Dear Electric Vehicle Owners: You Don’t Need That Giant Battery

When Hans Eric Melin thinks of battery waste, he imagines American driveways filled with electric vehicles. They look much like the gas-powered cars of yesterday, large and handsome and well-equipped: family-haulers, boat-towers, off-road ready. They also do things that those cars didn’t do, like go from zero to 60 in three seconds and travel 400 miles without emitting any carbon. The trade-off is that they carry a burden: a massive battery pack that can push the vehicles’ weight to over 10,000 pounds. Most of the time that pack is parked, or is being used to a fraction of its capabilities on school pick-ups or runs to the grocery store. Unless those cars are flying hundreds of miles down the open highway, which they rarely are, the precious atoms of cobalt, lithium, and nickel inside of them have very little to do.

In the United States, fewer than 5 percent of trips are longer than 30 miles. For a gas engine, that represents a portion of a fuel tank. For an EV, range is the result of a more complicated set of decisions about how to best use expensive, hard-to-obtain metals. Melin, an expert in battery recycling, is often asked by governments and automakers how those resources can be stretched. It would be nice if he could tell them that recycling materials from old batteries would do the job. But it can’t. Batteries can power cars for a decade or more, and with EV adoption and the size of the average vehicle increasing every year, old batteries can contribute only so much. So Melin’s suggestion: Start off with less. Use smaller batteries in the first place.

That’s a tough sell, especially in the US, and especially at this moment of EV adoption. “The push has been for more: more power. More range. Faster zero-to-60,” says Gil Tal, a professor at the UC Davis who studies the choices of EV buyers. That’s partially driven by an effort to rescue the narrative about electric cars. For decades, the popular image of an EV was a golf cart that might maroon you on some stretch of godforsaken open road. But battery technology has improved immensely. Now automakers are eager to show off improved power and range—even if that’s more battery than most drivers can actually use. “The big issue is that we buy cars for the dream,” Tal says. “When we buy for a dream in the US, we buy bigger than what we need. We buy four-wheel drive. We buy towing capacity, dreaming that one day we’ll get a boat.” 

Mostly, that’s the same fossil-fueled dream as before. For years, automakers have sold high-horsepower trucks and SUVs as “a paradigm of freedom,” says Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College who studies resource extraction for low-carbon products. “Really, it’s a paradigm of choicelessness.” Now EVs are carrying the same message—one that’s visible in the proliferation of luxury SUV and truck lineups in the US, Melin adds. Automakers could stretch their materials into selling more cars—like many do in China—but treating EVs as a luxury good translates into higher profit margins per car.

To be sure, EVs of all kinds are lower-carbon than their gas-powered counterparts. But battery size matters. Horsepower has been replaced by variables like range and battery size, which is usually expressed in kilowatt-hours. Those numbers make a difference when it comes to the greenness of the vehicle. According to Minviro, a consultancy that studies lifecycle carbon emissions of products, a 30-kwH battery is about half as carbon intensive as a 60-kwH battery. As Melin notes, the amount of lithium in a Ford F-150 Lightning could have built four or five Nissan Leafs, which are 3,000 pounds lighter but travel half as far. New mines for lithium or cobalt mean more waters poisoned, more species endangered, more homelands scarred. The moral calculus is still in EVs’ favor, especially if it means taking gas-powered cars off the road. But that avoids a harder conversation about what we’re using their batteries for.

When a recent New York Times op-ed asked how often people actually used 300-mile battery range, readers responded with indignation. Each person, it seemed, had a routine long-range commitment that mooted the article’s point: an extensive work commute, season football tickets at their alma mater halfway across the state. A 20-minute recharge along the way simply was not within reason. “This is the kind of silly coastal stuff Republicans like to ridicule,” one wrote.