Electric cars are already smooth and reliable, of course, but they are for now saddled with the acknowledged challenges of cost and range. But while they don’t make atmospheric tailpipe emissions, that doesn’t mean they could never be a threat to public health.
However, the general naivety in the 1920s to the concept of atmospheric pollution clearly has no equal 100 years or so down the line.
Experience has taught me to treat with contempt the occasional bouts of hysteria arising in the media about EV crash and fire safety. When it comes to engineering and testing fundamentally safe products, whose batteries don’t typically leak, degrade or explode, the car industry has already proven itself capable. The safeguards are in place. I don’t think it’s hubristic to imagine they will continue to work.
And as for the ‘upstream’ part of the equation – well, chemical research these days must, one assumes, mostly be done by trained chemists. Midgley wasn’t one of those, rather a mechanical engineer by trade. Could that have been considered a red flag? Or have you just dyed your handkerchief again, Thomas?
According to Bernstein, our man had to be persuaded, at length, to do his research into ‘Freon’, and would most likely have been happier if left to pursue the synthetic alternatives to natural rubber for tyres, to which he devoted much of the rest of his career. That was a largely fruitless search, though – and CFCs made the cash registers ring.
Perhaps it’s the very idea of ‘the one big breakthrough’ that the EV must avoid. Handy, since it seems to be content with lots of small ones. Solid state is close; new anode and cathode constructions, and nanotechnologies, are coming. The average volumetric energy density of lithium ion cells in EVs rose fivefold between 2010 and 2020 – and it’s set to double again between now and 2030.
It’s the kind of progress that clearly depends on a small army of mini-Midgleys out there right now, just doing their thing very competently and safely, with the right qualifications and without poisoning or harming anything or anyone.
