Electric Cars Powered by Batteries Are the Future

The increase in electric vehicles is truly remarkable.

Over the past decade, Teslas have gone from cars for the uber-rich to cars for Uber drivers. All the major automakers have invested in electric cars, lowering prices and expanding the options available. According to BloombergNEF, more than 14 million electric cars will be sold globally this year, up from just 700,000 in 2016. And some 23 countries have now passed the crucial electric car tipping point – 5% of new car sales – after which adoption will begin. up dramatically. In China, the largest electric car market, 38% of new car sales were electric in August.

“We’re now entering the race for EV adoption in China,” says Colin McKerracher, head of Advanced Transport at BloombergNEF, in this week’s episode of Zero.

Despite the tacit consensus on the future of powertrains, electric cars still face obstacles in achieving their emissions reduction potential. China’s dominance of electric car and battery supply chains has become a point of contention for other countries, as has China’s domestic subsidies for electric cars. In the long run, McKerracher says, the growing competition will produce a race to the top in terms of quality and efficiency. In the short term, however, it can slow down the development of the climate.

“All this money and all this capital and ingenuity is fundamentally a good thing in transition,” he says. “But it may be a matter of taking a step or two back to take two or three steps forward.”

McKerracher joined Akshat Rath at this week’s Zero to discuss how the EV transition is tracking climate goals, why China has succeeded where others haven’t, and when we’ll finally see more EVs on the road.

Listen to the whole episode and read more about Zero here. Subscribe to Apple, Spotify and Google to stay up to date with new episodes.

Our transcriptions are created by a combination of software and human editors and may contain minor differences between text and audio. Confirm by voice before borrowing by pressing.

Akshat Rathi 00:00

Welcome to Zero, I am Akshat Rathi. This week: electric cars everywhere at once.

Not long ago, Electric Vehicles were seen as a novelty that some eccentrics pursued despite many problems: the range was too short, charging too slow, the price too high. Now they are everywhere. Teslas have gone from cars for the uber-rich to cars for Uber drivers. And all major manufacturers have had to move into electric vehicle production.

The growth is staggering. In 2016, only 700,000 electric cars were sold worldwide. This year it is more than 14 million. China is clearly leading the charge, but the popularity of electric cars is growing all over the world. This has surprised many analysts. And yet, despite all this success, we are still far from achieving the climate goals.

Colin McKerracher 1:05

We are not on the right track. So even though it’s gone really fast, we’re not in a true net zero scenario. The net zero scenario is that, in terms of passenger car sales, the sale of combustion vehicles must be completely stopped worldwide by around 2035.

Akshat Rathi 1:17

He’s Colin McKerracher, director of advanced traffic at BloombergNEF. If you want to get an idea of everything that’s going on with electric vehicles globally and where the industry is going next, he’s the person to talk to. Every time I read one of his columns, I walk away feeling like I learned something new. He recently wrote about how China has reached peak demand for gasoline, how electric vehicle sales topped $1 trillion in total sales, and why electric cars are winning because of consumers, not politicians.

Colin joins us at Zero today to share his thoughts on how to get electric cars on track to meet climate goals, why China has succeeded where others haven’t, and when we’ll finally see more electric cars than fossil fuel ones. And I wanted to start by putting to bed a myth that has persisted for far too long.

Akshat Rathi 2:10

One debate about what it’s like to be dying, but I feel like if it’s dying, maybe it’s time to put the death nail on it. Do electric cars reduce carbon dioxide emissions compared to combustion engines, when the total emissions of their manufacture and use are taken into account?

Colin McKerracher 2:27

Absolutely, unequivocally, yes.

Akshat Rathi 2:30

Even in a 100% coal-powered network?

Colin McKerracher 2:32

Yes, if you have a 100% coal-fired grid, of which there are very few in the world, then the benefits on a life-cycle basis are quite marginal. It’s like a 10-15% advantage compared to a new efficient combustion engine powered vehicle. But in most other places, it’s a dramatic, dramatic reduction. So it could be 80%, 70% depending on the country.

You can think of it another way in terms of repayment. So manufacturing an electric car battery and related components has a larger carbon footprint than manufacturing an internal combustion engine. In the US, with the current grid combination, you pay back the larger CO2 load in about a year and a half. Now in some cases it is two years. In China it is more like five or six years. But the point is that the vehicle will continue to get cleaner throughout its life as long as we can get the electrical infrastructure and grid production mix cleaner. And so we do. You’ve done many presentations on solar and renewables, it just so happens that you’re not going to derail this trend, more and more renewables are coming online. And an internal combustion engine vehicle, when it rolls off the line, its emissions profile is locked in for the life of the vehicle and gets a little worse as efficiency can decrease. Now that an electric car’s emissions are not locked in, its emissions profile changes over time and continues to improve. So there are many ways to make this look bad. You may say, “Oh, the vehicle will only travel 100,000 kilometers (60,000 miles) in its lifetime.” It doesn’t; they go much further. You can take outdated studies on battery manufacturing emissions. You can look at the old data on the emission intensity coefficients of the network by country and assume that they remain frozen for 15 years. But again, all of these are just really bad methodological assumptions. And that really annoys me. And anyone who works on this stuff gets annoyed when these things come up over and over again. Because it’s actually not that complicated of a calculation. If you use the good current data on it, you will unequivocally come to the conclusion that the life cycle CO2 emissions of electric cars are lower than the equivalent combustion engine cars today.

I think there is also one important thing that needs to be mentioned. We’re talking all about carbon here My view is that from a health and urban air quality perspective you can probably make a case for doing this even completely apart from the CO2 benefits. And you can see the health benefits right away. And that’s just going to be more and more fuel to increase this work from a political perspective, especially in cities.

Akshat Rathi 4:52

So let’s start with a broad overview. What did you predict when you started working as an electric car analyst in 2015? And how have those predictions come true?

Colin McKerracher 5:03

Yeah, the main thing we said at the time was that battery prices had already dropped about 60% over five years, from 2010 to 2015. And we predicted that trend would continue, and then it would bring electrified transportation. to such an economically viable category in many, many different areas of transport. And this has practically happened. The learning rate of lithium-ion batteries has largely lasted, technology has improved, energy density has improved, cycle life has improved, safety has improved. But most importantly, costs have continued to fall. And that’s really why we are where we are today. Politics has also played a really big role, but it’s an incredible technology success story on the lithium-ion battery front. And that was our main prediction.

Akshat Rathi 5:44

Where have you been surprised during these eight years? If you were to look at yourself, knowing what you knew in 2015 compared to today, what in hindsight could you not have predicted or Didn’t you predict?

Colin McKerracher 5:56

I think probably the biggest is the speed at which China has invested in electric vehicles. So, as a point of comparison, in August 2023, 38 percent of vehicles sold in China had a plug. That’s pretty significant for the world’s largest car market. And that’s one of the hardest things about anticipating big changes in a consumer-facing product is that you look primarily from a technical-economic perspective to start and think about when these things become cost-competitive and all these different factors. politics and economics and technology. But at the end of the day, this is a consumer product. And what eventually happens is that consumer demand takes over. And this is what happened in practice in China. We thought it probably wouldn’t happen until 2025 or 2026. Because we looked at the technology and thought, “Well, it’s going to take a little bit longer to get the price competitive.” But what has happened is it happened several years earlier than we thought, and then the adoption just increased. I think we still probably got it better than most out there. But I think it’s important to recognize that it has moved faster than we thought, especially in China. In other areas, I think it is more accurate. In Europe it is exactly where we thought it would be. In the US, we’ve actually sometimes exceeded that. But I think the biggest flaw is probably just the speed at which this has happened in China. And we’re still looking at it, it’s going on. We are going to compete, if you like, for the introduction of electric cars in China.

Akshat Rathi 7:09

And just to give some context to the numbers. Electric cars were sold at 3 million in 2020, 6 million in 2021, and 10 million in 2022. And BloombergNEF’s forecast is 27 million in 2026. Now it’s a global picture, and China dominates this ecosystem. But before we get to China, what has this EV mania done to oil? As this transition is driven, its purpose is to reduce oil consumption. There is clear growth in the market, but has it really dented the demand for oil?

Colin McKerracher 7:50

It’s pretty modest so far if we’re being honest. We do this exercise every year where we look at all different types of vehicles to see how much oil they displace. And we’re currently evaluating all different types, and we’re talking about more than just cars, and we’re talking about buses and trucks and two-wheelers and three-wheelers. But that’s about 1.5 million barrels per day. And this is against this year’s global consumption forecast of around 103 million barrels per day. So it’s modest, but I’d say it’s growing pretty quickly, and it has the potential to start undermining oil demand in the second half of this decade. I think it’s important to remember that there’s this lag between new vehicle sales – EVs are now growing, about 20% of vehicles sold globally in the last month had a plug in last month, which is pretty significant.

Akshat Rathi 8:31

Wow.

Colin McKerracher 8:32

Yeah, that’s the latest data. So really, really significant numbers. But again, that’s a proportion of new sales, it will take a long time to trickle down to the fleet, there are about 1.3 billion cars on the road worldwide, most of them still have internal combustion engines, that’s just over 2% of those that are fully electric today.

Akshat Rathi 8:50

It’s always interesting to know when oil demand will peak. And predicting the peak is difficult. And one of the peaks that you got right is that in 2017 the number of internal combustion engine vehicles sold reached a peak.

Colin McKerracher 9:06

And it was an uncomfortable call at the time, I say, because we made that call in 2018, and we could see the cycle turning a little bit. And yes, sales of internal combustion vehicles are now down 20% from that 2017 peak. By 2025, we believe we will have dropped 40 percent. And then there’s just no real way back, right? You have to be careful when celebrating highs. Since there have been some missed calls on this for 10 years, something is starting to pick up again.

Akshat Rathi 9:33

That’s what’s happening now with coal.

Colin McKerracher 9:35

Exactly. Coal is probably the most famous of them. But I’m pretty sure we’ve done it right. I don’t really see the combustion engine growing back. And actually the most interesting place to see it is the Shanghai Auto Show. You go to the Shanghai Auto Show and you get all the design money, all the latest gadgets, all the coolest cars, all of them are electric cars, all the Chinese automakers, all the money, all the cool projects, all the smartest people, they’re working on electric cars, they’re working on electric platforms. ICE platforms, internal combustion engine platforms, are kind of left to wither.

Akshat Rathi 10:07

If you’re not sure, ICE stands for internal combustion engine.

Colin McKerracher 10:12

While they still make up the majority of car sales today, it’s clear that growth is what people want, not absolute market share. And growth is also what the market usually rewards, not absolute market share.

Akshat Rathi 10:32

So a lot of time you do this, you spend in front of big tables of data, but what do you drive on a daily basis? What’s driving you crazy? What fun things have you done as an electric car guru?

Colin McKerracher 10:37

Yeah, I think sometimes people think we should just drive these latest supercars or something, we really don’t. I have driven most of the serial production models. At the moment, my car is a Volkswagen ID.5, which I bought last summer.

Akshat Rathi 10:50 am

Are you happy with it?

Colin McKerracher 10:51

Yeah, satisfied, that’s great. Range 500 kilometers, does what it needs. Whenever we go on road trips, the kids have to stop to pee long before we ever have to load the car, so I haven’t had any problems. However, I know I have home charging in this apartment, which I think solves one of the challenges: In some places where apartments do not have home charging, there are still challenges to overcome in getting people to charge easily, shall we say

Akshat Rathi 11:15

China is a giant when it comes to electric cars, but we have to admit that you live in Oslo, which is technically the electric car capital.

Colin McKerracher 11:21

Yes, absolutely, there is a very high percentage here, I look out the window and see all the new electric cars. Whenever they come on the market, whether it’s Chinese or American or European or Japanese, you see them right away on the road here in Oslo, which is fascinating. Consumers have a ton of choice, and that’s because the market got in early and built a lot of charging infrastructure. And now 90% of sales are already extensions. This market is kind of done, basically we’re just waiting for the fleet to turn around.

Akshat Rathi 11:48

China is by far the biggest buyer of electric cars, the biggest manufacturer of electric cars. Last year, its share of sales was 60 percent. Why has China been such a success story, and even more of a success story than you predicted it would be?

Colin McKerracher 12:06

I think it’s been a combination of factors. And they have all gone well together. The first has been government policy support. So the government has been clear from quite early on that it sees the new energy vehicle, which is their term for a fuel cell, battery electric and plug-in hybrid, as the future. And they have supported various phases of politics to do it. So in the beginning it was about pushing government purchases in that direction, so all the government fleet vehicles and things like that. Then there was this second phase where automakers were pushed more heavily into it through the new energy vehicle credit system. And also city politics, which significantly contributed to the fact that it was difficult for end consumers to buy an internal combustion engine. You have to get a license plate from a major Chinese city, which usually involves a lottery or auction system, which is unheard of for people in North America, the idea that you might have to wait to get a license plate even though you already have the money to buy a car. But that’s how it works in many of China’s big cities because they’ve been worried about congestion.

Akshat Rathi 12:58 p.m

You can’t take away our freedoms in America, can you?

Colin McKerracher 13:01

Yes, or in other places too. I think if you told people in Europe that they had the money to buy a car but they can’t get a number plate for it, they might be upset too. So that’s been a big part of it too, because electric cars were allowed to get around it in the biggest cities and you could get a license plate right away, or at least in a shorter period of time, if you put an electric car on the road. So China declared war on urban pollution. And one of the best things you can do to clean up air quality in cities is to electrify vehicles. So places like Shenzhen, you go to them, they fully electrified the buses in 2018; all taxis, a large part of the passenger car fleet is now electric. It is quite clean and you will notice that the air quality is better compared to some of the others below. So it was a big part of the political pressure that affected both national, regional and local governments.

The second is simply that Chinese automakers were never really globally competitive in the internal combustion engine market. And if you look at the world’s largest economies—the United States, Japan, and Germany—all of these others had oversized domestic auto industries that export to the world. And China didn’t. And so they realized that there is an opportunity there and the focus of industrial policy is to keep that window open and jump through it. To jump a little and thus build a lot of the supply chain needed for that. So the battery manufacturing capacity in China is huge. This year, there are more batteries made in China than global electric vehicle demand and fixed storage space, but there is actually excess capacity. So building a supply chain was really important.

And then the last one is just that Chinese consumers adopt new technologies faster than their counterparts in North America or Europe. And part of that is due to the younger average age of the buying population. But part of it when it comes to cars, I think, is that the middle class has grown tremendously in China, and they may not have the same expectations over several generations of what a car journey could be or what a car should do. And you think, if you grew up in North America, maybe you went on road trips with your grandparents or your parents in college, and you have this very specific idea of what a car should do for you and what it should be. There’s also something about the newly emerging Chinese middle class that many of them are the first car buyers in their families. And I think that makes them a little more flexible to adopt new technologies. And this is certainly proven in the data, this willingness of the Chinese to adopt new technologies probably faster and faster than other regions of the world.

Akshat Rathi 15:26

In my book Climate Capitalism, I go through the story of Wan Gang, China’s science minister, who was at the center of this concentrated period from 2009 to 2017, when China ended up spending, by one estimate—a conservative estimate—about $60 billion. trying to build this industry. In the process, it has captured the battery supply chain. Batteries are at the heart of the electrification story. And we are beginning to see the reaction of other regions to this dominance. Batteries have certainly made regions like Europe and North America sit up and try to do something about it. How much do you think China’s dominance of the battery supply chain is a hindrance to the EV growth we need to reach the net zero goals we’re still nowhere near?

Colin McKerracher 16:21

Yes, this is one of the most interesting tensions to emerge in the last two years. The goal has been to use as much clean energy and clean technology as possible, and it has depended on reducing costs. And the cost reduction has been considerable. But now we are entering an era of competing priorities. Another priority is where jobs go and the balance of trade and R&D investment. Basically industrial policy. And in many ways it supports rapid decarbonization, but in other ways it can work against it.

We’re seeing more and more regionalization of these markets, as countries or regions say, “Look, we want to get more economic benefit and not just be consumers of these technologies.” And in the near future, I think it might increase costs. It is very difficult for me to say that a battery made in the USA will be cost competitive with a battery made in China given the scale and inexperience of the Chinese manufacturing sector. But I think in the long run this is kind of a race to the top. All this money and all this capital and ingenuity being put into these areas to try to compete with China is fundamentally a good thing in transition. But it may be a matter of taking a step or two back in order to take two or three steps forward.

I often hear this argument that “It’s done and China won and it’s over.” And I totally understand where it’s coming from. Our own data suggests that if you look at the share of solar cell manufacturing or the share of battery manufacturing, all battery components and raw material processing… China absolutely dominates. But it’s worth remembering that just over 2% of all cars on the road today are electric. There is still a huge market to play. And we’re seeing a lot of investment in next-generation battery technology. So, for example, semiconductor batteries, next-generation anodes, sodium-ion batteries. That stuff is still available. That doesn’t mean China doesn’t have a head start. But I wouldn’t underestimate the forces at play when really getting the innovation engines going, especially in the US. China has a commanding lead, but the story is not yet fully written.

Akshat Rathi 18:28

One place where these tensions are visible is Europe. In September, President Ursula von der Leyen announced an investigation into whether cheap Chinese electric cars are flooding the European market and distorting prices.

Ursula von der Leyen 18:42

The global market is now flooded with cheaper Chinese electric cars, whose price is kept artificially low by huge government subsidies.

Akshat Rathi 6:54 p.m

The probe may sound intuitive: are cheap electric cars a good thing to achieve climate goals? Only about 10% of electric cars sold in Europe are from Chinese-owned companies. Most electric cars are sold by European-owned companies. And yet there are fears that tens of millions of auto industry workers will suffer if China continues to eat up a larger share of the market. It’s missing a crucial point. Many of the cars sold by European brands are already manufactured outside of Europe. So is there anything to investigate other than protecting the European car industry, which is struggling to catch up?

Colin McKerracher at 7:30 p.m

I think some of this might just be politics, it might show that, “Hey, we’re there to make sure European industry succeeds.” Some of these manufacturers are a little behind, and they’re pushing politicians to say we need a grace period. “You’ve got to give us a grace period to catch up because we didn’t take this as seriously as we should have. We’re a little bit flat-footed. And one consistent thing over the last 20 years is that a lot of automakers resisted the steady tightening of fuel economy regulations; they always fought to water them down. And that meant they didn’t invest as much in electrification. In the case of European automakers, many of them invested heavily in diesel. But consumers want to buy electric cars, and now they’re lagging behind Tesla and the Chinese automakers, frankly.

Akshat Rathi 8:15 p.m

After the break: Can another technology derail the success of electric vehicles, or are battery-powered cars here to stay?

Akshat Rathi 8:36 p.m

Is battery electricity for passenger cars the future? Like we have this hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, we’ve had this plug-in hybrid situation going on for a while. But as you can see, the future battery is electric and nothing else?

Colin McKerracher 20:51

I think the future is electric and plug-in. As for the hydrogen point, I think it’s dead for passenger cars. Sales are going down, they went down last year. The only market that really keeps it alive is South Korea, where the incentives are very generous. They are also very generous in California, with tens of thousands of dollars available in incentives. And even then, the numbers are very, very modest. Even if the fleet of passenger fuel cell cars doubled every three years from now until 2040 – which is the most optimistic scenario I can come up with – in 2040 they would still be only about 0.2% of the world’s vehicle fleet. In other words, irrelevant in terms of reducing emissions, irrelevant in terms of the climate. More interesting is in chargeable vehicles. About 75% of all plug-in vehicles today are battery electric, but plug-in hybrids still sell reasonably well.

Akshat Rathi 9:40 p.m

A plug-in hybrid is a car with an internal combustion engine and a battery that can be charged using an external cable. The car runs on the battery until it runs out and then switches to burning fossil fuels.

Colin McKerracher 21:50

A fair number of plug-in hybrids are still sold. And the place where it’s really interesting is China. So for a while the plug-in hybrid market was primarily driven by Europe and was a compliance market. So car manufacturers had to meet certain CO2 targets for their vehicles and you saw this large number of questionable plug-in hybrids with very short ranges. They could game the system a bit, but people didn’t drive them in electric mode very often.

What’s happening in China is that there are plug-in hybrids coming out that aren’t just designed for compliance. They are designed for consumers to use them in the electronic space. Their range is 100-150 kilometers. And they are often used in places where the public charging infrastructure is not yet that good. I really think that in the 2030s we will go fully electric, but I think the 2020s will still be an interesting role for plug-in hybrids.

Another segment I just want to highlight is that it’s proven to be a bit difficult to fully electrify the largest pickup trucks in North America – the Chevy Silverado, the F-150. These are big trucks and you need a very big battery. In terms of the current economy, it is challenging to make it fully competitive. Maybe Tesla can do that with the Cybertruck. But I would say that actually in North America, it would be helpful if someone started offering a really good plug-in hybrid mid-size pickup truck that could get 100-150 km of range on all electrics and could be priced in the $40,000-$50,000 range. range instead of the $60,000 to $70,000 range that many large electric pickups enter the market.

Akshat Rathi 23:23

Let’s look at innovations and stick to passenger cars. You talked a little bit about batteries and charging batteries faster; higher energy density, which is essentially the same battery but longer range; and of course lower costs are all crucial. But what other EV innovations are you looking forward to that would speed up the transition?

Colin McKerracher 23:45

One of the underappreciated is that we’re at a point right now where many of the major manufacturers have their own battery electric vehicle architectures where they built their EVs from the ground up. And it just enables better performance, better integration and better efficiency. You can switch to a higher voltage architecture, which also allows for much faster charging. So you see some of these latest vehicles are ready for 350 kilowatts of charging, some even higher, which means you have 15 minutes to get from 20% to 80% battery. It’s a pretty quick stop at that point. It’s not gasoline, but when you stop and go in and get a coffee, it’s enough.

What’s interesting is that we’re also seeing—and this is a bit separate from EVs—but more and more automakers are using their EVs to leverage their latest other technology: vehicle connectivity, autonomous driving capabilities, heads-up displays. All these great things, they put them in their EVs as a priority as a way to make them more attractive. And then they spread them to their other vehicles. And that’s actually a pretty fascinating strategy, because then they become cool, tech-rich vehicles with the latest stuff happening. And people who maybe don’t care that much about electric powertrains but want to use that technology, they’ll buy them because that’s where you’ll find the latest lane-keeping assist or automatic emergency braking or third-level autonomy. , all these newer features that are starting to come out. So I think it’s actually quite an interesting trend to watch as well, that more and more of it is being put into those electric cars.

Akshat Rathi 25:10

Will we ever see an electric car that charges as fast as it takes to fill up a gas car?

Colin McKerracher 25:17

No, I don’t think you will, and that’s not the right goal either. Although you could look at it from a battery point of view, and it would take a lot of engineering, the network connection you would need for multiple vehicles at once would be astronomical. And you might damage the battery to do it in such a few minute time frame. But again, I don’t think you need it. If you look at data on where people charge, most people still do most of their charging at home. So we don’t need to copy the existing refueling infrastructure exactly as it is, because most of the energy delivered to the car comes when the car is stationary. I think you will see more vehicles that can accept a higher charge, but I don’t think it will go up forever. Making the vehicle capable of something that the chargers and the network themselves cannot do reduces the return.

Akshat Rathi 26:03

Now you mentioned that it’s really hard to electrify large SUVs and these pickup trucks in the US, not because the technology isn’t there, but because batteries have to go into it and the cost of batteries is still high. So should we aim for smaller cars?

Colin McKerracher 26:20

Yes, I mean unequivocally, yes. In terms of the environment, it has always been better to drive a smaller vehicle. That’s still true in the world of electric cars. Just because we’re moving to electric powertrains doesn’t mean everyone has to drive the biggest vehicle possible everywhere. A small car is still better. An electric vehicle is still better than a combustion engine, but we should aim for both smaller, lighter vehicles and electric vehicles at the same time.

Akshat Rathi 26:42

The story of electric vehicles from a car perspective has been a gang. And yet we are still behind on net zero goals. So what do we need to do to get the passenger car sector back on track? Practice? Will the sale (of combustion vehicles) be banned? What are the tools in the arsenal that need to be thrown at this?

Colin McKerracher 27:02

Yes, this is an important point you make, we are off track. Although it has gone really fast, we are not on track for a netnolla scenario. The net zero scenario is that, for passenger cars, the sale of combustion vehicles must be stopped completely, worldwide by around 2035. And even that will require some early retirement of vehicles in the 2040s to get some off the road. And that’s just because the vehicles last about 15 years. So if you say net zero by 2050, net zero vehicles only by then, you have to go back to that. So I think you need an even stronger policy. It’s very encouraging to see things like the Inflation Reduction Act investing significant dollars in increasing EV adoption in the US. And federal funding for charging infrastructure in the US is also really starting to flow now.

So whenever we talk about future scenarios, it’s important to say what policy does this entail? What we call our economic transition scenario does not require new policies because I am not prepared to predict whether Trump or Biden will win the next election and what policy platforms they might adopt if they do. But policy really does matter, and it’s safe to say that in places without supportive policies, EV adoption will be very, very low. And places with a lot of politics have a lot of adoption. So you still need a stronger policy. I think you need a few more automakers to loosen up a bit more, especially the Japanese ones. Nor should we absolve them of responsibility. Many of them lobbied against or sued the California government, in Toyota’s case, over the zero-emission vehicle mandate. So they are not blameless in that either.

I still think that continued R&D investment in the technologies that enable this will play a big role, as a breakthrough in next-generation battery chemistry could accelerate all of this. Sodium-ion batteries are currently showing a lot of rumbling. So far, it looks like it will likely go to cheaper cars or two or three wheelers. But a major advance in another battery chemistry could blow this up. And I think we shouldn’t stop investing in it because the path from lab and science to design and manufacturing will still take some time. So I think that’s another area where you should continue to see a big push.

Akshat Rathi 29:09

Do you think the success of electric cars is a distraction from the bigger conversations we need to have to encourage less car use and more public transport and are governments directing their subsidies – the subsidies needed to make this transition – in the right places today?

Colin McKerracher 29:28

This is a tricky question, and the longer I use data on global emissions from all types of traffic, the more certain I am that you need all of the above. So when you talk to the urbanist crowd, they say, “Look, electric cars aren’t the solution, it should be active transportation and mass transit.” When you talk to clean car people, they are skeptical about these things. You need all of the above, you definitely need more public transport, you need more active travel, you need more urban density so people don’t have to move, you probably need congestion charges and you need over a billion electric cars . And it should not be avoided. Policy makers should not avoid this conclusion. You need it all, but you need over a billion electric cars on the road. And that’s just because we’ve left this pretty late. There is not much time to get global emissions under control. And even in places with massive amounts of active traffic – and again, this is not to belittle them – but take the Netherlands. The Netherlands is probably the best-known example of a cycling-friendly country. It has great infrastructure, great cycling culture, great support policy for many years. About 9% of all kilometers driven are by bicycle and about 70% by car. And the Netherlands is small, rich, densely populated, temperate, and again has this cycling culture. So that has to be the upper limit for a place like the US. It’s just not that easy to do it, to achieve the same level of cycling adoption in other countries. So yes, you need more active transportation, you need all these things, but you also need a lot of electric vehicles.

Akshat Rathi at 9:00 p.m

You’re about to break the heart of Oscar Boyd, the producer of the Zero series and obsessed with cycling.

Colin McKerracher 31:04

I would just say this is how I get my kids around town. I have a bicycle and a stroller. I take two children, put them in daycare every day, so I exercise. A big believer in active transport. We just have to be realistic about what each thing can contribute to reducing global carbon emissions.

Akshat Rathi 31:22

When will there be more electric cars than fossil fuel cars in the entire vehicle fleet?

Colin McKerracher 31:28

As for the passenger car segment, again because it takes a long time to turn over the fleet, even though new sales are largely electric. In our economic transition scenario, it will be around 2041 before EVs make up the majority of passenger cars worldwide.

Akshat Rathi 31:42

We’ll be old men by then, but I’m going to hold you to it and come back to you in 2041 and be like how wrong were you?

Colin McKerracher 31:48

I’m happy to be proven wrong. What I’m saying is that I want to see urban air quality improve and reduce carbon emissions quickly is much, much stronger than my desire to be right about this.

Akshat Rathi 32:08

I’ve always lived in cities so I don’t really drive that much. But I can’t stop thinking about EVs for all the reasons Colin mentioned. They’re just a huge part of the energy transition, and there’s so much new technology coming out to make these cars better and more efficient. However, electric cars are only half of the electric car story. Join us for an upcoming episode of Zero where we hear more from Colin about the electrification of other modes of transport, the good and the bad.

Next week, my book Climate Capitalism comes out. It has two chapters that explore China’s electric car revolution. One follows the career of Wan Gang, who was China’s Minister of Science and Technology for much of the early electric car boom. If you want to learn more about this and other climate action stories, see the link in the show notes to pre-order the book.