EVs and The Future of Motorised Transport

Introduction

From the early nineteenth century through to today, our everyday means of  transportation have undergone a radical revolution. We have shifted from horse-drawn carriages and trams to cars operating at several hundred times more power. Moreover, with this we have also developed and adopted a wide variety of motorised vehicles, ranging from trains to buses to bikes. Overall, the late nineteenth and twentieth century marked a revolution in transportation from the norm that had been in place for thousands of years (even with some slight changes). It now appears clearly that motorised transportation is the new norm, one that will likely last for a vast stretch of time. In the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in a period not of rapid development and transformation but of fine-tuning and sustainable improvements.

Throughout the industrial revolution, we built our entire economy on the back of fossil fuels, something clearly reflected in motorised transportation. Yet in our ignorance we neglected the environmental effects of our rapid technological advancements. Today we are faced with the challenge of climate change, and transportation finds itself as one of the primary contributors to this problem, accounting for 16.2% of greenhouse gas emissions – of which 73% is from road transport. What is the solution to this? We seem to have collectively agreed that it is electric vehicles, and this does appear to be our most plausible pathway.

Are Electric Vehicles the Future?

EVs first became widely used in the public in the early twentieth century, at one point making up one third of all vehicles in the US. The main appeal of EVs lay in their nature of being quiet and easily driven, without requiring hand-cranking as gas cars did. Yet in 1912, the invention of the electric starter replaced the need for hand-cranking and, mixed with their cheapening price, gas cars became widely accepted as the norm. Now, in 2025, we again find ourselves making significant use of EVs, which are tremendously appealing in their lack of any direct carbon emissions. Nevertheless, there are of course a variety of indirect means of carbon emissions from EVs. One source of this includes manufacturing, where studies have shown EV production to have 30-40% higher production emissions than gasoline cars, yet this is generally considered a lesser issue due to their greater efficiency over the long run. The primary problem of indirect greenhouse emissions with EVs instead lies in their energy source – the electric grid – which is often powered off of coal, oil and natural gas. If EVs are to have an effect on future decarbonisation, they will need to be powered off a grid of clean energy.

Our World In Data

Beyond this, there are a collection of economic problems with EVs that must be addressed, particularly regarding costs of infrastructure development. EVs require charging, which is to be done in either one’s household or at a dedicated charging station, both of which will require investment to allow a viable adoption of EVs. According to Rabobank, demand will require between 0.6 and 2.4 publicly accessible charging ports by 2030, in total costing from $50-125 billion USD. Furthermore, in terms of household charging, EVs are not just another small electrical appliance, and they will bring a significant added strain to our energy infrastructure. As shown in the diagram below, EV charging will become one of the major sources of household energy consumption, alongside heating and cooling systems (as seen in below diagram). If EVs are to be widely adopted, they will clearly require a significant improvement in our electric grid infrastructure, which will take vast quantities of both time and money (in the meantime, it seems most likely that off-grid solar power will be adopted). Overall, to power the majority of cars, as well as later buses and trucks, off of the grid, we will clearly need more available power, which will require more power plants. In my view, it seems clear that this will lead to a far greater adoption of nuclear power, which offers all the benefits of fossil fuels, without the emissions and with substantially higher energy density, which I've more deeply examined in an earlier article. So we have now investigated the need for EVs, as well their energy and infrastructure demands, and it remains that we must look into their implementation, analysing key government investments and interventions.

US Department of Energy

Government EV Policies and Investments

As we previously discussed, developing EV infrastructure will be no mean task, and will require a significant investment of time and effort by governments, in terms of both infrastructure investments as well as implementation of policies and legislation to push the market in the desirable direction. In 2021, the US passed the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act”, representing a $7.5 billion USD investment into building a national network of 500,000 EV charging stations, while China’s 2020 “New Infrastructure” Initiative was a $1.4 trillion USD investment into a wide range of technologies, including the development of high-voltage EV charging stations, as well as support for the EV market. Beyond direct investments, a collection of countries across the world have set up significant subsidies for the purchasing of EVS, with countries such as Romania offering a €11,000 grant for scrapping an old car and purchasing an EV, and the Netherlands declaring fully electric vehicles as exempt from paying road tax.

As we now stand in a position where roads the whole world over are filled with motorised transport, the necessity of shifting to EVs is evident. Clearly it will not be an easy transition, with fossil fuel reliance in the grid as well as infrastructure costs posing as significant hurdles to their adoption, yet a plethora of government investments have been announced in the aim of reaching emission reduction targets that, even if overly optimistic, do seem to find EVs as a central solution. Overall, in a journey to a clean future, EVs have made clear their role as the future of everyday motorised transport.

How do you see it? Comment your take👇

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