And the solution will require a mind-shift North Americans may not be ready for.
I bet you think I just LOVE electric vehicles, like any good uppity urbanite would.
It’s not that simple. As I’ve said to my friends and family, all of whom assume the same thing: there are good applications; there are OK applications; and there are terrible applications.
And right now, in North America, we’re falling in love with Door Number Three.
Let’s start with the good news—there are excellent applications for battery electric vehicles! Subcompact urban runabouts and commuter cars are the best-use-case for such tech. Aerodynamic, light and only in need of short range travel—this is what EVs were built for. Europe and Asia are doing it best, but we we have some decent options.
There are “OK” applications. This is your midsize EV. I personally don’t think cars like a Tesla Model 3 (if the CEO weren’t a lunatic) or the Hyundai Ioniq5, etc., are doing anything terribly wrong, by nature…
…It’s just that they aren’t doing anything terribly right, either. They cost too much—you’ll never make it back in fuel savings. Their ever-expanding batteries are getting heavier and creating less efficiency. Charging infrastructure is lagging in most areas, meaning long-distance travel is still dodgy.
Like I said… they’re, OK.
But I’m actually here to talk about the terrible applications—the full-size SUV/van/truck. A bastardization of everything an EV should stand for. And for one major reason.
Weight.
They weigh just too damn much. And right now, there’s no way out of this pitfall. Consumers are plagued with range anxiety, but they also love their seven-passenger SUVs and full-size pickups.
Automotive manufacturers are medicating this anxiety like street corner drug-pushers with big, fat EVs that weigh as much as commercial vehicles and suck power like a black-market hydroponic grow-op.
Need proof? It’s easy to single out the Hummer EV, which weighs up to 9,063 pounds—chubby enough to be banned from most raised or rooftop parkades.
Or the Ford F-150 Lightning, which weighs just shy of 7,000 pounds—which for context, is about the same as a non-EV Ford F-350 Super Duty Crew Cab 4×4.
But what about the sleepers? How about the near-6,000-pound weight of a Volkswagen ID.Buzz? That’s 2,000 pounds heavier than a Toyota Rav4 Hybrid, no lightweight itself, and the VW is just 10 inches longer.
A Tesla Model X is 5,700 pounds. That’s heavier than any non-EV Ford F-150 you can buy.
A Kia EV9 is just a hair’s breadth shy of 6,000 pounds. Yikes!
I could go on. There are no outliers in this category—they’re all heavier than virtually anything else on the road, outside of commercial vehicles.
Why does this matter?
It tears up infrastructure—burning up roads, burning up tires (particulate pollution) and crashing through guardrails that were never built to withstand vehicles of this type.
They are inefficient—requiring larger and larger batteries to overcome their weight and aerodynamic drag.
But more than anything, these hyper-quick, overweight brutes present an existential threat to every other use of the road.
Yes, from the pedestrians who will be struck-dead on the crosswalks by blunt-nose two-tonners, to the subcompacts cut-in-half by 9,000-pound Hummers, to the fleets of overladen sedans hydroplaning through 30-year-old guardrails…
(Do you want to be T-Boned by a 6,000-pound Tesla Model X as it accelerates like a Lamborghini while the driver is distracted by trying to find the latest InfoWars episode on his 15-inch touchscreen?)
The heavier the car is, the more of a danger it presents. This is as immutable as the laws of physics.
That’s the problem with EVs, folks. And it ain’t going nowhere.
(Unless we suddenly learn to love small cars.)
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