Last week, leaders of states from all over the globe met in Glasgow to create plans for helping our planet prevent another climate disaster. These plans include electric cars.
Joe Biden of the United States has set a goal for halving all U.S. vehicle sales to electric vehicles by 2030. At that point, other countries such as France and Britain will ban the sale conventional ICE cars. Norway will be leading the charge. It has already reached that milestone in 2025. However, it may end up selling all its combustion-engined cars as soon as 2022.
But not everyone is looking forward to the EV takeover, and not just because they’re going to miss the sound of straight-piped V12 Ferraris on YouTube. Electric cars might be a key component in our strategy to save the planet, but they aren’t as angelic as they might first appear.
There’s the problem of where the electricity comes from to make them run, of course. Due to the high cost of lithium and cobalt extraction, there is a significant environmental penalty. But the mass switch to EVs will cause further devastation closer to home: it’s going to cost thousands of people their jobs.
Similar: A study shows that EVs have lower service costs than ICE models
That’s the tenet of a recent Bloomberg article titled “The Coming Electric Car Disruption That Nobody’s Talking About”. “.
Simpler Cars, Fewer Jobs
We’re often told that one of the key advantages of the electric car is its simplicity. An average EV will have far fewer moving components than an equivalent ICE engine, making it more reliable. That’s great for the driver, who has less reason to visit a dealership or local mechanic, but not so great for the guys working at the dealership, or the local independent shop, whose numbers will almost certainly be reduced due to a slowdown in demand.
Consider all the companies that produce the components for an average ICE vehicle. These are the engine components, often made in-house by OEMs. However, the small businesses that produce hoses clips, alternators, filters and hoses can be found. Some of them might be able to adapt to pick up different contracts, and of course even EVs need brakes, tires, dampers and bushes, but there’s little doubt some suppliers might go to the wall.
According to the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, the U.S. auto parts industry employs almost 5 million people and accounts for 2.5 percent of U.S. GDP. These jobs could disappear, though. Coming off the back of setbacks caused by the COVID pandemic and, more recently, the semiconductor shortage, that’s not great news.
The Ripple Effect
And if most of us are able to charge our EVs at home, and improving battery tech means those cars will be able to drive for 300+ miles on a charge, we’ll rarely need to visit gas (or should we say charge?) stations, where we’re often tempted to pick up a drink, sandwich, newspaper or bar of chocolate. In the middle of recent UK fuel supply crises, many service station owners claimed that losing footfall to their shops was just as detrimental to their earnings as inability to sell fuel.
The slowdown of fuel consumption will have an even bigger impact. Bloomberg points out that there is less demand to pump fuel, which means that there will be less demand for the alcohol that goes into our blends at the pumps. That ethanol production accounts for about a third the U.S. corn crop.
The Technological Innovation Churn
Change won’t happen overnight. ICE cars will be still sold in the years ahead, as well as those vehicles remaining in production for a further ten years. But that change is definitely coming, and predictably the auto workers unions are keen to ensure they get a slice of the newly configured industry pie, suggesting that if the car companies were happy to take taxpayers money from the government to survive the recession a decade ago, they should be obliged to protect those taxpayers’ livelihoods in the future.
Companies like Ford and GM are investing heavily in battery plants, bringing jobs to places like Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky, though those jobs may not be United Auto Workers (UAW) jobs, and they won’t be much comfort for workers in Detroit concerned about their own long term futures.
Major technological changes create and destroy jobs. This can provide amazing opportunities to some and extreme misery to others. The industrial revolution and mass adoptions of electricity as well as computers, smartphones, and MP3 audio tracks, had a huge impact on the world. It was pure chance that I found out about the closure in print of UK Modified Car magazine while researching this story. Fast Car, after 34 years, and it reminded me of the parallels between what’s going on in the car industry, and what’s simultaneously been happening in the media that covers it.
In the 20th century, magazine sales dropped by 20%. Publishers have spent much of their energy trying to reverse the decline. However, many failed to make investments in the latest technologies which could threaten them. There was also a rise in ambitious competitors who took advantage of the opportunity that the same technology provided and created websites, videos, social media content, etc. You’re reading this post on one of them, CarscoopsRight now. And you’ll probably watch something from another on YouTube, or like a picture on Instagram, at some point today.
When I got myself first gig at Autocar magazine 20 years ago this year, the title didn’t even have a website. It didn’t have one. CarWhen I first moved to the area in 2004, it was a very different place. Now, 95% of the content I write for online readers is written. When journalists test drive a car like the Audi RS3, it’s important that they can present a video and not just some text. There might be similar stories from your own life about change. You can’t always stop change (and you might not even want to), but you can do your best to be a part of it.
