Are Electric Cars Worth Buying Today?

 Are you looking for a new car to purchase? Either this is your first car, or you want to replace your ten-year-old car that needs to be jumpstarted every morning. Either way, almost everybody has heard of electric cars recently, and they are on the rise, and the benefits are clear as day. They are quieter, have better driving comfort, have self-driving or assisted driving, and most come with an inbuilt touchscreen the size of an iPad, with all the features you could ask for. They are also environmentally friendly, creating practically zero carbon emissions. They are so beneficial that some countries in the EU and some states in the USA are banning the sale of gasoline cars altogether, aiming for a CO2-free environment (Person). However, there are still too many drawbacks to switching to electric cars completely and discarding gasoline cars. Gasoline cars are irreplaceable because, compared to electric cars, they are safer, more reliable, and more accessible.

Gasoline cars are safer than electric cars for a few reasons. One of those reasons is that electric cars have lithium batteries, which are dangerously explosive and can cause minor crashes to be devastating (Courter). For example, on June 10, 2017, Richard Hammond was doing a Hillclimb in a Rimac Concept 1, an electric hypercar. At the finish line, where he was going pretty slow, he slipped off the hill and crashed a few meters down the hill. Richard Hammond is a massive car personality and one of the hosts of the Grand Tour and has been in numerous crashes far worse than this, with one being him flipping a top fuel dragster going 300 mph. However, he was driving an electric car, and the car’s batteries kept exploding, one after another, while he could climb out with a broken leg, the batteries kept exploding for two days straight after the crash. 

In 2006, Mercedes wanted to create an electric car to test its popularity. So, they took their supercar, the Mercedes SLS AMG, and created the Mercedes SLS AMG Electric Drive out of it, which removed the 6.2L naturally aspirated V8 and replaced it with four electric motors, boosting the power from 583 HP to 740 HP. However, during production, it was reported that the car was abnormally heavy, so much so that they had to create the entire monocoque out of carbon fiber, a rare material used for fast and sporty cars to make it lighter. However, with the addition of carbon fiber, the price also increased. With the standard SLS pulling $149,000, the Electric Drive cost the few lucky buyers $400,000 at the time, but with time, a used one can still pull north of $1 million at auctions (Edelstein). The SLS was just one of the cars showcasing how inconvenient electric cars are. However, the cost issue is not only evident in higher-class vehicles. In 2021, Tuomas Katainen, a 2013 Tesla Model S owner, had issues with his car within 900 miles of driving. When he went to Tesla to get it checked out, they quoted him a price of $23,000 to get his battery replaced. For comparison, if a man wanted to get his entire engine swapped, it would cost him no more than $8,000 for a decent swap, and a rebuild, which is considerably better and cheaper, would cost anywhere between $2,500 and $4,000 in engine parts and labor costs. In retaliation, the Tesla owner blew up his broken-down Tesla, choosing to spend those $23,000 someplace else.

However, the big issue with electric cars is their accessibility. Accessibility can include many things in the car world, such as maintenance, gas/electric stations, and other factors. However, electric and gasoline cars differ significantly in two factors: how many gas stations are compared to electric stations. I never had to worry about fuel in my 2011 Honda Pilot because of its great range compared to electric cars and how much more accessible a gas station was than an electric charging station. Below is a map of the 145,000 gas stations across the US, compared with the electric charging stations in the same region. While they are in the same hotspots, especially in areas like California and most of the East Coast, the real problem arises in the Midwest.

Here is a photo showing the 150,000 gas stations in the USA; you can see one almost everywhere.

Source: Energy.gov

Here is a photo of the 45,000 electric charging stations in the USA, much fewer than gas stations.

(Bureau of Transportation)

As you can see, there are fewer electric charging stations than gas stations in major cities and even in the Midwest more prominently. On the second map, you can see green dots and yellow dots, with green dots being standard chargers and yellow dots being DCFC (Direct Current Fast Charging) chargers. There are fewer electric stations and DCFC chargers, which means that for most of the chargers, if your battery is low, your car will take multiple hours to charge, which is a further inconvenience. 

In conclusion, electric cars are far from being on the same level as gasoline-powered cars. They are being revolutionized every day to make them equal to gasoline cars. However, the infrastructure required to support the mass growth of electric car enthusiasts is far from where it is supposed to be. Not only that, they are hated by many actual car enthusiasts because electric cars are the cause of the ban on gasoline cars, something many people do not want to see. Hydrogen cars are also taking a new look into the car industry, with production models already out on the market, such as Toyota’s 2023 Mirai and Hyundai’s 2023 Nexo Fuel Cell. While it may be true that hydrogen cars are nowhere near electric cars, banning gasoline cars altogether, like some countries in the E.U., is not a wise decision, and will benefit from having a lot of them still on the road in production. Does this prove that electric cars are terrible and should not be produced? No. Some fantastic electric cars are out there, such as the Rimac Nevara, Tesla Model S Plaid, Pininfarina Battista, and many others. However, relying solely on these cars, with all their problems, will not be good.