How long will the car’s battery last? How far can you get on one full charge? Is “range anxiety” a real issue? In this episode, host Tara Jean Stevens talks with Cara Clairman, founder of Plug N Drive, to bust the myth of “range anxiety”, plus Economist editor and historian Tom Standage, author of A Brief History of Motion, about the 100-year history of the electric car. Plus: what’s the secret connection between a 1980s camcorder and today’s electric car market?
How long will the car’s battery last? How far can you get on one full charge? Is “range anxiety” a real issue? In this episode, host Tara Jean Stevens talks with Cara Clairman, founder of Plug N Drive, to bust the myth of “range anxiety”, plus Economist editor and historian Tom Standage, author of A Brief History of Motion, about the 100-year history of the electric car. Plus: what’s the secret connection between a 1980s camcorder and today’s electric car market?
VARIOUS VOICES:
How long will the battery last? Will I be able to get where I need to go -- and back? Will I need to replace the battery before I'm ready to get a new car?
TARA JEAN STEVENS
I'm Tara Jean Stevens and this is Road to Electric - an original podcast powered by Mazda. On this show, we’re on a journey to separate fact from fiction when it comes to electric vehicles.
Today we're talking about the most crucial component of EV’s -- the battery. And more importantly, how much range do you really need?
We talk to people who drive electric cars, one of Canada's foremost consumer advocates for EVs -- plus the guy who wrote THE book on the surprising history of electric vehicles – answering questions you didn't even know you had, like what does a 1980s camcorder have to do with today's electric car market?
"Range Anxiety" is a term that's thrown around a lot when people talk about EVs. It refers to a fear that your electric car battery won't provide enough power to get you where you need to go.
PINO MASTROIANNI
My typical drive is 56 kilometers. Some days it's a little higher and the highest day is maybe a hundred to 125 kilometers in a day.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
Meet Pino Mastroianni. He bought his first EV more than a decade ago, and is still driving it for his daily commute, in Essex County, Ontario
PINO MASTROIANNI
I usually go three to six weeks before I even use a drop of gasoline,
JENN LEASK
My name is Jenn Leask and I live in North Vancouver, British Columbia, and I bought my first plug-in electric Hybrid in 2018. In a typical day, I probably drive somewhere between 10 and 15 kilometers, but it could be as low as five or as high as 30.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
Like so many people these days, Jen works remotely. She has no daily commute -- but even still, she wasn’t sure her battery range would be enough.
JENN LEASK
Our range is about 28 kilometers, because it's a plug-in gas hybrid, and when we first got it, I thought that that wouldn't be enough. It seemed very low, but the truth is, if we want go up the road to Whistler or down the road to Richmond, we can, and the neat thing about it is that it when the battery's out, the gas turns on and it recharges the battery, so then you can go back on battery power. So our gas use is always very low.
We bought this car as our secondary car because we thought that we wouldn't be able to do all the things we wanted to do. But actually it's become our primary car because we can easily do all the things that we need to do - I probably go two months or more without ever having to put gas in the car because you just don't use it (gas) most of the time.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
So the anecdotal evidence -- the anecdata, if you will! -- is strong. Jenn and Pino aren’t worried about running out of battery power and getting stranded somewhere. That's because they drive the right EVs to suit their needs. Pino knows his daily usage -- Jenn knows that sometimes her family will take longer roadtrips.
These stories are in line with the results from a recent study for the Canadian Automobile Association by PlugShare Research. After talking to more than 16 thousand EV owners, they found that once people had been driving their EVs for a few weeks, their concerns about range and battery life dropped significantly.
But I also want to hear directly from an expert. Cara Clairman is one of the top voices in this country when it comes to EVs. She founded the nonprofit PlugN Drive more than a decade ago - to educate Canadians about electric vehicles, and make it easier for people to make the switch.
We started off by asking Cara what SHE thinks about so-called "range anxiety."
CARA CLAIRMAN
Honestly, range anxiety is something that gas car drivers tend to have. And then new EV drivers have it for the first week or two of ownership of their new car, and then it goes away. And so it tends to be something we imagine will be a problem. And then once we get into it, we realize actually it's totally fine.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
I would say I saw that first hand over the weekend. I went to a ball tournament a couple of hours outside of town and the coach had just bought a brand new EV vehicle and he left it at home and came with someone else on the road trip because he was worried about the charge and I remember thinking, “I should tell him to listen to my new podcast.”
CARA CLAIRMAN
Right. I mean, the first time you do a trip that is unusual, that's not a destination you're used to going to and you're not sure where the charging is, it's understandable to have concerns. And then once you've done it once or twice, most of the time that just goes away.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
So how much battery power and range does an average Canadian driver think they need compared to what we actually need? Because I think that's, that might be what this boils down to.
CARA CLAIRMAN
That's right actually StatsCan collects data on how far we drive, and the last one that I saw said that the average Canadian drives about 50 kilometers per day, so that's about 80% of us. And so for most of us, this issue of range isn't really an issue at all. Most of us are not driving that far in a given day, so most of us could actually make due with quite a low range electric vehicle except many of us do love to take the odd road trip, and it's the road trip that tends to preoccupy people in terms of destinations and range. And so it's not actually the daily driving, and so of course we try to tell folks, “Hey, think about what you do 99% of the time, not what you do 1% of the time.”
And if that one trip a year or two trips a year gives you a lot of heartburn, then take a different car, but you still get all the benefits of EV driving for most of your driving.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
So we're talking a lot about battery life in this episode, but beyond range, beyond distance, what do we know about how long these batteries actually last?
CARA CLAIRMAN
Well, the oldest EV is about 12 years old, and so in terms of battery life, we now have a pretty good idea of how those cars are doing, and it looks pretty good. The studies of the oldest EVs on the road show those batteries are still going strong, lasting well. In fact, most studies out there will show that the battery is likely to outlast the car body, and so this issue of having to replace a battery is unlikely to happen to most drivers.
The reality is, though, we don't really know what it means at 15 years or 20 years, we don’t have that information yet.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
Since you first started Plug and Drive back in 2011, I'm really curious about what you’re going to say about this. How have you seen the public's attitude towards EVs change over these decades?
CARA CLAIRMAN
You know, the interest is exploding - it's still a low percentage of people that are actually making the switch, but the awareness has really improved in the first couple of years. Most people that we met when we would do public events had never heard of an EV, didn't know what EV stood for, never heard of it, never seen one for sure.
We're sort of out of those days, but I would say not as far along as I might have hoped at this point. But every month or two we see improvements. Where we’re struggling now is there's very low supply of vehicles, so the interest is there and unfortunately the vehicles aren't there to meet the demand. It'll be great as some of these new plants start manufacturing EVs so that there'll be more supply, and I think we're gonna see a huge surge in actual adoption.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
And will that be the tipping point? I mean, once demand can be satisfied, are we all going to get on board? I mean everyone in our neighborhood maybe could be driving an EV and you'll feel left out. I mean, is that, are we gonna get to that point in the next few years?
CARA CLAIRMAN
I think we're already at the tipping point in some parts of Canada, but it’s not all the same across the country. In British Columbia, for example, they're already at 20% adoption for new sales, and Quebec is getting close to that, and so in those two provinces, I would say you're probably at the tipping point.
I would say in the rest of the country, we still have work to do. You know, there's some parts of the country we're down just a couple of percent, so we're still not there yet.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
So at Plug N Drive, you offer curious drivers like me and my listeners an opportunity to actually explore and even test drive EV vehicles. With that experience, what's the biggest source of resistance or anxiety that you hear from people about adopting an EV as their primary vehicle?
CARA CLAIRMAN
Sure. Well, a lot of the folks who are looking at EVs are two car families. So a lot of the adoption right now is still often a second car. Not always, but often.
I think what we've seen - like we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of visitors from every walk of life and the common thread - is basically two concerns.
Number one is, is always price, that the EVs are a bit more expensive, and then number two is range. And so those are still the top two concerns that people have. I mean, the great news is the prices have come down and continue to come down, and we still do have incentives, so that's good, that helps. Where we have to help people a little bit more is in the total cost of ownership. So when I say that, I mean the sticker price of the EV might still be $5,000 to $10,000 more than the equivalent gas car, but as you own it, over the years, you're saving because electricity is about one fifth - depending on which province - one fifth to one sixth or one seventh the price of gas and maintenance is much less as well. So you save a lot every year that you own it. So we have to show people, “Hey, you're gonna pay now, but you're gonna save later. And in the end you will be ahead.”
So that's part of it. And the range issue still persists, but as I mentioned, it does tend to go away once people adopt the car, but we have to get people over it enough to be willing to adopt the car.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
So we're worried about the price, we're concerned about range anxiety. Those are all valid concerns that have concrete answers. But what about the misconceptions? What about the things that we're filling our head with that maybe are totally not true? What are you hearing?
CARA CLAIRMAN
Well, we do hear a lot of concerns about the battery, that they're gonna have to replace a battery. You read one news report that somebody had to replace their battery and it was $5,000 or $8,000 or whatever it was, and those stories do loom large for people.
And our experience is that that is not happening. It's very rare. And by the way, most of the automakers are putting an eight year warranty on their battery, so in general, if you have a problem with your battery, you're going to have it when you still have the warranty. So for the most part, this is a non-issue, but this is a belief that people have. And then the second thing about batteries, I would say is people are concerned about what's gonna happen to the battery eventually, you know, where's it gonna go?
TARA JEAN STEVENS
Where is it gonna go?
CARA CLAIRMAN
So this is a great Canadian story, there's a ton of research going on in the areas of reuse and recycling of batteries. So first of all, these batteries are so valuable, you never have to worry that these things are gonna end up filling up landfill sites. They are not. They still have juice left in them even when they're no good for a car anymore, and so what's happening is they will be refurbished and used for backup storage and other uses, and then they will be recycled. And there's a number of Canadian companies that are quite prominent in this battery recycling space and the automakers will either partner with them or some of the automakers will actually take the batteries back and do it themselves.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
Cara Clairman is the founder and president of Plug N Drive -- a non-profit that educates consumers about electric vehicles.
I have to admit that for someone like me, who commutes everyday, range anxiety is real. I think we need a real shift in thinking --- so how do we make this shift? History has some lessons.
We may think of electric vehicles as this new technology - but battery powered cars have been around for more than 125 years. And there is a lot to learn from this history that we can apply to the adoption of electric vehicles today.
So we called up Tom Standage. He's an editor at The Economist, but more importantly for us, he recently wrote a book called A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel to the Car and What Comes Next - so he is the perfect person to tell us how gas-powered cars initially beat out electric vehicles -- and what is different now.
TOM STANDAGE
If you go back to the 1890s and you look at the market for cars in the US it's really interesting because you've basically got a three-way fight between steam powered vehicles, electric vehicles, and internal combustion engine vehicles. And they're selling roughly equal quantities by the late 1890s.
And in fact, in 1897, the electric cars are outselling the other cars. So, might things have gone a different way? I think that's what we ask when we look at this. Could the electric car have won? And it was pretty obvious that steam powered cars weren't going to win. They were the old technology.
They were very big, very heavy. And the main problem with them was that if you wanted to go out in a steam powered car, you had to kind of get the boiler going several hours beforehand. So they were very, very inconvenient. Electric cars were great. You jump in them, they go straight away, they're quiet, they're clean, they're reliable.
But the battery was the big problem. The best cars had a range of maybe 70 miles, but there weren't very many places to plug them in. I mean, most houses didn't have electricity at this point, so that was a vulnerability. And the internal combustion engine car had a problem of its own, which was that the engines were just really not very reliable. And so you kind of had to be your own mechanic and you had to be prepared to deal with the car breaking down. And there wasn't a network of filling stations for you to fill up. You could buy the fuel at essentially hardware stores. So each of these technologies had their pros and cons, and that's why I think it's an interesting period because we kind of look at it and say, well, Is there a world where electric cars won?
TARA JEAN STEVENS
I read in your book that in 1897 more than half of the vehicles on the road were electric, but by 1900, this is the one I really wanted to get your insight in, most of the electric vehicles were being sold to women. Why Tom?
TOM STANDAGE
Well, there were a number of reasons for this - the main one I think was that electric cars were seen as feminine. They were quiet. You didn't need to be strong and manly to turn the cranking handle to start them. You didn't need to be your own mechanic to keep them running. And women were assumed to be terrible mechanics, whereas men were obviously natural mechanics. There's, you know, obviously a massive amount of gender stereotyping going on here. Another thing about an electric car is because you weren't fixing it all the time, you wouldn't get oil all over your frock. So that's very important.
And then there's another, I think, much more subtle reason why men might have preferred if they were buying a car for their wife's use to buy her an electric car, and that's basically she wouldn't be able to get very far in it. You know she might be able to go into town or go to the opera with her friends, but she would not be able to run away in it because there would be nowhere to recharge it.
So I think it's really interesting that Henry Ford, who we think of as the great pioneer of democratizing access to the car, buys his wife an electric car made by another manufacturer. So I think there's quite a big kind of element of coercion or control going on here as well.
But yeah, ultimately it was becoming clear by the early years of the 19 hundreds that internal combustion engine cars were going to win. They were becoming more reliable. The gas was becoming more widely available. And so electric cars kind of got pushed into this niche where they were deemed, you know, inferior, but good enough for girls. You see that reflected in the advertising at the time, electric cars are so easy to drive, even a woman can do it, you know, things like that. It's really, really shocking if you look at it now.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
Tom Standage in with the fun facts. So you've mentioned it there, and we all know it's true. Eventually the electric car does get overtaken by the combustion engine. What were the factors that made that shift?
TOM STANDAGE
Well, it's two things. There was the fact that the electric cars didn't really get any better, the batteries were lead acid batteries and lead acid batteries are big and heavy and they took a long time to charge and it was difficult. There wasn't charging infrastructure, as I said, and very few houses had electricity at this point. And the electricity they did have was not suitable for charging batteries really quickly. There weren't really very many public charging points. I mean, you could go to a hard hardware store or something and say, “Can I plug in my car?” but basically there wasn't any infrastructure.
So the electric car continued to have all of the problems that it had had in the late 1890s, whereas, the internal combustion engine car was starting to shed some of the problems it had had - it was becoming more reliable, the availability of filling stations was going up and that became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people bought them, the more demand there was for gas. You get the invention at the standalone gas station, originally a sort of offshoot of the convenience store, but then it becomes its own thing.
So internal combustion engines just become more reliable, you've got the advantage of range because you've got the ability to fill up, and then of course you get the Model T. And what the Model T does is by introducing mass production and the moving production line, it makes cars dramatically cheaper and much more accessible to people. And at that point, there really is no turning back.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
So during that time, Tom, electric batteries and electric vehicles, did they have any sort of peaks and rises where people were still trying to make it happen?
TOM STANDAGE
Well, interestingly, Ford and Edison got together around 1920 and said, “Maybe we should have another go at an affordable electric car”. And this was after the success of the Model T, and they were considered the two greatest innovators in their respective fields. At the time, Edison was the genius who had come up with all these electrical technologies and Ford had completely revolutionized car making. So you'd have thought that if anyone in the world could figure out how to make a decent electric car in that period, it would be them. And they failed. And largely, we look back at it now, they tried various different battery chemistries, and the problem has always been the battery chemistry and the fact that the lead acid chemistry is very simple and very reliable, but it doesn't give you a lot of capacity per unit weight. So you need a really, really big, heavy car if it's gonna have a range of more than a hundred miles. So that's a big problem.
And then the other thing is that even if they'd succeeded, those electric cars would've had to have been charged using the electricity infrastructure of the day and that electricity infrastructure of the day - and this is something that matters to us today, in retrospect - it would've still been burning oil. So a lot of concern in the 1920s was that the world was going to run out of oil, and this is a concern that has sort of gone away and come back many times in the past century, but one of the worries was that the car industry itself was much too dependent on the oil industry continuing to deliver oil.
That would still have been true with electric cars, because you'd basically have just burnt the oil in power stations in order to charge the cars. So what we also see in this time is that people are looking at things like biofuels and whether you can make fuel from crops, and GM did a big study on this in the 1920s and they very quickly came to the pretty obvious conclusion that given the volume of cars in use in America at the time, you would pretty much have to use all the crop land in America to make fuel and then you wouldn't have any food. So that was a big problem as well.
So the electric car fails because the battery chemistry is still rubbish, and also because ultimately it would still be dependent on fossil fuels, and the biofuel approach fails because it's impractical at that kind of scale. And so we end up with the internal combustion engine still going along the road, in fact picking up speed and making us all more dependent on cars and more dependent on oil.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
And yet here we are talking about electric vehicles. So at some point the electric batteries do become viable. What happened there? What changed?
TOM STANDAGE
Well, the big change comes in the 1970s and weirdly it begins at Exxon, it begins at an oil company, and there's a researcher there who is, you know, most oil companies have divisions that are sort of looking beyond oil and they're thinking, “Well, we can't go on doing this forever, so what are we gonna switch to?” And to some extent they're doing this to look good, for window dressing, right?
But what starts to happen in the 1970s is that researchers start to look at new battery chemistries based on lithium. If you remember the periodic table from your chemistry lesson at school, you've got all the metals, and you need a metal in a battery for various electrical reasons, and what's the lightest metal you could use? The lightest metal you could possibly use is lithium, and so people start to investigate lithium batteries, and the big problem with them is that lithium is an extremely reactive metal, and it catches fire very easily, particularly with the early battery designs, the way they worked you get this kind of runaway growth, sort of spiky crystals inside the battery that would pierce the battery and then it would leak and then it would catch fire.
I actually spoke to the researcher who was doing all of this at Exxon in the 1970s, and he said, “Yeah, the big problem is that you really can't have fires if you work for an oil company, they're particularly worried about that, so they shut that project down.” But the seed had been planted and other researchers then started working on lithium batteries in the seventies and the eighties, and what happened in the late 1980s is that Sony figured out how to make a lithium battery to power a camcorder. Camcorders used to be these big, chunky things and they would have big, chunky batteries, and the way to make camcorders much smaller and lighter was to use this very expensive, very innovative new battery technology.
That really got the market for lithium batteries going, and then they started to be used in laptops. There were a few incidents, you know, you may remember in the 1990s where people's laptop batteries caught fire because again, these lithium batteries do have these problems with thermal runaway and, and if they're damaged in any way, they tend to misbehave. And that really was what got the market going, the use of portable electronic devices, first laptops, and then later smartphones meant that the demand for lithium batteries went up and up, and as it goes up, then more people make them and figure out how to make them more cheaply.
And that paved the way for the use of lithium batteries in electric cars.
TARA JEAN STEVENS
And that's the technology that is powering this current moment of driving electric. Camcorders. Who knew?
Tom Standage is the author of A Brief History of Motion.
As Tom demonstrated, the batteries that power electric vehicles have come a VERY long way. And battery technology is only getting better-- and safer. As Cara Clairman pointed out, it's unlikely that a battery will even have to be replaced within the lifetime of a car -- and if it does, there are good options for recycling in place.
Although it might require a bit of a shift in how you think about your car, both the studies AND the stories show that once a person adopts an EV as a primary vehicle, their concerns about battery life kind of disappear.
That’s all stuff I’ll be taking back to the dinner table the next time my kids ask me “when are we getting an EV? When are we getting an EV Mom???” I’m getting to it! I’m educating myself!
I'm Tara Jean Stevens and you've been listening to Road to Electric - an original podcast powered by Mazda.
Next time on the show -- are they worth it? We dive into a cost/benefit analysis of electric vehicles.
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DISCLAIMER
The thoughts, opinions, and views expressed in this podcast are solely that of the guests and do not represent the thoughts, opinions, and views of Mazda Canada. The material and information presented in this podcast is for general information purposes only.