As we can see, all around us, electric vehicles are taking the world by storm, and people are wondering if they should make the switch. Obviously, climate change and emissions are the main reason they are offering electric alternatives but I don’t think that we need electric vehicles because the cons of an electric car overweight the pros. I’ll be talking about the cars, the costs of owning an electric car, and the semi-trucks.

First the cars, there are some pros and cons to an electric vehicle. One pro is that you can just park your car inside and plug it in when you are not using it. Gary Gastelu at Fox Business, on March 9th, 2022 said that according to the EPA the national average for a kilowatt-hour is 13 cents. Most chargers people have at home is a 240-volt charger, these take 8 hours or more to charge a car. So it costs about $7 to fully charge a car with a 150-mile range. Most gas cars have a 16-18 gallon fuel tank. The national gas price average right now is $4.24, with a 16-gallon tank it will cost 67.84 to fill a car up. So it costs more to fill up the gas car, but the tank will last around 3 times longer. 

The biggest problem with electric cars is the range. According to the US Department of Transportation on May 31st, 2017 stated that the average person will put on around 40 miles on their car per day. Let's use a 2021 Hyundai Kona Electric SUV as an example, for the battery only, the range is 258 miles. So if you were putting on about 40 miles a day, with this vehicle you would need to recharge it once every 6-7 days. Now a 2019 Ford Fusion will be able to go 561 miles on a highway and 379.5 in the city. So using the average of 40 miles a day, you will only need to fill it up about every 11-12 days.

 But another problem with electric cars is that they are horrible in cold weather. Charles Singh from Moterbiscuit on August 19th, 2021 said that electric cars will lose over 40% of their range in 20-degree weather, and in the northern United States, it can be that temperature for up to 5 months a year. To extend the range of the electric cars you will need a bigger battery, but with technology advancing so fast, maybe someone will find a way to increase the range without increasing the size of the battery.

Another downside to electric cars is that they cost more to own and operate. For example, a 2022 Ford F-150 costs around $30,000, but the 2022 electric Ford trucks will cost at least $40,000. It will also cost more for manufacturers to make electric cars rather than gas ones. According to the website Ypte, they said that the batteries for these cars need rare metals like lithium, which costs $17,000 per metric ton in 2021. Gas car engines can be made of aluminum or steel, aluminum cost $2,554 per metric ton in 2021, and steel costs $292 per ton. Ypte also said that making electric cars emit the same amount of CO2 as making diesel or gas cars, then saying that 16-19 tons are emitted when manufacturing these cars. So I think that the only good thing about an electric car is that it would be cheaper to recharge, compared to filling up a gas car with the rising fuel prices. Electric cars can sometimes be more reliable like if your daily trips weren’t that long. But there is one thing that I think cannot go electric.

The thing that cannot go electric unless the technology is very advanced, is semi-trucks. The reason being is that the range of a diesel truck compared to electric semis being produced is far superior, so it could cause issues with goods taking longer to get across the country. According to Caranddriver, Caleb Miller on Dec 20th, 2021, said that Nikola has started to produce electric semis to operate at the ports in Los Angeles. So the truck isn’t be making big trips right now, but if it were to start carrying cargo across the states, it would need some serious improvements on the range. Miller stated that the range on these trucks right now is 350 miles and it charges from 10 to 80 percent in 2 hours. Say a driver needed to go from Los Angeles to Chicago which is 2,015 miles and a 30 hr drive. That means the driver of the electric truck would need to recharge over 5 times to get there, and the recharging would add over 10 hours to that trip without the stops for food and sleep. On the other hand, most diesel trucks can go a little over 2,000 miles on a single tank, so they probably won’t need to refill on that LA to Chicago trip. Also, many trucks have to go through the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains which are very rural for many hundreds of miles, there are fuel stations every couple of towns, but charging stations will only be in the major cities. Plus the charging stations will only be for smaller cars.

In my opinion, there are too many cons to an electric car to have one. It is more expensive to own an electric car compared to a gas car, and manufacturers are creating just as many emissions making the electric cars. Plus the batteries also need rare and expensive metals. And if electric semis started to take over, it could cause issues with things taking longer to get places. And I think that all the money it would take to build more electric cars and replace gas stations with charging stations just isn’t worth it for what the electric cars would do for this world.