Americans love a good road trip. There’s nothing better than packing your stuff, turning on the music and just driving. For more than a century, summer dreams have been fueled by the limitless possibilities of a full tank of gas.
This same “live free or die” mentality has also made the United States, until recently, slower to adopt electric cars. The open road is freedom, and the need to stop and charge frequently an intrusion. Last year, connected vehicles accounted for less than 8% of new car sales in the US, far behind Europe’s 32% electric vehicle adoption rate and China’s 30%.
These places had an advantage in part by adopting small electric vehicles with small batteries and limited range. Instead, a survey conducted last year by
Bloomberg Green found that less than 10% of American respondents would settle for anything less than 200 miles of range. The most recent analysis of the ranges of electric vehicles sold in the US found that:
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Americans order the longest ranges in the world, about one-third more than the global average.
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The average range of electric vehicles is about to exceed 300 miles, a key psychological barrier.
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Many have been quick to wag their fingers at this quintessentially American excess. The average commute in the U.S. is 55 miles a day, the thinking goes, so why do you need to go that many extra miles? But the exceptionalism of American electric vehicles reflects a more nuanced understanding of range limitations than consumers usually recognize.
What affects the range of electric vehicles? A lot
Americans spend more time in their cars than drivers in any other country. Road travel in the United States totals about 4 trillion miles per year, or roughly 14,500 miles per person, one-third more than any other country. This makes range anxiety particularly acute for Americans, whose access to charging networks is still limited. For new EV buyers, figuring out how much range you really need can be tricky.
The problem is that a car rated for 250 miles of range doesn’t actually deliver 250 miles of reliable range. The number drops when you turn on the heat or air conditioning, or drive in rain or strong wind. Sudden stops and frequent braking also eat into mileage. So does driving over 60 miles per hour, loading the car with passengers and luggage, or using a ski or bike rack.
Even under perfect conditions, drivers can’t count on all of those classified miles. As with a tank of gas, running a battery down to empty runs the risk of leaving you stranded, so it’s important to keep some miles in reserve. Most batteries aren’t meant to be charged to full either: Tesla, for example, recommends not charging above 90% for daily charging. Finally, car buyers who plan to keep their vehicle for many years should anticipate battery degradation over time, which is accelerated for smaller batteries.
All of these factors combined can easily reduce the usable range of a 250 mile battery down to 90 miles.
At first glance, 90 miles seems like it should be enough to cover the average day for most drivers. But many days aren’t average: the times you forget to plug in your car at night, or lose power, or unexpectedly need to run extra errands or check in with a friend on the other side of town.
Well, one might ask, isn’t that what the public charger is for?
A little quirk of electric vehicle charging is that it’s usually much faster to add a few kilometers of charge to a large battery than to a smaller one. This is because longer-range batteries are made from materials better suited for fast charging. Also, once a battery is half full, the charging rate starts to slow down, so smaller batteries spend less time adding miles to their maximum charge rate.
What all this means is that 10 minutes on a highway charger can add 160 miles of driving to a long-range Kia EV6, but only 32 miles to a base Nissan Leaf. Drivers should plan their pit stops accordingly.
Experienced EV owners learn to extend range on long trips by keeping coats zipped up and heaters down while driving in cold weather, for example, or by slowing down to 60 miles per hour on the freeway instead of of 75 when they stretch to do so. to the next charge. But the mass adoption of long-range electric vehicles requires fewer of these compromises.
The technological case of the range
Some argue that given the world’s vast battery supply, automakers should prioritize smaller electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids. The reason is that we have to distribute what we have to as many vehicles as possible.
But this battery-maximizing strategy is based on the myth that supplies can’t grow any faster, a notion disproved by a century of mass manufacturing. Of course, it typically takes 2-3 years for a new battery plant to come along, and up to a decade to plan and develop new mines for essential minerals like lithium and nickel. But when demand is high enough, capitalism finds a way, and battery profits in 2023 are too massive to keep moving at the pace of 2013.
Right now, miners and refiners of key battery minerals are adding capacity to their existing plants and opening new operations around the world at the fastest pace in history. In the US alone, more than $58 billion was invested in the battery supply chain in the eight months to March. The battery supply chain is expanding like a tidal wave, driven by an earthquake of demand.
Another way that battery supplies are growing is with range-widening battery chemists who increase production using the same amount of key materials. For example, a new generation of battery suppliers is adding increasing amounts of silicon to the anode, which is the part of the battery responsible for storing lithium electrons after a charge. This simple tweak can instantly increase range by 20%.
This means that the same Panasonic or LG Chem factory that was designed to build enough battery cells for 100,000 cars could suddenly accommodate 120,000, without major changes to the factory or the critical minerals it uses. These high-silicon anodes will debut in long-range luxury vehicles, such as the 2025 Mercedes G-Wagon, but should eventually increase vehicle range and lower costs across the industry.
This pattern is typical of successful technologies, from cell phones to solar panels. Innovation begins in high-end markets and over time economies of scale bring it to the masses. In this way, US range enthusiasts can be a driving force in driving down battery costs globally.
The environmental case of the range
Another argument against large batteries is that they add to the significant environmental cost of making electric vehicles. Giant electric vehicles like the 400-mile Chevy Silverado pickup truck coming later this year have about the same lifetime environmental footprint as a gasoline-powered Honda Civic, according to EV researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In other words: if everyone swaps their small internal combustion engines for giant electric vehicles, we won’t make much environmental progress.
But few consumers trade Civics for Silverados or Volkswagen Jettas for Ford F-150 Lightnings. If America’s suburban cowboys can’t be talked into giving up their pickup trucks, they should get rid of their combustion engines, too. Look at any Walmart parking lot in America and imagine if all the giant SUVs and trucks were replaced by a fuel-efficient Toyota Corolla. This is the scale of environmental achievements inherent in long-range electric vehicles. And the environmental savings will only increase as batteries become more efficient and more of the grid runs on renewable energy sources.
Another thing to consider is the wonder of battery recycling. Although efforts to recycle lithium-ion batteries are still in their infancy, it’s only because few electric cars have reached the end of their useful lives. Recycling electric vehicle batteries is a profitable business and approximately 95% of the critical minerals can be recovered. Anyone buying an electric vehicle today can expect most of its battery to be made from newly mined materials at not insignificant environmental cost. But anyone who buys an electric vehicle today can also expect those materials to eventually be recycled into someone else’s electric vehicle.
better to walk
To be clear: there are plenty of Americans for whom smaller cars and smaller batteries are sublime. These vehicles can be perfect for short trips around town in temperate California, for example. Also, more people should cycle, walk and use public transport. If American cities did more to accommodate these things, we’d all be healthier and happier for it.
But walkable cities aren’t what the average freedom-loving American thinks of when he’s in the market for a new electric car. The main concern for most consumers is how much it takes to fit their lifestyle and how much they can afford.
To that end, the big battery boom is working: As the US approaches its 300-mile range standard, EV adoption is starting to rise faster than in other major markets (driven by part for the subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act). This year, sales will increase by 73%, according to the latest BloombergNEF estimate. This growth rate is more than double that of China and more than four times faster than Europe.
Consumers are not stupid. It’s not ignorance of how much we drive that keeps Americans from choosing low-end cars. In fact, it is the knowledge of the trust we have placed in our vehicles that pushes Americans to demand so much autonomy.
