Even the sagacious Walter Russell Mead repeated, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, the received wisdom that a “shift from internal-combustion engines to battery-powered electric vehicles threatens to reduce global employment in automotive manufacturing and make China the dominant producer.” He’s half right, but only the second half. To be fair, he’s not alone. The car cognoscenti also repeat this claim, as per Car and Driver: “The simplicity of a battery electric vehicle is analogous to that of a digital watch. It’s uncomplicated, reliable, and cheap. By that token, a car with an internal combustion engine is a bit like a mechanical timepiece: full of complicated parts that require regular maintenance.” The simplicity claim is also key to the belief that EVs will eventually be cheaper than combustion vehicles.

But this claim is a canard. The confusion stems from the failure to recognize what amounts to a complexity swap. A conventional engine is a thermo-mechanical machine, with anywhere from hundreds to a thousand parts, which is paired with a very simple fuel-storage system: a steel tank with a single-part electric pump. In an EV, by contrast, the electric motor is indeed simple, with a couple of moving parts, but it’s paired with a battery that is a half-ton electro-chemical machine with thousands of parts and welds, wiring, complex power electronics to control power flows and ensure safety, and a cooling system.

Counterintuitively, in fact, the total EV ecosystem involves more labor per vehicle, though most of the increase is found in the manufacturing supply chain.

[It’s a fascinating analysis, and it does eventually support the UAW’s concern over the transition to EVs. It’s not that EVs need less labor per car to produce, but that so much of the labor needed to produce them will necessarily be outside the US. We don’t have the raw materials needed to build these cars available domestically, and even those we do have can’t be accessed, thanks to the same environmental activists driving the transition. — Ed]