EV’s: Are They Really the Future?

Samir Abdalla
7 min readJun 7, 2022

--

Image Source: Car and Driver

In 2021, it was reported that EV’s accounted for 6% of the global automotive market, which is a big number if you really think about it. EV’s have been taking the world by a storm and every now and then there is a new startup company that rises up to the market claiming that they can deliver an EV in certain amount of time, and with a certain drivable mileage, power, torque and different set of features than other EV’s in the market, not to mention that the larger manufacturers in the automobile industry are also investing heavily on EV’s, and till this time we have been seeing a lot of EV’s that are being unveiled by the largest automobile manufacturers, cars like the Leaf from Nissan, the Taycan from Porsche, the I-Pace from Jaguar, the e-tron from Audi, the Polestar 2 from Volvo and the list goes on. We have also seen a rise on the number of SUV’s that are EV’s famous names like the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Chevrolet Bolt EUV, the Hyundai Kona Electric and also the IONIQ 5 which is also from Hyundai, BMW also got on that trend with the BMW iX, and it’s German counterparts, Audi and Volkswagen also got on that trend with the Q4 e-tron and the ID.4 respectively. But the hottest segment on EV’s today are trucks which is seeing a lot of unveiling from a lot of manufactures like the Silverado EV from Chevrolet, the Ford F-150 Lightning, the GMC Sierra EV and the GMC Hummer EV. So as you can see there is a lot of names from big manufacturers in the EV market, which is leading to a big rise up in the competition between the newer startup companies and the big manufacturers, and it’s really heating up as you reading this article, so are EV’s really the future? Is that why all big manufacturers and small startups getting on that trend, well let’s see.

Let’s start by what’s an EV first, well an EV is a shortened acronym for an electric vehicle. EVs are vehicles that are either partially or fully powered on electric power.

Electric vehicles have low running costs as they have less moving parts for maintaining and also very environmentally friendly as they use little or no fossil fuels (petrol or diesel).

EV’s are like smartphones as you can plug them into an outlet and charge them with electricity, and they store that energy in a rechargeable batteries which power the motors of the car so that it can move and gives it the ability solely on electricity without needing petrol or diesel, so the first thing that I think it came to your mind is that they are much more friendly in the environment department, and I can tell you that it’s still debatable, but if you considered the car alone, then yes it’s much more friendly than a petrol engine powered vehicle.

There are a lot of things that makes this car unique, first is that it’s faster than a regular car, it’s not lighter per say but it’s much faster and I think you noticed that in the newer Tesla cars, for example the new Tesla Model S Plaid can do 0–60 mph in 2.2 seconds, which is insane for a four-door sedan, it makes it faster than a huge portion of hyper cars and don’t forget that it’s much more friendly to the environment.

This are many reasons that EV’s are being loved by wide variety of consumers, and what makes it better that all manufactures and small startups are competing with one another to be the best producer of EV’s, and with the variety of cars are increasing by the time, with now cars being available and SUV’s and trucks are coming on the way. So that all can make it a good replacement to the petrol powered cars, but that maybe doesn’t mean that it’s a far better replacement, don’t forget EV’s are not the only replacement for petrol cars, there are also hydrogen cars, which are considered in many ways a better replacement to Petrol powered cars and EV’s alike for example Hydrogen powered cars tend to have better mileage not only that but they have far less refueling time than the time needed for charging an EV, which I think that this is the biggest setback to an EV.

Rivian R1T — Image Source: The Watt Car

So let’s think for a minute here shall we, having a car is a benefit because it decreases the time needed for a person or a group to go from a point to another point, you can travel all day around the city, something that is going to take you almost two days on your foot, you can go from city to city in 3 maybe 4 maybe even 5 hours, but can you imagine how much time you need to go the same distance on foot, that’s one of the reasons that cars were invented, they decreases the time need to go from place to place, now the car need energy to rely on while moving, petrol powered cars rely on petrol as a substance of energy to power the car and make it move from place to place, although it’s not safe for the environment, it’s very ideal, now let’s take EV’s, they rely on stored electricity so that they can move from place, and the problem with that, that these type of cars need time to collect (charge) all the energy that are going to be stored in the batteries for the car to use it to move from point to point and because we as humans didn’t figure out a way to make our batteries charge even faster that resulted in EV’s not charging fast. Now all EV’s need some amount of time for them to recharge. When a petrol powered car runs out of fuel, you need only 5 minutes to fill the car with gas maybe even less, and you can go another 300 km, but an EV needs at least 40 minutes to be somewhat fully charged so that it can give you a moving distance similar to the one that you can get from a petrol powered car, now for me I think that this is a major setback, let me give you an example if you are going from a city to another city, and let’s imagine that the distance is 500 km, if you move at a 140kmh speed then you need almost 3 hours and 20 minutes plus let’s say 10 minutes for filling the gas to reach your destination, but with an EV you need another 40 minutes for your car to be charged with an amount of electricity that can make you reach your destination equaling 4 hours and 10 minutes.

That increases the time even further, so I think that this is one of the biggest setbacks to the EV’s not to mention that the way of charging or the cables or methods that are used in charging the vehicles, are not standardized yet which is also considered a setback, think about it, when you buy a gas powered car you don’t think about how you will put fuel in it, I think that you will not even notice if the fuel door is on the right or the left, that’s why a lot of manufactures put an arrow on the dashboard which points to the position of the fuel door on the car. But let’s get back to the EV’s, they don’t use the same charging methods or technologies, so for that when you buy an EV you have to put in your mind which charging technology that the car that you are going to buy is going to use and how many charging units that they have down the road, if you thought of it that way, Tesla is the car manufacturer that has the most charging units or as they call it SuperCharger, and they also have announced a while back that they are working on a way to enable all EV’s to charge on their SuperChargers, which will be super convenient, and it will push Tesla stocks and revenues even further, but in the mean time you have to consider the way of charging the EV that you are going to purchase.

Tesla SuperCharger — Image Source: The Verge

Also you have to put this in the thought, that EV’s are not considered so much reliable unlike gas powered cars which has been going for years and years, not to mention that there are some car manufacturers who are considered thathe producer of the most reliable cars in the market, let’s consider Toyota for example as they are known to produce the most reliable cars in the market, and their Land Cruiser series which is an off-road 4x4 SUV is one of the most reliable cars in the market known to last almost 25 years with small maintenance something that made all the known organizations in the world including the UN to pass a resolution to make the Toyota Land Cruiser their main official car, do you think that EV’s can reach that type of reliability?

I know that it took the gas powered cars a long time to reach that kind of reliability, but do you really think that we can reach a point in time that EV batteries can last for a straight 25 years, could that really happen, I really hope so I really do, I believe in all the different types of vehicles in the road even the EV’s, but I’m still questioning if they are really the future, maybe there are a better ways to produce vehicles that can more efficient, save the environment and the most important thing is to be cheaper to produce and maintain.

--

--

Samir Abdalla

An Engineer, Writer and a Podcaster, with super huge passion for technology aiming to become a huge technology influencer in my home country Sudan