The Efficacy of EV’s, all its cracked up to be?

Hello world and welcome to my glorious blog, my name is Sean Romero and here’s a bit about myself before we dive into the topic. I’m a transfer here at SFSU finishing up my junior year studying Mechanical Engineering, my interest in Electric Vehicles (EV’s) started at the last school I attended (UCSC) in which I participated in a collegiate design competition in which we engineered and built our very own Electric Racecar. That seeded my interest in the then somewhat slept on world of electric vehicles. And yes yes I know that it sounds silly to call EV’s “slept on” now but at the time they really were nonmainstream options when it came to choosing a vehicle, of course that simply isn’t the case now.

But that got me thinking, the Electric Vehicle has been billed as our solution to global warming for years now, but is it really all it’s cracked up to be? I mean yes of course I would kill to have a Tesla as a daily driver but how is my buying a new vehicle solving our overconsumption problem, could it be that this is all just a pseudo-environmentally conscious sales pitch? I’ve decided to figure this out for myself; in this series of blog posts I will be tackling the question Are EV’s really a viable solution to our climate crisis, or simply a cleverly marketed continuation of our overconsumption?

To start, I found this paper published in the British Medical Bulletin, in which the author asks this very question and comes to the conclusion that instead of investing any deeper into personal transportation we should instead be focusing on building a reliable mass transportation system. Instead of deepening our dependence on our cars, shift our culture of transportation towards a more communal one. This paper does offer some good opinions and well argued viewpoints but when you see quantitative analysis such as this and this the waters become muddied.

This question is a complex one and will necessitate more analysis, but I believe it is one worth asking…