Electric cars shouldn’t be our only focus

By Josh Archanian

April 21, 2021

Electric cars have a purpose and can be quite cool, with Tesla's autopilot being one of the stand out tech features that not every car manufacturer can match. That said, there is an infrastructure problem.

In some states, there are few charging stations to recharge an EV. According to the Washington Post, there are only 3,884 public charging stations, compared to the 168,000 gas stations across the U.S. You can get on any major highway and not really have to worry about where a gas station is; however, with Ev’s there is a sense of range anxiety, not knowing if you are going to be able to make it to the next charging station.

President Biden wants to try and encourage people to buy more EVs. He also said he hopes to have over 500,000 charging stations in the U.S. by 2030, which would be a good thing to relieve some stress of EV ownership and having to plan out where you are going to recharge. However, the whopping $2 trillion infrastructure plan that aims to fix some of the problems with EV ownership, such as government incentives, doesn’t include any non petroleum based alternatives.

Porsche is well known for making sports cars over the past 90 years. They have recently been focusing on electric and hybrid cars such as their 918 hypercar. Even more recently than that, they’ve been manufacturing their fully electric Taycan sedan and station wagon. However, there is still hope for the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE).

Porsche says, “eFuels are produced from CO2 and hydrogen using renewable energy. In terms of their basic properties, they are no different from kerosene, diesel or petrol (gasoline) processed from crude oil. However, they can ideally be a climate-neutral fuel”.

This would be great for existing technology, as it would convince more people to use them if all it would require is to change the gas in the pumps. The infrastructure is already there.

This can be backed up by the article energy.gov which states, “Biomass-based renewable hydrocarbon fuels are nearly identical to the petroleum-based fuels they are designed to replace—so they're compatible with today's engines, pumps, and other infrastructure.”

These are called “drop in” fuels, and as the name suggests, they can just replace normal fossil fuels. This could be done as a solution for the current global warming issue and it could be put in motion much sooner than building a whole new infrastructure. We could also start sooner on reducing the carbon footprint if every car could run on fuel that doesn’t pollute the earth while we build the infrastructure needed for electric cars. This will give people more time to prepare for a switch.

Another problem with electric cars is that they are quite bad for the environment to manufacture. A 2015 study from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that “ manufacturing a midsize electric vehicle would produce about 15% more emissions than the process of building a similar gas-powered vehicle would”.

Using biofuels would lower the greenhouse gas effect while also giving time for infrastructure to be built and people to possibly switch over. If a new fuel that doesn’t pollute can be found, then almost all modern day cars could still be used without endangering the planet.

Why does all this stuff matter? A lot of people like conventional cars with gas powered engines, and do not want to let their cars go. Forcing people to make a switch to electric cars would be a shame, as not only do cars mean something to certain people, but they sometimes serve as time capsules from an earlier time. Car enthusiasts won’t take kindly to not being able to drive around in their cars that they spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours working on, ultimately making their vehicles an extension of themselves.