By Jo Nova

Just another catch on the road to Green Heaven. EV’s are heavier than petrol cars.

Where a full tank of gas or fuel is 70kg, a full tank of battery (or an empty one) weighs half a ton, or in the Tesla Model Y league — 771kg. That’s more than a whole Toyota Corolla weighed in 1967 (just 690kg). Now a Tesla Model X weighs 2,500kg and some of the newer EV’s weigh 4,000 kg.

That poses a problem for many structures that were designed with normal cars in mind. The odd EV is fine, but if the whole national fleet starts to become electric, suddenly loads on 50 year old bridges and shopping centre carparks are beyond the expected bounds. The infrastructure may have been designed when a normal car was just a 1970’s corolla.

In the UK, as many as 1 in 20 bridges may be too weak to handle the load. Perhaps it’s lucky then that there aren’t enough minerals in the world to make all those EV’s. If it takes us 200 years to dig up the copper required, that may give us time to rebuild the carparks and bridges.

Given […]