Sorry, Rowan Atkinson, electric cars are here to stay — and improve

Mr. Bean loves cars.

Over the weekend, the respected British comedian Rowan Atkinson, famous for his portrayal of a clueless, social misfit in his eponymous British series, wrote about "feeling duped" for buying an electric car.

"Our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end," he lamented in an opinion piece in the Guardian. "Sadly, keeping your old petrol car may be better than buying an EV."

I can see why Mr. Bean might suggest that. I’ve been driving a 2010 Honda Fit for quite a while, and I’m sure it will keep chugging well after my odometer's recent lap of the 100,000-mile mark.

But Atkinson, who says he has a "lifelong passion for motorcars" and an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, argues people should consider buying and keeping their internal combustion engines as long as possible, while we develop hydrogen and synthetic fuel alternatives.

On one front, Atkinson is right. EVs are not perfect. The industry, for example, has a lot of room to improve on how it sources battery materials, whose mining has ravaged communities and ecosystems around the world. Prices are high. Charging infrastructure is spotty. Supplies are tight. He points out some real problems in the current market.

But based on what we know about emissions and automobile engineering, EVs are the better choice for millions of people right now. The reason automakers and car buyers are embracing EVs is not primarily because they want to save the planet. It's because, on many fronts, they are superior technology.

Atkinson did not respond to a request for comment. When challenged about his arguments in the column by Inside Climate News, Atkinson told the publication in an email that "everyone cherry-picks evidence to support his or her thesis and I’m sure that your scientists and experts will be doing the same." He added, "My primary aim was to encourage debate ... The fact that you’re having your discussion at all is great news to me."

Here's why, when it's time to say goodbye to the Fit, my next car will run on electrons. And why yours — and Mr. Bean's — probably should, too.

"If you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible," writes Atkinson, noting most Brits only keep their new cars for three years.

In general, I couldn't agree more with buying used instead of new. But trading cars is not like emptying out your closet and buying a new wardrobe.

Cars aren't just discarded. They are resold or leased to new drivers, particularly in the unusual U.K. car market where "purchase agreements" are common. In these contracts, similar to leases, people defer the largest payments for three years. Most opt to sign an agreement for a new car rather than purchase the leased one. While expensive, this expands the tight market for affordable vehicles — especially used EVs in short supply.

"Leasing is an important business model for getting new tech — like electric vehicles — into the market," says Peter Slowik of the International Council on Clean Transportation.

In the rest of the world, people tend to keep their cars for much longer — an average of 8.4 years in the United States. With many EVs now logging hundreds of thousands of miles, that figure will probably keep rising.

EVs still pollute. As Atkinson writes, manufacturing EVs can generate more emissions than making conventional ones — nearly 70 percent more, according to Volvo statistics he cites.

There's some truth to that, largely because of the energy it takes to make a battery. Building an EV generates the equivalent of about 88 grams of CO2 per kilometer (averaged over the vehicle lifetime) compared to 46 for the average European vehicle, according to one examination of the scientific literature by CarbonBrief, a climate science website.

But that number is ultimately misleading. First, manufacturing emissions are predicted to plunge as battery manufacturing improves and the industry decarbonizes. Second, it doesn't matter much in the final accounting.

The vast majority of a car's emissions come from the fuel the vehicle consumes over its lifetime, not the materials that go into them. When overall emissions are calculated over 150,000 to 200,000 miles, it turns out those from manufacturing are "a really, really small number," says Jason Quinn, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State who conducts life cycle analyses.

A more honest accounting, by CarbonBrief, shows that driving a Nissan Leaf EV in 2019 generated three times fewer lifetime emissions per kilometer compared to an average conventional car.

In the United States, it's already less polluting — and cheaper — to recharge rather than refill in every state, according to Boston Consulting Group. The same is the case in most places around the world. Every year, this argument gets stronger. The United States is now targeting a carbon-free grid by 2035. "EVs are just going to get better because the grid is getting cleaner," says Quinn.

Atkinson suggests other fuels — hydrogen and synthetic fuels — hold more promise than electricity.

Let's talk hydrogen first. "If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks, and as a result every filling station stocks it," he writes, "it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars."

Hydrogen is a great fuel, the Hindenburg disaster notwithstanding. Fueling airplanes or steel smelting with hydrogen could make sense because those are high-value activities, and there aren't a lot of other carbon-free options.

But making every car burn it is not a good idea.

Relative to electricity, hydrogen is very expensive, inefficient and hard to ship. Building an entirely new system of hydrogen pipelines, trucks and storage just for cars is not a good investment — we already built one for electricity.

It also takes massive amounts of energy to use electricity to split water to make hydrogen for a car. At $16 per gallon for hydrogen, the math doesn't work.

"Even if hydrogen had a future, the existence of EVs has killed that future," says Ivan Drury, the director of insights at the automotive data company Edmunds. "Whatever workarounds there were going to be, we’ve gone too far down the EV road to change course."

Atkinson's other suggestion, synthetic fuels, is also not a magical solution.

Synfuels, a form of synthetic hydrocarbon, are mostly still in the lab. They can be manufactured with clean electricity and carbon dioxide from the air, but they are exorbitantly expensive. Porsche, which invested $75 million in a Chilean e-fuel company, estimates a cost of $37 per gallon for its racing team.

Even optimistic projections by the International Council on Clean Transportation put the price close to $10 per gallon. "Synfuels are just a distraction," says Brian Collie, BCG's global automotive analyst.

That doesn't mean synfuels are without a role. But they will almost certainly only be used for carbon-free versions of aviation and heavy industry, not driving to pick up milk.

There are reasons, in some cases, why it makes sense to stick with a perfectly functional gasoline-powered car instead of buying a new EV. For one, it's almost certainly cheaper. New cars are a notoriously bad investment. Car prices, and EVs especially, are still abnormally high. Financing is pricey.

But we are nearing the point when the total cost of owning an EV, including purchase price, fuel and maintenance, will be lower than conventional vehicles. For some commercial vehicles, says Collie, it already is.

Car buyers already know this. Globally, EV sales have grown more than 50 percent per year on average since 2013. They now make up 13 percent of all new sales, making EVs the fastest-growing segment of the car industry. The Tesla Model Y is now one of the top 10 selling vehicles in America.

Will it stay that way? Wall Street and the auto industry seem to think so: Global automakers committed $1.2 trillion to develop electric cars instead of gasoline-powered cars. This will be very hard to reverse, as every major automaker has announced a partly or fully electric lineup by 2030.

For some countries, the honeymoon is indeed over. It's just daily life. In Norway, about 80 percent of new sales were EVs last year.

My bet is most car owners who keep gasoline-powered cars in their garages in a few decades will be people like Atkinson who are passionate about motorcars. That's fine. Most people will be driving EVs and they’ll see gasoline cars the same way we see horses today: as hobbies.