Have questions about electric vehicles? We sat down with an expert

The Canadian government has introduced an Electric Vehicle Availability Standard, which will ensure that at least 20% of new vehicles sold by 2026 are 0 emission. Halifax IS Ecology Action Center calls the regulation an essential policy tool to reduce wait times for EVs in Canada by enabling A predictable supply, noting that the standards also create investor certainty and a utility business case to deploy charging infrastructure, driving EV adoption and providing transportation options for Canadians searching for relief from spiking gas prices. I sat there with electric vehicle expert Nat Pair for some Q&A about the number one type of 0 emission vehicle on people’s radar, the EV. First up, exactly how environmentally friendly are EVs? Battery manufacturing has an environmental footprint and that footprint is greater than the corresponding manufacturer of an internal combustion engine. However, over the lifetime of a conventional vehicle, a gasoline vehicle, the vast majority of the environmental footprint is associated with the extraction, refining, transport, delivery and combustion of fossil fuels. When temps get well below freezing, does that impact battery life? The range of the EV will suffer in cold weather, and this in the most extreme cases it might be as much as half, but that’s like -40. For sort of normal cold weather in the -10 to 20 range, that might be 20 or 30% of range loss, but again if you have charging at home. You can pre warm your battery before you leave in the morning and when you warm the battery that hidden energy reappears. Our price is going to become more reasonable for electric vehicles. In Canada 2023 the average price of a private vehicle was $66,000. So in that context if you have a $55,000 EV that’s getting a couple 1000 bucks of rebate, it’s not really a very expensive vehicle. Are hybrids the better choice for certain regions if you are a single vehicle household? And most households are not single vehicle households. And if you are in a region of Canada where there is not adequate DC fast charging infrastructure, so you can stop and charge on the highway in half an hour or something if those two conditions are met. The absence of DC fast charging and the absence of a second vehicle in the family in the household? Then yeah, hybrids are probably a great choice.