“The Ecological Debate: Are Electric Cars Really Sustainable?”

The enormous price of repairs for electric cars, which end up in the “total damage” category much more often than classic cars, gives rise to the question: is all electric mobility really that ecological?

Another unpleasant aspect of operating electric cars is slowly starting to emerge. And we are only at the very beginning of electromobility, when we meet on the roads every day units of pieces against hundreds and thousands of cars with internal combustion engines. That is, if you do not live in Norway or you don’t have a villa in California. However, here in the Czech Republic, in Germany and, apart from Norway, also in the whole of Europe, electric cars are still at the imaginary “starting line”. And yet they add wrinkles where no one would expect it – in insurance companies. Let’s look at it together.

Accidents and car accidents are not avoided even by electric cars

Like any vehicle moving on the road and in the road space, electric cars are also subject to accidents, whether at fault or not. However, unlike classic cars that can be easily repaired the battles with electric cars start from the moment of the accident. And that they are not small is proven by several numbers from the insurance company Allianz: electric cars make up to three percent of the total number of insurance claims, but their costs make up eight percent of all insurance claims. This is quite a fundamental disparity.

And it is given by several facts: first of all, for many electric cars, there is still no such thing as a battery repair plan. The only “fix” is a replacement. But at the current prices of batteries, which are worth it without any problems tens of thousands of euros and make up more than 50% of the price of the car, means a fundamental intervention in the entire economic (and ecological) balance of the car. In the case of the Model Y, Tesla glues its 4680 cells directly into the skeleton, which does result in greater strength of the entire structure, but on the other hand, basically zero repairability.

We do not repair batteries, we only change them

And if you “throw” the battery out of the electric car due to a banal defect, all its usefulness has ended at that moment, and there is never a chance that the situation will be reversed. Calculation of electric car savings, of course they count on a single battery, not two. And its CO2 emission balance will be similar. Not to mention the disposal of batteries from electric cars. Companies are currently putting them in special containers because, simply put, “no one knows what to do with them”. And how to dispose of them ecologically, not at all.

iPhoto source: Tesla

Some manufacturers, such as General Motors, deliberately manufacture their batteries in such a way that they can be disassembled and repaired individually, but insurance companies fundamentally lack the necessary diagnostics (and specialists) who could assess the level of damage. As Christoph Lauterwasser, executive director of the Allianz Center for Technology, said, “most batteries are probably undamaged or easily repairable, but without diagnostics we are forced to completely retire them.”

The risk of fires and fatal accidents is considerable

Insurance companies will not expose themselves to the risk of a misdiagnosed battery causing, for example, a fire in an electric car and, in the worst case, endangering the health or life of the crew. That’s why the batteries are discarded they store in special containers and are under control precisely with regard to the risk of fire. “The number of electric cars will increase, so battery handling is a key moment,Christoph Lauterwasser continues again.

As Michael Hill, chief executive of Synetiq, the UK’s largest electric car network, further told Automotive News, “over the past 12 months, the number of electric cars in the isolation shaft – where it is necessary to control them to avoid the risk of fire – at the Doncaster Yard firm he increased it sharply, perhaps from 12 every three days to 20 a day.” And what is most obvious, with the increasingly massive development of electric cars, these numbers will only increase. So will we dig new shafts for electric car batteries?

If it can’t be repaired even in the UK, what then in the Czech Republic?

Let’s hope not. For example, even the technically advanced Great Britain currently has no facilities for recycling batteries for electric cars. Why does Synetiq have to remove the batteries from the written off cars and store them in containers. Hill estimates at least 95 percent cells in the hundreds of electric car battery packs – and thousands of hybrid battery packs – that Synetiq stores in Doncaster are intact and could be reused. Anyone else want to argue “ecology”?

Can Elon Musk be forced to behave more considerately?

What with this? Maybe force Elon Musk to make the batteries in his Tesla cars easy to service by cells and not put Tesla car owners in front of a crucial problem when it comes to battery replacement. And with Musk, other manufacturers for whom battery service is largely unknown. We understand that this is part of the whole “Tesla business”, but this arrogance towards the problems of car owners (and the environment) is the road to hell. Then let no one claim anything about the ecology of electric cars. What do you think about this? Write to us in the discussion below the article, thank you!