This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.
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The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced what is being considered its strongest-ever proposed pollution standards for gas-powered vehicles – which if enacted would effectively mandate that 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2032 must be zero-emission ones.
The rule has been expected for weeks and is a dramatic, proposed increase from President Biden’s stated goal of 50 percent zero-emission passenger car sales – including battery-powered electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell vehicles – by 2030. It would also likely and dramatically increase EV sales, which accounted for just 5.6 percent of new car sales in the U.S. last year, according to Road & Track.com.
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Insurers are being forced to write off many electric vehicles with only minor damage to battery packs, sending the batteries to scrap yards and hindering the climate benefits of going electric, Reuters reported.
Battery packs typically represent roughly half the cost of an electric vehicle, sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars, often making it more economical for insurers to consider a car as totalled than replace a battery pack, according to Reuters. While many carmakers, including Ford and GM, told Reuters that their battery packs were repairable, many are unwilling to share key data with third-party insurers to help assess damage.
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First, don’t blame the vehicle. It is a tool that might be just what Los Angeles needs to cope with inversions. Electric vehicles are also very good as airport shuttles and for other locations where short, repetitive routes are the primary use. Some may even be fun to drive (except when they catch on fire).
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In his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, President Joe Biden promoted electric vehicles (EVs), trumpeting his plans to establish “a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.” In so doing, Biden is unwittingly supporting the worst humanitarian abuses in the world. This is because of the way in which the materials used in manufacturing the batteries that power today’s EVs are obtained.
To obtain a reasonable amount of power per pound of battery weight, EV manufacturers generally use various forms of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, so named because the battery’s positive electrode, called the cathode, is largely made up of the highly reactive metal lithium (Li). To keep the cathode stable when a battery is not in use, the lithium is combined in a metal oxide matrix, with different manufacturers using different combinations of metals.
Most EV manufacturers combine lithium with nickel, cobalt and manganese to create a Li-Ni-Mn-Co oxide matrix to form the cathode. Tesla substitutes aluminum (Al) for the manganese, yielding a Li-Ni-Co-Al oxide matrix for the cathode on their batteries. Tesla maintains that their formulae is more cost-effective as less cobalt is required.
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