Electric cars

This page is about passenger-owned electric vehicles (EVs): cars, vans, pickup trucks, etc. For commercial semi trucks, see the page on electric trucks. For passenger buses, see electric buses.

About 1% of today's cars are electric^{[USA, 2023]} - the rest run on gasoline which causes climate change.

Types

Battery electric vehicles (most common EVs today)
Fuel cell vehicles (very few models on the market today)

Considerations

Battery minerals

Currently a problem

The vast majority of today's electric cars store their energy in lithium-ion batteries, which contain too much cobalt to scale up. (...)( Cobalt mineral reserves would be depleted early-on, and the majority of cars would remain gasoline-based, even with desperate attempts at obtaining more cobalt such as strip-mining the ocean floor. See page on lithium-ion batteries for maths related to this. ) Lithium is also somewhat scarce and could be also be an issue.

Every once and awhile there's some news article about some company researching / developing / investing in some battery type that will supposedly be as energy-dense as lithium-ion. But there's no guarantee it'll happen in the near future, and if it does, it'll probably be expensive.

Scarcity is also an issue for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (which depend on platinum-group metals).

If car buyers are willing to compromise (settle for less range), electric cars could be made with other battery types(...)( such as sodium-ion, or somewhat less ideally lithium iron phosphate ) that are more sustainable/scalable. The main selling point is that they would be cheaper. ^{[QUANTIFICATION needed]}

Energy sources

Not green enough yet

If the electricity comes from fossil fuels, electric cars are barely any better than gasoline cars when it comes to carbon emissions.

In most parts of the world today, electricity is generated from fossil fuels. (...)( Consider that hydro and geothermal power are only available in a few geographic locations; conventional nuclear power is limited by scarcity of uranium-235; biomass waste energy is in extremely low supply. Whenever the local capacity of renewables is exceeded, fossil fuels make up the difference. ) For electric vehicles to save the environment, we're going to need a lot more solar and wind (which comes with other challenges), or other kinds of nuclear.

Availability of charging

Ongoing progress

This section has not been filled in yet.

Rare-earth magnets

Reasonable

Efficient electric motors need strong magnets, which can only be made with certain minerals known as rare-earth elements (REEs). Luckily, REEs aren't actually that scarce. Even if all vehicles were electric, we wouldn't even come close to running out of REEs.

This is true even if all energy were to come from wind turbines, which also contain rare-earth magnets.

TODO: Add the calculations & research that led to this statement.