The IT Nerd

Last December, the Canadian Government announced a plan to phase out gas powered cars by 2035. In short, what the Canadian Government wants is to have all of us driving zero emission vehicles (which is another way of saying electric vehicles) by that point or shortly after that point. This is an attempt to reduce emissions and allow Canada to hit their climate change goals. Now to be clear, I am all for making the environment better and reducing the effects of climate change. But this plan to shift drivers to electric vehicles is not workable for a number of reasons.

Let’s start with the fact that a robust and easily accessible charging infrastructure doesn’t exist. While some homeowners who own electric vehicles have level 2 chargers at home, there are a lot who don’t or can’t do so. Yours truly for example lives in a condo that doesn’t have any charging infrastructure whatsoever. And that’s the same for those in apartments as well. And many building management companies aren’t willing to budge on that. So what that means is if I want to charge an electric vehicle, it may be a challenge as illustrated by this search that I did on Apple Maps:

You’ll see a lot of big green dots and smaller green dots indicating where a EV charger is located. Compare that to simply searching for gas stations:

There’s a lot more blue dots (gas stations) that are big and small versus green dots (EV chargers) big and small. That means many people will find it a challenge at best to charge an electric vehicle. And that will hamper the sales of electric vehicles because humans will only adopt something if it is as easy or easier than whatever it is replacing. And right now if someone can’t just pop out to a charger that’s a five minute drive down the road and get a charge that gets their car to at least 80% in well under an hour, they’re not going to get an electric vehicle.

That brings me to my next point, electric vehicles are too expensive. Anyone that I know who has an electric vehicle is also someone who is willing and able to spend luxury car money on a gas vehicle. Even the cheapest electric vehicles out there are out of the price range of the average consumer who typically buys a Honda Civic or something in that price range. And that factors in government rebates for buying or leasing an electric vehicle. Now I get why this is the case. Car companies aren’t selling them in high enough volume to enable them to bring the price of these vehicles down to affordable levels. In fact, some companies have shifted away from producing more electric vehicles to producing more hybrids as those are actually selling. Until that changes, the needle on electric vehicle sales is going to move very slowly.

Sidebar: You should take Tesla out of the mix when it comes to companies who are shifting to making more hybrids as all Tesla makes are electric vehicles. Thus they have economies of scale working for them. Unlike every other car company that makes electric vehicles.

The next point that I’d like to bring up is the range of these vehicles. My 2016 Hyundai Tucson gets about 600KM on a single tank of gas. Sometimes more if I drive in a more “subdued” manner. That’s important as buyers like me who want to drive electric vehicles want to get a similar range relative to we get now with. a gas powered vehicle. In fact a KPMG study revealed that 80 per cent of Canadians wouldn’t “consider buying an EV unless it has a minimum 400 km range fully charged.” The problem is that many electric vehicles don’t get that range. Part of that is due to the fact that Canada is very cold for six months of the year. And cold weather has a negative effect on electric vehicles. Part of that is that you get reduced range in cold weather. Some people say about 30% less range. But there’s also the fact that the car might not work at all if it is too cold. I cite this example where many Tesla cars in Chicago wouldn’t work because it was too cold. Another somewhat related factor is that the range that an auto maker gives is often in “ideal” conditions. And none of us drive in “ideal” conditions because those “ideal” conditions are in a lab or a test track. Which is another way of saying that you’re going to be unlikely to see the range that the auto maker says you should get. Thus this is something that needs to be sorted before electric vehicles get adopted broadly.

Finally, there’s reliability. Electric vehicles generally are reliable than gas powered cars and this Consumers Reports article goes into the weeds on that. But let me cut to the chase here. Nobody is going to move to technology that is less reliable than what they have now. And that lack of reliability will slow electric vehicle adoption.

All of this makes Canada’s plan to move to zero emission vehicles by 2035 a non starter in my mind. I honestly would love to be proven wrong on this. But as things stand right now, I don’t think so. The only way I might be proven wrong on this is if there’s a major course correction to make electric vehicles more affordable, more reliable, improve the charging infrastructure, and make the range more in line with gas powered cars. This is something that all parties in this space, meaning government and the car industry need to tackle. And they need to start doing that today if meeting that 2035 deadline is to be achieved.

Do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

This entry was posted on March 27, 2024 at 9:02 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, Electric Vehicles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.