During an era from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, very few people were fortunate enough to afford and drive automobiles powered by coal.  Coal-powered cars were expensive, slow and worst of all, produced massive amounts of carbon emissions.  Would it perplex you if I informed that the number of coal-powered cars on the roads has increased dramatically in recent years?  Although, these modern coal-burners exemplified do not directly combust coal, therefore I am not attempting to depict the image of an old-fashioned, black smoke-puffing jalopy in your mind.  The cars I am describing are stylish, contemporary and in fact do not burn any fuel at all upon operation.  Fully electric cars are the climate culprits that are increasing in use and popularity.  Granted that these cars do not directly produce emissions, somewhere along the line, fossil fuels were burned and toxic metals and gases were exposed to the atmosphere to power the cars.  The electricity used to charge electric cars comes directly from power plants that burn coal and other fossil fuels.  These factories often have an equal or sometimes greater environmental impact than the combustion of fuel via gasoline and diesel powered automobiles.  Toxic metals and gases are apparent in the production and disposal of the batteries used to power the cars which also adds to electric vehicles’ environmental impact.  With this information in mind, what is the difference in the carbon footprints of manufacturing, fueling and operating electric cars versus internal combustion engine cars and is this difference substantial enough to justify widespread integration and large-scale commercial production of electric cars?  Although fully electric vehicle technologies have been greatly refined and improved in recent years, continued development is necessary to reduce the environmental impacts of their fueling and manufacturing as well as reducing their costly price tags.

For over one hundred years, humans have relied heavily on the automobile as a method of transportation.  In the early ages of the automobile, Henry Ford’s revolutionary Model T Ford was the predominant vehicle responsible for carting people around.  Since most people never traveled more than twenty-five miles away from their home before the invention of the Model T, this innovation enabled families to take road-trips to distant locations, packages and mail to be shipped and delivered more timely than ever, and the overall societal influence of specific areas to branch out to unthinkable boundaries.  Not to mention, the car was comfortably priced for most Americans at two hundred and sixty-five dollars in 1924.  The car was simple, effective and powered by an internal combustion engine.  For those of you who are not familiar with this type of engine, it is likely in the car you drive around every day.  If you make refueling stops at gas stations, then your car contains one of these heritable motors.  Gasoline has been the superior fuel for our cars since the first production automobile rolled off the assembly line.  Throughout the years, improvements have been made to the internal combustion engine to improve efficiency, power, and reliability.  Some modern vehicles containing economical engines can travel upwards of forty-five miles burning only a single gallon of gas.  With the advancement of efficiency technologies and standards pertaining to gasoline-powered cars, the carbon emissions produced per vehicle are steadily decreasing.  Although traditional gasoline-burning automobiles are dominant on our roads, scientists and engineers have developed cars propelled by alternative sources of energy.  The most prevailing of these automotive substitutes is the electric car.  Powered entirely by electricity extracted from homes and sparsely placed charging stations, these cars do not produce any carbon emissions upon propulsion.  Eco-friendly, right?  The “zero emissions” badges on the sides of these cars intended to communicate environmental sustentation are indeed misleading.  Even though fully electric vehicles do not directly produce carbon emissions, multiple factors contribute to these cars’ environmental ramifications.  Such components include the substantial carbon emissions and staggering inefficiencies of energy transfer from power plants and the toxic materials in the cars’ batteries and their disposal methods.  

The electricity used to charge electric cars comes directly from power plants that burn coal or other fossil fuels.  Burning these materials results in the releasing of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.  Therefore, electric cars merely displace their hidden emissions to a completely different location from where they are driven.  The areas in which the emissions are relocated are often less crowded and less polluted than urban areas, making the detrimental displacement of greenhouse gases seemingly justifiable.  Granted, these power plants produce high levels of harmful emissions, however, there are feasible methods to reduce their carbon footprints.  One such method is burning natural gas instead of coal as it is the cleanest combustible fossil fuel.  Utilizing natural gas as the primary fuel in electric power plants would increase efficiencies and reduce carbon emissions.  Many power plants have outdated technologies which results in the widespread continuation of inefficient energy practices.  Although, building new power plants with the most innovative technologies is extremely expensive, therefore, upgrading the large number of pre-existing power facilities should be a top priority among engineers to mitigate the high start-up costs.  Carbon sequestration is a state-of-the-art renewable practice in which the carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels is obtained and siphoned back to its underground origin.  This practice is crude and expensive, but may be a potential aide to the earth’s atmosphere if it can be incorporated into power facilities and other carbon emitting culprits at a more reasonable cost.  Although efficiency standards regarding power plants need to be reconsidered to incorporate these various sustainable techniques to further lessen carbon emissions, the widespread integration of fully electric vehicles, which facilitate the negative effects of this dilemma, is not justifiable.  In the United States alone, thirty percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions were generated by electricity producing power plants in 2014.  In the same year, automotive transportation accounted for twenty-six percent of total greenhouse gas emissions; less than that of electric power.  Instead of adding to the emissions produced by electric power plants by manufacturing more electric cars, internal combustion engine efficiency technologies should be upgraded and refined to a further extent.  Coal-burning power plants harness a measly thirty-three percent of the coal’s potential energy.  The other sixty-six percent of that energy is released in the form of heat and greenhouse gases.  Aside from the considerable amounts of carbon emissions generated by electric power plants, their inefficient consistencies extend to the electricity’s distant journey beginning at its source and ending in the batteries of an electric vehicle.  Ever wonder why power poles are ringed with strange apparatuses containing layers of ceramic disks?  These devices are integrated into our power systems to absorb and disperse excess heat from the power lines.  Comparable to the wasting of energy in power plants via heat emission, power lines account for up to fifteen percent losses in energy from the original amount of electricity that leaves the power plants.  Between direct heat emissions from power plants and energy transfer inefficiencies within power lines, the annual net loss of energy accumulated by electric power plants and their distribution infrastructure equates to the total amount of energy consumed by all the gasoline-powered cars in the United States.  With this statistic in mind, the concept of comprehensively applying an imposing burden on our nation’s environment in the form of the electric car is illogical and invalid.   Enclosed in electric cars are series of expensive batteries that contain toxic metals and gases.  Such materials include the solid and gaseous forms of mercury, lead, cadmium and lithium to name a few.  When exposed to the atmosphere or to humans via respiration or consumption, these metals pose a serious hazard to both the environment and to people.  Mining and refining these toxic metals for battery production does exactly this.  Once the metals are exposed to the atmosphere, they react with the surrounding air and blend into it.  Each of these metals have an extremely long half-life which means they take many years deplete in their hosts, whether that be the atmosphere or human organs.  Exposure to these toxic metals can cause many hefty health complications such as neurological degeneration, lung cancer and the increase of the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s or dementia.  Aside from source exposure, these elements are unveiled to the atmosphere upon the batteries’ recycling processes.  Although scientists and engineers are working to develop safe practices and infrastructure for recycling batteries on massive scales, most electric car batteries end up in scrapyards and landfills where their toxic metals become exposed to the atmosphere.  The combination of indirectly increasing carbon emissions and exposing toxic metals to the atmosphere in regards to electric cars takes a toll on the environment that is higher per vehicle than cars powered by efficient internal combustion engines.  Extraneous to environmental concerns, other ingredients contribute to the distastefulness of the electric car, such as price and driving range.     

A substantial concern among electric vehicles is their costliness.  The price of fully electric cars range from the thirty-two thousand dollar Nissan Leaf ascending to the seventy to one-hundred and forty thousand dollar Teslas.  These cars are not cheap by any means.  Beyond those initial price tags, the cost of replacing the batteries every eighty thousand miles ranges from seven thousand dollars in the Nissan Leaf to twelve thousand dollars in the high-tech Teslas.  For several thousand dollars more than the price of replacing Tesla batteries, you can purchase a hybrid Honda Civic, Toyota Prius or Fiat 500.  These cars get well over thirty miles per gallon on average and have driving ranges of four to five hundred miles.  Their average maintenance costs per one hundred thousand miles is between one and three thousand dollars.  With these considerable price differences in purchasing and maintaining fully electric cars versus cars containing efficient internal combustion engines in mind, the rationale supporting the widespread integration of fully electric vehicles is becoming increasingly irrational.  Senior writer and editor at Scientific American and author of Bottled Lightning, Seth Fletcher, states that “gasoline still isn’t expensive enough to justify the additional cost of a car that runs on a pricey lithium-ion battery” (Fletcher 212).  This statement further enhances the claim that the costliness of electric vehicles is not practical for societies that willingly purchase gas-powered automobiles and the gasoline to fuel them, thus this price difference is unappealing to the penny-pinching people of this world.  Another noticeable disadvantage to these costly cars is their driving range.  By using the term driving range, I am not conveying the vast green grass fields in which people smack golf balls until their hearts are content.  Rather, I allude to the total distance a vehicle can drive from being fully fueled to empty.  The driving range of the most technologically advanced and expensive fully electric car is just over two hundred and fifty miles.  This span cannot match the five to six hundred mile range of today’s most efficient gas and diesel automobiles.  Not to mention, when your car gets low on gas, it is extremely easy to locate one of the numerous gas stations alongside the millions of miles of roads in the United States.  On the other hand, pinpointing an electric vehicle charging station is comparable to finding a needle in a haystack.  In the following quote, “Today, electric cars come with too many caveats.  Unless it has a backup gas engine, an electric vehicle will have to be a second car.  Only when cities have installed charging stations in every parking meter and every parking garage will electrics truly be practical” (Fletcher 204), the fact that sparsely placed charging stations and limited range inhibits the widespread acceptance of the electric car is given a more concrete foundation.  The general, daily driving populations around the world might have a difficult time legitimizing any benefits to the fully electric car in an economical sense.  The vindication to the issues involving fully electric cars lies within an environmental and economical savior containing the best of both worlds.

Hybrids are cars that incorporate both electric and gasoline motors into their often-unstylish facades.  Although hybrid cars are typically slightly more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts, on average, they are cheaper than fully electric automobiles.  These cars contain very small gas motors or generators that alternate mechanical energy into their own electrical energy to power the electric motors.  In contrast to fully electric vehicles, hybrids do not have to be charged via electricity from power plants; a sustainable, mitigatory alternative for those looking to be economical and environmentally friendly.  These mobile mediators have the furthest range of any automobile and the highest fuel efficiency, but lack in the aesthetic appeal.  For example, the Toyota Prius is not exactly the sexiest car on the roads, but compounds sustainable technologies that reduce carbon emissions while remaining affordable.  In order to sell more hybrids, car manufacturers should redesign the bodies of these often-odd-looking automobiles to incorporate sleeker lines and a more aggressive stance.  By doing so, the hybrid technologies will inevitably exist in more people’s everyday drivers therefore having a positive impact on the environment.  In fact, some car manufacturers have already taken this method of marketing for their hybrid fleets into consideration.  Mercedes-Benz is known for producing elegant luxury cars and is now incorporating hybrid technologies into their renowned models without changing their appealing appearance.  A more affordable brand of car, Ford, affiliates hybrid technologies with their modish sedans, crossovers, and small SUVs.  In a rather extreme instance, three of the world’s most heritable racecar manufacturers used hybrid technologies in their latest hyper cars.  The Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, and Porsche 918 are the speed demons exemplified.  All three of these cars are powered by both electric and gas motors producing ludicrous amounts of horsepower.  Not to mention, they are absolutely stunning when it comes to looks.  Although these cars cost around one million dollars, they represent the culmination of the automotive industry for hybrid technology.  Future advancements in this field of collated mechanics will decrease the impact automobiles have on the environment.

An advocate for fully electric vehicles might argue that per mile, the operation of these cars is substantially cheaper than that of a car with an internal combustion engine under its hood or even a hybrid.  Although this is true due to electricity being cheaper than gasoline, hidden costs have been unveiled nullifying the widespread integration of the fully electric car.  These cars relocate carbon emissions to electric power plants which pleases an incognizant population.  Harmful emissions are produced from extracting and disposing the toxic metals used in the cars’ batteries.  The high costs of purchasing and replacing batteries in a fully electric vehicle do not appeal to societies around the world.  Short driving ranges and inaccessibility to charging stations add to the unattractiveness of electric cars.  While automotive manufacturers continue to refine the relatively crude fully electric vehicle technology, advances should be made in internal combustion engine efficiencies and hybrid technology as the search for the ultimate sustainable solution progresses.  In the meantime, do not feel guilty that you own a coal-guzzler.
