With gas prices spiking, is Canada finally ready to start buying electric cars?

Zan Freeman wishes he bought his IONIQ 5 Hyundai electric vehicle sooner.

“I’m absolutely in love with it,” he said.

Living just north of London, Ont., Freeman began his electric vehicle hunt last year when he saw the price of fuel climbing. At $1.50 to $1.60 for a liter of gas with predictions it will go even higher this summer, he wanted to save.

He has an at-home charger which he uses to power the car, but there are many charging stations in the cities and towns he lives close to.

At an 80 to 100 per cent charge, he can travel 400 kilometers, depending on weather. And what he used to pay for gas now goes into his monthly car payments from him.

“It was purely a financial move,” Freeman said. “If gas prices hit $2 per liter, you won’t be able to find an electric vehicle from coast to coast.”

Freeman is one of the five per cent of Canadians that own electric vehicles. Currently, Canada sits slightly ahead of the United States with electric vehicle car sales, but is far behind Germany, the UK and China, according to experts. The government of Canada wants to change that — and fast. It’s Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program has set an ambitious target to have all cars and passenger trucks be zero-emission by 2035, instead of a previous goal of 2040.

The push comes from transportation accounting for 25 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, with a good chunk of that coming from cars. The continued rise in fuel costs might be the tipping point in Canada achieving its zero-emission goal — but is it possible?

There are three main roadblocks are in the way of consumers buying electric vehicles: cost, infrastructure and driving distance capabilities, says Olivier Trescases, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of Toronto.

Electric vehicles, if bought new, average $40,000. Trescases says that average needs to be below $30,000, without tax incentives, to make an EV competitive with regular cars. The cost of an at-home charging station is around $1,000, he adds, saying an amount closer to $250 is needed.

The country also needs to build the infrastructure for more charging stations. Right now there are 15,000 in Canada, and 12,000 gas stations, according to Trescases. But a meaningful comparison has to do with the type of charger. Most of the electric vehicle chargers are a Level 2, which gives 200 kilometers after a 20-hour charge. A quick Level 2 charge can give a driver 30 kilometers.

A Level 3 charger gives an 80 per cent charge in 45 minutes with around 250 kilometers in an hour, which is needed for road trips and cross-country travel.

There are only around 1,000 Level 3 chargers in Canada, Trescases said.

“It’s a bit of a chicken and egg game,” says Trescases, “because if there aren’t many electric cars on the road, the charging stations won’t be built. I believe we need to build the infrastructure first and the cars will quickly follow.”

He would also like to see the average EV’s driving range increased to 350 kilometers in the winter as cold temperatures can reduce an unplugged electric vehicle’s range.

According to the Norwegian Automobile Federation, colder weather can cut mileage by 20 per cent and cause recharging to take longer.

While there are barriers in place, going electric does have it benefits, says Joanna Kyriazis, program manager at Clean Energy Canada.

In 2020, the clean energy think tank found that even if the upfront cost is higher, a Canadian driver can save between $1,000 to $2,000 a year on fuel and maintenance costs.

“Today these savings are even more pronounced with the high cost of fuel,” she said.

Convenience is also a bonus, as the majority of charging happens at home allowing owners to skip trips to charging stations all together, Kyriazis said.

Certain parts of Canada are leading by example, offering more supportive electric vehicle policies in place, Kyriazis said. Quebec and BC offer an $8,000 rebate on the purchase or lease of an EV car.

By 2030, Quebec aims to have 65 per cent of car sales be electric and BC is aiming for 90 per cent. While Ontario is lagging, Toronto wants 100 per cent of new sales to be electric by that time.

“There is a lot of political will behind these timelines,” Kyriazis said. “Government is backing it up with real measures by investing in charging stations and requiring automakers to sell more electric vehicles here.”

Since 2015, the Canadian government has invested more than $1 billion to make EVs more affordable, and is building more charging stations.

The move to buy electric cars is palpable, but Joe McCabe — president and CEO of AutoForecast Solutions, a provider of global automotive forecasting databases — said seeing only electric vehicles on the road won’t happen in his lifetime.

“The day when you see one in every three or four cars be electric? I’d give it 20 years,” he said. “We’re decades away from electric vehicles outweighing gas.”

McCabe said that while electric vehicles tick many environmental boxes, few people are lining up for them, adding that more tax incentives are needed, installing home charging stations must be simplified, and lowering cost of the cars are all factors needed to convince people to make the shift to electric. Once that happens, he said, the environmental factor becomes secondary.

One main criticism of EVs is they’re not actually better for the environment due to electric charging and the battery.

But Kyriazis said even if an electric car is plugged into a grid that uses coal and other fossil fuels to power it, the EV still comes out ahead for emission performance over gas-powered cars.

“As provinces work to decarbonize their electricity grid, which more are doing, electric vehicles get cleaner over time,” she said.

The battery is more mineral intensive, requiring more copper, lithium and cobalt. Mining those materials does have an environmental impact. “We need to ensure all mining operations meet the highest environmental standards,” she added, which can be done by ramping up battery recycling to reduce the amount of minerals needed to be mined.

“But when looking at carbon emissions on a life cycle basis, electric cars are much better. Even when incorporating emissions from mining the materials and manufacturing the batteries,” Kyriazis said.

Canada is “well-situated globally” with a large supply of the minerals needed to make the batteries, said Chris Doornbos, CEO and president of lithium company E3 Metals Corp.

As the demand for electric vehicles grows around the world, Doornbos says, it’s important for Canada to be a key player in the battery market.

Whether Canada can make the shift to having 100 per cent sales of cars and trucks to be zero-emission by 2035 remains to be seen.

“I think it can happen,” he said. “But having majority passenger vehicles on the road by then is aggressive and a major challenge.”