EV sales need a major jump to make a real dent in emissions; could hybrids be the answer?

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Electric cars are all very well with their clean emissions, but we’ll need a lot of them before our air starts getting cleaner. There just aren’t enough on the road to make any noticeable difference in our greenhouse gases. What’s more, it’ll take a long time to get to that point – another 20 or 30 years at least.

Last year, when life was relatively normal, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) – those powered only by a fully electric engine and rechargeable battery – accounted for about 3 per cent of all vehicle sales in Canada, or almost 35,000 units. They joined the other 50,000 BEVs still on the road from previous years, but they also joined the more than 28 million passenger vehicles with internal combustion engines, including hybrids and plug-in hybrids, as well as 1.1 million heavy trucks.

All told, BEVs now account for about 0.3 per cent of all passenger vehicles on Canadian roads, which isn’t much.

The number of Canadian BEVs is increasing every year (almost twice as many were sold last year than in 2018, according to DesRosiers Automotive Consultants), but only in British Columbia and Quebec, where the provincial governments offer subsidies of several thousand dollars each to offset their higher cost. It’s too soon to tell how the recently introduced federal subsidy is influencing buyers, but last year, outside B.C., Quebec and Ontario, BEVs accounted for an insignificant 0.2 per cent of the overall Canadian sales market. If they’re not more affordable, they’re not likely to become more popular.

Those government subsidies are expensive, though, and if their intention is to bring the purchase price of a BEV down to the price of an equivalent gas-powered car, then it will clearly cost billions before the number of BEVs on the road is enough to offset the emissions from all the other vehicles. Battery technology is constantly getting cheaper, but it still costs about US$150 to build every kilowatt-hour of a battery’s capacity. The fabled US$100/kWh price point that might bring BEVs to par with conventional vehicles is still years away, if it’s even possible. After all, there are finite supplies of the materials needed to build today’s batteries. Not only does the mining of lithium and cobalt exact huge environmental costs, but most of the worldʼs cobalt supplies come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country scarred by civil war and corruption.

There is, of course, a bigger issue at play. All those other vehicles aren’t just disappearing from the roads. In fact, they’re increasing in number because improvements in quality and reliability are leading to more people owning cars.

According to auto analyst Dennis DesRosiers, “consumers in Canada are embracing vehicle ownership at a record pace.” About 70 per cent of driving-age Canadians owned a car in 2000, but last year, that had increased to 88 per cent. This means there are at least 10 million more vehicles on the road now than at the turn of the century, and DesRosiers estimates that could increase by another eight million by 2030. The math just doesn’t add up for enough BEVs to offset those vehicles any time soon.

What’s more, the vehicles we’re buying in greater quantities are not small, fuel-sipping cars but pickup trucks and SUVs. Those are what we want to drive. If electric vehicles do sell for the same price as gas vehicles, you’d better believe fuel companies will lower the cost of gas at the pump to compete, and we’ll end up buying the largest vehicles we can afford.

So what’s to be done if we really want to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions and clean up our air?

DesRosiers has a suggestion: Remove old cars from the road and encourage people to buy new, more fuel-efficient cars. However, he believes the government’s carrot-and-stick approach is backward. He says it should not promote EVs through incentives for consumers and penalties on conventional automakers and offer $300 tax credits for clunkers. Instead, the government should give car makers incentives to further improve the efficiency of gasoline engines, lower sales taxes to encourage drivers to buy those better vehicles, raise gas taxes to reduce our truck lust and force older vehicles – say, more than eight years old – off the road by making them conform to stricter emissions standards.

DesRosiers isn’t naive. “Politically, this is very dangerous,” he acknowledges.

Toyota, though, has another alternative. It believes that if we’re serious about reducing emissions and conserving resources, governments should not encourage the sales of battery electric vehicles but instead look to hybrids as the answer.

After all, Toyota Canada president Larry Hutchinson says BEVs have batteries that are just too big to make efficient use of the resources they take to build. It’s all very well to have a battery with a range of 300 kilometres or more, he says, but when it spends almost all its time charged and parked, that’s a terrible waste of the scarce and finite materials inside it.

“Here’s something most people don’t know,” Hutchinson said in a presentation earlier this year. “The average battery capacity in a battery electric vehicle is about 60 kWh, and that number is growing as companies increase vehicle size and range. The average battery capacity in a Toyota hybrid is 1.4 kWh.

“Let me put this in practical terms: You could build 42 Priuses in place of the 60 kWh battery in one BEV. And 42 Priuses, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 per cent each, have the impact of 12 zero-emission vehicles. So for the same resources, same battery cells, do you want the greenhouse-gas reduction of one car or 12? And that’s 12 vehicles without range anxiety, unaffordability, government incentives or infrastructure investment.”

Those BEV batteries are growing larger, too, as buyers demand greater range and larger, heavier vehicles. The battery in an electric pickup truck can be as large as 180 kWh. A Tesla Cybertruck will never be replaced by a Prius, but perhaps a hybrid Ford F-150 pickup or Toyota Sienna minivan does make a lot more sense.

You could argue that Toyota has a vested interest in promoting hybrid vehicles, since it is the world’s leading hybrid manufacturer, and you’d be right. Good for Toyota. But it has proven its ability to make pretty much anything on wheels, including BEVs and full-sized trucks, and the argument for constantly improving hybrids makes a lot of sense.

Our gas-powered vehicles will be on the road for a long time yet. We should make the most of what we have, instead of trying to force drivers to buy something most of us still can’t afford.

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