Is it the huge shortage of critical minerals needed to meet such a goal? Is it that our electrical grid has nowhere near the capacity to charge that many electric vehicles? Or maybe it is the fact that the charging infrastructure does not exist and has no chance of coming into being in eight short years.The bottom line is that you should be prepared to spend money preserving your existing combustion engine vehicle form.
The fastest commercial outlets take 20 minutes, several times as long as filling your tank with gasoline, and good luck finding a working charger. The University of California, Berkeley, studied the San Francisco Bay Area’s public chargers and found that more than 1 in 4 doesn’t work. A 2022 national study by J.D. Power placed the broken public charger rate at 20%.
Even if you find a working charger, the electrical grid may not be able to meet demand from all the new electric cars that people are supposedly going to buy — upward of 2 million per year, based on current new car sales. Environmentalists talk of how much oil the United States will save from going electric, but just because oil isn’t being burned doesn’t mean energy isn’t being consumed. Studies estimate that electrical demand will go up by at least 25% thanks solely to electric vehicles.
A recent Scientific American study found that world production of lithium would need to triple overnight to maintain — not build, just maintain — an all-electric American fleet. The copper needed to meet the mandate would require more copper to be produced over the next 25 years than has been produced in the last five millennia.
Uh, should we all begin to install chargers in our garage ? Sad, for people who live in apartments, especially high rise apartments. You snooze, you lose.
Too easy!