What This Washington Post Column Gets Wrong About Electric Cars - by Joe Romm

Plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) sales are exploding.  Annual global sales are up tenfold in just five years — from a mere 45,000 in 2011 to a record 448,000 last year.

And yet for the Washington Post’s Charles Lane, the latest PEV figures are simply grist for his umpteenth highly-confused anti-PEV screed.

Before seeing how Lane pulls this off, let us go back two years, when the the Post published two attacks on electric vehicles by Charles Lane.  The first in February 2013, titled “Obama’s electric car mistake” began “The Obama administration’s electric-car fantasy finally may have died on the road between Newark, Del., and Milford, Conn.”

I am sure you remember that moment when a dubious New York Times review killed off that obscure electric car company nobody talks about any more.  What was it’s name.  Oh yes, Tesla.
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But Lane keeps plugging away.  Or rather, he keeps unplugging away.  In his entire story dissing the future of PEVs, he never once mentions what is arguably the biggest news of the year:  Apple revealed it is working on a PEV and indeed is speeding up its efforts to build and ship one by 2019.  But that would undercut Lane’s whole notion that electric vehicles are just a creation of liberals that have no future.
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It’s kind of obvious that the United States is probably the toughest market for EVs in the world since 1) we don’t have a significant gasoline tax and 2) we have a massive infrastructure of gasoline fueling stations and 3) we drive much farther than most everyone else in the world — so range matters more to us.  But rather than seeing those as reasons why the federal government should help the nascent U.S. PEV industry as the global market explodes, Lane comes with a lot of phony excuses for why the government should walk away from the whole thing.

Lane assert that this is the primary problem for PEVs:  “the limiting factor is, was and will be for years the value proposition:  Given the cost of advanced batteries, which has not come down as swiftly as EV boosters assumed, most EVs are still very expensive. ”
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So the best manufacturers have already reached the battery price needed for cost parity with conventional cars that a major 2013 study by the International Energy Agency projected would not happen until 2020.

Contrary to Lane’s claim, the cost of advanced batteries has come down much more swiftly than EV boosters assumed.  Yes, it’s true that most EVs are still expensive, but Lane knows full well that without even counting whatever Apple does, there should be at least three or four affordable EVs with a 200+ mile range on the market before the end of the decade, including one from Tesla.

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