I received the following from a Clover:
Denny writes: I’m afraid I am forced to conclude that you are either a liar or just plain stupid. You simply can’t be that ignorant. If you can somehow manage to get Elon Musk to build you a rocket to bring you from your planet to Earth you’ll find that people here really love their electric cars–especially Tesla owners – and are planning on abandoning ICE vehicles forever, regardless of losing tax incentives and regardless of whether global warming is real or just a hoax. I’m not sure what your problem is; maybe obsolete data, maybe simple prejudice, or maybe something more nefarious involving money, but one day you are going to wake up and find that you’ve been on the wrong side of history. Give it up. The future is electric!
My reply: Did I ever write that people who own electric cars don’t like them? I have no doubt that you and other electric car owners do like your electric cars. I like my Trans-Am.
Neither of our likes being relevant to the question of the viability – or advisability – of electric cars as replacements for gas-engined cars.
Which is a function, first of all, of their affordability.
However much you like something is immaterial if you cannot afford it. I very much like Porsches; trouble is, I can’t afford one.
Electric cars are Porsches – in terms of their economics. People who buy both cars do so because they have the disposable income to indulge their wants. And there’s nothing wrong with this.
But there is a problem with this – in terms of mass-marketing electric cars. The least expensive electric car – Nissan’s Leaf – costs twice as much to buy as an otherwise similar compact economy sedan/hatchback (like Nissan’s own Versa).
It makes no economic sense to buy the Leaf.
In which case, we get back to the car being an indulgence – like a Porsche – for those with significant discretionary income to allow them to indulge.
But most people can’t afford to spend even another 30 percent to move from IC to electric – and this is why electric cars will remain specialty cars for those relatively few people who can afford to indulge.
Unless the price of electric cars comes way down – and there is no evidence this is happening (in fact, electric car prices are artificially low because of the various “incentives”) or the buying power of average people goes way up, electric cars cannot be “the future.”
No matter how much you love them.
The battery powered EV will be the future because it is politically mandated and everyone but the very top will be poorer as a result. Most people simply won’t have private passenger automobiles. But that’s the plan of the owners and most people are just fine with their lives being planned by others. Well fine with it so long as it isn’t too obvious so they can pretend to be free. They’ll adapt to an energy credits system and after a few years they won’t be able to imagine being able to have as access to as much energy as they could purchase.
Denny, if the “future is electric”, just what will run all the power plants to generate all the extra electricity that we already don’t have enough infrastructure to support? I suppose you “imagine” it will be wind or solar power, which will take land not available unless everyone not already in cities is forcibly put there, and then the entire continent is deforested to build endless solar panels and windmills. Of course, this is “Minecraft” where resources and materials are unlimited, but you don’t care, because that’s not your responsibility. Aside from which, it will still require IC generation whenever and wherever these “natural” generators don’t have direct sun or wind. Electric heavier-than-air travel? You will sooner have transport by teleportation than to see the likes of that on any commercial scale.
All of which will be inconsequential, really, because society will be so vile and psychotic just crammed together like sardines in your utopian city, that no one will even care. Answers are always so simple for the simple-minded, so go back to your cubicle and keep “making the world a better place” #5.
From what I’m seeing, there are a good number of Tesla owners who are not so thrilled with their electric turds. From the electronics glitches; to the charging time and range issues greatly increasing their travel time; to build quality, to cost of insurance, and especially [ABSURDLY HIGH] cost of repair, and length of time said repairs take, due to never-ending parts shortages from Tesla; Tesla’s remote bricking of salvage cars so that they are useless and can not be repaired, etc. all is not as rosy as Denny Dim-wit would have us believe.
http://ericpetersautos.com/donate/
Oh…and there’s even a client of mine, who sent in a grand for a deposit on a $35K Model 3, as did his daughter- over three years ago…and both are still waiting. I have a feeling E-loons rocket ship to Mars will be taking off before those two get a promised $35K Model 3…..
For all the hoopla on the Electric is God websites, reading the actual TSLA owners forums paints a different picture…
i read about the 6 month wait time for repairs while you’re still making payments. As well as no dealership car for you. So you will rent or buy a new car while waiting for your current car to get repaired.
We should print up a ton of My Other Car Is A Tesla, No Seriously! bumper stickers…’cause I think there’s gonna be a run on them!
MarkyMark,
“in many cases, it’s around for THOUSANDS of years!”
How do we know this to be true?
I don’t think man has produced this stuff for a thousand years.
Since storage/disposal is almost exclusively a AGW enterprise, call me a skeptic.
Some will be around for hundreds of thousands of years.
We know this to be true since we have the ability to very precisely measure the decay rate of radioactive materials, and based on the decay rate and how much you have, you can figure out how long it’s going to be until it’s safe to handle. It’ll never stop being radioactive, but at some point, it’s manageable.
We even use this scientific process to build the world’s most accurate clocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium_standard
Scientists sometimes know what they’re talking about 🙂
It’s basic physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life
Opposite,
Like I said, I’m skeptical.
“We know this”
Who is we?
This is solely in the bailiwick of a government funded enterprise.
“WE” (as in you and me) can’t get close enough to verify anything.
Radioactivity could be a government boogeymen.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima-so far-have not been proven to be the end of the world. And I’m pretty sure Underwriter’s Labratory doesn’t have their label on radioactive waste containers.
I’ve never read about a body count from the Gilbert Atomic Energy Laboratory.
http://gombessa.tripod.com/scienceleadstheway/id4.html
My older sister got one from a garage sale when she was in high school. She’s pushing 70, and her kids/grandkids only have one head.
“Scientists sometimes know what they’re talking about 🙂”
And sometimes scientists talk the way their employers pay them to talk.
So much of the things I learned in the past have since been proven to be utter bullshit that I’m not so sure the notion that I need to be prevented from exposure to (fill in the blank) is 100% accurate anymore.
You can’t reproduce all scientific research for yourself, there’s far too much of it, and it requires specialized equipment. I mean, you could buy a geiger counter and see how fast it has to click before you die, but what’s the point of that?
Radioactivity has been heavily studied since Marie Curie died from its effects, we’ve got many examples of people who died from it in US labs, around Chernobyl. My home town was in Chernobyl’s radiation plume, about 300 miles away, and you could get a geiger counter to go bonkers just from the soil or milk in the store. The incidence of cancer after 1986 has skyrocketed, particularly in kids. It’s bad stuff. The science is well settled on this one.
Now, science is sometimes full of shit, you have to follow the money. Right now, climate science is mostly full of shit, with the actual science being fairly dull, and the reporting of it being very different from the truth. It’ll be settled in time.
Put another way – the experts are usually right and usually don’t lie, but sometimes they are wrong and they do lie. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but don’t throw away the valid results because some people have an agenda.
Look for more of these incidents to appear in the news. Or maybe not because people will then start locking their power points up from these thieves. Apparently their thievery is not limited to buying a car that needs taxpayer support. Now they want YOUR electricity to be used, not theirs.
It’s always the same types of people that are concerned with being on the right side of history. They will make the statement in an argument, as if their saying it makes it fact. They care about being on the right side of history, the winning team, and not the right side of individual liberty. The type of person that just wants their team to beat the other team, regardless of anything else. Yeah, their side may win by force, but they won’t be on the side of individual liberty. Every freedom lost throughout the ages had the support of drones like Denny, who fought tooth and nail to impoverish and enslave both themselves and their fellow man on the other “side”, just so they can say they won.
Here, I think that I just located “Denny”:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-27/entitled-tesla-owner-leaves-car-charging-strangers-lawn-12-hours-stealing-his-0
Guess we better start putting lock boxes on all our exterior outlets.
I don’t care if it’s the libertarian thing to do or not, I absolutely would press charges and go after the guy for the cost of my electricity too. Teach the guy a lesson about his wondrous electric future utopia.
Yes, this comment is the real me, I had a derp while putting in my email address.
That Tesla owner stealing the electricity was plugged in to a 120v outlet. That would take forever to accumulate even a couple miles of range.
Henry Ford made the ICE powered automobile affordable. Prior to that the horseless carriage was a plaything of the rich dandy.
Everyone is desperate for a modern Ford to make electrics affordable for the masses. Elon says he’s the one, but from everything I’ve seen he’s at best misunderstanding history and at worst a rent seeking thief.
When Ford created his Model T there were few if any regulations for automobiles. Most of the regs had to do with spooking horses and running down people, not with keeping occupants safe. In a similar regulatory environment and today’s technology I’m pretty sure an electric automobile could be a viable option, even with the 100+ year head start ICEs enjoy. But it would probably resemble a Model T. Perhaps a little better insulated. Perhaps a little more road worthy. But no way could it be the gadget-laden toy Mr Musk has foisted on the world.
Hey there Readykilowatt,
Your name implies one of the problems with a forced 100% electric vehicles, there wont be enough ready kilowatts available on the grid. Don’t buy into the “wind and solar” will provide the gap, no way Jose. Electric cars merely transfer the energy production from ICE locally to C on the grid. Unless you are willing to embrace nuclear power all other sources produce waste. The only way this will happen is by forced government action which means: time to light the torches, hoist the jolly roger and start slitting throats of our elected elites.
Nuclear energy produces waste too, and, in many cases, it’s around for THOUSANDS of years! Nuclear doesn’t produce exhaust gases as do coal, oil, or natural gas; in that sense, it’s clean. Nuclear does leave Cesium and other waste products that are around for thousands of years.
Nice thing about nuclear waste: It’s a solid. It can be encapsulated, shipped, tracked, labeled, and buried easily. And it really isn’t waste. If it were waste it wouldn’t be “hot” it would be lead.
And the half life of the really dangerous stuff isn’t thousands of years. It decays quickly into much less energetic isotopes in a matter of 10s of years. The regulatory standard for exposure being lower than what can be achieved on many parts of the Earth is the reason for the 10,000 year FUD.