It’s a Perfect Time for EVs. It’s a Terrible Time for EVs – Gas prices are up, commutes are back, and Russian oil is under sanction. Too bad the electric vehicle industry isn’t ready to seize the moment.
GAS PRICE GRAPHS look like sheer cliffs. Employers are finally summoning white-collar workers back to their offices and their commutes. Nations all over the world have banned Russian gas and oil following the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Plus, the ever-worsening climate crisis demands that humanity keep every possible bit of carbon out of the atmosphere (and even pull some out)—although transportation accounts for nearly a quarter of global emissions. Gee, it sure would be a nice time to own an electric vehicle.
A bunch of people apparently agree. The car-shopping company Edmunds says that searches for hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and battery electric vehicles jumped nearly 40 percent over the past month—up 18 percent in the first week of March alone. Environmentalists and security wonks are in. Last week, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council called for Americans to ditch their gas-powered rides, arguing, in a case that moved beyond this month’s terrifying events in Ukraine, that “drivers have been held hostage to the whims of petro-dictators for too long.” The Russian war has reinvigorated Carter-era calls for “energy independence.”
Too bad it’s a terrible time to buy a car—especially an electric one. Pandemic supply chain woes, production crunches, and congressional waffling about the future of electric subsidies have crashed into new challenges tied to the economic sanctions of Russia. “We don’t have enough batteries and auto manufacturing capacity to meet the demand for electric vehicles today, which is missing a prime opportunity,” says environmental economist Mark Paul of the New College of Florida. Plus, for the people most pinched by the rising cost of gas, going electric likely remains out of reach. The average transaction price for a new EV was $60,054 in February, almost $15,000 higher than the one for all new vehicles, according to Edmunds.
Gas prices were already inching skyward in the US thanks to increasing demand, brought on by the country’s “post”-Covid recovery.