My EV nightmare before Christmas
A bit late, but I nonetheless wish you all a happy festive season and all the best for 2025!
My EV nightmare before Christmas
‘KER-Chunk’, went the car, followed by an ominous warning message on the dashboard display: “Propulsion system failure.” We were driving at 100 km/h, at the beginning of a narrow and upward-sloping highway offramp. And true enough, the throttle didn’t respond anymore, the engine was dead. The car’s momentum carried us perhaps two thirds of the way up, where I stopped it as close as possible to the concrete divider. It was dark, cold and wet, and we were stuck in a very awkward place on a busy exit: the main road between Strasbourg in France and Karlsrühe in Germany. The overriding priority was clearly to get our family of four out of there ASAP. Alas, that turned out to be more complicated than it sounds.
Most modern cars come with a call button for support. After pressing the button, I was connected to the call centre in Belgium, since that is where the car is registered. Since the car was technically still on the highway, the roadside assistance service could not send a tow truck, it had to be coordinated by the French Gendarmerie, who run a fast response service along the highway. The roadside assistance case manager told us who to call, and to call them back when the tow truck arrived. The lady at the Gendarmerie’s call centre was friendly enough, and after gathering some basic info about the situation and the car, she dispatched a tow truck. She was not familiar with Polestar, but I mentioned it was an EV and she registered that.
After 30 mins of a decidedly stressful wait, the tow truck arrived, but I had immediate doubts: it didn’t seem to be a truck fit to deal with an EV, which cannot be towed of course. I explained this to the mechanic, who had his tow cable in hand, and he didn’t take this well. A testy exchange ensued, during which he made clear his views on Chinese-made EVs—“pieces of shit”, unsurprisingly. With a beret and a cigarette stuck in his mouth, there would have been great potential for a comedy skit.
Eventually, after 10 minutes of back and forth interspersed with calls to the roadside assistance centre, where they confirmed the car couldn’t be towed, the first mechanic called another tow truck, which this time was supposed to have the necessary equipment. Start of another 45 minute wait, cars and lorries zooming past and, as we found out later, driving over the warning triangle that I had put out earlier.
The second tow truck arrived, and did appear to have the right equipment, essentially a set of wheels to put under the car. However, it stopped some ways away from us and didn’t move for a long time. I went up to them to ask what was going on, they had called yet another tow truck to block off the exit because it was too dangerous for them to work with all the traffic coming past. So we had to wait another good 20 minutes, at least this time inside the warm cabin. At long last, the third tow truck arrived, the mechanics in the second tow truck could rig up our car, and we were able to drive off, car in tow.
This ordeal capped off an already challenging road trip. Even though the distances we were looking to cover were not particularly ambitious, 500km to our main destination and day trips of perhaps 200km round trip, they still required multiple charges of course. On the way there, the first fast charger that was indicated by the navigation system was full and had at least two or three cars waiting, so we skipped that. We found a slower charger nearby, that caused us to spend close to an hour and a half in a nearby McDonalds. The second charging location that day was supposed to be a 300kW fast charger—out of order. Luckily there was a slower 50 kW next to it that we could use to top up enough to reach our destination. At our destination, a small town in Germany, there was one 300 kW charger—out of order, and one 60 kW charger—also out of order.
Before driving out to our day trip destination then, we ended up in a town 10km away, spending 25 mins tethered to a fast charger in yet another McDonalds car park. EVs may be better for the planet, but evidently less so for our waistlines.
The plan was to top it up further at our destination, Strasbourg in France. Turns out there is practically no charger to be found there, let alone a fast one. The best option I could find then turned out not to work with my charging provider, and didn’t work with my credit card either, so a regular parking spot it was. Needless to say, the road trip up until that fateful dark and cold night on the highway offramp had been spent in low-key range anxiety.
Our experience of course did nothing to dispel my feeling that electric vehicles are not a technology ready for prime time yet, even more than ten years after Tesla became a household name. By now they match their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts on driving dynamics and comfort, but they are being held back by their batteries. The battery capacity does not allow for enough range, and the charging is too slow. Fixing this would require a step change in battery technology, but it’s not clear that is anywhere on the horizon.
From this perspective, it seems premature to write off hydrogen as an alternative. Replacing an infrastructure entirely fine-tuned to ICE vehicles over a hundred years is a monumental challenge for either EVs or hydrogen, but it seems hydrogen would deliver the more seamless ‘petrol pump’ experience we’re used to today.
Granted, the vast majority of car trips consists of short trips starting from a home. EVs that charge overnight at home, often with power from solar panels, offer a fit-for-purpose green solution for these trips. But right now, this setup is really only available for those living in a stand-alone house. By definition, this tends to exclude the poorer groups in society. This observation drives the criticism that incentives to install solar panels and purchase EVs are subsidies to the middle class only. Any policy that, when extrapolated to its logical conclusion, ends up sacrificing the often vital mobility of the poorest in society to reduce emissions is a non-starter in my opinion. Moreover, in the bigger picture, an urban design featuring stand-alone houses and suburbanisation is a major factor in carbon emissions, so making detached dwellings more attractive is traveling in the wrong direction.
Beyond the immature technology, a lack of systems thinking at a policy level is also holding back EVs. The unavoidable fact is that easily overlooked adjacent infrastructure is equally not ready to deal with EVs. Our tribulations with the towing service in France are a good example. The permission to tow cars along the highway is presumably handed out in concessions, so the government could mandate that they need the equipment to deal with EVs, but obviously they don’t. Similarly, operating permits for parking garages could mandate the installation of charging points, but evidently they don’t.
The impact of these lagging infrastructure improvements is plainly visible in the statistics: sales of EVs across the EU were 6% lower year-on-year, throwing in doubt the EU’s ambitions to phase out new ICE cars by 2035 and mortgaging emissions targets.
All this taken together, it’s hard to escape the impression that politicians are pushing EVs opportunistically, paying lip service to their zero-emissions goals and the green transition. At a philosophical level, merely providing some incentives to purchase EVs without considering the wider implications fully is also a mechanism to shift the responsibility of the green transition to individual citizens and their purchasing decisions. This neatly fits in the oil & gas industry’s narrative that climate change is caused by our individual “carbon footprint”, in the process practically absolving the industry of any responsibility. This is of course a lie. There will be no green transition without fundamental systemic change, and only politics can catalyse this type of change. It’s unfortunately way past time that we focused on that instead of on a new, shiny but immature technological deus ex machina like electric vehicles.