[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Electric vehicles have nearly 80% more problems and are generally less reliable than cars propelled by conventional internal combustion engines, according to a new report from Consumer Reports.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) have an even worse scorecard, with an average of almost 150% more problems, the consumer group found. By contrast, ordinary hybrid cars are a "bright spot," with about a quarter fewer problems than gas-powered cars, the analysis found.
Consumer Reports' latest vehicle reliability report comes as car buyers can take advantage of a federal tax credit worth up to $7,500 for purchasing an EV and as automakers roll out a host of new models. But consumers have been slower to adapt to EVs than expected, partly because they are often more expensive to maintain than traditional vehicles and require extra equipment, such as a home electric charging port.
"This story is really one of growing pains," said Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. "It's a story of just working out the bugs and the kinks of new technology."
The findings are based on a survey of Consumer Reports' members about problems they've had with their vehicles in the prior year. The current report included data on more than 330,000 vehicles made between 2000 to 2023, with a few reports about new 2024 models.
EV owners most frequently reported troubles with battery and charging systems, as well as flaws in how the vehicles' body panels and interior parts fit together. Consumer Reports noted that EV manufacturers are still learning to make completely new power systems, and it suggested that as they do the overall reliability of electric vehicles should improve.
Still, Consumer Reports noted that lingering concerns about reliability will likely add to the issues that give many buyers pause when considering a switch to the technology, joining concerns about higher costs, a dearth of charging stations and long charging times.
PHEVs may have more problems than conventional cars and electric vehicles because they combine internal-combustion engines with an electric drive, which creates additional complexity, Consumer Reports said. That means there's more than can go wrong.
Consumer Reports rates vehicles on 20 problem areas, ranging from squeaky brakes to EV charging problems, and PHEVs can experience every one of them, it noted.
Even so, the study found that there are a few PHEVs that outperform, with Consumer Reports finding that the Toyota RAV4 Prime and Kia Sportage score above average on reliability. Three PHEVs — the BMW X5, Hyundai Tucson and Ford Escape — earn average reliability scores, it added.
The most reliable segment of the market was compact cars, followed by sportscars, small pickups, midsize and large cars, luxury midsize and large cars. The top-ranked model for reliability is Toyota's 4Runner, the publication said.
Here are the top 10 automakers, ranked by reliability:
The five lowest-ranking brands were Jeep, Volkswagen, Rivian, Mercedes-Benz and Chrysler.
—With reporting by the Associated Press.
DETROIT (AP) — Crews have installed what’s billed as the nation’s first wireless-charging public roadway for electric vehicles beneath a street just west of downtown Detroit.
Copper inductive charging coils allow vehicles equipped with receivers to charge up their batteries while driving, idling or parking above the coils.
The quarter-mile segment of 14th Street will be used to test and perfect the technology ahead of making it available to the public within a few years, according to the Michigan Department of Transportation.
Demonstrations were held Wednesday at Michigan Central innovation district, a hub for advancing technologies and programs that address barriers to mobility. The district also is where Ford Motor Co. is restoring the old Michigan Central train station to develop self-driving vehicles.
The technology belongs to Electreon, an Israel-based developer of wireless charging solutions for electric vehicles. The company has contracts for similar roadways in Israel, Sweden, Italy and Germany. The pilot initiative in Michigan was announced in 2021 by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“Alongside Michigan’s automotive expertise, we’ll demonstrate how wireless charging unlocks widespread EV adoption, addressing limited range, grid limitations, and battery size and costs,” said Stefan Tongur, Electreon vice president of business development. “This project paves the way for a zero-emission mobility future, where EVs are the norm, not the exception.”
When a vehicle with a receiver nears the charging segments, the coils beneath the road transfer electricity through a magnetic field, charging the vehicle’s battery. The coils only activate when a vehicle with a receiver passes over them.
Tongur told reporters the roadway is safe for pedestrians, motorists and animals.
The state Department of Transportation and Electreon made a five-year commitment to develop the electric road system. The DOT is expected to seek bids to rebuild part of busy Michigan Avenue, where inductive charging will also be installed.
As electric vehicles increase in popularity in the United States, the Biden administration has made its plan for half a million EV charging stations a signature piece of its infrastructure goals.
The wireless-charging roadway helps puts Michigan and Detroit at the forefront of electric vehicle technology, officials said.
“In Michigan, we want to stay ahead of the curve. We want to lead the curve,” Michigan DOT Director Bradley C. Wieferich said.
No decisions have been made on revenue models in Michigan, Tongur said.
“The technology is smart,” he said. “The technology knows who you are — you’re a verified and authentic user — you can get a charge.”
Some firms argue that a law aimed at popularizing electric vehicles risks turning the United States into an assembly shop for Chinese-made technology.
The Biden administration has been trying to jump-start the domestic supply chain for electric vehicles so cleaner cars can be made in the United States. But the experience of one Texas company, whose plans to help make an all-American electric vehicle were upended by China, highlights the stakes involved as the administration finalizes rules governing the industry.
Huntsman Corporation started construction two years ago on a $50 million plant in Texas to make ethylene carbonate, a chemical that is used in electric vehicle batteries. It would have been the only site in North America making the product, with the goal of feeding battery factories that would crop up to serve the electric vehicle market.
But as new facilities in China came online and flooded the market, the price of the chemical plummeted to $700 a ton from $4,000. After pumping $30 million into the project, the company halted work on it this year. “If we were to start the project up today, we would be hemorrhaging cash,” said Peter R. Huntsman, the company’s chief executive. “I’d essentially be paying people to take the product.”
The Biden administration is now finalizing rules that will help determine whether companies like Huntsman will find it profitable enough to participate in America’s electric vehicle industry. The rules, which are expected to be proposed this week, will dictate the extent to which foreign companies, particularly in China, can supply parts and products for American-made vehicles that are set to receive billions of dollars in subsidies.
The administration is offering up to $7,500 in tax credits to Americans who buy electric vehicles, in an effort to supercharge the industry and reduce the country’s carbon emissions. The rules will determine whether electric vehicle makers seeking to benefit from that program will have the flexibility to get cheap components from China, or whether they will be required instead to buy more expensive products from U.S.-based firms like Huntsman.
The lawmakers who wrote the climate bill, including Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat, included language that bars an electric car from qualifying for the tax breaks if the critical minerals or other components used in its battery were made by “a foreign entity of concern.” Lawmakers defined that as any firm that is owned by, controlled by or subject to the jurisdiction of North Korea, China, Russia or Iran.
But they left it up to the Biden administration to fill in the details, including important questions like what constitutes a Chinese company, and what product qualifies as a “battery component.”
The administration faces a tricky calculation with the new rules. If it allows more companies to qualify for the benefits, Americans will have a wider choice of low-cost electric vehicles to choose from. That would put more clean cars on the road and help to mitigate climate change. It could also help to shore up the finances of U.S. automakers that are losing heavily on electric vehicle production.
But such a path could undercut the administration’s other priority — to build more secure supply chains for electric vehicles. The government has been aiming to use the climate law to boost manufacturing of electric vehicles and their parts in the United States and in allied countries, and reduce dependency on China, which dominates global markets for electric vehicles and their batteries.
The effort to balance these concerns has touched off a fight between automakers and parts manufacturers, U.S. miners and labor unions.
Automakers have been awaiting the guidelines with trepidation.
Carmakers like General Motors and Hyundai, spurred by the new climate law, are racing to build factories in the United States to produce batteries and process materials like lithium. But they are still years away from being able to produce an electric vehicle without materials and components from China, auto industry representatives say.
China dominates production of materials, like graphite and processed lithium, that are essential to the flow of electricity within a battery, and to the cathodes and anodes, the basic building blocks of a battery. Through both formidable government subsidies and enormous economies of scale, Chinese firms now sell some of the world’s most advanced electric vehicles and the components used to make them at much lower prices than competitors in other countries.
Automakers are also under intense pressure to keep costs down by buying from the cheapest suppliers. Ford Motor lost $1.3 billion on electric vehicles in the third quarter, the company said last month, equaling a loss of $36,000 on every vehicle it sold.
In June, Tesla, which sources key parts from China, submitted comments to the government arguing that the coming restrictions on foreign entities should be less restrictive. The limits on foreign purchases should be confined to major battery parts, like the cathode and anode, not the various minerals or other parts used to make them, Tesla proposed.
In the worst case, said Albert Gore III, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, “you can have vehicles made in the U.S., with the vast majority of parts coming from the U.S., that could be disqualified from the tax credit because a single part comes from China.” Mr. Gore, whose organization counts Tesla as well as battery makers as members, said he expected the administration to strike a balance.
In contrast, miners and other makers of battery materials and components say that allowing China to supply cheap parts could open the United States to a flood of foreign products. That would ensure that the United States was merely an assembly point for Chinese-made technology and products, and leave the U.S. economy highly vulnerable, they say.
So far, the climate law appears to have done more to stimulate investment in factories to make electric vehicles and their batteries than in the mines and facilities that produce the minerals, chemicals and smaller components that go into the battery itself.
In fact, the only cobalt mine planned in the United States, owned by Jervois in Idaho, temporarily closed this year. The company blamed cratering prices, caused by a new rush of material produced by China. Jervois restarted some exploratory drilling this fall, thanks to new funding from the Defense Department.
Until the final rules are issued, some companies have halted plans for new U.S. investment, conscious that their business calculations could change significantly in the coming months.
“You’re seeing a bit of a holding pattern until the final guidance is released by the administration,” said Abigail Seadler Wulf, the vice president and director of critical minerals strategy at Securing America’s Future Energy, a nonprofit organization.
Mr. Huntsman said that unless the government restricted the use of Chinese materials, there was no point in investing further in the company’s Texas project. He said the Chinese government was heavily subsidizing the production of ethylene carbonate, allowing Chinese firms that account for 90 percent of the global production of the chemical to sell it so cheaply.
“The question, really, is how does the United States want to respond to this?” he asked.
Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
Electric vehicle sales have risen significantly over the years. That trend is expected to continue with the market on track to surpass 1 million sales for the first time ever this year. Those numbers, however, are not meeting the expectations of manufacturers, car dealers and President Biden.
"Major auto companies are preparing for 50% of future sales to be electric vehicles by 2030, 100% by 2035," Biden said during remarks on rising prices in June 2022.
Now several companies are readjusting their targets and slowing production, even with the rise in vehicles on the road.
"It has a lot to do with electric vehicles, adoption and the segments of the adoption," said Kevin Book, managing director of Clearview Energy Partners.
MORE THAN 3,000 AUTO DEALERS SIGN LETTER OPPOSING BIDEN'S ELECTRIC VEHICLE MANDATE
A BMW electric vehicle sits parked at a Volta EV charging station July 28, 2023, in California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
"The first buyers, the early adopters, the one-percenters are only so much of the market. And then there are also the big users, the drivers for whom the sticker price matters less than the fuel price, folks like Uber drivers. For the rest of us, it's asking an awful lot of us to pay more so that we can drive shorter distances and have longer fueling times."
Car dealers are also warning Biden's goal may be too ambitious. More than 3,000 dealerships signed a letter calling on the White House to slow proposed regulations that mandate battery electric vehicle production and distribution.
"While the goals of the regulations are admirable, they require consumer acceptance to become a reality," the letter said. "With each passing day, it becomes more apparent that this attempted electric vehicle mandate is unrealistic based on current and forecasted customer demand. Already, electric vehicles are stacking up on our lots, which is our best indicator of customer demand in the marketplace."
Electric vehicles made up just under 1% of all vehicle registrations in 2022. When looking at registrations over the past five years, the number of EVs on the road has increased significantly. Since 2017, registrations in the U.S. have grown by nearly 547%.
"It's really important to talk about this today because electric vehicles are for certain customers who don't travel long distances, use it more (in a) commuting atmosphere, that are wealthier," Ford CEO Jim Farley said on "Special Report" in September.
"The F-150 Lightning is the bestselling electric pickup in the U.S. And for those customers, it works great, but it's not for everyone. We're going to offer customers a choice."
Ford has since said it is slowing production of its F-150 Lightning pickup. It’s also pausing construction at a Kentucky battery factory and postponing $12 billion in planned spending on EV production.
"There's a lot of oversupply right now, so consumers have more options," Cox Automotive Industry Insights director Stephanie Valdez Streaty said. "A year ago from today, there's 50 more models that consumers can buy."
Hybrid cars are also adding to the competition to shift away from gas. Registrations have increased over the years and now make up 2% of the vehicle market share.
NEW REPORT UNMASKS TRUE COSTS OF ELECTRIC VEHICLE MANDATES: 'REMAIN MORE EXPENSIVE'
"It seems very likely that the United States is going to electrify its transportation substantially, but maybe not as soon as hoped," Book said. "There's a lot more of us who care about our turn signals than our virtue signals.
General Motors is delaying the release of its Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra Electric pickups by one year. Tesla is also holding off on production at its planned factory in Mexico.
Ford Lightning F-150 pickups at a media event at Vino Farms in Healdsburg, Calif., May 20, 2022. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"Enthusiasm has stalled," the coalition of car dealers wrote. "Today, the supply of unsold BEVs (battery electric vehicles) is surging, as they are not selling nearly as fast as they are arriving at our dealerships — even with deep price cuts, manufacturer incentives, and generous government incentives."
The Inflation Reduction Act created a $7,500 clean vehicle tax credit for owners of new electric vehicles. The IRS states on its website that the vehicle must be purchased after April 18, 2023, and must meet critical mineral and battery components to qualify for the credit.
"One big thing which I think we need to continue to do is educate," Valdez Streaty said. "Consumers are confused about the Inflation Reduction Act. What does it mean? What's eligible?"
Some lawmakers have criticized the Biden administration for pushing auto dealers and manufacturers to transition to electric too quickly and without enough incentives to get consumers to bite.
"They were so aggressive on this. They're way, way out over their skis," Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said. "You can't even bribe the public with $7,500. They're not there yet. It's a good product. They'll get there eventually. But I'm not getting rid of my gasoline car anytime soon, I can assure you."
A Tesla Model S electric car stops for recharging April 9, 2023, at a service station in Greenwich, Conn. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
The credit often doesn’t make up for the price difference between EVs and gas-powered cars. U.S. News and World Report lists Chevy’s Bolt EUV as the most affordable new electric car. Its price tag of $27,800 is still nearly $12,000 more than the most affordable new gas car, the Nissan Versa.
"The price premium still exists in spite of that tax credit," Book said. "So, when you have a higher price for mobility, what you're going to see are really two things — a slower uptake by price sensitive drivers, which I think we're seeing, and also longer retention of existing cars, which means old gas guzzlers staying on the road longer and potentially polluting more."
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
The federal government also offers a credit of up to $4,000 for used electric cars. There are also some state and local incentives available.
"I think incentives are key, but I also think that the industry will need to continue to build and create models that are in that under $30,000," Valdez Streaty said.
AAA estimates fuel and maintenance is cheaper for electric vehicle owners. About 15,000 miles worth of electricity costs an average of $546 while gasoline costs around 130% more, over $1,200. Annual maintenance for an EV is estimated to be about $300 less than a gas-powered car.
"Fortunately, the battery prices are going down, and that's a large cost of a vehicle. So, I think that's good news," Valdez Streaty said. "We'll continue to see that over the next few months and into next year."
After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a trickle of electric current to pass through. The drips of that current might, Chen hoped, help settle a persistent mystery about how charge moves through a bewildering class of materials known as strange metals.
Chen, then a graduate student, and his collaborators at Rice University measured the current flowing through their atoms-thin strand of metal. And they found that it flowed smoothly and evenly. So evenly, in fact, that it defied physicists’ standard conception of electricity in metals.
Canonically, electric current results from the collective movement of electrons, each carrying one indivisible chunk of electric charge. But the dead steadiness of Chen’s current implied that it wasn’t made of units at all. It was like finding a liquid that somehow lacked individually recognizable molecules.
While that might sound outlandish, it’s exactly what some physicists expected from the metal the group tested, which along with its unusual kin has beguiled and bewildered physicists since the 1980s. “It’s a very beautiful piece of work,” said Subir Sachdev, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University who specializes in strange metals.
The observation, reported last week in the journal Science, is one of the most straightforward indications yet that whatever carries current through these unusual metals doesn’t look anything like electrons. The new experiment strengthens suspicions that a new quantum phenomenon is arising within strange metals. It also provides new grist for theoretical physicists attempting to understand what it might be.
“Strange metals, no one has any earthly idea where they’re coming from,” said Peter Abbamonte, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “It used to be considered an inconvenience, but now we realize it’s really a different phase of matter living in these things.”
The first challenge to the conventional understanding of metals came in 1986, when Georg Bednorz and Karl Alex Müller rocked the physics world with their discovery of high-temperature superconductors — materials that perfectly carry an electric current even at relatively warm temperatures. Familiar metals like tin and mercury become superconductors only when chilled to within a few degrees of absolute zero. Bednorz and Müller measured the electrical resistance in a copper-based (“cuprate”) material and saw that it vanished at a relatively balmy 35 kelvins. (For their breakthrough discovery, Bednorz and Müller pocketed a Nobel Prize just a year later.)
Physicists soon realized that high-temperature superconductivity was only the beginning of the mysterious behavior of the cuprates.
The cuprates got really weird when they stopped superconducting and started resisting. As all metals warm, resistance increases. Warmer temperatures mean atoms and electrons jiggle more, creating more resistance-inducing collisions as electrons shuttle current through a material. In normal metals, such as nickel, resistance rises quadratically at low temperatures — slowly at first and then faster and faster. But in the cuprates, it rose linearly: Each degree of warming brought the same increase in resistance — a bizarre pattern that continued over hundreds of degrees and, in terms of strangeness, overshadowed the material’s superconducting ability. The cuprates were the strangest metals researchers had ever seen.
“Superconductivity is a mouse,” said Andrey Chubukov, a theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesota. “The elephant … is this strange metal behavior.”
The linear rise in resistance threatened a celebrated explanation of how electric charge moves through metals. Proposed in 1956, Lev Landau’s “Fermi liquid” theory placed electrons at the center of it all. It built upon earlier theories that, for simplicity, assumed that electrons carry electric current, and that the electrons move through a metal like a gas; they flit freely between atoms without interacting with each other.
Landau added a way of handling the crucial but complicated fact that electrons interact. They are negatively charged, which means they constantly repel each other. Considering this interaction between the particles transformed the electron gas into something of an ocean — now, as one electron moved through the fluid of electrons, it disturbed the nearby electrons. Through a complicated series of interactions involving mutual repulsion, these now gently interacting electrons ended up traveling in crowds — in clumps known as quasiparticles.
The miracle of Fermi liquid theory was that each quasiparticle behaved almost exactly as if it were a single, fundamental electron. One major difference, though, was that these blobs moved more sluggishly or more nimbly (depending on the material) than a bare electron, effectively acting heavier or lighter. Now, just by adjusting the mass terms in their equations, physicists could continue to treat current as the movement of electrons, only with an asterisk specifying that each electron was really a quasiparticle clump.
A major triumph of Landau’s framework was that in normal metals, it nailed the complicated way in which resistance rises quadratically with temperature. Electron-like quasiparticles became the standard way of understanding metals. “It’s in every textbook,” Sachdev said.
But in the cuprates, Landau’s theory failed dramatically. Resistance rose in an immaculate line rather than the standard quadratic curve. Physicists have long interpreted this line as a sign that cuprates are home to a new physical phenomenon.
“You pretty much have to believe that nature is either giving you a clue or nature is incredibly cruel,” said Gregory Boebinger, a physicist at Florida State University who has spent much of his career studying the cuprates’ linear response. “To put up such a terribly simple and beguiling signature and to have it not be physically important would just be too much to bear.”
And the cuprates were just the beginning. Researchers have since discovered a host of disparate materials with the same alluring linear resistance, including organic “Bechgaard salts” and misaligned sheets of graphene. As these “strange metals” proliferated, scientists wondered why Landau’s Fermi fluid theory seemed to break down in all these different materials. Some came to suspect that it was because there were no quasiparticles at all; the electrons were somehow organizing themselves in a strange new way that obscured any individuality, much as the discrete nature of grapes gets lost in a bottle of wine.
“It’s a phase of matter where an electron really has no identity,” Abbamonte said. “Nevertheless, [a strange metal] is a metal; it somehow carries current.”
But one does not simply abolish electrons. To some scientists, a potentially continuous electric current — one that isn’t divvied up into electrons — is too radical. And some strange metal experiments continue to match certain predictions of Landau’s theory. The persisting controversy prompted Chen’s thesis adviser, Douglas Natelson of Rice University, along with his colleague Qimiao Si, to consider how they might more directly scrutinize the anatomy of the charge moving through a strange metal.
“What could I measure that would actually tell me what’s going on?” Natelson wondered.
The team’s goal was to dissect the current in a strange metal. Did it come in electron-size chunks of charge? Did it come in chunks at all? To find out, they took inspiration from a classic way of measuring fluctuations in a flow — the “shot noise” — a phenomenon that can be understood if we think of the ways that rain might fall during a rainstorm.
Imagine you’re sitting in your car, and you know from a trustworthy weather forecast that 5 millimeters of rain will fall over the next hour. Those 5 millimeters are like the total electrical current. If that rain is parceled into a handful of giant drops, the variation in when those drops hit your roof will be high; sometimes drops will splatter back to back, and at other times they will be spaced out. In this case, the shot noise is high. But if the same 5 millimeters of rain is spread into a constant mist of tiny droplets, the variation in arrival time — and therefore the shot noise — will be low. The mist will smoothly deliver almost the same amount of water from moment to moment. In this way, shot noise reveals the size of the drops.
“Just measuring the rate at which water shows up doesn’t tell you the whole picture,” Natelson said. “Measuring the fluctuations [in that rate] tells you a lot more.”
Similarly, listening to the crackle in electric current can tell you about the chunks of charge that make it up. Those chunks are normally Landau’s electron-like quasiparticles. Indeed, recording the shot noise in a normal metal is a common way of measuring the fundamental charge of the electron — 1.6 × 10−19 coulombs.
To get to the heart of a strange metal’s current, the team wanted to measure shot noise. But electronic shot noise can be obscured if electrons are pushed around by ripples in a metal’s atomic lattice. To avoid that fuzz, researchers send current through wires so short that the ripples don’t have time to influence the electrons. These wires need to be nanoscopic in scale.
The group chose to work with a particular strange metal made of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon because Natelson and Si’s longtime collaborator, Silke Bühler-Paschen of the Vienna University of Technology, had worked out how to grow the material in films just dozens of nanometers thick. That took care of one spatial dimension.
It then fell to Chen to work out how to take those films and carve out a wire measuring mere nanometers in length and width.
Over the course of about a year, Chen tested different ways of whittling down the metal by effectively sandblasting it with atoms. But in trial after trial, he found that the resulting nanowires suffered atomic-scale damage that destroyed the strange metal’s characteristic linear resistance. After dozens of attempts, he landed on a process that worked: He plated the metal with chromium, used a stream of argon gas to blast away all but a thin line of the chromium-protected strange metal, then stripped off the chromium with a bath of hydrochloric acid.
In the end, Chen, who successfully earned his doctorate in the spring and has since gone to work in finance, crafted a handful of nearly flawless nanowires. Each was roughly 600 nanometers long by 200 nanometers wide — about 50 times narrower than a red blood cell.
After cooling them to frigid, single-digit Kelvin temperatures, the researchers ran electric current through the strange metal nanowires. They also ran current through nanowires made of normal gold. The current in the gold wire crackled in the familiar way that currents made of charged quasiparticles do — like fat raindrops splattering on the car roof. But in the strange metal, current slipped quietly through the nanowire, an effect akin to the nearly silent hiss of mist. The most straightforward interpretation of the experiment is that charge in this strange metal does not flow in electron-size chunks.
“The experimental data provide strong evidence that quasiparticles are lost in the strange metal,” Si said.
Not all physicists, however, are fully convinced that the experiment kills Landau’s quasiparticles. “It’s a very bold claim,” said Brad Ramshaw, a physicist at Cornell University. “So you need bold data.”
One limitation of the experiment is that the group tested only one material. Just because shot noise is low in Chen’s ytterbium, rhodium and silicon blend, that doesn’t guarantee that it’s low in other strange metals. And a one-off anomaly can always be ascribed to some poorly understood detail about that material.
Ramshaw also pointed out that metals ring with all manner of strange vibrations that might distort shot noise in the current. Chen and his colleagues ruled out interference from the more common vibrations, but it’s possible that some exotic ripple evaded their notice.
Nevertheless, Ramshaw finds the experiment compelling. “It’s strongly motivating for people to try to do other things to see if they are also consistent with no electrons,” he said.
If the quasiparticle picture continues to crumble, what could replace it? How is current moving around strange metals if not in electron-like parcels of charge? It’s not an easy situation to describe, much less put into precise mathematical terms. “What’s the right vocabulary to use,” Natelson said, “if you’re not going to talk about quasiparticles?”
When pressed, physicists respond to this question with a quiver of metaphors for what appears when individual electrons disappear: They meld into an entangled quantum soup; they congeal into a jelly; they form a frothy mess of charge sloshing around. Philip Phillips of Urbana-Champaign likens a strange metal’s electrons to the rubber in a tire. When rubber comes out of a tree, its molecules line up in individual strings. But during the vulcanization process, these strings transform into a rugged net. A new substance emerges from the collection of individuals. “You’re getting something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts,” he said. “The electrons themselves have no integrity.”
To go beyond vague descriptions of emergence, physicists need a precise mathematical description — an as-yet-undiscovered Fermi fluid theory for strange metals. Sachdev helped develop one simplistic candidate, the SYK model, in the early 1990s. It got the linear resistance right, but it had nothing at all to do with real materials made of a real grid of atoms. For one thing, it had no space; all electrons sit at a single point where they randomly interact and become entangled with all other electrons.
Over the last couple of years, Sachdev, Aavishkar Patel of the Flatiron Institute, and their collaborators have been working on bringing space into the SYK model. They spread electron interactions across space by considering the effects of flaws in the atomic lattice — spots where atoms have gone missing or extra atoms have appeared. This dusting of atomic imperfections causes random variations in how pairs of electrons interact and become entangled. The resulting tapestry of entangled electrons has a linearly rising resistance — the hallmark of a strange metal. They recently used their framework to calculate shot noise as well. The numbers don’t quite match Chen’s observations, but they form the same qualitative pattern. “All the trends are right,” Sachdev said.
Other researchers emphasize that the theoretical situation remains fluid — it isn’t clear to some whether materials as distinct from one another as sheets of graphene and cuprate superconductors could all share a similar enough slate of flaws to produce the shared strange-metal properties in the way required by Sachdev and Patel’s theory. And alternative theories abound. Phillips, for example, suspects that strange metals call for an emergent form of electromagnetism that doesn’t rely on whole electrons. Si and Bühler-Paschen, meanwhile, have spent almost 20 years developing and exploring a theory for how quasiparticles dissolve when a system sits at a “quantum critical point,” where two different quantum mechanical states struggle for the upper hand. In the shot-noise experiment, they brought their nanowires to just such a critical point.
While physicists don’t yet agree on why electric charges appear to dissolve inside strange metals, or even if they truly do dissolve, they are determined to find out.
“If we really think there’s a whole category of metals out there that we don’t understand,” Natelson said, “it’s important to understand those.”
Editor’s note: The Flatiron Institute is funded by the Simons Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent magazine. Neither the Flatiron Institute nor the Simons Foundation has any influence over our coverage. More information available here.
Quanta is conducting a series of surveys to better serve our audience. Take our physics reader survey and you will be entered to win free Quanta merchandise.
With the holiday season underway in the US, how Americans heat their homes this winter – and how much that will cost them – is the latest focus of the gas v electricity climate culture war.
Earlier this year, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry were furious at suggestions from US regulators that gas stoves could be phased out over concerns about dangerous indoor air pollution, prompting president Biden to rule out such a ban.
Now a slew of publications, including the rightwing Daily Caller, have reported that US households using electricity for heat this winter will pay hundreds of dollars more than those who use gas.
The claim, based on new federal data, may spark concern among those considering ditching their fossil fuel-based heating systems. But it’s highly misleading because it fails to address the efficiency of new technologies and the widespread uses of electricity in US homes, according to the pro-electrification group Rewiring America.
Each year, the federal Energy Information Agency publishes a winter fuels outlook, forecasting how much households using different fuels will pay for heat from November through March. This year, it says heating-oil customers will face the steepest costs, at $1,856; followed by propane users, at $1,337; electricity users, at $1,063; and finally gas users, at just $605.
But that number doesn’t distinguish between older electric-resistance appliances, such as electric baseboard heaters and electric space heaters – which are much more expensive to run – and highly efficient electric heat pumps.
“Both run on electricity, but they’re fundamentally different machines,” said Wael Kanj, a research associate at Rewiring America. “It’s like averaging the top speed of a Power Wheels [toy car] and a Tesla.”
Electric heat pumps, which are installed outside buildings and can both heat and cool homes, push warm air out of the home in the summer and draw it inside during the winter. Because they transfer heat rather than generate it, heat pumps warm homes very efficiently, using half as much energy as electric resistance heaters, according to the Department of Energy, and two to three times less energy than oil- and gas-powered heaters, according to recent research.
That means heat pumps, championed as the best option for the planet, will probably cost much less to operate than the $1,063 that the Energy Information Agency estimated for electric heating in its winter outlook report.
Another issue, Rewiring America says, is that the agency includes all uses of each fuel in its cost estimates, meaning cost projections for electricity customers include energy used to power other electric appliances such as refrigerators and electronics.
Other uses of the same fuel are also included in the agency’s gas, oil and propane customers’ projections – gas projections, for instance, also include fuel usage for stoves. But electricity has the widest range of uses in US homes, said Kanj.
The federal report acknowledges the difference in fuel costs for heat pumps and electric resistance heaters.
“Total expenditures will vary from our forecasts in this outlook depending on the efficiency of the equipment, along with housing characteristics and geography,” it says. “For example, heat pumps are more efficient than electric resistance heating.”
It also said that its expenditure projections represent all uses for each heating fuel. “It’s not uncommon for users to miss this distinction in our forecast, so we re-emphasized this point on social media last week to address confusion,” Chris Higginbotham, the press officer for the agency, said in an email.
He added that the report also includes a graphic to underscore the issue.
“We take every step possible to help our data consumers understand the full message of our reports,” he said, inviting readers to contact the agency with questions.
Still, the report’s top-line figures don’t reflect these subtleties, and neither do many articles about the report. That’s a problem, Kanj said.
Addressing these issues would yield a very different picture. Using data from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which guides state administrators of federal energy aid programs, the group did just that.
It found that heat pump users can expect to pay just $639 for electricity from October to March – more than 60% less than homes with electric resistance heaters.
The Biden administration has championed heat pumps as part of its push to decarbonize US homes. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included millions of dollars to accelerate heat pump production. Last week, Biden invoked a cold war-era law to pour taxpayer funds into the domestic manufacturing of the appliances.
Despite these efforts, the Energy Information Agency has repeatedly underestimated the potential savings heat pumps can bring to American homes, Kanj said. “We really need to make sure the agency is caught up with the times,” he said.
It has been a bumpy few weeks for carmakers who sell electric vehicles, which are moving more slowly off the lot than they were earlier this year. What’s going on? It seems that American drivers may be more hesitant about E.V.s than automakers expected.
I am familiar with trepidation about electric vehicles; I hear it when I give talks around the country about how each of us can take small steps to slow and stop climate change, when I chat with my neighbors and when I go on a road trip in my own E.V. Some people worry about running out of battery power far from a charging station; others are dissuaded by the upfront costs. The electric Volkswagen ID. 4, for example, sells for about $40,000, while the similarly sized, gas-powered Volkswagen Tiguan sells for about $30,000 — though the E.V. has a lower total cost over the life of the car.
Those concerns will likely diminish in 2024 as money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into building more charging stations and making discounts for electric vehicles available right at the dealership. But I think something else may explain why so many Americans, including those who consider themselves climate conscious, have been hesitant to buy an electric vehicle. It’s a fear that such vehicles aren’t really all that much better for the environment than hybrid vehicles that have both gas and electric motors, and might even be worse, because of everything required to manufacture batteries and mine the materials that go into them. This worry is keeping some would-be buyers on the sidelines of the E.V. revolution.
If you look under the hood, so to speak, these concerns share two fundamental misunderstandings: They assume that the electric vehicle industry is locked in to today’s technology, and they discount the huge environmental drawbacks of gas-powered alternatives. Electric vehicles are like digital cameras in their early iterations. They are already better than the alternative for almost everyone, and improving at a breathtakingly fast clip. And while there are environmental concerns with them, they are dwarfed by the benefit they provide regarding climate change — the biggest environmental threat to human well-being in the 21st century.
Let’s start with the concern about emissions during battery construction, a topic that comes up in almost every talk I give on this subject. Electric vehicle batteries require a lot of materials and electricity to manufacture, and that process does produce more greenhouse gas emissions than not making a battery.
But let’s do the math as I’ve done for my family’s two E.V.s. We got the first to replace our 10-year-old, gas-powered Subaru, and after only two years of driving, the E.V. has created fewer emissions over its lifetime than if we had kept the old car. It will take our second E.V. only four years to create fewer emissions over its lifetime than the 2005 hybrid Prius it replaced. That’s counting the production of the batteries and the emissions from charging the E.V.s, and the emissions payback time will only continue to drop as more emissions-free wind and solar power comes onto the grid and battery technology improves.
My colleague Yue Qi, a battery researcher, recently told me, “Every prediction made 10 years ago about the change in price, efficiency and energy density of batteries was too pessimistic.” For instance, an assessment from the Argonne National Laboratory found that the lifetime emissions of E.V.s dropped 40 percent between 2015 and 2020. Even 2020 is ancient history when you look at another oft-cited concern — that we will run out of materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel to make batteries. Here again, it’s a mistake to think present constraints will continue into the future given that the price of lithium has fallen roughly 70 percent from its high in 2022.
Cobalt, another key component of batteries, has been in the public eye because of its scarcity and the horrific working conditions for miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those conditions need to be addressed, but it’s a mistake to view them in isolation. Oil extraction has its own horrific human and environmental costs, as does climate change. In my view, relying on gas cars over electric vehicles is the bigger contributor to environmental injustice.
Happily, an increasing number of E.V.s, including those of Tesla and the Chinese automaker BYD, no longer use cobalt in their batteries in most markets because the performance of cobalt-free alternatives is rapidly improving. Within a decade, many batteries may be built with sodium in place of lithium, a trend already accelerating in China, the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. Again, our present concerns will most likely fade in the near future.
After batteries, the second most common question that comes up is about plug-in hybrids, which are cars that can run for about 25 to 50 miles on a smallish battery and then switch to a gas engine for longer trips. You might think that that’s a pretty good compromise — most car trips in the United States are, after all, under 25 miles, and if everyone had a plug-in hybrid, a vast majority of trips would be solely battery powered.
But what matters for emissions is not trips but miles, and long trips are where we really pile on the miles. That means about half of all miles driven in plug-in hybrids would still be driven using gas on long trips. Thus, buying a hybrid, rather than an electric vehicle, perpetuates our dependence on gas production and distribution, slowing — rather than hastening — the transition to a zero-emissions future. Simply put, we can’t solve the climate crisis if we keep our gas infrastructure; only fully electric vehicles (coupled with clean electricity) can eliminate emissions from our cars.
Even without considering climate, anyone who has already switched to an electric vehicle knows it is more fun to drive, and saves time. My family doesn’t have to spend time charging our E.V. every week for the simple reason that we charge our vehicle overnight at home and wake up to a full battery. And because electric vehicles have fewer parts — no gas tank, no exhaust system, no catalytic converter, no radiator, no fuel injector, no timing belt — downtime for repairs is practically eliminated.
Given all the benefits of electric vehicles, it’s clear they should be the next car purchased by a vast majority of American drivers. And getting over our uncertainty is one of the biggest steps we can take toward a safer climate future.
Stephen Porder, the Acacia professor of ecology, environment and society and the associate provost for sustainability at Brown University, is the author of “Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Study determines the astronomical true cost of electric vehicle ownership TheStreet
EVs have an affordability problem.
There just aren't very many cheap options – with the average price hovering just over $50,00 in September, according to Kelley Blue Book data.
Auto execs have pointed to high prices as a big reason why demand for electric cars has slumped this year.
Several have slowed down their EV plans as a result, with Ford postponing a $12 billion investment and General Motors abandoning plans to build 500,000 EVs by the first half of 2024.
All this, however, may be about to change soon. EV sales are on the rise, with more than 1 million electric vehicles expected to be sold in the US this year, taking a record 9% of the passenger car market, according to Atlas Public Policy.
That share is still well behind other countries, with EVs reaching 33% of sales in China and 35% in Germany in the first three months of 2023, according to Bloomberg data.
Tesla is reportedly planning to put a 25,000 euro ($27,000) car into production next year, and a number of fast-moving developments in the technology behind electric vehicles may soon see prices plummet.
Goldman Sachs even thinks EVs will hit price parity with gas-powered cars by the middle of this decade.
Here's three reasons why electric cars are getting more affordable.
By far the most expensive part of any EV is the battery, and spiking battery prices have hit automakers hard.
However, the long-term trend is still heading towards cheaper battery packs.
Prices may have risen in 2022, but the Department of Energy estimates that the price of a lithium-ion battery pack dropped by 89% between 2008 and 2022, and Goldman Sachs says that prices for batteries will fall a further 40% by 2025.
"The battery is the single biggest cost going into electric vehicles and it's subject to the same kind of technology price curves that you see elsewhere," David Browne, the UK chief of EV manufacturer Smart, told Business Insider.
Leading the charge is the development of new classes of EV batteries, including sodium-ion batteries, which are more sustainable and cost-effective than power cells based on lithium. And, solid-state batteries, which are lighter and have more range.
In October, Toyota announced a breakthrough in solid-state technology that it said would allow it to halve the weight of its batteries by the late 2020s. Manufacturers think there are more breakthroughs to be made.
"We're only scratching the surface in battery development," said Browne.
"Working with ICE engines, you were chasing the smallest improvement in efficiency because people had been working on it for over a hundred years," he said.
"But battery technology is moving so quickly, and there are so many exciting developments, that there is lots we can do to improve efficiency," he added.
Another speed bump in the road to mass EV adoption is the US's charging network, which is still patchy even in big cities such as Los Angeles.
Matthias Preindl, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, told BI that boosting charging networks would allow manufacturers to put less emphasis on powerful range-boosting batteries, making their vehicles lighter and cheaper to produce – and in turn, meaning lower prices for the consumer.
Tesla's North American Charging Standard and the CSS network are the two major charging networks operating in the US.
Tesla's network is expanding rapidly, with the company planning to double the number of chargers it offers by 2024. It is also becoming the industry standard, with both Ford and GM announcing that their EVs will use Tesla superchargers from 2024 — something Cox Automotive director Stephanie Valdez Streaty believes will help boost the US' charging infrastructure.
"From an adoption standpoint, a consumer really wants to have that same experience as they do with an ICE (internal combustion engine vehicle), where it's never a barrier," she told BI.
"I think the key thing when it comes to charging infrastructure is going to be standardization," she said.
One key headache for automotive companies is that the best way to bring down the cost of making EVs is to produce more of them.
"You have to get to a certain scale to really start to make money on electric cars and for the costs to go down," Valdez Streaty said.
"You begin to see more innovation and improved efficiencies in the manufacturing process," she added.
That's an issue for legacy automakers, who have increasingly moved to cut EV production targets in the face of slowing demand.
Some companies such as Tesla are bringing down costs by changing how they mass produce their cars, with Elon Musk's firm pioneering a new process called "gigacasting" that allows it to produce large parts of a car's body through molten metal poured into high-pressure molds.
Other firms like Toyota are racing to adopt similar methods, which allow manufacturing plants to produce cars that are both lighter and cheaper.
However, there are concerns that the new method could make it harder to replace car parts, and Browne said that while Tesla's tactics are good for keeping costs down, they could lead to a spike in repair costs.
"The trade-off is if you've got one big mega casting down the side of the car and somebody damages that, you've then got an issue with repair costs," he said.
Alongside new production techniques, major automakers are still expanding their EV assembly lines, even if they aren't doing it quite as quickly — and that is good news for EV prices.
"I think one of the challenges that we're seeing is that we're still ramping up EV production. So as production increases we will see prices also decreasing long-term," said Preindl.
