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I wish this article would address change in population.
Country 1990 Population 2024 Population % Change Canada 27,512,000 40,861,221 +48.5% USA 248,709,873 336,030,624 +35.1% Japan 123,611,167 122,631,43 -9.0% Italy 56,756,561 58,697,744 +3.4% France 56,412,897 64,881,830 +15.0% EU 418,764,395 448,387,872 +7.0% Germany 79,370,196 83,252,474 +4.9% UK 57,210,443 67,961,440 +18.8% This isn’t an excuse and we need to do a whole lot better as a country. I just think blaming our increase of carbon output on transportation and not looking at per capita numbers gives the oilsands and other heavy industries a pass. I’d love to see more active/public transportation (and some EVs, but that’s an inefficient solution for the ~85% of Canadians living in urban areas).
There’s several big problems that impede adoption of electric cars, one being limits to battery technology (like winter performance, charging speeds, and mileage off a single charge). Although they have gotten better over the years, there’s still more room for improvement. Another issue is that a sizeable chunk of the population lives in rural and remote areas, where the necessary infrastructure to support electric vehicles simply doesn’t exist. But even in more urbanized areas like Southern Ontario, the network of charging stations for electric cars is not consistent enough for many people to switch. There’s no excuse there - multiple Provincial governments failed to address this problem due to a lack of vision and forward thinking (or lobbying from automakers against green policies and infrastructure that hurt their bottom line), while most voters were too busy worrying about carbon footprints (corporate gaslighting) rather than discussing long term solutions.
EVs are an inefficient solution for the ~85% of Canadians who live in urban areas. We need more investment in efficient solutions in areas like public transportation, active transportation, and liveable cities.
This will help with the externalities of cars too like massive parking lots, noise pollution, and urban sprawl which waste more resources and land
I agree with all of you, though the fight for expanded public transit will be even harder than that of electric cars (just look at Toronto’s light rail/subway woes)
Yeah, I am 100% with you on the need for investment in infrastructure. The reason Norway is so successful is because they both set hard deadlines on the sale of gasoline and diesel powered vehicles and simultaneously heavily invested in infrastructure and incentives to remove older vehicles from the road.
That said, having owned multiple BEV vehicles (in what’s arguably the middle of nowhere, BC) the issues with cold and lack of charging infrastructure are largely overestimated by the buying public. To the point of feeling like an excuse rather than an actual reason. People that actually try to live with a BEV for their daily transportation will find that, by and large, charging at home and driving to where you need to be and back is perfectly doable and will cover 99% of your yearly transportation needs. Even in temperatures down to -35, your EV is going to function just fine, and your range will get you where you need to be and back.
So, unless you are going on a 300km+ trip every day (which the vast majority of Canadians don’t do on a daily basis, statistically speaking) you’ll very likely be fine with a BEV. And, just in case you are wondering, if you do need to drive those 300km+ trips often within BC you will find a charger within 300km of the previous one, pretty much regardless of where you are (see: https://pluginbc.ca/charging/finding-stations/).
I honestly feel that too many people repeat the above factors (which are real and should be addressed by both the government and car manufacturers respectively) without having actually tried to live with a BEV.
That’s a good point. It doesn’t have to replace all use cases, but just handle the most common ones more efficiently (without being prohibitively expensive to purchase).
Change is scary for people, but we must adapt to free ourselves of our addiction to oil and gas.