I was having a conversation with a friend about electric cars and it proved that neither of us know what we’re talking about. I’m also now having a difficult time sourcing information for the pros and cons of the future of lithium batteries in cars. Would anyone be able to ELI5?
In: Engineering
Lithium ion batteries makes sense long term vs fossil fuels.
Whilst there may be a higher environmental cost of manufacturing EV’s initially versus ICE vehicles, lithium ion batteries can be recycled at the end of the vehicles lifetime, unlike the fuels used in ICE vehicles which end up in our atmosphere.
Another key point is that recycling lithium from lithium ion batteries is actually economically cheaper than mining lithium from the ground. This means that battery manufacturers will be incentivised to recycle lithium ion batteries in the future, as it will be more profitable than mined lithium. Recycle rates have also proven to be very high (95%+).
All of this battery power needs to be sourced from renewable electricity when recharging to make sense, but long term solar panels plus battery storage is trending to be one of the cheapest forms of electricity provision going forwards, so this is feasible.
As a use case, EV sceptics quite rightly point out that lithium ion battery charging does not make sense for those who don’t have access to home EV charging. This drawback of batteries will mean ICE vehicles will maintain more market share in this demographic for longer, but the advent of autonomous vehicles is now starting to look very likely that we have driverless cars within 10 years. If this is the case, that reduces significantly the potential impact of charge times for EV’s as no access to home charging can be avoided by vehicles autonomously charging away from home. The vast majority of surveyed current EV owners also say they much prefer to charge at home than visit gas stations, and charging on longer trips is an adequate user experience.
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