Electric-vehicle issues may be all in your head, study suggests

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These days, electric vehicles (EVs) are going farther than ever on a charge, and more municipalities are putting in public charging stations, but the main issue many drivers still have against the cars is psychological.

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That’s according to a new study by a team at Switzerland’s University of Geneva, which looked at the cognitive factors dissuading many people from switching to EVs. They found that “car owners systematically underestimate the capacity of electric driving ranges to meet their daily needs” — in other words, they think they’ll need more battery capacity than they actually do.

The study was partly financed by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy and published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Energy. The scientists interviewed more than 2,000 drivers in Germany and the U.S. and found that more than 90 per cent of car trips can be completed in vehicles with a driving range of 200 kilometres, and that 250 km is the “ideal range” – less required range than almost all EVs offer right now. However, the team also found that an estimated 30 per cent of consumers wrongly believe that the vehicles available today aren’t enough to cover their daily trips.

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“The trend is to increase (range) performance, but we have observed that a greater range, beyond 300 kilometres for example, does not increase the fit to daily needs,” said Mario Herberz, one of the study’s authors. “It would only have a minimal impact on the number of additional trips that can be completed with one electric charge. Increasing the size of the batteries is therefore not a key element in the energy transition.”

The importance of the study, Herberz said, is that it shows the importance of psychological factors in EV adoption, especially since “the main financial and technological barriers have been removed” with lower vehicle prices, more incentives, and denser infrastructure. Instead, providing information to consumers about their needs with electric mobility, and helping them get over their reluctance, is just as important as installing more charging stations or making bigger batteries, “which require scarcer resources such as lithium and cobalt.”

The researchers said that fossil fuel vehicles account for nearly 18 per cent of CO2 emissions globally, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). While sales of EVs are increasing in many countries, their market share is still far too low to create a significant reduction in CO2 from traffic. In 2020, electrified vehicles (including hybrids) accounted for only 1 per cent of vehicles globally, but that must increase to at least a 12 per cent proportion to meet 2030 climate targets.