What You Didn’t Know About Electric Vehicles: The Hidden Costs To You And The Environment
If you think electric cars are “greener” than conventional ones, you’re not alone. But there’s an untold part to this story-and it’s not about the batteries. It’s about electric-car makers holding onto the exclusive right to repair their vehicles. This means hidden costs not only to you, but to the environment.
The electric-car transition is here. Car maker after car maker is committing to selling electric vehicles. General Motors will go all-electric by 2035. Volkswagen has said it will increase its proportion of electric vehicles to 70% by 2030. Audi will stop designing cars with combustion engines altogether in 2025.
Such bold moves are matched by government commitments. The EU will impose stricter emissions standards in 2025. The UK plans to end the sale of combustion-engine cars by 2030, France by 2040. And starting in 2035, California will ban the sale of gas-fueled trucks and cars.
This massive transition to electric vehicles made me wonder: What will happen to the millions of old internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles? I envisioned rusty shells of vehicles piling up in landfills or stockyards, while car makers built yet more new vehicles to ultimately add to the heap. I worried that car companies could be creating a new environmental crisis in their efforts to avert the current one.
It turns out I was right-but not for the reasons I had thought.
The biggest environmental threat from the shift to electric doesn’t come from huge piles of rusting conventional cars. It comes from electric car makers retaining the right to repair.
Meanwhile, although it is true that ICE vehicles do immense damage to the environment through their use of fossil fuels, their end-of-life process is a model that electric-car makers would do well to emulate. And it all hinges on that same right-to-repair issue.
Widespread right to repair leads to long life and recycling
I asked Steve Fletcher, Managing Director of the Automotive Recyclers of Canada, where old conventional cars went to die. He said that about 83% of an ICE vehicle is reused or recycled. When a car is retired, recyclers remove the operating fluids (e.g., gas, oil, wiper fluid) for use or recycling elsewhere. They then strip the car of its parts for sale in an after-market. Once the car is stripped, it is pressed and sold to companies that will shred and remove the metal for recycling. Only the plastics, textiles, and carpets go to landfill.
Importantly, the vehicle-identification number (VIN) provides a detailed history of the car’s original and replaced parts. Such information builds an ecosystem of organizations, including repair shops, recyclers, and after-sales shops. Not only does this ecosystem dramatically lower the average cost of repairs for the car owner, it also prolongs the average life of a car.
Making this long life and afterlife possible is one key element: the fact that the mechanics and everyone else involved with a conventional car (including the owner) have both the needed information and the legal permission to fix or tinker with it as they see fit. They have, in other words, the legal right to repair conventional vehicles.
Electric vehicles, not so much.
The issue for electric vehicles is the right to repair
“Right to repair” means just what it sounds like: only certain parties are allowed to fix something. For instance, users of Apple iPhones or Amazon Alexas must send them to authorized technicians for repair. They aren’t even allowed to try to fix them themselves.
In the electronics and digital industries, a strong convention has arisen of manufacturers retaining the right to repair. This is because these devices are considered proprietary inventions and are protected by patents and intellectual-property laws. The makers’ ability to claim intellectual-property rights allows them to skirt laws that force other industries to hand over repair rights to consumers.
The manufacture of ICE vehicles is one area where for at least the past 20 years , laws have compelled manufacturers to reveal their “trade secrets”. This has birthed a life-prolonging ecosystem of auto-repair shops, after-sales markets, and recyclers.
However, with the advent of the electric-car revolution, the intellectual-property element has kicked in again. Since electric vehicles are simply containers of electronic equipment-just like an iPhone or Alexa-their makers can bar others from tampering with them. Electric-car warranties require owners to take their products either to the manufacturer’s service department or to manufacturer-certified repair shops.
As well, these car manufacturers withhold their diagnostic equipment, to ensure that customers remain captive to them. In this way, car companies grab a greater share of the service market and keep their customers coming back to their shop. They also restrict the information they put in the VIN, so repair shops and recyclers know less about what’s under the hood or how to fix it.
The end result: large repair bills, as car owners are held hostage to the car companies instead of being able to use their usual mechanics and tap into the after-market system of new and used parts. And what happens when owners face a whopping bill for their car’s repair? They are more likely to just trade in the car for an upgrade.
Some would argue that electric vehicles have fewer parts than ICE cars, so less can go wrong. This is true, but only to an extent. There are still plenty of things that electric-car owners may need fixed, whether from an accident or a fault with the car’s electronics. These sorts of things aren’t cheap or easy to fix-especially when a small number of authorized mechanics and other technicians have a monopoly on doing the work.
More electric vehicles, yet less aftersales service
The right-to-repair convention for electric vehicles poses a threat to owners’ pocketbooks. But it also poses one to the environment. When people buy new cars instead of repairing their existing ones, the system of repair shops, recyclers, and after-sales markets takes a hit. As that support group dwindles, car owners are even less likely to repair their cars.
Fletcher told me that he saw an uncertain future for the recycling industry with the advent of electric vehicles and the move towards car companies retaining the right to repair. “Less recycling means a larger environmental footprint,” he said.
What car companies can do to ease the transition
The tide is turning inexorably toward the electric car. Perhaps these vehicles will eventually be designed with their end of life in mind. But until then, the environment could take a big hit.
Electric-car makers can improve the transition in a number of ways.
- Relinquish the right to repair and give independent service providers the needed training and diagnostic tools. This will keep cars on the road longer.
- Design electric cars in such a way that they can be easily dissembled or reused, so that they can have multiple future lives.
- Participate in extended producer-responsibility or stewardship programs to prevent sending cars and batteries to landfills at the end of their life.
- Rebuild and reuse batteries instead of simply recycling them. And offer the option of leasing batteries, to increase their reuse.
If car manufacturers are indeed moving to electric vehicles in a good-faith effort to help save the planet, they need to think more holistically about the solutions. They need to encourage not just use, but also repair, recycling, and reuse. Otherwise, electric vehicles could end up adding to the problem instead of being part of the solution.
Originally published at https://www.forbes.com.
