Electric cars will come of age in 2018

Electric cars will come of age in 2018. For the first time they will compete in price and performance with petrol and diesel cars. But in the year ahead we will also be confronted with some uncomfortable truths about going electric.

2018 is set to be the year the world fully embraces the electric car. We’ll see a global tipping point for drivers as electric models start competing with petrol and diesel cars head-to-head.

But we’ll also be confronted with the uncomfortable truth about the impact of going electric.

They've long been vaunted as the vehicle of the future but from laughing stock in the mid-1980s to rising stock today electric cars have come of age.

Companies are clambering to take the lead with billions in investments and promises to make the switch, but it’s pressure from governments that's driving this push from the industry.

It's an unlikely country that's leading the pack. In 2016 China brought more than 40 percent of the world's electric cars. These fume free cars will make our cities cleaner but uncomfortable truths lurk behind the electric car revolution.

The rise of electric cars will challenge the world's thirst for oil. It could spark a global shift of power from countries that have enjoyed the influence that oil has bought. Beyond oil, attention will turn to lithium electric car batteries which rely on the mineral Cobalt. Two thirds of the world's cobalt comes from one country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Demand for cobalt has doubled over the past five years and is set to triple by 2020.

But the electric car revolution is coming. After 2018 there will be no turning back.

Daily Watch: mind-stretching short films throughout the working week.

[KTPurdy]

The dirty secret about petrol is the amount of electricity needed to refine the oil for it.

[GrisAnik]

Yes it will cost trillion of dollars, but if you do not do it oil will also cost you trillions and also your life ...

[CyrusYareff]

No mention of the fact that China is building record breaking amounts of solar panels year after year so their electricity is cleaner and cleaner every year. Way to give the full context Economist. .:.:.

[mikeboy]

Stop this nonsense about electric cars polluting as much as an ICE engines, simple laws of thermodynamics tell you otherwise
Most cars struggle to have a thermal efficiency of 25%, whereas a coal plants have about 35%
Even if all electricity came from coal plants, which it doesn't, electric cars would still be less pollutant
Not to mention affordable solar power is coming at giant leaps

[funny-video-YouTube-channel]

The battery is an upgrade-able technology. Petrol and diesel is stuck at the same level of energy-density for the long time.

*Electricity will win this game.*

[IoannisNousias]

Even though this piece rightfully points out that the transition to electric is happening faster than people may realize, it makes some ‘strange’ mistakes.
China is mostly using LiFePO4 batteries, not LiCo2. Next gen batteries could be sodium based, not even lithium. Talking about Cobalt as if it’s a new energy source, akin to ‘the new petrol’, is misleading. This piece also fails to mention that coal is being decommissioned globally in favor of renewables. The cheapest after hydro is wind, followed by solar. Neither coal and certainly not nuclear, will be able to compete.

[YourXellency]

Electric cars are all over Shanghai. Electric automobiles are the main vehicles on our campus next to sharebikes at .15 cents an hour. Shanghai is winning!

[eDriver]

electric driving is so much fun...
I never thought about that before, but since I have an electric car, I love to drive a lot.

[RobertFabiano]

Dirty little secret? This story fails to mention that a grid powered by dirty power sources is still more efficient than having a combustion engine in every car. It's a little of the "best being the enemy of the good."

[martinlacey]

@TheEconomist
Thanks for a good summary of the current Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) situation. However, pointing to the electricity supply, you gave the incorrect impression that BEV's are just as polluting as their Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) ancestors, scientific research shows that not to be true.

Unlike an ICE vehicle which gets more polluting with age a BEV will get greener as utility electricity is moving to the cheapest provision on the market - renewables, chiefly solar, but also wind generation and battery storage.

[phasA]

Thank you Tesla. You are the reason the world finally gets it... the world needs a clean grid and is now forced to change...

[saliman]

yet another article blaming electric car for dirty grid. Like until now we had clean grid???? lets blame A/C and electric heaters as well! sooner we all shift to EVs, the better. Smart and clean grid will follow. And don't forget, it takes electricity to refine oil.

[sirierieott]

Once again, a video on the EV future can’t resist scaremongering about fossil fuels power grid scale electricity.
So disappointing from The Economist.

[weekendintokyo]

3:07 "China wants to be an leader in the production of electric vehicles".... shows a video sequence of akihabara in japan. lol.

[murdelabop]

Not all lithium ion batteries require cobalt. There are a number of lithium ion battery chemistries, the two major options of which, lithium-manganese, and lithium-iron phosphate, do not need cobalt.

[mrpetehampson]

99% of electric in Norway comes from hydro electric dams and wind power and 1% dirty fuel, we should follow their example

[nathanschmick]

Imagine a world were every country can power itself. Everywhere has wind and solar to some extent raining down on them. How great would it be if countries could get the power already there instead of shipping liquids to burn from around the planet.

[luizhkgx]

stop with the irritating weird random sounds in the video, who is editing these things, please stop

[heyedddie]

I think we will start to see a noticeable shift around 2019 / 2020 because that's when several major car companies will release mass market electric vehicles,
people outside the US will have received their Tesla Model 3 and at that point most countries will (hopefully) have built a somewhat sufficient charging infrastructure.

[Tony]

It doesn't seem that long ago when hardly anyone had the faintest clue of just how rapidly the transition from vinyl LPs to CDs would be, even when taking into account the phenomenal price of early CD players, which then started to reduce rapidly as their popularity increased.
Similarly the almost overnight change from CRT TVs to large flat screen LEDs.
So my own guess would be that it will be a similar scenario with electric vehicles, especially when the tipping point of mass production and plummeting prices really start to kick in.