Here’s the latest reader question, along with my reply!
Fran asks: If you had to pick just one thing that is the worst thing about electric cars, what would it be?
My answer: This one’s easy. The single worst thing about EVs is that they’re being forced on the market, thereby distorting the market for EVs. If there weren’t mandates – and subsidies – the market would impose the disciplines of cost/value/efficiency on electric cars and we’d likely have EVs that made economic and practical sense. Instead, we have EVS that are designed to be quick and luxurious – because cost is no longer an object and efficiency is irrelevant. It makes me want to hit something when I have to deal with people who talk up $40,000 EVs as being anything other than toys for the affluent – subsidized by the not-affluent.
The truth – which almost no one wants to discuss – is that there is no market to speak of for EVs absent the mandates and subsidies – because EVs cost too much relative to what IC cars cost and when you add that to the hassle of owning an EV vs. the absent hassles of owning an IC car, the EV’s appeal is minimal – except to those who are willing to pay more in money and hassle for ideological reasons.
Which is ok by me, so long as they’re the ones paying for it.
. . . .
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“worst thing about electric cars”
The people who drive them. I am sure there are some decent ones, but they have obviously been making a supreme effort to avoid me. 🙂
Nailed it.
Close follow-up would be those EV battery fires that fire depts are not trained to extinguish, along with the fact that they’ll spontaneously fuckin reignite in the junkyard two weeks later. “Oh but anyone would die in that kind of crash or fire anyway! I like my Tesla stock!”
And then there’s the shitty mileage they get, presumably to keep us from desiring to stray too far from home of our own mobility.
There’s so much to rage about when it comes to these pieces of shit simply because of all that they signal when it comes to human philosophy. Reject the hell out of them for your own good.