The heart of a petrol or diesel vehicle is the engine. With proper care and maintenance, it can power the car for around 200,000 kilometres. Sometimes even more. The most important component of an electric car is not the motor, but the battery. Most car manufacturers offer a warranty of eight years or 160,000 km on it. Sounds good at first.
The battery for an electric car contains lithium and cobalt. Lithium is mainly mined in Australia, Chile and China, so it has to be shipped in from overseas. Cobalt mining produces sulphuric acid, which can poison groundwater or lakes and rivers. Cobalt is considered carcinogenic and is mainly mined in the Congo. That's not exactly around the corner either. Calling electric cars environmentally friendly is therefore highly questionable. Even when the electric car is sitting in the shop, it has already caused significant collateral damage to the environment. But that's not what this article is about.
Let's take a look at the market for used electric cars. A new vehicle is usually leased or financed by commercial or private customers for 36 or a maximum of 48 months. During this time, there should be no major technical problems. The first customer enjoys driving the car. After that, the vehicle is returned to the car dealership and everything is fine. Is that really the case?
It is worth comparing this to a petrol or diesel vehicle. Cars powered by fossil fuels can be sold quickly and reliably to second and third buyers. Many car buyers do not need a new car and prefer to buy used cars. These are much cheaper and still drive well and safely – ideally even with a dealer warranty. You can also resell the car at any time with relatively little loss in value, depending on how long you have driven the vehicle. If in doubt, you can always find a student or novice driver for your ageing youngtimer. Ultimately, the cars are sold off to Eastern Europe or Africa, where they enjoy a „second life“.
The situation is completely different for electric cars. Leased cars that have been returned are sitting like lead weights on dealers' used car lots. The remaining service life of an electric car cannot be calculated. Once performance starts to decline, this process accelerates; the battery would actually need to be replaced. If that made sense, that is. A new battery usually costs more than the residual value of the entire car. This means that the end of the battery's life equals a total economic loss. Even in Africa, there is no need for cars without batteries.
Now one could argue: so be it. After all, the electric car will run for up to eight years, until the end of the manufacturer's warranty for the battery. That is, if the original buyer were to drive the car for eight years. But that doesn't usually happen. The leasing cycle ends after three or four years. And then the electric car just sits there and sits and sits and...
When you compare the energy balance of an electric car with that of a vehicle with a combustion engine, the ideology-driven madness becomes truly apparent. On the one hand, there is the electric car with its environmentally harmful battery production and an actual useful life of three, four or a maximum of eight years. On the other hand, there is the car with a combustion engine, which has a total useful life of fifteen or twenty years somewhere on the planet.
Everyone should continue to be free to choose the drive technology for their car. However, the government needs to explain honestly how the energy transition is supposed to work in light of these facts while it is still in office. Expanding the charging infrastructure will do little to help. And if we want to be honest, we should also mention that new electric cars are hardly selling anymore. Many buyers only purchased their electric car because there was an attractive subsidy for first-time buyers. But this subsidy no longer exists because the federal government has to make savings.
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