Electric cars are to a large extent, green washing. Another way for companies to make you want to get rid of the current thing you have in exchange for new thing.
The most efficient and cheap car to run is the one you already have.
I sat down and did the maths of a $/km travelled of my current car, versus the expected future life of a few new cars that marketing caused to twinkle in my eye.
They were all significantly more expensive to do the same amount of travel, given the same class of vehicle.
The great thing about electric cars is the fact that they store so much potential energy within their batteries. In cities with large apartment blocks, all it takes is a single fire in a single electric car to start a chain reaction for themral run away in a basement. A basement that will now be full of ludicrously toxic gases which will ride on waves of convection upwards to the apartments above.
Let us ignore the fact that a basement of a building is probably not really built to withstand a fire, and given the modern construction methodology of large structures, this would be a case of "jet fuel" - except "lithium fuel" really melting steel beams.
We are so woefully unprepared for the future as a species. It makes me glad my wife and I have chosen to not have children. I can't justify the suffering that would be imposed upon a new generation.
I have seen very few talk about the dangers imposed by large lithium batteries.
Only hydrogen cannisters are scarier to me.
Just think, you are a wrecker. You pull up to a broken car, you reach out to help, and ZAPPP, fried in an millisecond. There is nothing like lots of energy in a little box just looking for a circuit to ground to. Extremely dangerous.
The horror is that thermal runaway has not been solved. It has just been limited. Meaning, its just a matter of time.
Soooo, invest in oxygen absorptive fire suppression systems? The fire trucks roll up and pump that basement full of fire suppressant... hope nobody was alive in there... well, they probably weren't (fire + toxic gasses), sooooo...
Sand. Lots of sand. Friends who work in electronics repair have buckets of sand at their station to dump on top of any batteries that are looking like they're going to go thermal run away.
There's several stories of local fire fighters getting Cobalt poisoning in responding to Lithium battery fires. If you see an EV on fire, please stay away from those fumes. They are much more toxic and harmful to human life than any ICE vehicle fire.
Hydrogen is for the most part okay. The cannisters are are well engineered, and we've been moving hydrogen around for dozens of years at this point, so we're pretty good at it. At least with hydrogen, it goes boom, then it is over; as opposed to the lingering contamination caused by other fuel types.
With everything, the more of something we have in existence, the more likely we are to see failures.
A failure rate of 1% on 100 vehicles is 1. That impacts 1 person. If it is 200 vehicles, it is 2. This is obvious and linear.
The cost of dealing with that failure, however is not linear, as there's this lovely thing called cause and effect. Medical responses and emergency preparedness is also not something that works on a linear curve, either.
I really wish I could go back to school and be an actuary. It really is fascinating stuff when you look at how everything interacts with everything else.
Yep, except for the BOOM, hydrogen is much nicer...
And don't go into actuarial work! Then you will look at the data coming out from the VAXXX and get terrified for the human race.
(also, if you are really interested in it, brush up on your math skills, and then just apply at a insurance company. You need to learn all the stuff on the job, because the reality is not really taught anywhere else)
Here is a story from long ago.
There was a group working on developing large sized lithium batteries.
They had a million dollar lab (1980s dollars)
The just walked away from place.
The destruction left nothing useful, including the reinforced building.
In my day job I do Reporting, Analytics, and Business-y stuff for a telecom company. I learned it all on the job. Not quite data science, not quite boring reporting, but an intersection of being a Business Analyst and a Data Engineer.
I ironically have a Masters in Visual Art and Design, which I don't use in my day job other than applying colour theory to charts and trend lines. :D
I was offered a job at an insurance company when I thought I was being retrenched at my current job, but it was entry level, lower pay than what I was leaving, and I turned it down, and the rest they say, is history. In ten days time, I would have now been at the same company for 11 years.