Many Americans hesitate to buy electric cars (EVs) because of range anxiety — the fear they'll run out of electricity on the road. Even when they can find charging stations, people worry that recharging will take much longer than the minutes needed to fill a gas tank.
Recent developments could make range anxiety a thing of the past. They might also allow electric cars and trucks to have smaller batteries, saving weight and conserving the scarce materials used to manufacture batteries.
These developments would also increase miles per kilowatt-hour in our vehicles, since it takes more electricity to run heavier cars.
For many of us, EVs are already totally practical for daily commuting and around town driving, since they can be charged overnight right in our garages. My own EV, a 2018 Chevrolet Bolt, has never been charged anywhere except at our house. It is good for 200-300 miles on one charge, depending on the weather.
In addition to its convenience, my Bolt, like all electric cars, requires little routine maintenance and leaves internal combustion cars in the dust at traffic lights.
The ideal fix for range anxiety would be equipping major highways so they can supply electricity wirelessly to cars and trucks as they move along on intercity trips. This would allow EVs to travel intercity without drawing electricity from their own batteries, leaving these batteries well charged for local driving after leaving the freeway.
A major obstacle to doing this could be the high cost of installing the necessary equipment under every mile of the main highways. The interstate highway system alone has 47,876 miles of road.
A one-mile experimental installation of a wireless charging system planned for a Florida highway is estimated to cost $14 million. At this rate, electrifying the entire interstate road system would cost $670 billion. This might be a reasonable investment, but it certainly sounds like a lot of money.
Perhaps, though, it might not be necessary to electrify all 47,876 miles.
If electricity beamed up from the road could both propel a vehicle and also top off its batteries, a few miles of charging every so often might do the job. If only one mile out of 10 on interstate highways were equipped for charging, this would reduce the total cost down to only about $67 billion.
This possible fix is just another example of how modern technology is heavily dependent on the infrastructure within which it operates.
Smartphones would be worthless without the large number of cell towers with which they connect. Without these cell towers, our phones could not allow us to talk with anyone.
Old-fashioned gasoline-burning vehicles themselves are highly dependent on infrastructure: service stations, refineries, and the trucks bringing gas from refinery to service station. I can still remember driving my VW Beetle cross country on I-80 when the interstate highway network was still being constructed back in the 1960s and few services were available along it.
Today's personal computers would obviously be far less valuable if we could not connect them to the internet, another major example of dependency on infrastructure that is totally external to our gadgets.
Of course, there is still work needed to make EVs practical and convenient for everyone. Perhaps the most important task is figuring out how to make charging EVs convenient for people who do not live in single family residences.
A lot of attention is being paid to this problem, and given American ingenuity, I am sure that solutions will soon be found.
Given the rapid installation of solar panels and the long-distance grids needed to make them most efficient, we are well on the way to the age of clean electricity. Within 20 years, internal combustion vehicles may be regarded as things of the past, along with fax machines, long-distance phone bills, and cable television.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, "Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective," was published in 1981. His most recent book is "The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America's Original Sin." His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon and other states. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.