The pressure is on for California to meet its clean-vehicle goals. In less than two years, 35 percent of vehicles sold must have zero tailpipe emissions. And by 2035, all light-duty vehicles sold must be zero emissions. 

Automakers have ramped up their production of battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles to meet this mandate, and so far, sales seem to be on track. But many questions remain on how to achieve this wholesale revamping of transportation. Experts at UC Davis are researching how to overcome the remaining road bumps to eliminating tailpipe emissions. Here, they answer some common questions on California’s zero-emissions mandates.

While the zero-emissions target may have felt sudden to some when Gov. Gavin Newson announced it in an executive order in 2020, it’s really the next milestone on a road that state officials have been pursuing since the 1990s. 

California first began to introduce regulation in the early 1990s, explained Alan Jenn, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and researcher at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. At the time, unhealthy air plagued regions such as the Los Angeles metropolitan area and inland valleys — frequently, cities failed to meet federal and state thresholds for pollutants. So, officials started setting targets for automakers to offer zero-emissions vehicles among their fleets. But, as automakers stalled in the rollout of clean cars, regulations were delayed.

Finally, when in the 2000s automakers began rolling out viable hybrid and electric vehicles, the state air resources board started putting formal targets in place. The governor’s executive order was really the next step to ensure continued progress along this route, said Jenn. In 2022, the air resources board formalized the executive order, making it official that all light-duty vehicles — including passenger cars, trucks and SUVs — sold in the state must be zero emissions by 2035.

Are we making enough progress to achieve the mandate?

 

Aside from a couple of flat years of sales between 2018 and 2020, sales on electric vehicles in California have been rising since 2011. Today, one in four new cars sold in the state is an EV, said Dahlia Garas, program director at UC Davis’ Electric Vehicle Research Center. 

As batteries become cheaper, ranges increase and competition increases between automakers, electric vehicles are growing more affordable and attractive to drivers. “We’re making reasonably good progress,” said Garas. “I think our market is actually really strong.”

Still, recent news headlines have called attention to the fact that sales in 2023 slowed down. To be clear, more EVs still sold in 2023 than 2022 — but the rate of increase dipped. During the 2019 dip, there were also worries that EVs had reached a market saturation point, but the slowdown turned out to be temporary, said Jenn. He said he remains optimistic. “It’s hard to make those conclusions from these small blips in the data,” he said.

California Energy Commission

Will the electric grid be able to support that many EVs?

To achieve the zero-emissions vehicle mandate, California will need about 15 times as many electric cars on the road as today. From an energy supply standpoint, state officials believe the state will have a capacity to keep all these cars charged with planned expansion of wind and solar power. 

That said, the rollout of electric vehicles may strain the grid, especially if they are all charging at the same time, such as in the evening when people get home from work. In addition to needing a lot of electricity available at those times, that demand could exceed the capacity of local infrastructure, including neighborhood transformers. Utilities will need to upgrade much of this local equipment.

Luckily, encouraging people to spread out their charging times could help with the above issues, said Jenn. For instance, if more people have the option to charge during the day — for example using a charger at their workplace — that would shift demand away from peak evening hours. Incentivizing daytime charging also has the added benefit of drawing power when the sun is out, supplying vehicles with clean and plentiful solar.

Will EVs be affordable for everyone?

If you’re noticing a conspicuous number of luxury EVs, your eyes are not deceiving you. “The lineup of vehicles that most automakers are releasing these days, as it relates to electric vehicles, is more on the top end,” said Jenn. “So there aren’t as many affordable electric vehicles.”  

Part of the reason for that is that automakers are attempting to recoup the costs of transitioning their production. Trucks and SUVs have a higher profit margin than smaller vehicles, so companies make more money for each automobile sold.

That said, EV prices are becoming more competitive. They currently are not far off the average price tag for a combustion-powered car. According to Kelley Blue Book, the average price for a new EV was $55,353 in January 2024, whereas the overall average new car price was $47,401. With incentives such as federal tax rebates applied, the cost of an EV shrinks even closer to combustion vehicles. 

Still, there is a dearth of affordable options, such as economy sedans that will fill the niche occupied by cars like the Honda Civic or Toyota Camry. Jenn said he expected that automakers will start to fill in these holes over time, making more affordable options available.

Buying used EVs might be a viable affordable option, too. Considerations like battery warranties can help reassure car buyers, about 70 percent of whom exclusively purchase used vehicles, said Jenn. By 2026, California will require that all EVs come with an eight year, 100,000-mile battery warranty, with the goal of ensuring that used EVs retain most of their battery function.

California Energy Commission

What if I can’t charge my car at home?

In order for California to be successful, electric vehicles must be practical for everyone — not only for people who can install a garage charger.

Right now, apartment dwellers and renters often don’t have access to a charger at home.

Even when there is a charger around, EV owners in these homes face hurdles. Garas said that she’s heard of charger rates at apartments abruptly shooting up — an unexpected expense that can be especially challenging on an already-tight budget.

Relying on public chargers isn’t a great alternative, either. A public EV charger tends to cost more than home charging, which means renters would potentially have to pay more to charge than homeowners. “Folks that are in apartments, that are maybe lower income than folks that are in single-family homes, are now also getting the most expensive charging solution,” said Garas.

To solve these problems, researchers and policymakers will need to consider the needs of people across the car-buyer market. There are federal and state incentives available for installing chargers in multifamily housing, and new developments are required to include chargers. It’s often not as simple as hiring an electrician, however, because EV owners will use more power and charger operators need to recoup those costs. For example, one system to account for energy use is differential parking rates. At UC Davis, drivers who park in a space with a charger pay a higher per-day rate, accounting for the cost of electricity. It may be a straightforward system to apply in other settings, too.

In the meantime, another option for people in multifamily housing or rural areas with limited charging access are plug-in hybrid vehicles. These vehicles can run solely on battery power, like EVs, but can also be powered with gasoline when their charge runs out.

 

Will I be able to drive long distances?

Not only will people need to be able to charge in their daily routine, but having access to chargers to support longer trips is crucial, too. It’s estimated that by 2035, California will need more than an additional 2 million chargers to support the electric car transition. According to the air resource board, the number of DC Fast chargers, which can recharge a vehicle battery in about 30 minutes, is growing to meet this demand.

But the number of chargers alone won’t be enough to make drivers confident. Every time Jenn gives a talk, he said he asks EV drivers in the audience to raise their hand if they’ve never had a problem using a public charger. No one’s hand goes up.

That problem is motivating UC Davis researchers to study the issues surrounding public charging. Sometimes, a charger may be running just fine, but a driver won’t be able to use it because their cell phone network isn’t supported in that area. To understand bugs like this, a group of UC Davis undergraduates are currently traveling around the state — in an EV, of course — and plugging into more than 3,000 public chargers.

California Energy Commission

Are EVs actually cleaner? Will the transition make a difference?

Electric vehicles are actually more resource-intensive to build than combustion cars. That’s because their big batteries contain minerals that are polluting and energy-intensive to extract. But that’s only one part of their total footprint. 

To get a full picture, you also have to consider impacts over the course of driving the car for several years. Because electric vehicles produce no tailpipe emissions, over time, their carbon footprint relative to combustion vehicles goes down. Additionally, as electricity in California is increasingly generated with renewable sources, the energy that is powering EV motors will also be cleaner. Even right now, when accounting for the pollution from power plants, a combustion car would need to hit 134 miles per gallon in order to be cleaner than an EV. “When you actually run the numbers,” said Jenn, “The EVs tend to be quite a bit better over the full lifecycle.”  

Meeting the mandate would be huge for the state’s emissions, almost 40 percent of which come from tailpipes. “It’s just such a huge percent of our emissions,” said Garas. “Tackling and cleaning our transportation systems in any way possible is going to have an enormous impact on climate and greenhouse gas emissions.”

California’s environmental laws also tend to nudge other states and the federal government along. The recent zero emissions rule is no exception: 13 other states have adopted at least some portion of the mandate, putting the country even closer to slashing climate-warming transportation emissions.

Credits

We recently compiled a list of the 15 Biggest EV Stocks in the World in 2024 and in this article, we discuss whether VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS)'s standing in this report.

According to the Global EV Outlook 2024 by the International Energy Agency, electric car sales surged in 2023, reaching nearly 14 million globally. This represents a 35% jump from 2022 and brings the total number of electric cars on the road to 40 million. Weekly registrations in 2023 surpassed the entire annual total from just ten years ago. Electric cars now account for 18% of all car sales globally, a significant climb from 2% in 2018. This rapid growth indicates a maturing electric car market with strong momentum. Interestingly, battery electric cars make up the majority (70%) of electric vehicles on the road today.

Approximately 95% of these sales were concentrated in China, Europe, and the United States, which dominate new electric car registrations. In these regions, electric cars represent a significant share of their local markets, with over 30% in China and over 20% in Europe. As these three key markets account for two-thirds of total car sales globally, their swift adoption of electric vehicles has a significant influence on worldwide trends.

In addition to US, China, and Europe, emerging markets like Southeast Asia and Brazil are also seeing rising EV sales, supported by various incentives and investments. In terms of the future outlook for electric vehicles, the long-term goals of top automakers in the world are quite ambitious. If achieved, they could put over 20 million electric cars on the road by 2030. This will lead to electric vehicles making up between 42% and 58% of car sales by 2030, exceeding even the most optimistic forecasts. The electric vehicle market size is predicted to reach over $950 billion by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.7% between 2023 and 2030.

Key drivers for growth in the Global EV market include decreasing EV battery prices and supportive government policies. The fastest-growing market segments are fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) and mid-priced EVs. Additionally, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to lead market growth. However, challenges such as high initial investments for charging infrastructure could impede growth.

Where Does VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS) Rank in the Major EV Stocks in 2024?

A fleet of electric vehicles lined up in uniform, highlighting the convenience of the company's transportation solutions.

Our Methodology

To compile our list of the 15 biggest EV stocks in the world in 2024, we shortlisted companies on the basis of their market capitalization. We have only included companies that are pure play in the EV sector or have substantial exposure to the sector. The biggest EV stocks in the world in 2024 have been ranked in ascending order of their market capitalization figures in USD. We also scanned our database of 919 hedge funds (as of Q1 2024) to share the number of hedge fund investors, where applicable.

Story continues

“Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).”

Is VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS) Leading the EV Market in 2024?

VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS)

Market Capitalization: $11.43 Billion

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 7

VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS) is a Vietnamese multinational car company founded by Vingroup, the leading private conglomerate in Vietnam, established by Pham Nhat Vuong.

VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS) unveiled new electric vehicles at CES 2024, including the VF 3 mini SUV and the VF 9 full-size SUV, alongside electric bikes. The company is entering the US market with its VF 8 SUV through agreements with five dealers.

VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS) reported strong Q1 2024 results, with revenue reaching $302.6 million. This reflected a YoY increase of 269.7%. Furthermore, the company’s operating loss decreased by 7.8% YoY and 15.4% from Q4 2023. With a market capitalization of over $11 billion, VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS) is one of the biggest EV stocks in the world in 2024.

VinFast Auto has an average price target of $6.50, derived from the 12-month forecasts of Wall Street analysts over the past three months. The highest target is $8, while the lowest is $5. This average price target indicates a potential upside of over 35% from the current price levels.

The stock was held by 7 hedge funds at the end of the first quarter of 2024.

Overall, VinFast Auto Ltd. (NASDAQ:VFS) ranks 4th among the 15 biggest EV stocks in the world in 2024. You can visit the 15 Biggest EV Stocks in the World in 2024 to see the other electric vehicle companies that are on the hedge fund radar.

While we acknowledge the potential of electric vehicle companies, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVIDIA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

Read Next: Michael Burry Is Selling These Stocks and Jim Cramer is Recommending These Stocks.

Disclosure. None. This article is originally published on Insider Monkey.

Credits

Lithium-ion batteries still dominate the market, Kevin Shang, a senior research analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, told me. But “over the next 10 years, we do see more and more long-duration energy storage coming into play.” Typical lithium-ion batteries can provide only about four hours of continual power, occasionally reaching up to eight — though that’s an economic constraint rather than a technical one. Generally speaking, it’s too pricey for lithium-ion to meet longer-duration needs in today’s market. So as states and countries get real about their clean energy targets and install more wind and solar generation, they need some way to ensure their grids’ reliability when the weather’s not cooperating or demand is peaking.

“There’s a need for something that can substitute for natural gas,” Logan Goldie-Scot, director of market research at the sustainable infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital told me. Almost no one believes lithium-ion batteries will be a viable alternative. “And so then it is an open question of whether that role will be filled by long-duration energy storage, by green hydrogen, or by clean firm power” like nuclear or geothermal, he said.

There are some novel battery chemistries and configurations out there, from Form Energy’s iron-air batteries to flow batteries that store their electrolytes in separate tanks to zinc-based batteries. But there are also numerous more creative, non-chemical, not-what-you-might-consider-a-battery batteries vying for a role in the long-duration storage market.

A battery that stores compressed air in caverns

Founded back in 2010, Toronto-based Hydrostor has been pursuing “advanced compressed air energy storage” for a while now. Essentially, the system uses off-peak, surplus, or renewable grid energy to compress air and pump it into a water-filled cavern, displacing that water to the surface. Then when energy is needed, it releases the water back into the cavern, pushing the air upward to mix with stored heat, which turns a turbine and produces electricity.

“Everybody has talked about long-duration storage for probably the past five years or so. The markets have not been there to pay for it at all. And that’s starting to change,” Jon Norman, Hydrostor’s president, told me.

Part of Hydrostor’s pitch is that its tech is a “proven pathway,” as it involves simply integrating and repurposing preexisting systems and technologies to produce energy. It’s also cheaper than lithium-ion storage, with no performance degradation over a project’s lifetime. Major investors are buying it — the company raised $250 million from Goldman Sachs in 2022, to be paid out in tranches tied to project milestones. At the time, it was one of the largest investments ever made in long-duration energy storage.

The company has operated a small 1.75 megawatt facility in Canada since 2019, but now with Goldman’s help it’s scaling significantly, developing a 500 megawatt grid-scale project in California in partnership with a community choice aggregator, as well as a 200 megawatt microgrid project in a remote town in New South Wales, Australia.

“Our bread and butter application is serving the needs of grids and utilities that are managing capacity and keeping the lights on all the time,” Norman told me. The company’s projects under development are designed to deliver eight hours of energy. “That’s what the market’s calling for right now,” Norman said, though theoretically Hydrostor could handle multi-day storage.

Standard lithium-ion batteries have shown that they can be economical in the eight-hour range too, though. Back in 2020, a coalition of community choice aggregators in California requested bids for long-duration storage projects with at least eight hours of capacity. While Hydrostor and numerous other startups threw their hats in the ring, the coalition ultimately selected a standard lithium-ion battery project for development.

While this could be viewed as a hit to more nascent technologies, Hydrostor said the process ultimately led to the company’s 25-year, 200 megawatt offtake contract with Central Coast Community Energy, which will purchase power from the company’s 500 megawatt project in California’s Central Valley, set to come online in 2030. But that long lead time could be one of the main reasons why Hydrostor didn’t win the coalition’s bid in the first place.

“When you consider the very pertinent needs for energy storage systems today in California and yesterday, a technology that is not due to come online for another six years – I don’t think you’re even yet at the cost comparison conversation,” Goldie-Scot told me, in reference to Hydrostor’s timeline. “It’s just, how soon can some of these companies deliver a project?” Generate recently acquired esVolta, a prominent developer of lithium-ion battery storage projects.

But ultimately, Norman says he doesn’t really view Hydrostor as in competition with lithium-ion. “We would even add [traditional] batteries to our system if we wanted to provide really fast response times,” he told me. He says the use cases are just different, and that he has faith that compressed air storage will eventually prove to be the superior option for grid-scale, long-duration applications.

A battery that stores kinetic energy in heavy blocks

Another company taking inspiration from pumped storage hydropower is Energy Vault. Founded in 2017, the Swiss company is pursuing a “gravity-based” system that can store up to 24 hours of energy. While the design of its system has shifted over the years, the basic concept has remained the same: Using excess grid energy to lift heavy blocks (initially via cranes, now via specialized elevators), and then lowering those blocks to spin a turbine when there’s energy demand.

The company raised $110 million from Softbank Vision Fund in 2019, but failed to find an immediate market for its tech. “When we founded the company, we started thinking long-duration was going to be required much more quickly, and hence the focus on gravity,” Rob Piconi, Energy Vault’s CEO, told me.

But instead of waiting around for the long-duration market to boom, the company went public via SPAC in early 2022 and reinvented itself. Now it makes much of its revenue selling the sort of traditional lithium-ion energy storage systems that it once sought to replace, and has made moves into the green hydrogen space, too.

“The near term difficulty for many of these long-duration storage companies is that we’re still relatively early on in the scaling of lithium-ion,” Goldie-Scot, told me, noting that prices for Chinese-made batteries have plunged in the past year. Generate usually only invests in tech that’s well-proven and ready to scale up. So while lithium-ion alternatives will look more and more attractive as the world moves toward full decarbonization, in the interim, “there’s a gap between that longer term need and where the market is today.”

Piconi agrees. “If you look at storage deployments 95% to 98% of them are all this shorter duration type of storage right now, because that’s where the market is,” he said, though he added that he’s seeing demand pick up, especially in places like California that are investing heavily in storage.

All that’s to say the company hasn’t given up on its foundational concept — its first commercial-scale gravity energy storage system was recently connected to the grid in China, and the company has broken ground on a second facility in the country as well. These facilities provide four hours of energy storage duration, which lithium-ion batteries can also easily achieve — but the selling point, Piconi says, is that unlike lithium-ion, gravity storage systems don’t catch fire, rely on critical minerals, or degrade over time. And once the market demands it, Energy Vault can provide power for much longer.

Still, the upfront costs of Energy Vault’s system can be daunting for risk-averse utilities. So in an effort to lower prices, the company recently unveiled a series of new gravity storage prototypes that leverage either existing slopes or multi-purpose skyscrapers. They were designed in partnership with the architecture and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the company behind the world’s tallest building.

The market may not have been ready five years ago, Piconi told me. But “in 12 to 24 months, we’re going to start to see gravity pop up,” he projected.

A battery that stores thermal energy in ice

But wait, there’s more. Perhaps one of the best use cases for lithium-ion alternatives is in onsite, direct heating and cooling applications. That’s what the Israeli company Nostromo Energy is focused on, aiming to provide cleaner, cheaper air conditioning for large buildings like offices, school campuses, hotels, and data centers.

The company uses off-peak or surplus renewable energy to freeze water, storing it for later use in modular cells. Then, as temperatures rise and air conditioning turns on, that frozen water will cool down the building without the need for energy-intensive chillers, which commercial buildings normally rely upon. The system can be configured to discharge energy for two-and-a-half all the way up to 10 hours.

“Because air conditioning is roughly half of the electricity consumption of a building, we can provide that half from stored energy. And that’s overall a huge relief on the grid,” Nostromo’s CEO Yoram Ashery told me.

While a lot of (my) attention has been focused on how thermal batteries can help decarbonize heat-intensive industrial processes, and much has been written about the benefits of electric heat pumps over gas-powered heating, cooling is sometimes overlooked. That’s at least partially because air conditioning is already electrified.

But as more of our vehicles, appliances, and systems go electric, strain on the grid is poised to increase, especially during times of peak energy demand in the late afternoon and evening as people return home from the office before the sun goes down. Nostromo’s system can help shift that load by charging either midday (when solar is abundant) or at night (when wind is peaking), and discharging as demand for AC ramps throughout the afternoon.

Goldie-Scot said thermal storage technologies like this “offer something that some of the other technologies that are purely power-focused cannot. But they are still competing against relatively cheap natural gas.”

The upfront cost of the system, $2 to $3 million, is also nothing to sneeze at. But Ashery says it will fully pay for itself after just five years, as building owners stand to see significant savings on their electricity bills by shifting their demand to off-peak hours.

While one could theoretically power a building’s AC system using large lithium-ion-batteries, “it’s a problem to put big lithium batteries inside buildings,” Ashery told me. That’s due to the fire risk, which could impact insurance premiums for businesses, as well as space issues — these batteries would need to be container-sized to run an HVAC system. “That’s why only 1% of energy storage currently goes into commercial/industrial buildings,” Ashery wrote in a follow up email.

Shang told me that he sees so-called “behind the meter” applications like this as promising early markets for long-duration storage tech, especially given that utilities are “pretty cautious to adopt these technologies on a large scale.” But ultimately, he believes that policy is what’s really going to jumpstart this market.

“For long-duration storage, it may look years ahead, but actually the future is now,” he said. Because some of these new systems take longer to design and build, Shang told me, “you have to invest now. For the policies, you have to be ready now to support the development of these [long-duration energy storage] technologies.”

The Biden administration is certainly trying. All energy storage tech — thermal, compressed air, gravity, and lithium-ion — stands to benefit from generous IRA tax credits, which will cover 30% of a project’s cost, assuming it meets certain labor standards. Additional savings can accrue if a project meets domestic content requirements or is sited in a qualifying “energy community,” such as a low-income area that derives significant revenue from fossil fuel production.

The Department of Energy’s ultimate goal is to reduce the cost of grid-scale long-duration energy storage by 90% this decade (with “long” defined as 10-plus hours). And last year, the DOE announced $325 million in funding for 15 long-duration demonstration projects.

So while the market might not be quite ripe yet for funky, alternative approaches to long-duration storage, support like this is going to be necessary to ensure that these technologies are proven, cost-effective and available as the grid decarbonizes and the need crystallizes.

“There is not currently a system-wide way of valuing long-duration energy storage while competing against gas, but there are customers and utilities that have shown a willingness, especially with federal and state support, to invest in these technologies,” Goldie-Scot said. “That I think is giving us the first real inkling of the role that the long-duration can play in this market.”

Credits

With recent news that GM is going to re-introduce plugin hybrids in 2027, it’s likely that the company is still figuring out the design. So, I wanted to offer some unsolicited advice GM and everyone else going back to PHEVs need to think as they put new designs together and bring them to production.

How Much Range Is Enough Range?

My first EV was a bit of a failure. I bought a used 2011 Nissan LEAF that had spent a good part of its life roasting in the Phoenix sun sitting at 100% battery. By the time I got it, the thing had only 50 miles of range, and that was assuming city driving. I didn’t have it in my budget to buy a Tesla Model S or X, and this was before anything else with normal range came out. So, I had to look at affordable alternatives that would let me drive electric and still provide for my needs.

What I ended up getting was a Chevy Volt. It was a 2013 model, and got between 30 and 40 miles of electric range. When the range was depleted, the car made a groaning sound and its 1.4-liter four-cylinder engine would come to life, going from being an EV to being a hybrid. Initially, I charged it at home using a standard 120-volt outlet in my little makeshift add-on garage. 

But it didn’t take me long to find that I needed a little more power. I’d take the kids to school in the morning, drive home, work on stuff at home while it charged back up, and then go pick the kids up. On most days, I had just enough electric range to do what I needed to do, and when the gas tank got low, I didn’t fill it back up. Though, one day one of the kids forgot a backpack at home, and I didn’t have enough range to make the trip again on electric power. 

So, I upgraded the wiring in my garage and then upgraded my EVSE to feed the Volt with 3.3 kilowatts of power instead of 1.4 kilowatts. This meant I could easily do 2 and maybe even 3 full charges in a day, which effectively upped my capacity from around 10 kWh to roughly 30, which translated to around 100 miles of electric driving a day. So, there were almost no days when the vehicle would need to use gas unless I was taking a road trip or something, even when I had an unusual number of places to go for family and work needs.

Since then, I’ve had a newer Nissan LEAF with 40 kWh of battery (~150 miles), and then a Bolt EUV with almost 250 miles of EPA-rated range using about 60 kWh of battery. For almost everybody in most situations, that’s more than enough range to never worry about running out, especially for local driving. There’s still a lot of work to do to get the charging network for BEVs ready for everybody, but the range isn’t a problem for affordable EVs these days.

Beyond My Anecdote

While I found that around 100 miles of range was more than enough, that’s just my odd story. I lived out of district and had the kids under my ex’s address, so I had to drive a lot more and a lot longer to drop them off. I also had a business (architectural photography) that often required driving all over town to get to different jobs for real estate agents, architectural firms, and engineers. In other words, my need for around 100 miles to get gas mostly out of my daily life was probably more than most people.

Fortunately, there is a study from the ICCT that gives us a lot better info on what people’s needs are, and, more importantly, what kind of range they need to get them to actually plug the car in and use it as an EV. Here’s a key chart from the study:

Chart by the ICCT.

The horizontal axis is how much EPA-rated EV range a plugin hybrid vehicle has. The vertical axis shows us how much of the time the vehicle gets driven under electric power (zero is self explanatory, and 1 is 100%, so for example, .5 is 50%). 

It’s pretty clear that there’s a relationship between these numbers. The more electric range there is, the more often people plug the vehicle in and the more time it’s actually operating on electric power. For lower-range EVs, this is particularly bad because even people who plug them in use them a lot on gas power, as the battery doesn’t have enough range for people to do all of their local driving. 

My interpretation of this data is a little different from the ICCT’s. If we ignore everything below 30 miles (about the average miles Americans drive daily) to exclude crazy small batteries, it’s pretty clear that the line is more linear than they’re saying. It even fits in the data at the top-right corner of the graph, showing electric usage for cars with around 80 miles of range being used about 90% of the time under EV power!

What A New PHEV Needs To Be Legitimate In The 2020s

Today, a PHEV can’t really be compared to an ICE vehicle. That’s 2010 standards, where we were thankful for any amount of electric driving people were doing. Today, we have to have higher standards. If a PHEV is going to be useful today, it needs to be plugged in and driven electric most of the time, not driven on ICE except in very rare cases.

And it’s clear that anything under about 60 miles of range is too little, because real people in the real world simply aren’t driving many electric miles in those vehicles. And, really, 80–100 miles is what it takes for people to drive them almost exclusively on electric power, so that’s even better. But we have to set a reasonable floor, and I’m putting that at about 60% EV miles.

More importantly, though, the vehicle had better have some bona fide electric range. Many nonsense bull**it PHEVs have come out that didn’t even have an EV mode. Sure, they got better mileage running on a mix of plugin and gas power, but that means every drive is going to be using gas.

So, at the end of the day, it needs to be 60+ miles of all-electric range. If manufacturers can’t produce that, they’re selling cheap excuses.

Featured image: two first-generation Chevrolet Volts charging. Image by Jennifer Sensiba.

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Credits

The Tesla Model Y wasn’t the first electric car sold in America. Hell, it wasn’t even the first Tesla. But the roomy electric crossover is, to date, the most important electric vehicle ever designed by an American company. As the first electric car here to offer more than 300 miles of range for less than $30,000, the Chevy Equinox EV will be a key piece of intel in determining if there’s more unrealized demand for electric cars when it goes on sale. It’ll also determine what kind of future General Motors will have.

Reviews for the new Equinox EV are embargoed until noon ET tomorrow and we’ll have one for you to read, written by the great Sam Abulesamid. I haven’t driven the car yet so I cannot say how it performs, but in 15 years of covering electric cars in the United States, I’ve scarcely seen a more important launch for a company.

Everyone knows electric cars are too expensive. The Equinox EV promises to be in that magic sweet spot the industry hopes will appeal to buyers who have suddenly become hesitant to buy electric cars. It’s a compact two-row crossover, which is the segment with the most juice. The economical version set to launch later this year should cost under $28,000 and offer 319 miles of EPA estimated range.

Even the version launching this summer costs just $35,795 after an instantly-applied tax credit, making it the cheapest thing you can buy with more than 300 miles of range in the United States currently.

Why The Model Y Was So Important

Source: Tesla

The GM EV-1 was the first modern quasi-production electric car sold by an automaker. General Motors abandoned the project, but it showed there was a future for electric cars. A decade later, the Nissan Leaf demonstrated that it was possible to mass produce an EV.

With the Tesla Roadster, the nascent company proved a startup could build a vehicle with more performance than what the traditional manufacturers could achieve. But the Roadster was scarcely a real car. It was a demonstration of what was to come in the form of the Model S, a mainstream luxury car with more than sufficient range. The Model S was a huge hit, eventually overtaking luxury sedans from Germany.

The Model X and the Model 3 would follow, but it’s the Model Y that is ultimately the most important Tesla built to date, and therefore the most important electric car. With the Model Y, Tesla showed off it could build a car for a broad audience at a lower price. Not only that, the Model Y revolutionized production techniques and basically showed the rest of the industry what was possible.

It also, arguably, set off a sprint by the rest of the automotive world to try and catch up. So far, only the Chinese are close, but the Tesla Model Y remains the best-selling car in the world. That’s a huge deal. The previous best-selling vehicle was the Toyota Corolla, which is a cheap global car with a million variants.

Tesla is also more than a brand. It is a lifestyle. It’s an environmental statement. It’s also the global standard for electric vehicles. Don’t believe me? In the first quarter of 2024, with numerous brands selling EVs, 1-in-3 electric cars sold in the United States were Tesla. The brand sold 96,729 Model Ys here in Q1, followed by the Model 3 in 2nd place at 30,842 units. The third most popular electric car in Q1 was the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which sold a whopping 9,589, or slightly less than 10% of Model Y sales.

Is there a market for that many non-Tesla EVs?

Why The Chevy Equinox EV Is Just As Important

The Model Y is important because it was a success. The Equinox EV will be important as a success or as a flop.

As recently as June of 2021, GM said it would spend $35 billion on electric cars and autonomous vehicles. The investment in autonomous cars hasn’t worked out as of late, putting a lot of pressure on GM’s Ultium electric vehicle platform. So far the results have been mixed. Supply and production problems have delayed a full rollout of the Cadillac Lyriq, Chevy Blazer EV, Silverado RST, and GMC Hummer EV.

The Blazer EV may have been named the Motor Trend SUV Of The Year, but software issues sidelined the vehicle (and its platform cousin) for months. When the Blazer EV finally came back on sale the company had to lower the price to make it more competitive, albeit at a still-expensive $50k+ after incentives. We’ll get Q2 sales data in July, but the Blazer EV only moved 600 units in the first quarter, putting it essentially last among mainstream two-row electric crossovers. The Cadillac Lyriq is performing better, having sold 5,800 units over the same period, but that still lags vehicles like the Mustang Mach-E and Ioniq 5.

While not quite as large, the attractive new Equinox EV will finally offer Tesla-like range at a sub-Tesla price. That’s key. When the sub-$30,000 model finally hits the market, it’ll be the first real affordable electric car with the magic 300+ range offering. While I think a more affordable Chevy Bolt is probably fine for most people, it’s a hatchback with semi-limited range and there are only so many people who will buy one.

I also think there’s a hard limit on the number of people who will purchase a Tesla. Some of that has to do with Tesla’s CEO, but I think a bigger potential factor is that are consumers who are going to be more comfortable buying a car from a more traditional brand. If the Equinox EV isn’t crap then I think it’s the best choice for people who are more interested in a long-established brand (at the same time, there are probably people who won’t buy it precisely because it’s from GM).

GM’s Ultium platform

If the Equinox EV is successful, it will go a long way to show that there are still more buyers out there and the recent slowdown we’ve seen in the market has more to do with the types of electric cars we’ve got on sale and less to do with the idea of electric cars themselves. At the same time, it’ll justify GM’s big investment in Ultium and show that a non-Tesla company can build a lot of electric vehicles profitably and at scale.

If the inverse happens, well, then the inverse might be true. If Americans are unwilling to buy a relatively cheap and capable vehicle from a longstanding American brand then, well, the market is smaller than General Motors hoped. It’ll also possibly doom the Ultium platform as, so far, none of the other products GM has trotted out with Ultium have been smash hits and it’s too early to tell how the Ultium-based Honda Prologue is going to do.

Right now, Tesla Model Y sales have leveled off, but the car also hasn’t been significantly updated in a few years. The Equinox EV, in my opinion, looks better than the Model Y and offers an almost identical range for a lower price. It’s not going to be as fast, as technologically advanced, or as Tesla as the Model Y, but did I mention it’s going to be cheaper?

Assuming GM does what it needs to do to build and market the Equinox EV, this will be the first electric car for everyone else. It’s just a question of how big “everyone else” actually is.

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Whether you drive an electric car or are considering making the switch, you've probably been drawn into a discussion about whether they are really better for the climate.

Electric cars are key to the world reducing emissions, with transport accounting for almost 20 per cent and rising, so you probably haven't had that debate for the last time.

To save you from your next barbecue encounter, we have turned to the EV Council, which has crunched the numbers for you.

We're comparing an electric car and a traditional petrol one and looking at the life-cycle emissions — that is, all the emissions produced from cradle to grave.

For both types of car, these are the key stages where emissions are produced:

manufacturing of the car,production of the battery, especially for electric carsrunning the cars over their life-cycle, either on petrol or electricitydisposal and recycling of the vehicle at the end of its life, including batteries

We'll also compare electric cars in different states because each state uses different amounts of fossil fuels for electricity, which affects how "clean" the car is.

To compare cars, we've chosen an average medium SUV, the sort of car you commonly see on Australian roads.

Some examples of a medium SUV are the electric Tesla Model Y, Toyota's RAV4 and the Mazda CX-5 on the petrol side.

So, buckle up and let's go.

Let's start at when the car is made

Manufacturing covers the production of the raw materials in the car’s metal body, interiors, tyres, seating, the whole bundle. At this first stage, all these cars come out with similar emissions profiles.

... adding batteries for EVs

Battery production is the stage where we start to see a split between petrol and electric cars.

Electric vehicles are powered by batteries, so their batteries are significantly larger and heavier, and use more critical minerals. Our electric SUV also needs a bigger battery than a small hatchback.

It's important to note that this is about life-cycle emissions, so we aren't evaluating other environmental or human rights impacts from battery production for EVs, and we're also not critiquing the oil industry in those areas for petrol cars. That barbecue debate is for another day.

Batteries produced in China have higher emissions than those produced in Europe, and as most Australian electric cars currently have Chinese-made batteries, that's what's used here.

Climate experts and even the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expect these figures to drop as more renewable energy is used in the coming years to make the batteries.

"So the energy needed to produce batteries is decarbonised, and therefore has lower emissions," according to University of Technology Sydney transport researcher, Professor Robin Smit.

So at this point, before the cars hit the road, electric cars have more embedded emissions.

But that all changes when you start driving …

Taking our cars on the road

It won't shock you to find out that most of a car's lifetime emissions come from powering it to drive.  

"The fuel energy cycle is normally the most important part of the life-cycle assessment [and] that includes on-road driving, the maintenance, and of course, the production of the energy," Professor Smit said.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimates the average Australian car drives around 12,600 kilometres a year, or 189,000 over its lifetime, so that is what's used in this modelling.

Petrol cars are dirty. That's a fact. Combustion cars are powered by burning petrol, which releases emissions into the atmosphere and is — pardon the pun —  a major climate change driver. These are referred to as 'tailpipe emissions'.

The petrol SUV here is up against an electric SUV charged on the national grid, which has a mix of fossil fuels and renewables.  

Our petrol SUV produces almost 46 tonnes of carbon over its lifetime on the road. 

These figures also factor in the emissions coming from refining and transporting the fuel.

"When you look at fossil fuels, they need to be extracted, processed, and then transported to service stations, for example, to make them available. So there's a greenhouse gas emission costs associated with that," Professor Smit said.

The estimated petrol used here is 8.3 litres for 100 kilometres and comes from the Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP). These figures are almost always lower than real-world petrol use.

So, a lot of energy is burnt to move petrol cars, but most of it is wasted.

"They are not efficient, about 70 to 80 per cent of the electricity or energy is wasted in heat. So you only use 20 to 30 per cent of the energy into fuels for actually driving around," Smit said.

What's more, Australians typically drive heavier cars than other countries, especially in Europe. Heavier cars require more fuel to move them, resulting in higher emissions. 

This all means that petrol cars start producing significantly more emissions during their use, leaving electric cars in the dust.

Let’s look at a different view of our two cars as we drive them for 15 years or 189,000 kilometres. Petrol cars are displayed in the blue line, and electric cars in red.

Electric cars are powered by electricity (obviously!) but how that electricity is created makes a huge difference to the overall emissions profile of EVs.

Strap in.

You can see emissions for the petrol car rise while the electric car's life-cycle emissions curve is flattening. That's because the composition of our electricity grid is rapidly changing and more renewables are coming online.

To account for that, this modelling from the EV Council uses the scenario mapped out by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) which predicts the rate of new renewables coming into the grid and fossil fuel plants being decommissioned. That is, by 2030, the same electric car will be producing lower emissions because it will be charged with more renewable power. 

So this is for Australia as a whole, but where you live can also have a big impact on how much cleaner and EV is.

Some Australian states already have mostly renewable energy powering their grids, while others still have lots of fossil fuels. 

A car that's charged off a grid with lots of fossil fuels produces much higher emissions than a car charged somewhere with mostly renewable energy.

Let's look at our electric SUV in Western Australia, where in 2022 more than 83 per cent of electricity came from fossil fuels, mostly gas. 

Now this is what our SUV's emissions look like in Tasmania (shown in the green line), which powers almost its entire electricity network on hydro.

It's the same in South Australia, which has lots of wind and solar energy in the grid.  You can see here that no matter where the EV is, it saves tonnes of emissions overall compared to a petrol SUV.

This highlights the huge opportunity to reduce transport emissions with electric cars.

The cleaner the grid, the cleaner the electric car. 

What about cars charged on rooftop solar?

More than 3 million Australian homes have rooftop solar and, according to a 2021 survey, most EV owners plug into their own set-up.

A car that's charged with rooftop solar produces even lower emissions over its lifetime. 

"When you use solar panels, they basically have very small-to-negligible emissions," transport expert Professor Smit noted.

Less than a tonne of carbon over all those kilometres!

Now, it's time to say goodbye to our cars and send them to the car afterlife …

Getting rid of our cars

According to Professor Smit, the greenhouse gas emissions from taking cars off the road are small compared to the overall driving life of a car.

What's more, most of the materials in a car can be recycled, so this offsets some of the emissions from the production of the car at the start of the cycle.

To complete our emission profile, let's add the emissions for the disposal of our cars.

There's a lot of potential for improvements here too.

It takes a lot of grunt to power a car, and when a battery can no longer do that and comes out of an electric car, it still holds a lot of value and charging potential.

It can be used as a backup household battery, for example. Some car companies like Tesla are already using old car batteries to power their factories.

It's estimated this second life for EV batteries could cut the carbon footprint of battery production by half.

At the finish line

Overall, every electric car will produce fewer emissions than its petrol equivalent, no matter where they are charged.

Even with an electricity grid that still uses some fossil fuels, electric cars have much lower overall carbon emissions, and that will continue to drop as the electricity gets greener.

And remember, this example uses SUVs, so lighter electric cars like hatchbacks have even lower emissions.

Hang on, what about hybrids?

Put simply, hybrids are complicated.

Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) can be run off either petrol or from a battery that's plugged in and charged. Therefore, the life-cycle emissions from a plug-in hybrid depend on the region where it gets charged but also on how diligent the driver is with charging. Remember, it can also run on petrol.

The European Union's Environment Agency recently found that emissions from plug-in hybrids were 3.5 times higher than reported.

It concluded that hybrids "are charged and driven in electric mode much less than how they were expected to be used."

Where we get our figures from

These figures come from the Electric Vehicle Council, which based its life-cycle emissions calculator on modelling from the European organisation Transport & Environment.

We got Professor Robin Smit to look over the EV Council's modelling and he said while it was generous to petrol cars, it provided a good way to compare life-cycle emissions.

The inputs for petrol use are based on the Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP). As mentioned in the story, this is likely to underestimate real-world petrol usage.

The modelling uses data for a Nickel-Mangenese-Cobalt NMC li-ion battery produced in China, as that's the most common type of battery in the Australian EV market.

It calculates 105kg co2/KWh for the carbon produced from battery production.

This same study found that "producing batteries with photovoltaic electricity instead of Chinese coal-based electricity decreases climate impacts of battery production by 69 per cent". Considering this estimate would reduce the emissions calculation in the point we make about battery production.

For a medium electric SUV, the energy used is 17.3 KWh/100km and a battery size of 70.2 KWh average for cars available in that category.

The emissions factors for energy sources are based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) here. 

To model the rate of renewables coming into the grid, the EV Council used the step-change scenario from the Australian Energy Market Operator.

Statements about the composition of the electricity grids in different states come from 2022 numbers from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW).

The estimate of recycling emissions comes from a study by Transport & Environment.

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