The Truth about Electric Cars

CRYPTODAY 144

I've been driving electric cars exclusively for 1.5 years now and wanted to do an overview for the EV-curious folks out there. I'm not a car expert but I have a ton of real-world experience: I currently own a 2024 MG4, a 2024 Tesla Model 3, and a 2025 Tesla Model Y, and I've tested and reviewed cars from BYD, Hongqi, Seres, and GWM. Let's dive in!

1. “I'm scared that I'll run out of power in the middle of the road!”

   This is by far the most common concern I hear from non-EV drivers — nobody wants to get stranded after all. But although it sounds scary, in reality it's also the least problematic part of being an EV owner. At the heart of this worry is the fact that we're not used to the idea of being able to “refuel” in our own homes, because that's never been a possibility with gas cars. This is the most important mindset shift when switching to electric: you can always top up your battery whenever you want in your own garage. You could even plug in every night when you get home, the way you charge your phone, because modern EVs have an automatic limiter to prevent overcharging. In reality though, you will rarely need to charge more than once a week. The average Metro Manila driver doesn't do more than 70km a day (that’s twice the distance of SM Fairview to SM Mall of Asia) and even an older EV will support 350km on a full charge. And even if you somehow find yourself at 0%, you can squeeze out another 8-10km of travel before your car finally shuts down.

2. “I live in a condominium so I can’t install my own wall charger!”
   EVs aren’t for everyone just yet, and condo residents will probably find it challenging to charge their vehicle. That said, the DOE reports that there are now over 900 charging locations across the country – including in some condos and office buildings – so it's getting easier by the day. The government's target is to increase that number to 8,000 locations by 2028. My problem with this rollout though is not in terms of accessibility, but in the overall cost to the consumer. Most commercial charging stations charge over 25 pesos per kwH, which is double of Meralco pricing, so until competition drives that cost down, I’d say that EVs only become viable if you are living in a house with a garage, where you can enjoy a cheaper rate. (Tesla superchargers only cost 19 pesos per kwH, which is a lot more reasonable, but there are only 4 stations nationwide so far.)

3. “EVs are just as polluting as gas cars!”
   Many people consider switching to EVs because they believe that they have less of an impact on the environment. However, you've probably heard the counter-argument that the production of EV batteries is equally as bad for the environment as gas cars. This is factually correct, but there's some nuance here that deserves to be clarified. The way to think about this is that EVs have a big upfront cost to the environment, because battery manufacturing has a big carbon footprint. Gas cars meanwhile have an environmental cost that starts low and goes up over time. After their second year of use, both EVs and gas cars will have roughly the same carbon footprint, but gas cars never stop increasing their carbon emissions, and get steadily worse as they get older. Most importantly, EVs don't spew out carbon monoxide, so they don't contribute to the worsening air quality in our cities. If you live with kids or elderly folks, this is an important consideration. And EVs also don't contribute to noise pollution because their motors are essentially silent.

4. “The electricity we use for EVs is generated by coal and gas power plants anyway!”
   In the Philippines and in many other less industrialized countries, this is almost certainly correct. However, electric cars at least make it *possible* to use renewable sources. We’ve got so many other options now — solar, wind, hydro, geothermal – and they’re arguably more efficient than sucking oil out of the ground and venting methane into the atmosphere and creating thousand-mile-long pipelines to deliver petrol that then gets burned up at the rate of 97 million barrels per day. For reasons both geo-political and logistical, it is a lot better to generate electricity in our own locales than it is to harvest oil remotely and ship it to our petrol stations. (And let’s not even talk about the wars that get started over these oil fields.) Now, if this stuff really mattered to you, you could make a personal choice and install solar panels on your roof right now and generate your own renewable energy today. You don’t have that option with a gas car. They’re a legacy invention, and while our reverence for them is not entirely misplaced – they’ve served us well for a century – it’s time to start planning for a change in direction.

5. “EVs are a fire hazard!”
   This is also factually true, but only in the sense that, yes, EVs can catch fire. The people who repeat this issue conveniently forget that the “combustion” part in “internal combustion engines” literally also implies fire. The real-world statistics tell us that gas cars are 60 times MORE likely to catch fire than EVs, and the reason we don’t hear about it is that the media doesn’t bother to write about it anymore. The numbers are pretty stark: for every 100,000 electric cars sold, you can expect 25 fire-related incidents, but for every 100,000 gas cars sold, you can expect over 1,500 to catch fire. Because EVs are new and relatively rare, headlines about EV-related fires are still considered news-worthy, but gas car fires apparently happen so often it’s not even worth writing about anymore.

6. “You can’t drive an EV through a flood!”
   This is just false, and I’ve tried it myself in the Tesla Model 3 when I had to drive through 2-foot-high flood water along Osmena highway during an unexpected thunderstorm. An EV will perform better than a gas car in these situations because there’s no tailpipe for water to enter through, and the entire bottom of the vehicle is fully sealed. Of course, no car manufacturer will ever recommend that you do this often, but it’s good to know that it can. Other than the car looking a bit gross afterwards, it was completely fine.

7. “You should just get a hybrid so you get the best of both worlds!”
   If you’re regularly traveling more than 150km in one trip, a hybrid is currently the better option, but this is the only situation where I would recommend a hybrid instead of an EV. My biggest issue with hybrids is that you don’t actually get the best of both worlds – what you really get is the worst of both worlds. First, you get a far smaller battery so you can’t really rely on it for anything more than a few dozen kilometers of travel, and second, you inherit all the maintenance issues involved with having a traditional combustion engine under the hood. Additionally, hybrids are 2.5x more likely to catch fire than gas cars, at 3,500 accidents for every 100,000 units. (Note that I’m not talking about EREVs here, because there’s not currently enough data to evaluate their fire safety, although if I were to guess, they’d probably be similar to hybrids.)

8. “EVs are too overpriced!”
   EVs are somewhat more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts, but we’ve got EVs on sale at just 700,000 pesos now (the Changan Nevo is a new interesting option), so I’m not sure how long this argument will hold water. You also need to take the operational savings into account: whatever your fuel costs might have been for an equivalent gas car, you will save 70% by switching to electric. So for example, if you were normally spending 5,000 pesos on fuel every month with your Ford Territory, you can expect to spend around 1,500-2,000 pesos on electricity every month with a BYD Atto 3. Over a 3 year period, you’re saving over 110,000 pesos easily, and the savings keep growing the longer you keep your EV. Now, a mid-range Ford Territory is 1.6M pesos while a BYD Atto 3 is closer to 1.8M pesos, so on paper it looks like the Ford is still a better deal in the medium-term, but remember that it’s also 25% less powerful, at 158 horsepower against the BYD’s 204hp. EVs are always faster and more powerful than their gas equivalents. It’s also worth mentioning that there are no oil-change costs with an all-electric drivetrain, and your brake pads last twice as long because the motor itself helps with deceleration, so the long-term maintenance costs are also substantially less.

9. “You’ll get a nasty bill when your battery dies!”
   This concern stems from an old notion that battery packs eventually fade in capacity, and a replacement will cost basically the same amount as a new car. Most EVs now have an 8-year battery warranty specifically to address this. But let’s talk about the actual lifespan: the degradation rate for an EV battery is less than 2% per year, so even after 10 years of driving, your range will only have dropped to approximately 80% of its original output. Coincidentally, gas cars see about 30-35% reduced fuel economy over that same time period, so they’re substantially worse from this perspective as well. You are in fact more likely to swap out your car as a whole than to swap out your battery pack. But even if you did need a replacement, EV batteries are becoming steadily cheaper as the industry becomes more competitive and the technology improves. From 2012 onwards, we’ve seen a cost reduction of about 75% in battery pack replacements (from $400 per kwH to now just $111), and the expectation is that this will continue to become more cost-efficient over time.

At the end of the day, switching to an EV is a personal choice, but in my opinion, the critical decision point is whether you have a garage. If you do, then an EV is the better choice for the average driver on nearly every level: overall cost of ownership, vehicular performance, environmental impact, and safety.

Stay safe out there!