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Originally Posted by why?
There are not enough materials to go around
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If we dump the things into landfill at end of life, that’s true. But almost everything can be recycled and reused... if it can be made cost effective. That’s they key barrier to wider scale recycling... that and the energy it requires.
We also need a change in thinking, from mindless consumerism and ‘engineered obsolesence’ to keeping, repairing and upgrading things instead of always buying a brand new one. Manufacturers (with consumers support) themselves have driven much of this waste and depletion of materials by engineering in obsolescence into their products, giving them a deliberately shorter life because they want to sell more new ones.
When it is cheaper to throw something away and buy a new one, instead of repair or upgrade the existing one, there is an inherently bad and wasteful incentive built in. We probably need to move away from ‘buying’ to ‘leasing’ for many products with rare elements in them so that there are strong financial incentives for the manufacturer to make the product last as long as possible in order to reap the greatest financial return.
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And let's also be clear, the power grid of absolutely no country is ready for even 10% of its population to have ev's, never mind 50% or more.
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You might want to look at Europe, where some countries, like Norway, have reached significant EV penetration. Norway passed 10% of its fleet as EVs in 2018, and in 2019 56% of newly bought vehicles were EVs. So far their power grid hasn’t collapsed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug...cles_in_Norway
But sure, for most countries significant changes to infrastructure are required. Ideally we need everyone generating power locally with support from base load power as a backup, instead of relying on centralised base load generation only.
The obvious thing in a country like Australia is solar - every home should have it, and with sufficient panels and battery backup, most homes could be self sufficient... including charging their EV off their own power.
Even the design of EVs should factor this in... PV tech has advanced to the stage where not only could all the body panels be PV cells, but even the glass could as well. The car could literally be recharging itself as it rolls down the road, or sits parked outside.
Yes, it would be expensive, so govts would have to step up and heavily subsidise it until economies of scale made it cost effective. But much is possible if we leverage both science and govt to support it.