When Americans are asked why they haven’t yet switched to an electric car, there is one answer that appears more than almost everything else: Range. Charging an electric car, after all, isn’t like filling a tank with gas; fast charging takes at least 20 minutes, and slower charging can take hours. People worry about getting stranded, or having to vie for a charger.
So automakers have started producing ever more gigantic batteries, using large caches of minerals to satisfy the American need for distance. This year, one EV on the market — the sleek $140,000 Lucid Air Grand Touring — boasts a whopping 516-mile range. Toyota recently announced that it had achieved a breakthrough with solid-state battery technology, saying it will soon be able to produce electric cars that can go 746 miles on a single charge.
But some analysts say that all that range — and all that battery — misses the point, and wastes resources. Only 5 percent of trips in the U.S. are longer than 30 miles. The vast majority of big batteries will never be used — particularly if the owner has a place to plug in their car every day.
“People need to hit the pause button in terms of how much range they actually need,” said Robby DeGraff, an industry analyst for AutoPacific.
At this point, it’s a cliché to point out that the American auto market thrives on size. U.S. cars are big, and are only getting bigger — from the massive, boxy Hummer to the gigantic, snub-nosed Ford F-150 truck. And that uniquely American calling card has carried over into electric cars. Ten years ago, the median range of an electric car in the United States was just 82 miles; in 2021, it had reached 234 miles. Those batteries are massive, in every sense of the word: the battery on the electric F-150 Lightning, which allows the car to go more than 300 miles on a single charge, weighs a whopping 1,800 pounds.
But is all that necessary? Americans drive a lot, but most of our trips are not very long. According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, 95.1 percent of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60 percent of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average U.S. driver only covers about 37 miles per day.
And there is evidence that much smaller batteries could do the lion’s share of the work. In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87 percent of all driving days in the United States. Providing Nissan Leafs to everyone whose driving fit that pattern, the researchers found, would cut 61 percent of U.S. gasoline consumption by personal vehicles. (Longer trips, obviously, use up more gasoline.)
As long as you can get a good charge overnight, “the vast majority of trips are covered” by electric vehicles, said Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Institute of Data, Systems, and Society at MIT and one of the authors of the study.
So most of the time, drivers are lugging around giant batteries but only using 10 to 15 percent of their actual power. And those big batteries require mining a lot of metals, damaging the environment and workers’ health. Just an average-sized EV battery requires about 18 pounds of lithium, 77 pounds of nickel, and 31 pounds of cobalt. Overall, EVs are still better for the planet than gas-powered cars — but those minerals don’t come cheaply. And much bigger batteries will require proportionally more metals.
In a report by researchers at the University of California at Davis, the Climate and Community Project, and Providence College, experts found that simply switching to smaller EV batteries — batteries that could give a small car a range of 125 miles or so — could cut lithium demand by 42 percent. Switching to other modes of transport, like trains, buses, or e-bikes, could cut that number even more.
“We’re doubling down on the worse tendencies in our transportation sector in the mission of electrifying it,” said Thea Riofrancos, a professor of political science at Providence College and one of the report’s authors.
And the trade-offs matter. In 2025, Dodge is expected to begin selling the Ram 1500 REV, a sleek electric truck that will have an optional 229 kilowatt-hour battery and about 500 miles of range. That battery, DeGraff points out, is roughly equivalent in terms of resources to 16 batteries for the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid. And the Prius Prime still has a range of about 44 miles — enough for the vast majority of American driving days.
Electric vehicles are new technology — it’s normal for people to worry about charging, range anxiety, and adapting to a different kind of driving experience. But DeGraff says the key is evaluating how much you actually drive: How many road trips do you take in a given year? How much is an average day’s driving? For those who need to take frequent long road trips and don’t want to have to plug in, a plug-in hybrid can be a good option. But for most Americans, an EV with medium range will do just fine.
“You really need to slow down and see how much driving you do,” he said. “The vast, vast majority of Americans are not driving 200-300 miles in a single day.”