While it is possible that condensation collecting in the bottom or perhaps corrosion from road salt can cause a gas tank to fail, in most cases they last for the life of the car. With the average age of a car in America now running about 12.2 years, having to spend about the $700 – $1,400 in parts and labor to replace one is extremely rare. This brings us to the point of this post. What if your car needed a new gas tank every 6-8 years and it cost anywhere from $3,500 to $25,000 to replace it? Welcome to the world of EV vehicles. They don’t have a gas tank, but the battery that holds the “fuel” for the car has a very finite life span. While it typically costs about 40%-70% less to drive an electric car per 100 miles of normal driving, there are factors that need to be considered. To begin with, the car itself costs more to buy (40% on average), Then you need to shell out $1,000 or so for a home charging station and installation of a 240v outlet if your garage isn’t already wired for it (more if you have an older house with a supply panel that doesn’t support enough amperage and you don’t want it to take 3 days to charge your car from a 110v outlet). Add the eventual cost of replacing the battery if you keep it after your 84-month financing is paid off or the reduced trade-in or resale value of a car doomed to die a year later without said battery replacement, and these factors narrow the gap considerably. When you add the eventual increased cost of shifting to renewable energy so your “clean” electric car isn’t actually powered by coal and the cost per mile ends up pretty close to parity with a driving a combustion-powered vehicle. Come to think of it, you might have to add the cost of renting a hotel room every 400 miles or so while your car charges overnight if you want to take your shiny new EV on a road trip.
But…the environment! EVs will save the environment!
Where do batteries for those world-saving EVs come from? Well, first you need to mine the world’s salt flats to get the lithium and expand the copper mines to get more cobalt (most cobalt production is a by-product of copper and nickel mining) and some other fairly or extremely rare elements in enough quantities to build the batteries needed to replace the 98%+ of the 280 million vehicles on the road that currently use refined oil (in the US alone). Fortunately, Tibet and the countries in South America where a lot of the world’s lithium is produced and African countries like the Congo that mine cobalt don’t have restrictive environmental or child labor laws to throttle production. Because much of South America is a rainforest or has plenty of runoff from the mountains as does Tibet, the 500,000 gallons of water needed to process each metric ton of lithium shouldn’t be a problem. Where the toxic materials left over from the production go isn’t a problem since it is dumped in some other country’s environment, not ours. This and the many other environmental impact issues involved in building and powering EVs don’t happen if we don’t see them, right? It’s not like second-hand smoke, after all. The issues involved in eventually providing enough renewable clean energy to charge all those batteries over and over again during their 8-year life span including vast weather-changing arrays of solar panels and bird-bashing wind farms is a subject for another time.
As you may have guessed, the transition to an all-electric future will take a lot more than some unelected government official telling you to “just buy an electric car” if you don’t like the cost of gasoline.