The Hidden Costs and Burdens of Electric Vehicles

Tesla

Article QuickTakes:

• Financial considerations for EV owners
• Less-quantifiable costs of electric vehicles

The per-mile cost to charge an electric vehicle (EV) is about half of what a driver would spend to fuel a similarly sized gas-powered car. That's true if you charge that EV at home during off-peak hours. An electric car accounts for a fraction of the pollution of a gas-powered one, although that depends on the mix of power plants feeding your local electrical grid. In any EV cost-benefit analysis, there are several caveats.

Electric cars are not the simple panacea, as they're often described. An analysis shows that EVs are cheaper to own and cleaner to operate than internal-combustion-engine vehicles and will only get more so with time. But their benefits — to your pocketbook and to society — are more nuanced than you might realize.

Here, we've split the hidden costs of EVs into two groups: the actual costs borne by EV buyers and those harder to quantify.

Financial Considerations for EV Owners

• Home EV Charging Station: Electricity is cheaper at home than at public EV charging stations, so much cheaper that if you relied solely on public charging, your per-mile cost would rival that of driving a car with an internal-combustion engine (ICE). Nationwide, typical home charger installations cost between $1,000 and $2,000, but homeowners can claim 30% of that cost up to $1,000 as a tax credit.
• Repair Cost: Various news outlets place maintenance costs for electric vehicles at around half of their ICE counterparts, but for EVs needing major repair or that are involved in crashes, that balance seesaws back to favor gas-fueled cars. Several factors inflate average repair costs for EVs, such as fewer licensed repair shops and technicians, more specialized tools and training for those that do exist, more exotic lightweight materials, and pricey sensors. As electric vehicles become more common and the repair industry catches up, costs will likely decrease.
• Insurance: With higher repair costs come higher insurance rates. Many news publications report an average insurance premium about 20% higher for an EV than a comparably priced ICE car. This is due not only to the higher repair costs but also a shortage of risk-assessment data for insurers to base their rates upon.
• Registration Fees: Upkeep and expansion of roads and other national infrastructure is largely funded through taxes on fuel. Since EVs don't use fuel, many states charge annual registration fees for EVs as a sort of lump-sum gas-tax equalizer. They range from just under $100 to more than $200. In Texas, for example, there is now a $400 initial registration fee and $200 annual fee thereafter, which are applied to the state highway fund.
• Charging Variability: The cost to charge an EV is variable in the same way that gas at one station might be 5 to 10 cents cheaper than at one around the corner. Electricity costs less in some regions of the country than in others, but the volatility goes deeper with EVs. Some charging networks charge by the minute, meaning it will cost more to pump the same 30 KWh into a Mini Cooper than it does for a GMC Hummer EV because the latter's 350-kW onboard charger can inhale that amount of juice faster than the Mini's 50-kW charger.

Less-Quantifiable Costs of Electric Vehicles

• Charging Emissions: Generating power generates emissions. While EVs don't spew harmful gas into the air, the power plants that replenish EV battery packs do. The emissions attributable to an EV depend on the mix of power plants serving its local grid. This tool from the Union of Concerned Scientists can tell you how clean an EV in your area really is.
• Manufacturing Emissions: Lithium-ion batteries are messy to produce. Some analyses place the greenhouse-gas emissions from the manufacture of an EV at about 70% higher than those from manufacturing a gas-powered car. The batteries are responsible for most of that excess. And when the batteries wear out, they'll need to be recycled. There's talk about the lack of a recycling infrastructure, but the industry's response is calm. Battery recycling infrastructure isn't up to speed because the packs should last 10 years or more. There simply isn't critical mass to support a significant recycling apparatus yet. Battery recycling is of tremendous interest to automakers, however, and third-party recyclers are already realizing methods that recover 80% or more of a pack's essential metals. Look for big advancements in battery recycling as more EVs hit the road.
• Geopolitical Unpleasantness: Many of the metals required to make batteries and electric motors are rare and expensive, and the global supply chain is already strained at current manufacturing volumes. To simply replace every car on the road in the U.S. with an EV would require three times the amount of lithium mined globally today. In recent history, lithium mining has a habit of trampling ecosystems, water supplies, and indigenous populations.
• Strain on Infrastructure: The Telegraph, a British newspaper, sounded the alarm early in 2023 on behalf of a British engineer that the additional weight of EVs could collapse parking garages. That’s a justifiable concern, though perhaps one that has been blown out of proportion. EVs might be heavier, but they're not twice as heavy as gas-fueled vehicles. K.N. Gunalan, who served as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2020, writes on the ACSE website that consumer EVs pose no immediate threat to our nation's roads and bridges. He notes, however, that a proportionate weight gain in commercial vehicles transitioning to electric propulsion would accelerate wear and tear on the nation's roads, 43% of which his organization rates as being in poor or mediocre condition.
• Road Safety Concerns: A few high-profile EV crashes that resulted in the vehicles catching fire are not indicative of an overall trend. Data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the National Transportation Safety Board indicates that EVs are in fact less likely to ignite in a crash than gas-powered vehicles. Raul Arbelaez with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, reports that his team has crash-tested 55 EVs since 2011 and not one has caught fire. The danger posed by EVs to other road users again comes down to their added mass. All crumple zones and structural reinforcements don't change the basics of physics: Heavier vehicles impart more force to other vehicles in collisions. One frequently cited study in the 2010s by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that a difference of 1,000 pounds between vehicles correlates to a 47% increase in fatality risk for occupants of the lighter car. The Hyundai Kona, a subcompact, for example, weighs about 800 pounds more in EV form than in ICE form.