According to the leading experts in energy storage, current technology allows us to reach energy density values of 250-270 Watt/hour for each kilogram of batteries. Compared to that of petrol and diesel which are around 12,200-12,700 Wh/kg. When the first Ursula commission was established in Brussels, in July 2019, the car batteries available on the market had even lower capacities, around 190-200 Wh/kg. Explained in this way, the comparison is merciless, except to consider that of that large amount of potential energy contained in hydrocarbon fuel, our engines and mechanical means are able to exploit an honorable 33% to the maximum, compared to the 90% efficiency of an electric engine. At that time in history, engineers were divided into two large groups: those who didn’t have to sell anything and therefore candidly admitted that it would take at least 15 years to reach interesting values, and those who, in order to sustain investments, guaranteed a rapid evolution of batteries, which today we honestly struggle to see, even though there are examples of greater capacity on the market. But one inescapable fact remains: if to travel one hundred kilometers in electric mode while moving five people at an acceptable speed, an average of about 13,000 Watts/hour is needed, in the best case scenario, at least 48-50 kg of batteries need to be transported. While in gasoline, only 1.6 would be enough, which is equal to about two liters because gasoline weighs 0.70 kg per liter. But Brussels was only interested in one thing: eliminating emissions on the soil of the Union, and who cares if the cure would be worse than the disease. Worse, they were interested in reducing road accidents, but since they couldn’t invest billions of euros in educating drivers, they were then reserved for the obligations to install many new mandatory devices that no one dreamed of asking for, further increasing the weight, complexity and cost of vehicles. But when we wrote it, with plenty of warnings about employment and the unsustainability of an electrified car fleet in record time, we were accused of being populist and retrograde, of not seeing “the design of the bright future” that someone was painting for us. Even a man considered the emperor of hybrid cars, Akio Toyoda, former number one of the giant Toyota, had warned them several times, but in Brussels, when it comes to Watts, kilograms and efficiency, they evidently thought they knew more than him. How it’s going to end is in the pages of the news and, worse, in the dismissal emails they are sending. And now that the plan to earn more by producing less has fallen through, even the big managers of the automotive industry are making a fool of themselves like the Pravettonis. While one of the main culprits of the disaster, the former European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services Thierry Breton, has run away and we won’t even be able to hold him accountable. Now ACEA, the association of European car manufacturers, wants to request a 2027 revision of the Cafe (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations, which would come into force in 2025 and which impose a 15% reduction in the quota of CO2 emissions allowed for new cars compared to 2020. Hold on tight: these are decisions taken with data from 2016 (when new-generation batteries were being dreamed of in a short time), approved in 2019 by the Ursula 1 commission. But this, respecting the laws of physics and those of the market, could only be possible if the quota of electric cars in circulation was around 22% of the total, a figure far from the truth since the reality remains between 15% of cars and 7% of vans (Salesforce data). This means that the EU would have to cut the production of cars and light commercial vehicles with internal combustion engines by another three million units, obviously closing a dozen factories and leaving tens of thousands of people homeless. Or pay fines of close to 16 billion. We can only choose what kind of catastrophe to try to survive. Or reset the rules that do not take into account the equations.
