The Shock of the EV — Tesla and Electrification

Last time, we watched the automobile industry reorganize itself across borders, an era in which giants joined hands even as they competed on a global scale. Alliances and mergers alike came down, in the end, to a contest over how to sell gasoline-powered cars as efficiently and as widely as possible. The internal combustion engine — a mechanism that explodes fuel to move a piston — remained the heart of the automobile for more than a century, and almost no one thought to question it.

And yet, a movement to deny that very heart, so long taken for granted, gathered speed rapidly as the twenty-first century began. The car that runs on electricity, that is, the electric vehicle (EV). To many people the EV looks like a brand-new vehicle of the future, but its history is in fact almost as old as the automobile itself. It flourished once, lost once, and is now waking from a century-long sleep. In this chapter we trace that long story, and the change happening now, neutrally and including the points on which opinion divides.

The Electric Car That Lost Once

In the dawn of the automobile, there was not just one source of power. There was an era when three methods — steam, gasoline, and electricity — competed, each with its own supporters.

It may come as a surprise, but from the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, the electric car was in fact a strong option. Against gasoline cars, which required cranking a handle by hand to start the engine, the electric car set off quietly at the flip of a switch. It vibrated little and had no exhaust smell. Around 1900 it is said that electric cars made up a considerable share of the automobiles on the road, and that electric taxis ran in city centers.

That advantage, however, did not last long. Mass production, typified by Ford’s Model T, brought the price of gasoline cars down sharply, and the development of oil fields made gasoline cheap and abundant. The electric car, with its short range and long charging time, was gradually pushed aside by the gasoline car that could travel long distances cheaply. By the 1920s it had all but vanished from the streets, and the electric car entered a long age of oblivion.

What was needed to wake the electric car from its sleep was a decisively better battery. And the key to that arrived from a world entirely separate from the automobile.

The Battery That Changed the Scene

In the latter half of the twentieth century, our lives overflowed with portable electronic devices. Mobile phones, laptops, video cameras. What supported them was the lithium-ion battery — small, light, and rechargeable again and again.

For his major contribution to putting this battery into practical use, the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three researchers, among them Akira Yoshino of Asahi Kasei. The lithium-ion battery is said to have been commercialized by Sony in 1991, opening the age of mobile devices. At first it was a technology for handheld devices, but as performance rose and mass production drove costs down, a larger use — the use of moving an automobile — came to seem realistic.

The progress of batteries greatly eased — if not completely — the EV’s greatest weaknesses: short range and long charging time. Cars that could travel several hundred kilometers on a single charge became real, and choosing to run on electricity was no longer something unfit for practical use. And then one new company appeared that bet on this possibility.

Tesla, the Challenger

Born in California, Tesla took on the electric car with an idea entirely different from that of the established majors. Founded in 2003, the company began delivering its first mass-produced car, the Roadster, in 2008. It was a two-seater electrified from the base of a British sports car, and it drew attention as a fast, attractive car that overturned the assumption that electric cars were dull and feeble.

Under Elon Musk, who became the central figure in its management, Tesla went on to send out into the world the Model S, a four-door sedan, and others. By reported accounts, the road from founding to stability was a string of cash-flow crises, with moments said to have driven it to the brink of bankruptcy. As for how it is judged, while some see it as an innovator that rewrote the conventions of the automobile industry, opinion on its stock price and the conduct of its chief is also sharply divided, making it a company of fierce praise and blame alike.

Tesla’s arrival stirred the established makers, long lukewarm toward the electric car. One after another, the firms announced electrification plans, and the EV changed from the preserve of a few advanced users into a theme for the whole industry. Yet it was not the effort of a single company alone that drove this momentum.

Decarbonization, Regulation, and Then China

As the twenty-first century began, a sense of crisis over global warming moved the policies of the world. Within the so-called flow of decarbonization, of reducing greenhouse gases, the electric car, which emits no exhaust while driving, came to be positioned as one of the trump cards of environmental measures.

In the European Union (EU), it was reported that a policy aiming to bring new-car CO2 emissions effectively to zero by 2035 was raised, and a flow toward greatly restricting the future sale of new gasoline cars has been debated. As various nations backed electrification with subsidies and regulations, another enormous change occurred: the rise of China. Chinese makers such as BYD grew rapidly and are reported to have come to show a large presence in global electric-car sales, and exports of cheap Chinese-made EVs became something that could not be ignored even in the European market. In response, the EU side is reported to have considered countermeasures such as additional tariffs — so the EV has become, at once, an environmental issue and a main battlefield of industrial competition between nations.

That said, the road to electrification is not a smooth one. The spread of EVs requires building out charging infrastructure and securing the resources used in batteries, and the environmental effect changes depending on how the electricity itself is generated. If generation relies on fossil fuels, there is the point that the emissions not produced while driving are merely being shouldered by the power plant instead. Moves to reconsider the regulatory targets once raised by various nations have also been reported, and as for when and how the end of the internal combustion engine will come, views are divided even among experts.

The car that runs on electricity has woken from a century-long sleep and is again drawing near to the center of the automobile. But electrification is only half of the change happening to the car. Within that same car, whose power has turned to electricity, another, more fundamental change was quietly advancing. Before long the car that runs on electricity will leave human hands and begin to drive itself.