When you buy a car advertised as consuming 10 litres per 100 km, you're essentially purchasing 20,000 litres of petrol or diesel to cover 200,000 km. Large fuel-guzzlers, which are more expensive to buy, are repaired much more often than small city cars, and it's not uncommon for them to clock up 400,000 km on the odometer, consuming 40,000 litres during their "lifetimes". Moreover, as these engines age, it's not unusual for them to consume 1 litre of oil per 100 km. These quantities, when compared to the extraction of a few dozen kilograms of lithium, should give us pause for thought. Furthermore, lithium is recyclable, unlike the greenhouse gases from fossil fuels that vegetation won't absorb. The opposite is happening with droughts and heatwaves, due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, which further fuel global warming with these forest fires occurring all over the world.

Claiming that electric cars "only benefit the conscience" is not a joke, but the perfect summary of their failure. It's an admission that their only benefit is psychological, not environmental. And looking at the data, they don't even benefit the wallet or practical sense, so much so that nobody, or almost nobody, really wants them without heavy incentives and impositions.

Electric is the most colossal greenwashing operation ever conceived. It merely shifts the problem: not zero emissions, but emissions relocated to gas or coal power plants. The greatest impact is in production: lithium and cobalt extraction creates environmental and social disasters, an "ecological debt" that a petrol car doesn't have.

But it doesn't even save the industry. It's creating an epochal crisis: development costs are unsustainable, Chinese competition is ruthless and margins are collapsing. Historic brands are sinking in a forced transition that destroys jobs (fewer components, less labour) and devalues their century-old know-how, reducing them to simple battery assemblers. It's a rescue that's leading to shipwreck.

But the worst damage is that it distracts us from real solutions. The obsession with electric cars makes us waste resources on a convenient technology, whilst we ignore the only viable path: strengthening public transport, redesigning cities and promoting soft mobility.

The electric car is a placebo. It makes us feel virtuous whilst we perpetuate the problem. It benefits the conscience because, in fact, its benefit to the environment and industry is very dubious. And the public, as it demonstrates every day, doesn't like it.