Electric cars, the talk of the decade and the vehicles that are talking over. Within the last couple of years, we have seen a massive growth in electric cars like Tesla making their own electric cars to prevent carbon and fuel emission pollutants in America. But will they take over? Well, maybe.

Obviously, they can’t ban driving gas/fuel powered cars but they can ban the selling of them. On August, 28th 2022, California passed a policy stating that all cars sold by 2035 must be emission free, with the hopes that existing gas/fuel powered cars will die out in the following 10-15 years after. A former resident of San Diego, California, Mr. Rodriguez said, “I understand why this law has been passed and I remember days when the smog was horrible and almost unsafe to be outside.”

Mr. Welle, a Woods and Metals teacher at TG, also understood the law passed, but he questioned work vehicles and trucks like garbage trucks and heavy-duty trucks. He thought they should be exempt from emission laws until they make an affordable and reliable electric work vehicle or truck because there are no commercial grade electric trucks out right now.

Are electric cars even worth it for the average American or even the government?  There are still a lot of pros and cons to electric versus gas powered vehicles.

To start, electric cars are still expensive, with the average price of an electric car in the U.S. being $66,000 which is well beyond the means of many people. Second, where are the charging stations? Sure, there are charging stations but not many, and on top of that, most charging stations aren’t even reliable. The U.S. government understands this issue though, so they are creating a 7.5 billion dollar project to try to build more charging stations across the country.

Can the power grid even be able to handle it?

Last, the workforce, all the people in the auto and transportation industry, what will happen to them. Nearly 1.8 million people’s jobs are directly related to the auto industry and eight million people’s jobs are affected indirectly.

Then again, there are a lot of positives to the elimination of gas/fuel powered vehicles like the overall cost of driving, driving 100 miles in a gas powered car cost on average around 15 dollars while electric cars only cost 3 dollars on average per 100 miles. Another advantage of electric cars is lower maintenance costs, gas powered cars have countless of needed parts to run while electric is simply a battery. 

The annual maintenance cost for an electric car is around $5,000 while gas cars are double the cost. Obviously, EV cars are good for the environment. Electric cars give us clean streets, making our towns and cities a better place to be for pedestrians and cyclists. In over a year, just one electric car on the roads can save an average 1.5 million grams of CO2. That’s the equivalent of four return flights from London to Barcelona.

But are we sure this is the end of gas cars as we know it?