Wireless charging: The roads where electric vehicles never need to plug in - BBC.com

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By Martine ParisFeatures correspondent

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The first wireless electric road in the US has been installed in Detroit, allowing electric vehicles to charge up as they drive along. But at nearly $2m (£1.6m) per mile, is this really the future of transport?

It looks like any other stretch of asphalt in cities across the US. But drive down 14th Street in Detroit, Michigan in the right vehicle, and something strange happens. This is the first public place in the US where you can drive an electric vehicle and it doesn't drain the battery – it charges it.

The quarter-mile (400m) section of road through the Corktown area of Detroit is a pilot of a wireless technology that is capable of charging vehicles as they drive over it.

Electromagnetic coils were laid under the surface and connected to the city's power grid. These create an electromagnetic field just above the road that transfers energy to a receiver attached to a vehicle battery through a process known as "inductive charging". It is similar to the technology used in wireless charging for mobile phones.

The hope is that roads like these may help to combat one of the major barriers that keep people from switching to electric vehicles – range anxiety. With charging infrastructure still not at the levels needed to support large numbers of electric vehicles, and the time it takes to charge a vehicle while on long journeys, most motorists are hesitant about swapping their fossil-fuel-powered cars.

But driving along a road where the car gains some additional charge as it travels could help to extend the range of electric vehicles or even do away with the need for plug-in charging altogether.

Where once mobile phones needed charging cables but can now do without, soon the same may also be true of electric vehicles, says Stefan Tongur, vice president of business development at Electreon.

"The evolution of charging will be going from cord to wireless," he told the BBC when we caught up with him at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. "And we will have roads that can charge vehicles while they drive – and where they park."

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The induction coils are installed just below the road surface and connected to the electricity grid, as in this stretch of road in Tel Aviv, Israel (Credit: Electreon)

Electreon is piloting wireless charging technology at select locations across Europe, Asia and America. It installed the magnetic inductive coils in the road in Detroit in November. Vehicles with the right receivers attached to their base can charge dynamically as they drive along it.

Part-funded by $1.9m (£1.5m) from the Michigan Department of Transit, with Electreon contributing the remainder, the goal is to expand the length of the "smart road" to a mile over the next few years to provide a way to test the technology in a real city environment. It forms part of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's vision to transform the state's transport infrastructure in an effort to become carbon neutral by 2050. This includes a focus on electric vehicles by providing a reliable charging network by 2030, with wireless charging roads and 100,000 chargers in place to support two million electric vehicles, says Michigan's chief mobility officer Justine Johnson.

With Detroit's rich automotive legacy as the "Motor City", she believes it is fitting for it to be leading innovation for the future of vehicles and mobility.

But with the project costing nearly $2m (£1.6m) per mile, some experts question whether the technology is scalable. Extending smart roads like these throughout a whole city or along long stretches of intercity highway would be astronomical at current costs. Tongur believes the cost to install wireless charging will soon start to drop as the technology matures, and predicts it could cost around $1.2m (£0.9m) per mile and $1,000 (£790) per receiver.

"Wireless charging looks good on paper. But the logistics, the cost involved, make it quite impractical," says Ashley Nunes, a researcher in behavioural economics at Harvard Law School.

But Tongur says the technology doesn't need to be under every road. "It's not meant to deploy everywhere," he says. "It's to be very strategic in where it makes the most sense, where the good business models are."

The company is initially focusing on transit corridors that are frequented by commercial fleets with predictable schedules. This includes buses and trucks where there are cost benefits to keeping them in use rather than having to stop for a charge.

An electric road of 155-186 miles (250-300km) long on busy routes could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from lorries by more than 200,000 tonnes

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Nunes agrees that wireless charging roads could be a plausible solution for the medium and heavy duty trucking industry, which he says disproportionately contributes carbon emissions on a per mile basis. "If the vehicle is traveling a fixed route it doesn't deviate that much from, retrofitting these sections of roadway with wireless charging may well make sense," he says.

And the goal is not to replicate a plug-in fast charger. Tongur says Electreon is able to achieve 35kW of dynamic charging per receiver. That means buses or trucks that have three receivers can get up to 100kW while driving. Over several miles, that's potentially a tremendous boost to range, he says, particularly helpful if you're out on a stretch of the road in areas where charging stations are few and far between.

Analysis by the Swedish government suggests that an electric road of 155-186 miles (250-300km) long on busy routes could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from lorries by more than 200,000 tonnes.

To make the service more affordable, Electreon is also offering a subscription model where operators can pay a monthly fee, around $800 (£630) to $1000 (£790), for the continuous operation of public, commercial and autonomous vehicles, says Tongur. The company is calling it their Charging-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform and it is being used in a $9.4m (£7.4m) partnership in Israel with Tel Aviv public transit operator, Dan Bus Company, which has a fleet of 200 buses. A pay-as-you-go model might be more appropriate for more casual road users looking to charge up their vehicles on a journey, says Electreon.

Electric roads are now widely seen as an enticing solution to help overcome the charging infrastructure problems facing electric vehicles.

(Alamy

The only sign that there is anything different about 14th Street in Detroit are white dots marking the position of inductive charging coils beneath the surface (Credit: Alamy)

In Europe, France has plans to build 5,500 miles (8,850km) of electrified roads by 2035 using either overhead cables, rails or induction charging, while studies in Germany have recommended installing 2,500 miles (4,000km) of overhead cables or inductive charging infrastructure on the country's Autobahn. Sweden has estimated it will cost around SEK30-40bn (£2.3-3bn/$2.9-3.8bn) to build approximately 1,200 miles (2,000km) of electric roads.

Electreon is working on a number of wireless charging pilots across Europe, including a project to electrify a portion of the German Autobahn. In the US, the company is building a wireless charging roadway with Utah State University for its National Science Foundation funded research center, Aspire. It also made a bid to electrify the Pennsylvania Turnpike, according to Tongur.

He says to help meet climate deadlines, municipalities can easily add coils to already existing road maintenance schedules to quickly turn them into chargeable assets. And by adding receivers to vehicles, car makers could reduce battery size and the overall cost of EV ownership, which could help to speed adoption.

In passenger vehicles, the competition is heating up. Toyota has a partnership with Electreon to explore wireless charging options, BMW and Ford have been working with Witricity, and Stellantis with Hevo Power. Tesla is believed to be working on its own solution having last year bought, then sold, the wireless charging company Wiferion.

Nonetheless, transformation is coming. In the US, the federal government has set aside billions of dollars for its National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (Nevi) programme and Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program to fund the building of high-speed charging for the nation's highways and places where people live, work and shop. The goal of the Biden Administration is to create 500,000 publicly available chargers by 2030 – with wireless charging roads possibly playing a part.

"As we think about transitioning from the internal combustion engine to zero emissions vehicles, we have to think about systems that allow for people to transition," says Johnson. "It is less about range anxiety and more about charging reliability – that will help consumers make informed decisions."

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Should you buy a plug-in hybrid car? Here’s what to consider. - The Washington Post

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We are entering the electric era. But millions of drivers want their gas engines too.

While electric vehicle sales are booming — 14 percent of all new cars sold globally were electric in 2022, up from less than 5 percent in 2020 — sales of plug-in hybrids are rising even faster. They accounted for almost 30 percent of all electric cars sold in 2022.

This presents drivers looking at a new car with something of a conundrum: Should I switch to all-electric? Or drive away in one of the slew of new — and old — hybrid models now on the market?

I looked at a dozen models powered by gasoline, electrons or both to help you make that decision. What I found is that it will all depend on how you plan to use your new car and what’s most important for you. To gauge that, you should ask yourself three main questions: how will you charge, how will you drive and what’s your budget?

Here’s what to consider.

1. Can you easily plug in?

Plugging in is easier than you think. You can just use a standard 120-volt wall outlet, known as a Level 1 charger, which adds about 4 to 6 miles of range per hour, equivalent to about 50 miles overnight, more than enough to cover most Americans’ daily routine. If you don’t have a garage, there are some effective options if you live in an apartment, rely on street parking or can access public chargers.

If these don’t work, go with a standard hybrid, or the most efficient vehicle that fits your needs. You can even consider an e-bike.

Gil Tal, director of the Plug-In Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California at Davis, says when it comes to efficiency, “it doesn’t matter if it’s hybrid or not, just look at the MPG.” Some new gasoline vehicles such as the Mitsubishi Mirage (39 mpg) can edge out hybrid models. “From a cost perspective, hybrid is just one technology that makes it more or less efficient,” he adds.

Standard hybrid vehicles, which use a small battery to assist the gasoline engine, comprised 7.2 percent of U.S. sales in the second quarter of 2023, compared with 1.7 percent for plug-in hybrids. Most offer between 29 to 60 miles per gallon. The Toyota Prius, which debuted in 1997, boasts a 57-mpg rating from the Environmental Protection Agency.

You’ll get much better mileage with a plug-in hybrid, with many new models achieving more than 120 miles per gallon, according to ratings from the Environmental Protection Agency.

But don’t buy a plug-in hybrid if you won’t be able to recharge it. That’s not only less efficient, it’s pricey, usually adding several thousand dollars to the sticker price, as well as requiring higher maintenance. “Some people buy a plug-in [hybrid] and never plug them in,” says Tal. “I see that behavior all the time.”

If you can plug in easily, either at home or work — where more than 80 percent of EV owners charge — or on the road, then you’ve got options.

2. Do you drive long distances?

If you’re generally driving less than about 200 miles a day and can access charging, switching to all-electric makes the most sense. You’ll be able to top up your battery, saving money and emissions.

Plug-in hybrids will give you longer range without refueling, but are less efficient, since they carry around both an electric and gasoline drivetrain. “Where the plug-in hybrid fails is that you pay for two drivetrains. It’s a suboptimal solution,” says Tal, comparing the technology to a spork, neither a superior spoon nor fork. “If you don’t need the [gasoline] engine, don’t take the engine with you.”

But plug-in hybrids can maximize flexibility: They’re a pragmatic choice if you need a car that handles daily and long-distance driving with limited charging access, or special applications such as towing and heavy-duty cargo. EVs such as the Ford F-150 Lightning have significantly diminished range when towing heavy loads such as a trailer. And while public charging networks are improving fast, some regions, especially in areas of the Midwest and Deep South — still lag behind, making it inconvenient to recharge during long road trips.

For drivers looking to take advantage of the plug-in hybrid’s range flexibility, the technology shines when two conditions are met: You can finish your daily routine day without starting the gasoline engine and you have easy access to charging most of the time.

The average American drives just under 40 miles a day. Today’s plug-in hybrid batteries typically have enough juice to travel between 25 and 50 miles of all-electric driving. That puts most trips well within the all-electric range. Once the battery is nearly drained, the cars operate like a standard hybrid recharging during braking and normal engine operation.

For some families, including Tal’s, plug-in hybrids allow them to own just one car, rather than one for driving around town and another for road trips. “It can save you a lot of money if you need this Swiss army knife,” he says. “For me, the plug-in hybrid is the way to stay a one-car household. Most of our routine is electric.”

3. How much do you want to spend?

If plug-in hybrids have a rosy future, they must beat all-electric vehicles on the road. That means competing on cost and performance over the lifetime of the car. Fuel, maintenance and incentives make this a complicated calculation.

For help crunching the numbers for some of the top-selling vehicles, I turned to Energy Innovation, a policy think tank aimed at decarbonizing the energy sector.

How did plug-in hybrids fare against their all-electric peers? Not well, at least financially. I found that while gas cars remain the cheapest on the lot, it’s now very tough, if not impossible, to beat battery electric vehicles on a total cost of ownership basis. The plug-in hybrid was the most expensive in this sample of popular SUVs and crossovers.

Driving a Toyota RAV4 plug-in hybrid for ten years costs about $15,000 more than a Tesla Model Y or Volkswagen ID4, two similar SUVs. It costs about $8,000 more over the same period than the Hyundai Ioniq 5, which currently doesn’t qualify for the federal $7,500 EV rebate. Even the gasoline RAV4 was about $5,500 cheaper over a decade compared with its plug-in counterpart, which is nearly 40 percent more expensive than the gasoline model.

EVs were cheaper to maintain at a cost of 6 cents per mile, compared with 9 cents for plug-in-hybrids and more than 10 cents for conventional gasoline vehicles, according to the latest Department of Energy data.

What should you drive?

Depending on where you live, your mileage may vary: Electricity prices in markets such as California and New York have spiked in recent years, especially during peak hours, while gasoline prices have also become more volatile. Other costs, such as higher insurance premiums or repair costs for EVs, may eat into those savings, although Consumer Reports says these are now trending down.

What’s the takeaway based on price? If you want the lowest sticker price, gasoline cars are still the winner — but they will cost you over time in fuel and maintenance, not to mention much higher carbon emissions. If you’re looking for the biggest savings over five years or more, and charging is accessible, go with electric.

EV models on the market at virtually every price point deliver respectable range, plenty of performance and big savings. If the flexibility of a gasoline engine is essential, a standard hybrid or paying a little more for plug-in models delivers the functionality you need, especially if you want one car that does it all.

In the long run, EVs are poised to become the hands-down financial winner for the vast majority of Americans, as battery technology and charging networks improve. But plug-in hybrids aren’t going away anytime soon. Even California, which plans to phase out the sale of most internal combustion cars by 2035, will permit 20 percent of “zero-emission” vehicles sold in the state to be plug-in hybrids with at least 50 miles of range beyond that deadline.

“While EVs will be the wave of the future, gas hybrids make more sense now and, for many of us, always will,” writes George Shaeffer, a reader from Clearwater Beach, Fla., who drives a Camry Hybrid. “I don’t see any reason it can’t last until it’s 20 or 30 years old.”

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Truck Makers Team Up to Push for Electric Vehicle Chargers - The New York Times

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Daimler, Navistar and Volvo have been criticized for not selling many electric heavy trucks, but the companies say the country first needs many more chargers.

There are more than four million electric vehicles on American roads, but fewer than 1,000 of them are heavy-duty trucks. On Tuesday, the three largest truck makers announced a push to remedy that deficit by calling on governments and utilities to help them build many more places to charge big rigs.

Daimler Truck, which owns Freightliner; Navistar, which is controlled by Volkswagen; and Volvo Group North America have formed an association to push for chargers, improvements to the electricity grid and other measures they say are needed to promote battery- or hydrogen-powered trucks.

The new organization, Powering America’s Commercial Transportation, will be based in Washington and also be open to suppliers, nonprofit organizations and other groups.

The companies’ decision to work together underscores the degree to which the transition away from fossil fuels is dependent on government support and decisions made in Washington and state capitols. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in 2022, provides $1 billion for electric trucks, including tax credits of up to $40,000 for companies that buy them, as well as subsidies for charging infrastructure.

But officials are just beginning to distribute the money, and the truck companies complain that they have gotten less attention from federal and state governments than makers of cars.

“There’s a lot of funding that’s available out there from the federal government,” said Dawn Fenton, vice president of government relations and public affairs at Volvo Group North America, which owns Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks. “There’s been little so far focused on the heavy-duty charging infrastructure.”

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Tapping the Brakes on Electric Vehicles - City Journal

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It’s been a rough few months for electric vehicle fans. During the January cold snap, social media sites were filled with sarcasm and pictures of Teslas stranded by freezing temperatures. Lots of “dead robots out there,” one wag put it.

In mid-January, the rental car company Hertz, previously an eager early adopter of fleet electrification, announced a big sell-off of EVs that it had only recently purchased, mainly because they proved far more expensive to maintain than advertised. The same week, Ford slashed EV production, having earlier pulled back on planned battery factories. Both Ford and GM now face higher labor costs, having negotiated epic United Auto Workers pay hikes that now include previously excluded battery factories. Adding to the woes, unsold EVs are piling up on dealer lots, spurring aggressive discounting. The big sales benefit buyers but deepen the already-massive losses of manufacturers.

Finally, in the fusillade of bad news, as Fortune reports, “no one wants to buy used EVs,” leaving EV used-car values in free fall. That’s a problem for auto companies because their finance arms have been left holding the bag on fictitious residual values for leased vehicles. According to one industry executive, the situation “has the potential to destroy billions” of dollars in value for auto firms.

And now leasing has soared to over half of all EV sales, as it’s the only way to capture the federal $7,500 tax credit for most EVs. How so? By law, that credit is supposedly available only when purchasing vehicles built with materials sourced primarily in the U.S. This domestic-sourcing feature is what it took, reportedly, to get West Virginia senator Joe Machin on board to pass the all-partisan Inflation Reduction Act, because, as he surely knew, nearly all battery materials are currently foreign-made and will remain so for ages. However, the final legislation had a surreptitious exception allowing the credit for leased vehicles built with foreign materials. Evidently, the pen is mightier than the miner.

All this bad EV news, advocates claim, is merely a symptom of a nascent industry’s growing pains. There’s some truth to that, especially for the kinds of engineering issues amenable to rapid resolution. Reliability and supply chains will improve with experience and redesigns. You can bet Elon Musk has tasked his impressive engineers to improve Tesla’s cold-weather resilience to avoid future embarrassment. And America just might, one fine day, allow domestic mining to expand and to build new refineries for the minerals needed for batteries—and for everything else.

Meantime, EV boosters note, “people keep buying them.” Again, true. Last year saw record EV sales, even if outside of China it’s still a Tesla story; over half of all EVs sold in the U.S. were Teslas. Even though the trumpeted high growth-rates are an arithmetical outcome of growth from small beginnings—something one always sees in the early days of a new product—there’s no doubt that tens of millions more consumers will happily buy an EV.

What is in doubt—in fact, what won’t happen—is realizing the aspiration of an accelerating transition to an EV-dominated future. Separating aspiration from reality wouldn’t matter if this were just a debate between advocates and skeptics making private bets. This debate matters because hundreds of billions of dollars in public spending will be deployed via the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act to push EVs into markets—and because a proposed rule from the EPA, with comparable legislation in more than a dozen states, will make it impossible to buy a new car unless it’s an EV within the decade. The unprecedented magnitude of government intervention gives EV enthusiasts confidence that it will all “spur consumer demand.”

But government diktats and largesse can’t change reality. The putative EV revolution will stall out for three main reasons, and not because of “dead robots” or the other road bumps in recent news. What will happen is that we’ll run out of money, we’ll run out of copper, and car drivers will run out of patience in putting up with inconveniences. But before unbundling these truths about the practical limits of EV dominance, we have to deal with some of the myths that anchor all EV enthusiasms.

It’s received wisdom in many social media corners that “Big Oil,” worried that EVs will radically cut oil use, is somehow funding anti-EV “misinformation.” As World Economic Forum sages have declared, “rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) will potentially disrupt the traditional oil market.” Credit the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Neil for noting that “some of my fellow travelers suspect there must be a conspiracy to trash-talk electrification in the media, funded by Big Oil. I take a contrary view: It didn’t take a conspiracy to make EVs look bad.” Rarely have truer words been written about EVs.

EV enthusiasts at BloombergNEF claim that “EV adoption cut demand for oil by 1.8 million barrels in 2023.” At the same time, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global gasoline consumption in 2023 blew past the pre-lockdown 2019 peak, even with roughly 30 million EVs on the world’s roads, up from near zero a decade ago.

Discerning analysts will note that, globally, EVs still account for barely 2 percent of all vehicles—thus, the admonition to wait. Consider, then, the case of Norway, where EVs now account for close to 25 percent of all cars. Even there, overall on-road oil consumption has remained flat instead of collapsing. Even assuming an impossibly high goal of replacing half of the world’s cars with EVs, simple arithmetic shows that doing so would eliminate only a skosh more than 10 percent of global oil demand. That’s not nothing, but it’s hardly the end of oil. The most that one can say is that EVs will moderate the growth in oil use.

But the myth that anchors the entire edifice of subsidies, mandates, and policies to force-feed EVs on everyone is that they will radically cut CO₂ emissions. Again, from the IEA: “Electric vehicles are the key technology to decarbonise road transport.” The BloombergNEF team touted that, according to its calculations, EVs in 2023 avoided “122 megatons of carbon-dioxide emissions.”

Facts and context matter. The world in 2023 saw, according to NOAA, a new peak in global CO₂ emissions. The claimed 122 megatons cut by EVs sounds big, but it amounts to only 0.03 percent of global emissions. For context, oil-burning war-machines in Ukraine are adding at least that much CO₂ to the atmosphere yearly. Moreover, the 122-megaton figure is a calculation, not a measurement. No one really knows how much, or how little, EVs reduce global CO₂ emissions.

The problem is that you can’t measure an EV’s CO₂ emissions. That’s totally unlike conventional cars, where emissions are directly measurable by the quantity of gasoline used. Further, gasoline emissions are the same wherever or whenever a car is driven, or fueled, or even built. EVs obviously don’t burn gasoline, and thus those emissions are, equally obviously, avoided. But there are emissions associated with EVs, and, according to the technical literature, everything about those numbers is highly variable, requiring estimates, guesses, and assumptions about when an EV is driven, when and where it’s recharged, and especially where the materials came from to build it in the first place.

In the real world, as opposed to the realm of PowerPoint presentations, that emissions accounting is hard to nail down because it entails information not just about consumer behaviors and grid operations but also about activities in the labyrinthine global supply chains. Much about that data is proprietary or opaque, and much of it originates with Chinese industries.

The CO₂ emissions arising from building an EV before it gets driven revolve around a simple fact: a typical EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. That half-ton battery is made from a wide range of minerals, including copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, and lithium. Accessing those minerals requires digging up and processing some 250 tons of earth per vehicle. All that mining, processing, and refining uses hydrocarbons and emits CO₂. The critical fact found in the technical literature is that those upstream emissions vary by 300 percent or more, depending on where and when materials are mined and processed. At the higher end of known ranges, upstream battery emissions can wipe out emissions avoided by not driving a gasoline car.

Every claim made about EVs reducing emissions, whether from automakers or governments, is a rough estimate at best—and sometimes an outright guess based on averages and assumptions. In every study, one finds that authors have cherry-picked a value, typically a low one. As for the future, all the variables relevant to mining and processing battery minerals point to upstream emissions rising.

Advocates respond that, whatever the emissions benefits, it will soon all be free because EVs will be easier and cheaper to buy and use. EVs, they assert, are simpler vehicles, and thus inherently cheaper to build than their gas-fueled counterparts. But EVs aren’t simpler; they’re just differently complex. The booster’s narrative claims that the transition to EVs is the equivalent of going from horse-and-buggy to the car, and thus an “inevitable shift,” in the words of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. The better analogy is that an EV is the equivalent of changing a horse’s food.

Yes, conventional cars have complex thermo-mechanical systems. Engines and automatic transmissions contain hundreds of components, mated with a simple fuel tank and pump. EVs, inversely, have a simple electric motor, but the battery pack is a complex electrochemical system made from hundreds or thousands of parts, including sensors, safety systems, cooling or heating systems, and a boatload of power electronics.

One shouldn’t be surprised that the data show that building EVs entails no less labor; it just shifts it to different components and places. Tesla, the world’s biggest non-Chinese EV maker, employs about 90 people per 1,000 cars produced per year. About 80 people are employed per 1,000 conventional cars produced. Neither figure includes the upstream labor for the materials supplied to the factories.

A conventional car’s weight is 85 percent steel and iron, wherein that upstream supply chain employs less than one person per 1,000 vehicles produced. Most of an EV’s weight lies in more exotic minerals, especially aluminum and copper. That upstream supply chain employs roughly 30 people per 1,000 EVs. Nearly all that labor is offshore.

The underlying materials requirement is the single constraint that will cause the EV stall-out before other factors kick in. All the world’s mines, both currently operating and planned, can supply only a small fraction of the 700 percent to 4,000 percent increase in various minerals that will be needed to meet the wildly ambitious EV goals. The IEA estimates that we’ll need hundreds of new mega-mines to feed factories across the “transition” landscape, and that it takes 10 to 16 years to find, plan, and open a new mine.

It bears noting that buying basic materials accounts for more than half the cost of building an EV battery. That means the future price of EVs will be dominated by the future costs of those basic materials, which, in turn, depends on guesses about the future of foreign mining and minerals industries. Consider just copper, the pillar of electrification. EVs use 300 percent to 400 percent more copper than conventional cars. Industry data show that the world will need twice as much copper as it will be producing well before aspirational EV goals are reached. Unsurprisingly, one major mining CEO observed that the coming chasm between demand and supply could trigger a ten-fold copper price hike. That alone would add about $15,000 to the cost of building an EV.

This is not a question of whether planet Earth has enough copper or other minerals; nature has abundance in all domains. The issue is one of industrial infrastructures. We have no evidence that the necessary decades-long mega-investments to expand mining have begun anywhere—certainly not in the U.S. Thus far, EV boosters have waved away the minerals challenges with facile rhetoric about recycling and, in a sure sign of technological naiveté, invoking the promise of seabed mining.

And we haven’t talked about the other engineering-economic problems with accelerating the EV revolution, such as building enough chargers, expanding the electric grid, and hoping consumers will tolerate radical increases in inconveniences.

The inconvenience of EVs boils down to the reality of very long refueling times, not range. So-called fast charging isn’t fast; it takes 30 to 60 minutes, compared with five minutes to fill a gas tank. Most consumers will chafe at such long waits. And each supercharger costs about three times as much as a gasoline pump. The oft-touted $7 billion that the Biden administration is spending on fast chargers won’t come close to meeting the need; the government’s own national labs show that we’ll need more like $100 billion in superchargers if EVs reach just 10 percent of all cars.

At-home, overnight charging, using lower-cost slow chargers, currently accounts for 90 percent of all EV users, nearly all of whom have two or three cars and a garage. But only one-third of U.S. households have a garage. Of course, enthusiasts assert that charging points can be added at parking lots and roadsides. All of it will require staggering neighborhood-grid upgrades that have neither been funded nor included in the Inflation Reduction Act’s lollapalooza of spending.

And that doesn’t count eye-wateringly expensive grid upgrades needed for on-road superchargers. To be clear, this is not about energy, but about the hardware needed to deliver the energy, especially grid-scale transformers. Today, a roadside fuel station puts an electric power load (again, not energy) on the grid equal to just one 7-Eleven store. A typical EV fueling station will have the power demand of a stadium. Highways need tens of thousands of fuel stations. Making on-road refueling as convenient, simple, and cheap as the gasoline network isn’t possible with current technology.

EV boosters typically greet all these obstacles and limits with the assertion that technological progress will solve them. For some of these items, there’s some truth to that assertion. But for EVs to become ubiquitous, we’ll need quantum-leap innovations, and history shows that mandates, taxes, and subsidies aren’t how we get that kind of progress. All they do, instead, is lock in yesterday’s technologies and waste money.  

None of this is to deny that there will be millions more EVs purchased, whether the government interferes or not. EVs offer interesting, useful, and even fun features for many consumers, just as do sports cars and myriad other vehicle models. But the rate of EV adoption will slow long before there’s a battery-dominated future because, again, we’ll run out of money, copper, and political tolerance for enriching other nations—especially China, where 50 percent to 90 percent of the critical materials are now produced and will be for years yet, no matter how lawmakers rewrite the sourcing regulations. And if proposed EPA rules for an EV-dominated future do become law, count on millions of very unhappy consumers, otherwise known as voters.

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Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here's why - Fox Business

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All Out Paintless Dent Removal owner Matt Boyette joins The Bottom Line to explain the high costs for small fixes on electric vehicles.

Between the federal government, states and municipalities, untold billions in taxpayer dollars have been spent adding electric buses to transit fleets across the U.S. in an effort to reduce carbon emissions. 

However, cities from coast-to-coast are grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed, are too expensive to fix, or they have scrapped their electric fleets altogether.

Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, recently expressed frustration that three of the five e-buses the city purchased for millions in 2018 are now sitting idle due to a combination of software issues, mechanical problems and an inability to obtain replacement parts.

Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs' Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants. 

A photo of the Proterra Catylist XR bus is seen at the electric bus company that has its headquarters in Burlingame, California. (Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Image / Getty Images)

Part of the problem is the manufacturer of the buses, Proterra, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August. The company, founded in 2004, rose to become the largest e-bus company in the U.S., representing nearly 40% of the market prior to going belly-up.

THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE PUSH RUNS OUT OF POWER

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm sat on Proterra's board until she joined the Biden administration, and President Biden touted the company while taking a virtual tour of the manufacturer in the spring of 2021. Granholm made $1.6 million selling her stock in the company shortly after that, following criticisms that her holdings in the firm were a conflict of interest.

President Biden delivers remarks on energy as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm listens during an event in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Oct. 19, 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Asheville's interim transportation director, Jessica Morriss, told local outlet WLOS-TV it has been impossible to get parts since Proterra filed for bankruptcy last summer. However, Asheville – and several other cities – had problems with the company's buses long before then.

In 2020, The Philadelphia Tribune reported SEPTA's entire $24 million fleet of Proterras had been pulled out of commission. A spokesperson for the transit agency would not get into the specifics of why the 25 buses – the third-largest fleet of all-electric buses in the U.S. at the time – were put on ice, but suggested the issues might be covered under the manufacturer's warranty.

EVS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS RELIABLE THAN GAS-ENGINE CARS, CONSUMER REPORTS FINDS

Then in Sept. 2021, the Daily Bulletin out of California reported that "As of August, Foothill Transit, based in West Covina and serving the San Gabriel Valley, parts of Los Angeles and Pomona Valley, had 13 idled battery-electric buses out of 32 in its fleet. At one point, the agency indicated up to 67% of its electric buses were not operating during 2019 and 2020." 

An all-electric Proterra bus moves through the neighborhoods on Route 60 in Stockton, California, on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2016. (Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

The outlet noted San Joaquin Regional Transit District in Stockton, California, the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County in Reno, Nevada, and the Transit Authority of River City (TARC) in Louisville, Kentucky, were also struggling with Proterra buses sitting idle.

In Nov. 2022, WDRB-TV reported that TARC's entire fleet of Proterra electric buses had not operated in two years. The outlet said $9 million had been shelled out for Louisville's e-buses.

Last month, Austin, Texas-based KUT News reported the city's Capital Metro had entered into a $46 million deal with Proterra in 2020 for the company to build 40 buses. CapMetro only has six of them in operation while they await another 17 that have been built but are sitting in Proterra's South Carolina factory because chargers for them are not yet available. 

The outlet also pointed to a filing from attorneys representing Broward County, Florida, regarding Proterra's bankruptcy. The lawyers told the court Broward County purchased 42 buses from Proterra for $54 million, and the first batch only operated for an average of 600 miles before breaking down, while the second batch averaged 1,800. For comparison, the county's diesel buses average 4,500 between failures, the filing said.

FORD DEALERSHIP DETAILS ‘STRUGGLE’ WITH EV TRUCK AS ‘CONCERNS’ MOUNT

Some of the cities that have taken multimillion-dollar losses on inoperable e-buses, including Asheville and Colorado Springs, have paused purchasing more all-electric transit vehicles for now, and are instead opting for adding hybrid models to their green fleets until EV technology improves. 

In the meantime, Proterra is poised to make a comeback.

The company was split into three parts during bankruptcy and its transit bus division was purchased earlier this month by Phoenix Motorcars, a California-based manufacturer that primarily builds medium-duty electric vehicles like shuttle buses for airports.

Phil Flynn and Tom Maoli discuss the Biden admin's push for electric vehicle production when consumers don't want them on ‘The Evening Edit.’

Jose Paul, Phoenix Motorcars' chief revenue officer, told FOX Business in an interview that the company has taken ownership of "really world-class technology" in its acquisition of Proterra. 

He noted that EVs, like any new technology, have issues but are continuing to evolve and advance. When Henry Ford rolled out the Model T, it was not perfect, Paul pointed out, and says Proterra's buses have continued to improve with each generation.

Paul acknowledged that some customers, like the city of Asheville, have had challenges with operating Proterra buses, particularly due to the inability to obtain parts since the bankruptcy. He said one of the first things Phoenix Motorcars plans to do is to focus on restocking spare parts to make them available, explaining that some suppliers refused to sell to Proterra while it was under bankruptcy protection. 

Roughly 300 Proterra employees, some of whom have been with the company from its start, have agreed to stay on board with Phoenix. The new owner is currently working to identify what parts customers need and, if required, to provide service technicians to get inoperable vehicles fixed.

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"It's been eight days, and we've already made significant progress," Paul told FOX Business. "We can now go out there and start ramping up on all fronts, be it honoring…the backlog of orders which Proterra had…ramping up production. That's the immediate goal for us. So those are all things we're doing right now."

Paul said Phoenix's hope is that a lot of the issues customers have faced due to Proterra's bankruptcy will be handled within the next six to nine months.

He emphasized, "Our goal is to take care of customers…every single customer."

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U.S. Oil Drillers Are Going Electric—and Hitting Speed Bumps - The Wall Street Journal

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U.S. Oil Drillers Are Going Electric—and Hitting Speed Bumps  The Wall Street Journal

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New Report Shows Electric Vehicles Are Unreliable — These 3 Are the Worst - Yahoo Finance

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A sobering new reliability report from Consumer Reports indicates electric vehicles still have a long road ahead regarding dependable performance. The survey of over 300,000 vehicles found electric models suffer 79% more maintenance problems than gas-powered cars. Meanwhile, plug-in hybrids fared even worse — with a concerning 146% more issues reported by drivers.

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The results portray an industry still struggling to iron out the kinks in new electrification technology — at a time when more environmentally friendly vehicles are sorely needed. As global temperatures rise, manufacturers race to deliver reduced emission models to market. But in this breakneck pace, reliability appears to be an unfortunate casualty thus far.

Across the EV options surveyed, three models stood out for their subpar owner experiences:

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Chrysler Pacifica Plug-In Hybrid

The plug-in hybrid variant of Chrysler’s signature minivan scored dismally — a 14 out of 100! — in CR’s analysis. Owners reported an array of issues – from rattling noises signaling mechanical problems to outright transmission failure. After shelling out for the newest iteration, drivers were left with a supposedly high-tech van that all too often left them stranded rather than carrying the family.

Audi Q5

Audi’s luxury plug-in hybrid SUV fared a little better, earning well below average-marks for reliability. Owners detailed problems with the engine, electrical systems, and comfort features meant to elevate the driving experience. But all too often, the pricey vehicle’s complex technology failed – resulting in a trip to the shop rather than the open road.

Tesla Model 3

Once the poster child brand for EV adoption, even Tesla showed cracks in Consumer Reports’ assessment. While the company’s powertrains largely measured up, other components of supposed Tesla innovation — from touch screens to body panel alignment — disappointed. Paint defects, loose trim, and glitchy interfaces suggest Musk’s engineering wunderkinder still has work to do before EVs live up to their promise.

The results indicate lurking growing pains for an auto industry hastily undergoing an electric transition. And while some models showed EV technology can deliver durable transportation, they remain the exception rather than the rule. Until manufacturers remedy the root causes behind lackluster reliability, early adopters of electric vehicles may need to brace themselves for a bumpy ride — along with an occasional tow.

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: New Report Shows Electric Vehicles Are Unreliable — These 3 Are the Worst

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Porsche Rolls Out Its Second All-Electric Car - WIRED

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German auto manufacturer Porsche announced its second-ever model of an all-electric vehicle. The new EV Macan comes in two forms—the Macan 4 and the slightly beefier Macan Turbo.

Both of these all-electric SUVs have high-performance 100-kilowatt-hour batteries. These are also the first Porsches to use an 800-volt architecture, which allows the cars to charge from 10 to 80 percent in 21 minutes at a 270-kilowatt DC fast charger. The cars will be just as quick on the road: The Macan 4 puts out the equivalent of 402 horsepower, and the Turbo model puts out 630 hp. Zero to 60 times are 4.9 seconds for the Macan 4 and 3.1 seconds for the Turbo. Range is equally impressive; Porsche is claiming its SUVs will go well over 300 miles per charge.

The Macan’s interior will feature a network of displays the company calls the Porsche Driver Experience. It’s a combination of displays in front of the driver, a display on the console, and augmented-reality tech that can overlay images like digital navigation arrows on the road in front of you as you’re driving.

Porsche’s Macan model was originally launched in 2014, so this new electric version marks the 10th anniversary of the model. It’s Porsche’s second fully electric vehicle, after the $150,000 Taycan was released in 2019. The Macan 4 will start at $78,800, while the Turbo model goes for $105,300. (There’s also a $1,650 delivery fee for both.) Look for them in the second half of the year.

Porsche’s Macan is one of the many electric vehicles coming in 2024. It may wind up being the zippiest, but there’s some stiff competition.

Here’s some other consumer tech news from this week.

Apple Dabbles in GenAI

Just about a year after the generative AI craze took over the tech world, all signs indicate Apple is getting serious about the technology. According to a story in the Financial Times, Apple has been slowly making a series of investments and employee hires that suggest it’s building more AI technology into its products. A separate report in 9to5Mac found evidence in beta code for iOS 17.4 that indicates Apple has been testing some Siri features with ChatGPT’s help. While this development is not a guarantee that Apple will be using ChatGPT in its software, it is telling that the company is playing with the tech in general.

While companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta have been eager to dive into the AI deep end, Apple has largely downplayed the AI revolution in its product announcements over the past year, sticking to its typical iterative updates to its hardware and software lineup. But change is coming. It’s not clear when Apple will officially announce any of its AI enhancements, though we should expect to learn more at the next WWDC, the developer event Apple puts on every summer.

Shazam Your Ears

Shazam, the music search app owned by Apple, has gotten even more useful. Thanks to a recent update of its iOS app, Shazam can now detect any song playing through your headphones. The app used to only be able to use a device’s built-in mic to recognize a tune. Then last year, Shazam added the ability to find music directly in social video apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Now, the latest update will allow you to figure out what the hell you’re hearing without having to take out your earbuds, whether it’s what you’re streaming on YouTube, the backing track of a TikTok dance, or that song you’re hearing from the overhead speakers at the grocery store. It works with wired and wireless headphones.

I Know What You Did With That Bitcoin

It’s a common belief of the dark web that payments made with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are untraceable, so people have been using them to buy all sorts of illegal things online. Turns out, that’s not true, and once investigators realized that illicit transactions could be tracked, it led to the takedown of the dark web’s biggest kingpin.

This week on the Gadget Lab podcast, we’re resurfacing the conversation with WIRED security writer Andy Greenberg about the codebreaker who blew up the myth that bitcoin is untraceable and the investigators who used that traceability to bust the world’s biggest child abuse site. Read all about it in Andy’s book Tracers in the Dark, which is now out in paperback.

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