety, but it made sense when viewed through a business lens; few truck
buyers are seeking a model that protects those outside their vehicle.

Indeed, carmakers are likely to claim that their EV designs and marketing
pitches merely reflect the size and speed that Americans seek when
considering their next vehicle. The electrification of America’s vehicle
fleet will happen faster, one could argue, the more consumers view EVs as
objects of desire, rather than as obligatory concessions to the greater
good. But such claims treat car demand as fixed, overlooking ways in which
carmakers’ multibillion-dollar advertising budgets shape consumer
preferences. Anyway, why should consumer preferences trump the deadly
risks posed by unnecessarily fast and heavy EVs?

Although other road users’ safety won’t tilt many EV-purchase decisions,
shoppers are more likely to care about another societal impact: climate-
change mitigation. Gas-powered cars and trucks have accounted for about a
fifth of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, but today’s carmakers are eager to
adopt a green halo. Ford has vowed to become carbon neutral (albeit in
three decades from now), while GM has made “zero emissions” a centerpiece
of its corporate mission.

Because they do not produce tailpipe emissions, electric cars are less
polluting than otherwise identical gas-powered models. But EVs still
create emissions in other ways, notably from the electricity required to
build them and charge their batteries. Such energy needs rise dramatically
for the biggest cars: According to the American Council for an Energy-
Efficient Economy, the 9,063-pound GMC Hummer EV contributes more
emissions per mile than a gas-powered Chevrolet Malibu.

Worse yet, enormous EVs are compounding the global shortage of essential
battery minerals such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel. That Hummer EV’s
battery weighs as much as a Honda Civic, consuming precious material that
could otherwise be used to build several electric-sedan batteries—or a few
hundred e-bike batteries. One recent study found that electrifying SUVs
could actually increase emissions by restricting the batteries available
for smaller electric cars.

That reality is inconvenient for size-obsessed automakers, as well as for
certain image-oriented EV buyers, the kind The Onion skewered for
believing that “driving one makes up for every bad thing you’ve ever done
in your life” (including, presumably, draping your electric charging cord
across the sidewalk).

Even modest-size electric cars are not a climate panacea. A 2020 study by
University of Toronto scholars found that electrification of automobiles
cannot prevent a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius by 2100
without a concurrent shift toward cleaner travel modes such as public
transportation and bicycles. Aware of that need, Norway, a global standout
in electric-vehicle adoption, is replacing its EV subsidies with support
for people walking and biking, while also considering a car-weight tax to
nudge purchasers away from the bulkiest electric cars. A recent article in
Nature endorsed such weight-based EV fees.

The United States is not as farsighted. The Inflation Reduction Act that
Biden signed in August includes a tax credit of up to $7,500 for those
buying an electric car with a price tag below $55,000; in an implicit
incentive to buy a larger vehicle, eligible SUVs can cost as much as
$88,000 and still qualify. The new law offers nothing for buyers of e-
bikes, e-cargo bikes, or electric golf carts—all of which produce a
fraction of the emissions of an electric car while posing much less danger
to road users. Americans require little encouragement to buy an SUV or
truck; what the country needs are policies that nudge them toward vehicles
that are less dangerous to the planet and to other travelers. Instead of
capitalizing on electrification in that way, policy makers are further
codifying the supremacy of the biggest, most dangerous automobiles.

Car executives, whose supercharged electric behemoths play to Americans’
worst instincts, are surely grateful. But the rest of us shouldn’t be.


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