Why the car of the future might be more dangerous to cities

Jordan There’s a growing sense that if electric vehicles are the cars of the future, then the future is pretty much here. I mean, barely a day goes by without a breathless report of the environmental impact, of the shift to electric cars accelerating in countries around the world, or even just some sleek, sexy new electric vehicle model takes over the internet for a day.

Electric Vehicle Clips …the total number of orders for the model three in the past 24 hours has now passed 115,000…

…a future of the automobile industry that is electric…

…European Commission also expects companies to stop selling diesel and petrol cars…

…marking the first time ever that a full-line automaker has produced full battery electric vehicles in Canada…

…Lucid’s up in the premarket. It’s off the highs of the morning. The EV maker is now topping GM and Ford in terms of market valuation, now number three…

…mankind needs to transition to sustainable mobility and the route to that is technology. This is a tech race…

Jordan Electric vehicles are better for carbon emissions, of course. And that’s great. What about everything else? If EVs are the car of the future, why does the future look so much like the past? And why do these cars of the future seem even more deadly than the cars we were driving just a few years ago? The need to leave fossil fuels behind is obvious to everyone. But as we do it, are we missing a chance to actually rethink the car, how it’s made, and everything it does?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is the Big Story. Tim Querengesser is an Alberta based journalist and writer. He looks at a lot of subjects, in particular cities, and often cars. Hello, Tim.

Tim Hello.

Jordan Why don’t we start with this just because I want to get out in front of the angry listeners when you title a piece about electric vehicles, ‘why the car of the future sucks’, you are begging for a blowback. So are you talking about the concept of electric vehicles here, or are we talking about the cars themselves?

Tim We’re talking about the cars themselves and we’re talking about the market more than the electric car. So the electric car does not suck. The electric car could be a great thing if made to fit and work within the context of a city. What I’m talking about here is the market, and the manufacturers meeting the market demands that we’re seeing, and creating a car that I would compare to sort of like a Frankenstein or sort of like everything that you want all in one. Do you remember The Simpsons episode where Homer got to design a car?

Jordan Yes.

Tim Okay. So Homer designs a car and you see Homer in this God awful looking thing with things popping out of it and all sorts of things. This in some way is what the car of the future is being conceptualized at the moment. It’s everything that you could ever want and need. It’s going to cost you more than your house. It’s going to weigh more than three standard cars that exist today, and no one’s really talking about those sort of things. They’re talking about the electrification, which is super important, and it needs to happen tomorrow. But the other parts of this are not being talked about. So that’s why I titled the post ‘Why the Car of the Future Sucks’, because it’s provocative. We need to talk about some of the other parts of the car of the future that don’t often get talked about.

Jordan We’re going to talk about all the reasons why this car of the future sucks. But first, maybe just to set the scene because this is I feel like kind of a pretty critical time in terms of the development of this market. So in theory, why are electric vehicles the car of the future? And how fast is this adoption happening? It feels like it’s really ramping up now.

Tim There’s all sorts of reasons why the electric vehicle is the car of the future. Just before I came on this call, I was reading about a Vietnamese company coming into the North American market with an electric SUV. The electric vehicle is easier to make, that’s one. So the electric vehicle requires less. It’s less mechanically intensive in some ways. So it doesn’t require as much of the R and D, the manufacturing brilliance that we have in some of the car companies today. You can create an electric vehicle with a lot less. You see that with bicycles. You see a lot of the people that ride electric bicycles in my neighbourhood, they’re often from China. They’re quite low cost because you can just plug an electric motor onto that existing bike. And there you go, you’ve got an electric bicycle.

The other reason is that obviously we’re in a climate crisis. Everyone is waking up to the reality that we have to act now to prevent things that we’re seeing. You can just talk about the news in British Columbia at the moment. I think people are starting to get legitimately worried and scared about what they’re seeing. So the electric vehicle is then portrayed as obviously what we need to do. If we’re so dependent on cars which we are, and if internal combustion cars, are such a source of climate change, which it is, then it makes sense that the electric vehicle would be seen as the solution. And in some ways, in the emissions sense, it could be.

Therefore, we’re seeing a lot of governments now trying to take the ball and push it forward by saying no more internal combustion vehicles by a certain date. Canada has suggested that we might do this by 2035. A lot of other countries are on that time scale, or even quicker. Anyone that writes about the car industry will often point to California as the leader, because California is such a large market. Whatever California does, when it comes to emissions or other things, the market tends to adopt. So it will probably be what California adopts in some ways for the North American market. But those are the reasons that we’re adopting the electric car.

Auto makers, they’ve been slow to get on top of this. But now that they see that the market is willing to adopt, that the context is there, that people are starting to demand action. They’re starting to demand different options. They are jumping on board. So you see a company like Rivian, they make electric SUVs and pickup trucks. Their market valuation is through the roof because they’ve come along, they’ve created a concept truck that’s now going into production, and the market sees them as an insanely valuable company out of nowhere. They’ve been around for three, four years.

This is where the market is going. It’s going to tip very quickly it feels. And you’ve got companies like Audi and Volkswagen saying they’re no longer developing the internal combustion engines that they manufacture. So basically, this generation of the car is the last generation of the car, as we know it.

Jordan So how are these companies marketing these cars? Because this, to me, has been pretty stark. If I think back 10-15 years, how I imagined the car of the future, the electric vehicle would be sold to me, it’s not what I’m seeing.

Tim Yeah, that’s a really great point. And I think I share that sentiment. So I remember, given that I’m ancient, I remember that back in the 90s and early 2000s, electric vehicles were being talked about, and you would see these things and they would look like they were developed in a wind tunnel. They were 50 pounds, and they were flimsy and fragile and tiny because the idea was that we wanted to maximize their efficiency.

Jordan Right, little city buggies is what I remember.

Tim Right, they might even have, like, a solar panel on them. They would look like they were spaceships. So if you fast forward to today, what we’re seeing is, as I brought up, the market. The car market really is basically everyone telling a car manufacturer what they want, which is everything. And because the electric vehicle allows a designer to do almost anything, the market will be met. So if I say, hey, auto manufacturer, I want a car, but it has to have all wheel drive, so it never gets stuck. And I want it to go off road sometimes, I want it to carry maybe seven passengers once or twice in its lifetime. And I want to be able to go to Home Depot and pick up plywood. Well, guess what? I can make that, that just becomes a super SUV with a pickup truck bed, and it weighs 8000 pounds, and I use its capabilities 5% of the time. But the electric vehicle allows me to do that because the electric vehicle is so powerful.

One of the things that’s hard to understand for the non engineer or geek out there is that the electric motor produces all of its power immediately. So what that means is when I press on the pedal that determines whether I go or not, all the power is there. It doesn’t have to develop power the way that the internal combustion engine does.

Jordan Like the 0 to 60 type thing we talk about sometimes?

Tim Well, when you step on the gas in your regular car, the engine has to rev. It has to develop. It has to develop more power. So your car will rev, and then it will shift and kind of stay in a band of power where it’s making more power than it would at idle. Imagine, on the flip side, an electric motor where it makes all the power at any rev. So at idle, it makes full power. So if you press on that accelerator and say, I want to go fast, you are going to go fast.

So if you’ve taken a ride in an electric vehicle, I’ve had the good fortune of going for a ride in a Tesla, and the driver said, okay, are you ready? Hold on. And I rolled my eyes like, it’s really not going to be that big of a deal. It really was. It felt like I was taking off in a spaceship. It throws you back into your seat. The power is immediate. It’s a weird feeling, and we’re not used to it because we’ve grown up or we’ve come to be accustomed to the internal combustion car. So part of the argument that I’m trying to make in the story or the article that I wrote, is that what we think we know about the car is not going to apply in future.

I don’t know if that answers your question. I can circle back if you don’t feel it did.

Jordan Well, I think we’re going to get to the aspects that you’re talking about, and that’s a great way to sort of lead into this, because when you say with electric vehicles, there’s no limit to what you can build and how you can construct a car, that leads to one question, which is, let’s start with the price. How do the prices on these vehicles compare to cars in the past? And one thing in particular, I kind of have been watching this market and you would assume that as adoption increases, prices would come down. That doesn’t seem to be happening in the electric vehicle space.

Tim Yeah, well, this is a tricky one. In theory, and I think eventually the electric car could become a very affordable thing. As I kind of pointed out earlier, it doesn’t take as much to become an electric car manufacturer. You could get your motors from X Place, and you could kind of cobble together all sorts of suppliers and create an electric car. So in theory, the cost could come down. What’s happening, though, is the North American market in particular, is going a certain way.

So I don’t know how old you are, but I’m in my early 40s, and I remember a time when the car companies always had at least one model that was like, for me. I don’t make much money and I really need some mobility, I need a car. I remember the first Hyundai that showed up in Canada. I believe it was called the Pony. I think it was like $3,000 back in the day. You could afford it because it was built to a price. What we’re seeing now is that all of those low end, affordable, small, efficient cars are kind of being culled. They’re going away. So you can no longer buy the Honda fit in North America, you can no longer buy the Ford Fiesta, the Ford Focus. You can no longer buy those entry level, small, kind of utilitarian vehicles that were car based in North America.

What you can buy are the SUVs that are being created to replace them. These SUVs are a factor more expensive, because they have more things within them, more gizmos and things that you really probably don’t need. They weigh more, and they’re less efficient. Ten years ago, SUV sales were something like less than 10% of the market. Now they’re 50% and growing. So the SUV is the car of the future. So the car of the future doesn’t really exist. It’s not a car, it’s an SUV. And this is the point I’m trying to get at with the market. That’s the market saying, hey, I want a vehicle that can do everything anytime.

So I don’t want to have a car and potentially an off road vehicle for those two times in my entire lifetime that I’ll go off road, I want to have it so it can do it whenever I want. It’s sort of like the mountain bike of cars, if that makes sense. So I don’t have a mountain bike, I have a road bike. I like to go fast and kind of have agility. Some people have a mountain bike because it’ll do everything.

Jordan What I want to talk about next is the makeup and design of these cars. You’ve touched on it a couple of times that they’re incredibly heavy. Why is that? And what does it do to the impact of the car as a whole?

Tim The reason is the range anxiety that has really limited the electric vehicle in the market so far. So one of the first things that people concern themselves with when it comes to electric vehicles is how long can I go before it runs out of juice? This is a normal thing to worry about. How many of us want to worry about whether our vehicle is going to stop while we’re driving? We don’t want to. So the range portion of the question is really why we’re seeing the weight increase.

The battery within that vehicle has to be a huge size to accommodate that range. So if you think about a typical car having, say, 400, 500, 600km worth of range with a full tank of gas, that’s kind of what the market is demanding and hoping for when it comes to the electric vehicle. And the manufacturers are really meeting that. And the way that they’re doing that is through just these massive batteries. If you take an apples to apples comparison, the recent release of the Ford F150, the electrified version, is something like 1500 to 2000 pounds heavier than the standard version—which is already a way too heavy vehicle—because of those batteries.

Jordan Why does that matter in terms of how heavy the car is? What’s the actual impact of that?

Tim Well used word there, the impact, I think, is that what we’re not talking about. And this is where I really have my challenges with the automobile. Is that regulation for the automobile typically concerns those within the automobile or other people in automobiles. So we develop safety features like antilock brakes and all sorts of other things that are now standardized and required to sell a vehicle in North America. Right. What we don’t talk about are the people on the street in the cities where these vehicles are used.

So when you take a heavier vehicle that can accelerate more quickly because of the attributes of the electric motor that I brought up, you’ve got a different situation. So, for instance, the new Hummer that’s coming out, the electrified Hummer, weighs something like 9000 pounds, can accelerate as quickly as a standard Corvette sports car. Weighs 9000 pounds. What does that mean for people in collisions where they’re on their feet or in a wheelchair or on a bicycle? Well, physics plays a role, speed and weight. And so what that means is these larger, heavier, faster vehicles have the potential to really amplify what we’re already seeing with SUVs. So what we’re already seeing with SUVs is that pedestrian injuries are increasing. The streets are becoming less safe for people on their feet.

It’s ironic, because the reason that people are drawn to SUVs in a lot of ways is because of this, what some call a vehicular arms race. That I will get the bigger vehicle to be safer on the street, because if you crash into me, I’m going to get a bigger vehicle that’s heavier and chunkier, and I will survive. That’s the perception. So what we’re seeing is that, as I said, if the market demands it, these automakers are able to meet that with the electric vehicle. The potential is and I don’t know the future, but the potential is that the market could really meet what you’re demanding. So you now just drive this 9000 pound electrified Hummer. And if you’re on the street as a pedestrian or a cyclist, you may have second thoughts about how safe that is.

Jordan How do we get a handle on where this is going and who even is the governing body regulator, even maybe just the consumer public who can alter the course of this? Because the problem, I guess, is maybe not that these cars exist, because in rural places there is a demand for SUVs and pickups and all of that kind of stuff. But much like with combustion engine cars, the problem is who’s buying them and where they’re being used. And I don’t know how you change the course of that.

Tim Well, this article came out of what I might describe as frustration, in that I was trying to write about that through another technology that’s available and already being used on electric vehicles, just those with two wheels. So if you are familiar with electrified scooters or electrified bicycles, you will know that electrified bicycles in Canada, North America, often come with speed limiting. And if you get a shared scooter, an electrified scooter, so we have them here in Edmonton. I’m not sure if you have them where you are.

Jordan Not yet, thankfully, or maybe not thankfully, I’m not sure.

Tim Well, depends on your viewpoint. So the electrified scooter here from companies like Lime and Bird, they’re shared. So I have to have an app. I go walk up to it and can use it. But they are geofenced. So what that means is the scooter knows where it is on a map and in certain areas, the regulator, so in this case, the city government has said, nope, you can’t use that at full speed. So it goes from 20 km/hour, which is already pretty slow down to eight, which is barely walking speed.

So geofencing is a capability that exists. It’s a technology that some automakers have used in pilots to determine or fix and work with things like emissions. So I was able to speak to one manufacturer that had piloted a program where the geofence would kick in and the hybrid vehicle would go into its electric mode in certain areas of a city, if it passed a fence point. And what I’ve found is that electric vehicle makers and traditional vehicle makers, they don’t want to talk about geofencing when it comes to speed within cities.

Jordan Why not?

Tim I don’t know. There is a sense of Liberty. We can get into the deep philosophical tensions of modernity in this. But when it comes to Liberty and my ability to do what I want, somehow being in a vehicle is like, we can’t really get under that one. People push back very strongly against regulation of that space. So the anger that you see with speed cameras and photo radar and things like that, it’s palpable. And so I think that regulators and vehicle makers just don’t want to go there, because the open road is kind of that last frontier, it’s seen as a place where there are some rules, as long as I follow them, leave me alone.

That’s the way I perceive it at least in my discussions, but my effort here was to try to write about Geofencing. Is this coming? Could this be the solution that we’re talking about? That we should be talking about when it comes to these increasing vehicle weight and speed things that could be introduced with electric vehicles as the market is demanding them. But no one wants to really talk about it, it seems, so it’s a difficult one.

Jordan Will the market support and are there still, I guess I haven’t maybe looked around enough to see. But will the market still support some of those traditional, smaller, city based cars that… look, we have a Hyundai Accent, right? It’s a little hatchback. It’s fine. We’re not hauling lumber. Will that exist in ten years in the electric vehicle market? There’s got to be room for that stuff, right?

Tim I think it will. And I think that’s where I hold out my hope. So Toyota has something called the i-Road, which is a three wheeled, basically, like advanced tricycle that’s kind of built for the city. This is totally possible. The electric vehicle could really be something that’s transformative in this way, that basically it changes our cities for the better, that people on their feet, on bicycles, in their wheelchair, whatever, feel safer because the vehicles have gotten smaller and more scaled to the actual city.

So there’s a discussion just I think today or yesterday on Twitter, where municipality has bought a fire truck that is electric and smaller. It’s much skinnier and smaller than a traditional fire truck. And the argument is, well, we can design our cities to be the size that we want for people, and the truck doesn’t have to dictate. Because what happens nowadays is that the fire Department, if you want to build a small street, will say, well, we can’t fit our truck there. So the electric vehicle does open up those options as well. So there’s a lot of positive potential here.

But it goes back to that problem that I kind of sketched out, which is that arms race, who would buy said vehicle if you have to share the road with 9000 pound electric SUVs? Would you want to be in that three wheeled tricycle? Probably not. So in some cases or in some ways, there could be a discussion about where these behemoths do everything accelerate like a spaceship vehicles, where do they belong? But I don’t see that discussion happening. And the difficulty is that that discussion would be kind of atomized. It would be like different city governments having different rules in different places, because really, they regulate the streets. They are the one ultimately that says, well, the speed limit should be 40 km/hour, which it is now in Edmonton for a residential street. They are the regulators.

And so they don’t really have the power to shape the market in some ways, unless they work together or there’s like an overarching policy I guess. As I sketched out earlier, I think there’s a lot of regulation when it comes to how safe vehicles are for those inside them and those sharing space as drivers. There’s not as much for people just sharing those streets. To be honest, I don’t know what the answer is. I’ve thought about this and written about it in different ways for quite a while, and it feels like there’s not a way to say, hey, no, those vehicles are not allowed in this city.

Jordan The last thing I want to ask you kind of brings us back to where we started this conversation, which is how difficult is it to get people who understand that the future is electric to engage on this topic? When you published this that says ‘Why the Car of the Future Sucks’, What kind of criticism did you hear from people who think that criticizing electric vehicles in any way is like sort of trying to stop the future that could save us?

Tim Yeah. That’s a really great point. And it’s something that I’ve thought deeply about. It pains me to have to write that the electric vehicle as the market is being shaped to deliver, is not what we need. I have big hope for the electric vehicle. I have big hope for electric mobility. So I think electric mobility in future, in cities, at least where 90% of us seem to live at the moment if we’re talking Canada, urbanized areas. The electric vehicle, really the electric vehicle of the future is like an electric bicycle or an electric smaller format, four wheeled thing. It doesn’t have to be a car as we’re imagining it. The car is really great to do long distances between city A and city B. There’s really nothing better if you don’t want to live to a schedule and you want to pack all your stuff and bring your family, there’s nothing better than a car, right?

But that’s not what they’re being used for. They’re being used for commuting within cities as well. So the electric vehicle of the future, to me, could be something smaller, cheaper, more accessible, safer, that sort of thing. So when I criticize the electric car, it’s mostly just the way that the market is imagining it. I’m trying to sketch out that difference. Electrification is great. Don’t get me wrong. And that’s why it’s so provocative.

So I was looking at some of the marketing messages that are out there, ‘Vehicles for the planet’. This is one of the taglines. Okay. So yes, they will produce much less carbon, much less emission, for sure. But is that really the only thing that changes when you go electric and the car becomes 2000 pounds heavier and bigger and all sorts of things? A car still is a car and so the pushback I got was from people that didn’t quite understand that nuance.

But there was also a lot of support for that because there is a lot of discussion within kind of like the city-thinking circle that the electric car is just another car and really the main problem with our cities at the moment, when it comes to street safety, when it comes to how our cities are built, which completely is connected to how sustainable our cities are is just the car itself. Our car dependence is really the problem. And what I’d love to get underneath, is why aren’t we being offered these other options? So I’d love to be offered an electric bicycle that does all the things, I’d love to be offered a four wheeled electric whatever that does all the things. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like the city is built to accommodate that. It’s built to accommodate the car. So the pushback I got was interesting. I didn’t get the anger that I was anticipating, to be honest.

Jordan Tim, this has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for joining us.

Tim Thank you.

Jordan Tim Querengesser, and if you’d like to read his piece on why the car the future sucks, you can go to CityHack.Substack.Com.

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