Yahoo Autos The U.S. Is Making the Same Mistakes With EVs That It Made With Gas-Powered Cars
The auto industry is in the middle of a big shift to EVs, so now would be a good time for it to hunch down, hands on knees, and catch its breath. Or if the auto industry won’t, then we, the buyers, should because U.S. automakers may be rushing us down the wrong way with bigger, faster but not better EVs.
That’s what the Atlantic claims in a report outlining the downsides of the EV transition in America, which I encourage you to go read since it lays out how automakers are repeating the same cycle of excess that got us into trouble in the first place.
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The gist of it is that electric cars are better for the environment but they come with their own unique problems that we’re not trying to fix, including size and weight, speed and safety, and the relative waste of resources (battery metals) that comes with big fast EVs.
Some of those problems are hand-me-downs from combustion cars, which went from once-popular sedans to large trucks and SUVs, as the Atlantic explains:
But automakers’ focus on large, battery-powered SUVs and trucks reinforces a destructive American desire to drive something bigger, faster, and heavier than everyone else.
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The forthcoming electric Chevrolet Silverado EV, for example, will weigh about 8,000 pounds, 3,000 more than the current gas-powered version. And there will be a lot of these behemoths: A recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy shows that carmakers are rapidly shifting their EV lineups away from sedans and toward SUVs and trucks, just as they did earlier with gas-powered cars.
The timeline of EV production in the U.S. has mostly been overlooked as the microcosm that it is: electric cars have gone through the same progression that ICE-powered cars went through. From small to big, slow to fast. Think of the GM EV1... then the GMC Hummer EV. How did that harmless little wedge from the 1990s beget the monstrous (yet massively popular) Hummer EV?
