The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

(Antfer) #1

44 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022


new nickel-iron batteries, supplied by
the Edison Storage Battery Company,
promised a range of up to a hundred
miles. “At last,” Electrical World declared,
“the electric vehicle is to have ... a low
price and quantity production”—roughly
the same message I heard in Austin.
Only a few Ford-Edison cars were
ever made. During the First World War,
petroleum mechanized the conflict, and
securing access to the world’s oil reserves
became one of the motives for fighting
it. And Edison’s battery didn’t work as
advertised. Apparently, the Wizard of
Menlo Park wasn’t exempt from the adage
one hears from industry insiders about
“liars, damn liars, and battery suppliers.”
Bill Ford noted that, with the dis-
covery of oil in West Texas, “gasoline
became so cheap that the whole fleet
converted over.” He added, “I often won-
der what would have happened had that
discovery not occurred.”
Internal-combustion engines emit
pollutants that can cause cancer, asthma,
heart disease, and birth defects. In 2019,
according to the E.P.A., transportation
was responsible for twenty-nine per cent
of U.S. greenhouse emissions, which
trap heat in the atmosphere and deplete
the ozone layer, prompting average global
temperatures and sea levels to rise, and
putting the planet on a path to catastro-
phe. And now the company and the
family whose products have contributed
to this predicament are offering us a
way out, by electrifying its icons. What’s
not to believe?


T


he F-150 Lightning isn’t the only
electric pickup coming to the mar-
ket, nor is it the first one. Rivian, a startup
headquartered in Irvine, California, has
already begun deliveries of its R1T “elec-
tric adventure vehicle” to customers, with
its R1S S.U.V. soon to follow. The next
two or three years will bring an electric
version of General Motors’ popular Chevy
Silverado pickup, a battle-ready Hum-
mer E.V., and the Cybertruck, Tesla’s
deeply dystopian-looking pickup, which
reportedly has more than a million ad-
vance orders. Stellantis, formerly Fiat
Chrysler, is also planning electric pick-
ups and S.U.V.s. Electric sedans from
Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lucid, and
Audi are on the market or in the offing.
Electric trucks are intended, in part,
to appeal to drivers like me, who feel


guilty about their gas-guzzler, as well as
to citizens whose concern for the common
good has kept them from buying a pickup
at all. (Two hundred thousand people
have reserved Lightnings with Ford deal-
ers; most of those potential customers
are neither pickup drivers nor Ford own-
ers.) But will buying a Lightning absolve
me of my sins against nature? If one cal-
culates all the nonrenewable-energy costs
incurred in manufacturing an E.V. pickup,
including the mining and processing of
battery metals—lithium, cobalt, nickel,
and manganese, among others—and the
worldwide shipping of those components,
along with the percentage of fossil-fuel-
based energy that goes into the grid that
charges E.V.s (in 2020, less than twenty
per cent of the electricity generated in
the U.S. came from renewables), and
then compares that with the environmental
cost of driving my gas F-150, might keep-
ing my old truck be the better option for
now, at least until renewable-energy
sources make the grid cleaner?
According to Rahul Malik, a battery
scientist who is currently working in the
natural-resources department of the
Canadian government, even an E.V.
plugged into a highly renewable grid
must be driven for more than twenty-
five thousand miles before it has lower
“life cycle” emissions (which include the
energy used in mining and manufac-
turing) than a combustion vehicle. And,
as William Green, a professor of chem-
ical engineering at M.I.T., pointed out

to me, “if a person sells their used car
and buys an E.V., that used car doesn’t
disappear, it just has a new owner, so it
keeps on emitting.” Ultimately, what
matters is that first-time car buyers
choose electric.
Then there’s the other big issue with
pickups, whether they’re gas-powered or
E.V.s: their size. Since 1990, according
to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the
weight of the average pickup has in-
creased by twelve hundred and fifty-six

pounds—thirty-two per cent. A recent
post on Vice observed that the largest
pickups and S.U.V.s today are as big as
Second World War-era tanks. Now pick-
ups are going to get heavier still. The
Lightning, because of its lithium-ion
battery, weighs approximately sixty-five
hundred pounds; in some cases the pickup
can be more than two thousand pounds
heavier than its gas counterpart. You’ll
be capable of assaulting a mountaintop
redoubt, even if you’re just driving to the
store for milk.
Not only are large E.V.s not as green
as smaller E.V.s.; what about all the
people who aren’t in big vehicles? Anal-
ysis from the National Highway Traf-
fic Safety Association has shown that
pedestrians who are hit by pickups or
S.U.V.s are two to three times more likely
to die than those who are hit by cars. In
fact, the number of pedestrians killed by
vehicles rose forty-six per cent between
2010 and 2019. According to the Gov-
ernors Highway Safety Association, if
you count deaths against vehicle miles
travelled, 2020 saw the largest increase
in pedestrian fatalities (twenty-one per
cent) since nationwide tracking started,
in 1975. Even though fewer vehicles were
on the road early in the pandemic, more
people died.
In “The Road to Transportation Jus-
tice: Reframing Auto Safety in the SUV
Age,” a forthcoming paper in the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Law Review, John
Saylor, a law student, argues that our
entire concept of auto safety should be
reconceived in the age of mega-vehi-
cles, so that we focus not just on the
people inside them but also on the peo-
ple outside them, in other cars and on
the streets. Automakers, for their part,
say that adding cameras and sensors to
vehicles will alert drivers to potential
collisions, and, should autonomous-driv-
ing features be deployed, the vehicle
might be able to take preventive action
faster than any human. But autonomous
vehicles, of course, pose a new set of
possible hazards.
Still, 2022 looks like the year of the
pickup. Ford is betting that, by making
its vehicles greener through electrifica-
tion, the company can increase profits,
boost its stock price, and claim to be on
the right side of the war against human-
made climate change. Having come of
age at a time when the well-being of U.S.
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