Background & Introduction
Having Tesla as an awesome example of developing electrical vehicles and earning a great success during the past decade, a lot of technical companies including Google and Amazon started to pay attention to perform research on electrical cars. Admittedly, the industry of electrical vehicles have made a lot of achievements, and the general public are optimized about the transportation from cars equipped with internal combustion engines to vehicles powered by electric.
(Tesla hyber car: Roadster. Retrieved from: https://www.technologicvehicles.com/media/uploads/default/0001/02/5a115f3635ca4-tesla-2020-roadster-2-jpg.)
However, at the same time, people who hate electric cars and refuse to recognize this new industrial revolution do exist, and the progress of electrical vehicles may have been delayed for many years resulted by those haters. This blog post will introduce who is standing on the way of development of electrical vehicles and why there are reacting to the raising of electric vehicles in an extreme manner.
Traditional car production companies and industries
The battery between traditional car and electrical car industries never stopped. Many media laughed at Tesla as loud as they could on its idea of factoring electrical vehicles which can be used by the general public in 2018. While nowadays, the same media are describing electrical vehicles as the “key to the future”, and the trend of electrical vehicles as “it’s coming, and you can’t stop it”.
(Global Electric Vehicle Forecast. Source from: J.P. Morgan estimates. Retrieved from: https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/research/electric-vehicles.)
Chart above clear shows how much the electric vehicle’s industry will affect the whole automotive industry. Electrical vehicles are becoming a more and more promising industry because the general public think it is more environmental friendly to the Earth. Also, people prefer electrical vehicles because charging is easier than ever. Many gas stations have one or two power bars for charging, and the cost of using an electrical vehicle, including money paid for power and maintenance, is cheaper than cars equipped with internal combustion engines. Many press predicted that electrical vehicle will become a trend in the next decade, and one reason for it is there are going to be a large number of models published in the near future.
(Predicted umber of models of electrical, hybrid vehicles in 2025. Source from: Wards Intelligence and LMC Automotive. Credit: Thomas Wilburn/NPR.)
Other than traditional car industry, creation of electrical cars is also impacting other industries, for example, fuel providing merchants, battery makers, etc. In the article published by Putrus and his co-workers, they found that the high demands for electrical cars are impacting the production of battery making companies and fuel providing industries. Their article pointed that with the development of electric vehicles, they became more and more mature and thus got popular among customers. At the same time, traditional engine makers are forced to research on engines that will be more environmentally friendly, companies failed to achieve or apply this technique to their engines are facing critiques from the general public and governments. Gas industries are also challenged by the electrical vehicle’s industry, providing gas to vehicles is one of the largest business of those companies. Thus the future of those gas companies are uncertain even though their sale values are not experiencing huge decreases. Also, although there are increasingly more companies producing electric vehicles, the market for battery powered and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles is currently limited. And if a battery making company targeted on providing batteries to electrical companies cannot follow the step of development of electrical cars, that company might fail as well. As a conclusion, the development of electrical cars are impacting the traditional car industry, the furl providing merchants, and the battery maker at the same time, which led those companies complained a lot about electrical vehicles.
Car dealers
The word car dealerships is defined as a business that sells new or used cars at the retail level. It is interesting to read reports about how car dealers hate electrical cars. According to an article talked about the relationship between electrical cars and dealers by Field, the author pointed out that the car dealers were having an intense relationship with Tesla and other electrical car companies. As Field claimed in his article, it is well known in the dealership industry that most dealers were not making their life by selling electric vehicles. Furthermore, due to one of the key features of electric cars, that those vehicles do not require too much maintenance, vehicle dealers could not get benefits by providing post-sale manufacture to electric cars owners. Regarding to the fact that those car dealerships made the majority of their profit off of post-sales maintenance, it is easy to understand why car dealers do not like electrical vehicles. Regarding to car dealers who are selling Tesla cars, they might earned a large sum of money by selling Tesla to their customers, while it is reasonably to make the guess that most of them do not like that company a lot right now. In February this year, Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, claimed that his company was going to reduce headcount in sales, and close most of its stores. Five months passed, Elon Musk kept his words, many stores were closed, and people can only order Tesla vehicles by phone or online. Dealers used to sell those vehicles had to find a new job after this policy was published.
Some groups of environmentalists
What? Electrical vehicles are usually assumed to be cleaner and provide less pollution than gas powered cars by the general public, even haters listed above might also agree with this opinion. As a result, it is shocking to witness that some groups of environmentalists are not happy with the development of electrical car. According to the article published by Fitzner, after analysising on a recent study focused on how environmentally friendly the electrical car industry is, he found out that electrical vehicles nowadays are truly more environmentally friendly than the traditional internal combustion engines. Nevertheless, some environmentalists are still not satisfied with the pollution of them. As Fitzner stated in his article, production of electric vehicles increased the demand of lithium, which is usually being used as the main source of batteries. Mining of that element increased rapidly from around 64,000 tons in 2012 to around 500,000 tons annually in 2018. Fitzner pointed out that electric cars would never be the final answer for environmentally friendly vehicles; furthermore, development of this new creature required a lot of natural resources, which made many environmentalists complained a lot about it. Moreover, research emphasized on life cycle air quality conducted by Christopher Tessum and his two colleagues at the University of Minnesota renewed that pollution produced by battery-powered cars recharged with electricity generated by coal-fired power stations were likely to be more than three times life-threatening compared with most conventional petrol-driven vehicles on the market. Which led to the discussion that electric cars were still far away from the definition of “clean engine” by a lot of environmentalists.
Works cited
Domonoske, C. (February 16, 2019). As More Electric Cars Arrive, What’s The Future For Gas-Powered Engines? Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/16/694303169/as-more-electric-cars-arrive-whats-the-future-for-gas-powered-engines.
Putrus, G. A., Suwanapingkarl, P., Johnston, D., Bentley, E. C., & Narayana, M. (2009, September). Impact of electric vehicles on power distribution networks. In 2009 IEEE Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference (pp. 827-831). IEEE.
Field, K. (2018, July). The Problem With Dealerships & Electric Cars. Retrieved from: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/10/the-problem-with-dealerships-electric-cars/
Fitzner, Z. (2019 May) How environmentally friendly is the electric car industry? Retrieved from: https://www.earth.com/news/electric-car-industry-environment/
Christopher W. Tessum, Jason D. Hill, and Julian D. Marshall. Life cycle air quality impacts of conventional and alternative light-duty transportation in the United States. PNAS December 30, 2014 111 (52) 18490-18495; first published December 15, 2014.
Kolodny, L. Feb 28, 2019. Tesla is closing stores, shifting all sales online. Retrieved from: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/tesla-shifts-sales-to-online-only.html