The World Economic Forum And The Five Things Making EVs More Attractive

The World Economic Forum (WEF) issued a report under its Unban Transformation group highlighting five things that could make owning an EV more convenient. It is interesting to see reports by global organizations that aren’t part of the car industry because they often step away from technology as a goal and instead focus on benefits that focus on larger environmental or socio-economic issues.

Let’s examine each of the five elements they list and discuss whether they are achievable, make sense, and impact EV ownership.

Battery Swapping

If this worked, Battery Swapping would be a huge game changer for the EV market. Rather than recharging your batteries rapidly, which is never quick enough and tends to degrade them over time, Battery Swapping would be better for the batteries (they could be slowly charged in hyper-cooled environments). This would extend battery life, result in under 10-minute waits to refuel, and potentially reduce the car's cost by the battery's price, which would then be provided as a service.

There are three problems with battery swapping. The first is that EVs aren’t all the same size or use the same battery infrastructure. Battery swaps in devices work because the batteries have standard configurations and are designed to be replaced easily. This lack of consistency would mean that a battery station (like a gas station but with batteries) would have to stock an impossible number of battery variants and have incredibly flexible tools to swap out the battery without having an extensive installation process.

This needs to be a service where the service owns the battery because current EV owners don’t want to swap their nearly new battery for a used one with uncertain parentage. Add to this that the practice puts charging stations at risk, and you can see why it’s never been adopted.

New Battery Technology

We’ve been talking about this one for a while, and there are a host of companies and schools coming up with new battery formulations. One that has taken off is Lithium-Ion Phosphate batteries, which use phosphate. These batteries still use Lithium but don’t require other problematic chemicals such as cobalt and nickel. Another is Solid-State batteries, which improve charging times, reduce the needed space for the battery, and have a far greater potential range. These are expected around 2027 in EVs.

Then we have Sodium-Ion Batteries, which replace Lithium with far cheaper and safer Sodium and also eliminate expensive cobalt and nickel. We even have new manufacturing techniques that significantly improve the life of existing batteries.

These alternatives are coming rapidly, but the more compelling of the lot isn’t due to market until the late 2020s, so we may not see many benefits before 2030.

Public Charging

There is a massive buildup of Public Charging stations, but we are still short enough chargers located conveniently to avoid battery anxiety. Tesla clearly set the bar here with their extremely easy-to-use and well-deployed charging stations. Some of the newer solutions include repurposing old telecom boxes as charging stations, pole-mounted charging, and new charging stations that include places to eat and buy stuff. 

This just takes time to build out, and with the coming improvements to battery technology, charging experiences should improve sharply year over year. Tesla is still the gold standard for doing this right. Building out these charging stations, coupled with EVs with an ever-greater range, should have the most significant positive impact on EV sales in the long term.

Faster Charging

China is leading the way here (well, they are pretty much leading the way with EVs in general), as they currently have 85% of the world’s fast chargers in China. Their stations can charge up to 8 cars at a time, and the charges for their new electric cars take around 10 minutes.

You get Fast Charging down to 10 minutes, and make those chargers as convenient as they are in China. You potentially remove much of the battery anxiety that current electric car owners driving distance experience. The lack of public chargers has been one of the biggest drags on EV sales to date.

Electrified Roads

This is a bit of a pipe dream. The first electrified road in the US is being planned in Detroit, Michigan. If we could electrify our highways and freeways, cars and trucks could use this capability (they currently aren’t equipped to do inductive charging). You’d never even need a public charger in most cases, and it would be the dream of most men never to have to stop at a gas station again. Women might take issue with this.

However, the cost of doing this is massive and unlikely to be funded at scale in larger countries like the US. However, smaller countries like Sweden are aggressively looking at this and could eventually help convince the rest of the world that this approach is not only viable but would also result in massive cost savings for interstate travel and trucking. 

Wrapping Up:

The World Economic Forum has put forward a list of things that would improve EV adoption. They are focused on this because EV dominance should result in a reduction in global climate change. However, they left off things like EV cost, EV service, EV Reliability, and China's massive advantage regarding EV costs and pricing.  

Each of these problems is being slowly addressed, but until they are, EVs will not be able to fully replace gas vehicles in most countries.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.