This essay is based on the opening remarks delivered at a recent SOHO Forum Debate on electric vehicles. If we could imagine a time machine bringing to New York City, an American citizen from the 19th century, odds are the one thing that would seem the most amazing about our time would be the proliferation of the personal automobile. Big buildings, big cities, roads, nighttime illumination would all be imaginable, even if different looking and greater in scale.
The realities of costs and emissions for EVs is dominated by a simple fact a typical EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds to replace the fuel, and the tank weighing together under 100 pounds. That half-ton battery is made from a wide range of minerals including copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, cobalt, manganese, and of course, lithium. And to get the materials to fabricate that half-ton battery requires digging up and processing some 250 tons of the earth somewhere on the planet.