Electric cars are far too cheap
And other things I learned renting a Tesla for a weekend
As always, if you like this newsletter, please consider buying the book…
Last week, on the way back from a wedding in London, my wife and I missed our connecting flight back to Chicago, and got stuck in New York for essentially a full week. (So did lots of other people). Rather than hanging around trying to get rebooked we decided to make the most of it and take a few days to go up into the Catskills, and so we rented a car. And, bizarrely, I suppose because all of the demand was for one-way rentals for people trying to get home, the cheapest option I could find was a navy blue Tesla Model Y, rented from Turo, the car-sharing app.
This was not in fact the first time I’ve driven a Tesla. But it nonetheless was a useful exercise, just to help me think about electric cars. A few observations:
Teslas are, frankly, terrific cars. If you have to drive a car, they basically provide everything I want in a car. The speaker system is great. The climate control works really well. You do not need to fight with Android Auto or whatever to load up Google Maps. And I say this reluctantly, but they are fun to drive. Pushing the accelerator feels a little bit like playing with a Scalextric set. You feel the electric motor whir up, quite unlike a petrol-powered car. You know if you push it too fast, you will absolutely crash. But it gets you to 60mph as you enter the motorway absurdly effectively.
Because of this (and because of annoyance with Elon Musk) I felt especially guilty driving it. This objectively makes no sense—it is an electric car that obviously emits far less pollution than most. Also it is quite low slung and so driving it I was probably less likely to kill a pedestrian than in most tank-like cars on the road in America now. But I normally hate driving and zooming along empty country roads I found myself questioning everything. What if actually, driving is great? To my slight relief, the drive back to Newark airport was in thick traffic and I recovered the strength of my convictions. Driving is only good if nobody else is doing it.
The other guilty feeling came from how little it costs to charge. The hotel we stayed at had a free charger, and ours was the only electric car in the car park, so I was able to charge it up twice for free. In the end I spent a total of $12.50 at the supercharger pictured above to drive the thing about 350 miles over the course of three days, and only then because I was obliged to return it almost fully charged. That is absurdly cheap.
My view on electric cars is that they are fantastic. They are fun! They produce much less CO2! They cost practically nothing to drive! And that is also why they are potentially dreadful for society as a whole.
My big fear is that as more people buy electric vehicles, the farther they will drive them. In America especially, the cost of petrol really does stop people driving. When gas prices go up, people drive less. Freed from the tyranny of filling up, people will drive a lot more. Even more so as self-driving technology improves.
Moreover, when you charge an electric car, and unlike when you fill a tank up with petrol, you are generally paying nothing in taxes towards maintaining the road you are using. Even though you might be using it a lot more. Of the $12.50 I paid towards electricity, literally nothing went towards repairing potholes or enforcing speed limits or whatever. The general taxpayer will end up covering that.
And ultimately, if they are so cheap to drive, electric cars might not even reduce CO2 emissions. For sure, they are a lot cleaner to drive. But if driving long distances is cheap and easy, people may choose to live farther apart. And it is sprawl much more than the direct emissions released by cars that are warming the planet. People who live in spread out suburbs use far more energy, and so produce far more CO2, in every single way, compared to people who live in dense cities. Heating, air conditioning; rubbish collections; etc. Densification is how we reduce carbon emissions dramatically. Electric cars, and self-driving cars even more so, might just enable more sprawl.
As I wrote in the book, a funny thing about petrol cars is that they too were once seen as a way to reduce the awful pollution caused by an older form of transportation technology. The streets of London in the late 19th century were so thick with the manure left by horses that in 1894, The Times predicted that “in 50 years, every street …will be buried under nine feet” of the stuff. Cars solved that problem. And if they had replaced horses one to one, that would have been a radical improvement. But they didn’t. They replaced them by more than 10 to 1.
Electric cars are great. But we need people to drive them less than they drive their petrol-powered cars, not more. They are far too cheap to run right now, and the result I fear is that they will ultimately make the situation on our streets worse, not better.
ICYMI:
Another podcast appearance - on The Spokesmen, a cycling podcast hosted by the excellent Carlton Reid. Carlton wrote, “Roads Were Not Built For Cars”, one of the first books I bought when I started writing Carmageddon, and the podcast was a joy to record.
Another excerpt of the book ran on Jonn Elledge’s newsletter last week—this a trimmed down version of the chapter about Mumbai and the growth of cars in the developing world. Check it out here.
My Economist stories:
Not much the past few weeks on cars or transport, but a few stories nonetheless.
On Chicago’s hopes of becoming a quantum computing powerhouse
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