Why should you not buy an EV?

As a nation we're very fond of the internal-combustion engine.

Sure, we use electricity to run shavers and hair dryers and cooktops and hot water tanks, kettles, microwaves, computers, phones, drills and angle grinders... the list goes on.

But most of us draw the line at electric power for our motor vehicles (and our lawn mowers too, for that matter).

As consumers, we demand a particularly high standard for cost and efficiency when it comes to electrically-powered motor vehicles, but some of the antipathy for electric vehicles also appears rooted in emotion and prejudice.

Here are some common concerns – and responses.

Currently it's true that EVs are more expensive than similarly-specified cars powered by internal-combustion engines. The Hyundai Ioniq Electric Elite is presently priced at $44,990. A conventional Hyundai i30 auto with the 2.0-litre engine in entry-level ('Active') trim costs $23,390 – barely half the price of the EV.

Factor in the total cost of ownership over a five-year period, however, and that closes the gap considerably.

Based on an average electricity tariff of 28 cents per kilowatt-hour, the Ioniq will likely cost about $20 to drive 400km in a week.

The i30, based on $1.40 per litre of petrol and covering the same distance (in an urban setting) costs $56 a week to run. Calculating this figure from the price of petrol and the urban-cycle consumption figure is fair game, given the short trips and cold starts.

Over that five-year period the Ioniq reels in the purchase price advantage of the i30 by about $10,000 once you've also included the reduced cost of servicing.

Most urban-focused electric vehicles are just not practical for longer trips to a country destination.

The Hyundai Ioniq's real-world range, according to the manufacturer, is around 230km. That would (just barely) take you from the eastern suburbs of Melbourne to Apollo Bay for a few days of R&R by the ocean.

But if you're using the Ioniq as a runabout around town, the range is more than adequate for most drivers. Upmarket EVs from Tesla, Jaguar and other prestige brands can better the Ioniq's range by a considerable margin.

By way of contrast, a four-cylinder internal-combustion car can typically travel up to 400km or further on a tank of fuel, but not if all its travel comprises short trips from cold starts. The conventional four-cylinder car's range might be as low as 300km in that circumstance – which is not much better than the Ioniq's.

We're yet to see EV recharging stations proliferate to the same extent as service stations, but among the nations of the world Australia is relatively well placed to take advantage of electrically-connected residential garages for recharging EVs.

EV owners are in a much better situation than the pioneering motorists from a hundred years ago, looking for the next waypoint where they could purchase petrol.

It only takes a cursory internet search to find stories about new electric-vehicle recharging stations being installed around the country. It's common to see such stations in the public car parks of the nation's larger cities, but they're beginning to sprout up in regional centres as well, and along the major highways linking capitals.

Best of all, most new homes feature garages with electrical power connected, so charging may be as simple as opening a flap on the car's bodywork, inserting an electrical adaptor and flicking the switch at the wall to 'on'.

If you have purchased a home built within the last 30 years it's more likely than not the garage will be an integral part of the structure. And newer units and flats, even in high-rise buildings, have a dedicated car space, which is often powered up.

Furthermore, one or two home builders are including a Tesla Powerwall in the price of new house & land packages as an added inducement to buy.

If the home you own has a separate, unpowered garage, it will set you back a few hundred dollars to have electricity connected – and you might as well specify a 15-Amp outlet for faster charging. It will cost little more.

Connecting power to the garage could pay for itself within a few months if you use it to recharge an electric vehicle.

Recharging does take time. It's not like the three minutes required to fill the fuel tank of a conventional car, but if it takes you just one minute to hook up the charging lead at home to the car, well that's two minutes of your personal time saved by not having to stand by the pump and wait for the tank to fill.

Recharging a thoroughly depleted battery – one that's 'flat as a tack' – from a domestic 10Amp power outlet will certainly take a few hours at least. But if you're recharging from home, you're probably doing so overnight, while everyone is tucked up in bed anyway.

It's unlikely that you'll use up 90 per cent or more of the battery's capacity in a typical day of driving to the shops or down to the train station, so recharging the battery to 100 per cent may not be as time-consuming as the manufacturers suggest.

Out in public – away from home – there are fast-charging facilities that will deliver an 80 per cent charge while you're in a business meeting or having lunch with a friend. Typically, a fast charge to 80 per cent can take roughly 20 minutes or half an hour, depending on the type of vehicle and the output from the recharging station.

The complaint commonly levelled at EVs is that they won't get you from Sydney to Melbourne on one charge, and a Tesla could delay your journey by hours while it's sitting idly to recharge. In reality, an EV owner is more likely to drive to the nearest airport and hop a plane interstate than drive there.

Back in 2009 Mitsubishi was telling Australian journalists that even in Victoria – the local home of brown-coal power generation – the company's tiny i-MiEV emitted only marginally more CO2 than the Toyota Prius, a petrol/electric hybrid.

In a state like Tasmania the well-to-wheel emissions of the Mitsubishi were much lower than those of the Prius.

Since then, power generation has improved, with Victoria's infamous Hazelwood power station closed and more solar and wind farms in operation around the country.

Evidence supports the view that EVs are actually cleaner than conventional cars, even if they are charged from electricity supplied by a coal-fired power station. They're certainly cleaner when recharged from the growing number of sustainable-energy resources, which are conservatively anticipated to generate as much as 50 per cent of Australia's power needs by 2025.

As more renewable energy sources come online the CO2 toxicity of Australia's power generation will gradually wane, and the gap will widen between the CO2 emissions of internal-combustion cars and the lower emissions of EVs.

Few people criticising EVs for relying on coal for power generation take into account the well-to-wheel CO2 emissions of an internal-combustion car. The CO2 emitted in the refining of petrol or diesel is in addition to the particles spat out of the exhaust.

And while some critics counter that with the question of how well-to-wheel emissions for a high-performance Tesla measure up against a light hatch with a sub-2.0-litre petrol engine, the obvious comeback there relates to comparing apples with apples.

How much cleaner is the Tesla against a conventional car offering the same or similar performance potential – something like a Lamborghini Huracan for instance?

Manufacturers acknowledge that production of a battery-electric vehicle results in more CO2 emissions than production of a conventional, internal-combustion car. But they also state that smaller EVs, emitting no tailpipe CO2 emissions, can offset the increased emissions within six months of operating life.

Larger EVs, like the Tesla Model S and Model X may not offset the emissions during manufacture until they've completed 18 months of continuous operation on the road.

EV batteries are expensive to replace, don't last long and are environmentally toxic.
Battery technology is in a state of intense flux at the moment. There are new ideas coming along almost every day; just google 'battery technology development'.

For the time being, the state of the art in terms of commercially available battery technology is lithium-ion. The price of lithium has doubled in recent years, due to China's insatiable need for batteries to power the country's rapidly growing electric-vehicle fleet, so the price of EVs hasn't come down as rapidly as the industry expected. But analysts say that with Chile extracting lithium from seawater and more mines opening up in Australia, the price will fall by 45 per cent within two years.

Lithium gets a bad rap in some quarters for its impact on the environment, but a recent Swiss study attributed less than 2.3 per cent of an EV's environmental footprint to the mining of lithium.

Much of the concern with mining lithium is based around the need for massive quantities of water, which leaves farmers in the vicinity of the mine struggling to grow crops. In the Pilbara, however, where Australia is already digging up and exporting huge quantities of the raw material for lithium-ion battery production there's not that much farming going on nearby.

Until newer, cleaner battery technology arrives on the scene, there's always recycling to extend the life of lithium and reduce our reliance on mining new deposits.

Practically every initiative to reduce CO2 emissions in Australia will have little effect on global CO2 output, but the climate science is accepted by the vast majority of credible scientists and polls indicate that Australians mostly see a need to do more about climate change.

It's about leading by example. Can we expect the rest of the world to make the leap into a reduced-emissions future ahead of us when Australia is one of the countries more vulnerable to climate change?

Some years ago Land Rover developed an electric Defender that was capable of safely wading through water.

If an off-road EV can proceed unimpeded through moderately deep water, then EVs can clearly cope with a light shower or even occasional flooding.

Lithium-ion batteries and the hardware on board do generate high-tension current, and emergency services receive training on how to disable electrical systems in EVs, just as they are trained how to use hydraulic rams and cutters to force their way into a car without triggering an airbag. The manufacturers of EVs actually engineer them to cut all power in the event of a prang, so that no-one in the car and none of the rescuers are placed in danger.

There have been reports of lithium-ion batteries bursting into flame, mostly involving Tesla models, but in many cases the problem arises from a crash (or a passenger reportedly firing a bullet into the battery pack, as in one incident).

It's not unreasonable speculation. Power bills have been out of control for a few years now. And Australia's national grid is generally felt to be badly in need of an upgrade to cope with higher loads from electric vehicles in future. Upgrading the grid will cost the consumer more, as will the extra capacity required to charge an EV.

A point to note about EVs, however, is that a smaller car like the Nissan LEAF only draws about the same power to recharge overnight as a refrigerator.

Domestic power bills have climbed so high that private consumers are collectively migrating to photo-voltaic cells on the roof of the family home to reduce their dependency on power from the grid. With each home becoming its own little solar-power farm, the EV can be recharged in the garage, without drawing power from the grid. The upfront cost of PV panels is offset by lower power bills over coming years.

To date, according to the Clean Energy Council, in excess of two million Australian homes now have solar panels installed.

Homeowners with PV cells on the roof can install a domestic battery to store the sun's energy overnight, further freeing the family from the power grid.

If you want to find out how an EV could conceivably save you money, the Electric Vehicle Council has developed a handy online calculator for that very purpose.