Copenhagen Interviews

This blog post presents the key takeways from two interviews with Danes from the Copenhagen area about their views on electric vehicles (EVs) and Tesla. One is a long-time EV enthusiast and a technical student who works for a company selling charging stations. The other is a geologist at Copenhagen University’s GEUS department who is critical of the general public’s ignorance of resource needs and global supply chains. Both prefer to remain anonymous in this context.

Love at first sight

Ever since the first time he drove an electric vehicle when he was a young student interested in air pollution and environmental science, he has been certain that he wants to enter the world of electric cars.

“The very second I sat in the car and it started driving, all my doubts evaporated - that feeling and the absence of noise and vibration, smoke and exhaustion, right then I was convinced”, he says.

There are still many skeptics and doubters of the technology today, he finds. He talks with them frequently in his job at a small charging station company.

“Insecurity and lack of information are the main factors when people make decisions about electric cars. Most have a positive view of the technology, but they are challenged by all the technical stuff”, he explains, referring to factors such as battery life and charging speed, and then adds:

“Besides from the technical, economics also remain a key barrier to wider adoption.”

Tesla models are among the dearest in the market. Often viewed as a luxury car out of reach for most, they play an outsized role in the Danish imagination of electric cars. When they first became available in Denmark, the technical student quickly became a dedicated followe. He read all he could find about it and even convinced his father to lease one for the sake of the environment. Though not available to everybody, he wants people to realize how important the company has been in developing and slowly democratizing the technology:

“They have contributed a lot to accelerating the development by being a first-mover. Many don’t know just how important they have been in that regard”, he says.

He thinks the best motivation for adopting the technology is to improve the local environment and reduce air pollution. Yet, he admits the effects elsewhere are less beneficial:

“There is often reason to doubt that the metals used to produce the batteries are supplied in an ethical manner. And it is a fact that it takes a lot to manufacture the batteries. In the overall CO2 balance, it exceeds that of a conventional car.”

Whether EVs are good for the climate or not depends on how long they drive (the more, the better) and how the energy to charge cars is produced. The latter factor is especially favorable in Denmark, he points out.

Don’t forget the small components

Electric cars might help the global climate, but people should wake up to the environmental, economic and political dilemmas of the technology. So is the message of the geologist from Copenhagen University:

“There is an incredible alienation towards natural resources - if possible, even worse than when people go to the supermarket and grab something from the meat counter. The question of resources are very intangible to most because we don’t have any experience of it and because they are deeply hidden in the products we buy. In a computer or a battery, it is very abstract. We simply lack knowledge of natural science,” he says.

Batteries in electric cars require a wide range of resources that are mined around the world and often processed in China. They flow across borders through global supply chains, and consumers - not to mention decision-makers in business and politics - have no chance of tracing the travel up to the point they ended up in their Tesla model.

The public debate on EVs is similarly ignorant of resource requirements and the politics around them. This must change or European countries and manufacturers will face a serious problem in the years to come, the geologists claims:

“It is not a matter of geological limits. It is the supply chains that are the problem. They are not functioning smoothly, because certain countries have a lot of control over them.”

For several years, he has urged decision-makers in Denmark and the European Union to develop a strategy for how to reduce their dependence on China in particular:

“The resources are out there - we just need to find a way to extract them in a way that is politically, economically and environmentally reasonable.”

But there is a deeper problem with the entire debate on electric cars, he continues. The conversation shouldn’t just be a matter of the total number of green cars on the roads, but must also take the larger picture into account.

“We approach it in the wrong way when we assume non-stop growth. Perhaps we should instead try to redefine what we perceive as a good and sustainable future for society.”