Walkability pioneer, UC San Diego urban planning professor Lawrence Frank revisits two decades of evidence linking car dependence and chronic disease – and explains why cleaner cars won’t make us healthier.
Yeah. Electric cars are much heavier so they cause dramatically more road and tire wear (Fourth power law). This leads to more costly road repairs being needed and more dust and microplastics in the air, soil, and water.
Electric cars also have steep upfront mineral costs due to the need for more electronics, wiring, and those gigantic batteries. Recycling won’t save us for this because we’re already producing more and more of these minerals than we ever have before.
Then you get all the secondary effects of electric cars: the increased stresses on the grid and need for more grid maintenance and upgrades, the need for more generating capacity because of the increased demand, and the distributed nature of the grid stresses which is much more problematic than an increase of centralized demand (like you get with electric public transit systems). It’s the fact that you have neighbourhoods with electrical service that was designed for the number of buildings in that area and now you’re increasing the demand per building by a significant fraction.
It’s really hard to make arguments like this against EVs though, because there are a huge number of these issues and not much of way to summarize everything into one bottom line conclusion.
With all of these things said, EVs are still significantly better than ICEs. Please make sure that’s clear when commenting - don’t do the oil and gas industry a favour by spreading their propaganda for them.
Yeah. Electric cars are much heavier so they cause dramatically more road and tire wear (Fourth power law). This leads to more costly road repairs being needed and more dust and microplastics in the air, soil, and water.
Electric cars also have steep upfront mineral costs due to the need for more electronics, wiring, and those gigantic batteries. Recycling won’t save us for this because we’re already producing more and more of these minerals than we ever have before.
Then you get all the secondary effects of electric cars: the increased stresses on the grid and need for more grid maintenance and upgrades, the need for more generating capacity because of the increased demand, and the distributed nature of the grid stresses which is much more problematic than an increase of centralized demand (like you get with electric public transit systems). It’s the fact that you have neighbourhoods with electrical service that was designed for the number of buildings in that area and now you’re increasing the demand per building by a significant fraction.
It’s really hard to make arguments like this against EVs though, because there are a huge number of these issues and not much of way to summarize everything into one bottom line conclusion.
With all of these things said, EVs are still significantly better than ICEs. Please make sure that’s clear when commenting - don’t do the oil and gas industry a favour by spreading their propaganda for them.