Why do people vilify electric cars?

Mockery of the electric car is a rising trend in some parts of the world. Plenty of memes get posted on social media sites talking about dirty secrets of electric vehicles or moaning that they don’t want to give up their petrol cars. Of course, even in the face of sharp rises in petrol prices and a rising availability of electric vehicles, this sentiment remains.?

Of course, electric vehicles have also had an insidious history that people haven’t really properly noticed. Most electric vehicles in the early 60’s and 70’s were commercial vehicles. British dairies had changed from horse-drawn carts to the electric milk float. These were low-powered, slow-moving icons of that era that comprised nearly all the electric vehicles in the UK?

In the world of golf, Lyman Beecher invented in 1935 the first electric cart to help him navigate a course. This developed and evolved mainly to help elderly golfers, even earning the moniker of the ‘Arthritis Express’ but given its quietness and lack of emissions became the preferred power source for golfers. No golfer is every happy at any sound distracting them from making that hole in one. . The Citicar formed in America in response to rising petrol prices. The same size and speed as an electric golf cart, this sadly set the stereotype for years to come of being small and slow.

This is one of the fundamentally insecure reasons why the more extremist of the petrolhead set dislike electric vehicles. These automobile klansmen don’t like the idea of their fuel-guzzling vehicles going away to be replaced by something smaller, slower, and less impressive. There’s a certain joy to be had in hearing and feeling the rumble of a powerful engine as you get behind the wheel. Perhaps the best auto experience I ever had was when I first got behind the wheel of a Bentley GTS and fired it up. There’s so much power associated with that sound and feel.?

By comparison, the dual motor electric vehicles actually have more power in comparison to petrol engines, but you don’t get the sound and feel. These extra senses do have a powerful psychological feel and auto manufacturers have built on this symbolism before. Some models of the BMW M5 add noise to the car's audio system, for instance, and the 2015 Ford Mustang also added a system for sending the car's engine noise through its speakers.

Now, electric vehicles can, and do, add fake sounds of car engines. The Model S Plaid, which is the quickest Tesla in the world at present emits the sound of the V8 through its external speakers and it sounds very much real. While it sounds as relevant as the addition of a fake horsehead on the 1899 Horsey Horseless, the external speakers have a life-saving purpose - emitting noise means visually impaired people will know that the car is there.

Of course, some witty fellows often repeat the clever assertion that today’s electric vehicles are actually being charged by many fossil-fuel-burning power plants. Yes, this is very true. And yet the US Environmental Protection Agency states that petrol cars emit 4.6 tons of carbon emissions a year. An electric vehicle doesn’t produce any emissions. Now, if we calculate the EPA’s percentages for one megawatt-hour of emissions by a gas turbine plant, that’s 898 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. Given that, on average, an electric vehicle uses around 30 kWh to travel 100 miles, and an approximate 400-mile capacity on an electric car, this means 10.7 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions for a full recharge. Let’s say we drive that car 30,000 kilometres. That means the recharges from a gas turbine would be 3,232 pounds – effectively just over 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. So, the electric vehicle wins, and even then, the green wave of energy is rising, albeit slowly.?

Even in the oil-rich middle east, utilities are diversifying into clean energy. By way of example, in the United Arab Emirates, the second largest economy in the Arabian Gulf, Dubai’s electricity supplier now generates over 11% of its power from clean energy, having started the process of diversification back in 2011.

Today, electric vehicles are no longer these small, slow, and unimaginative vehicles that we’ve seen before. Dual Motor vehicles can outperform petrol-powered performance cars for acceleration, speed, and handling. And they’re now coming down in cost as well. One strong price-worthy model is China’s MG ZS EV. It’s set to hit showrooms in Dubai in January at about just under 37,000 US dollars. China is the centre of excellence for electric auto manufacturing these days, with other European brands such as Volvo producing their next generation Polestar there too.?

Ultimately, the naysaying about electric cars this time around no longer has teeth. Electric cars can be affordable, they can also be enjoyable and useful to drive too. Just as people said of the car itself that it would never replace the horse, the electric car is only going away if it’s pulling ahead of you on the highway.