A Tale of Two Geniuses

Hi Chris

NOTE: The first people to buy electric cars were the most sold on the idea, the biggest believers, 20% of them are switching back to ice powered cars because of the inconvenience factor, the charging time hassle.

Hi, RG,
> If flying commercial is a burden to most free thinkers because of the pat downs, masks, and flights rarely on time wouldn’t the most self-sufficient among us say “I don’t want to deal with this anymore.”
I made that decision a long time ago.
Buck the fozos. 🙂
For awhile, at least, it was possible to avoid Thieves and Sexual Assailants, as Becky Akers calls them, by “flying” Amtrak. Tip: pay for a compartment, to avoid the lowlife. Possible bonus: interesting conversations in the dining car, while the natural beauty of the USA is just outside your window, not 30,000 feet below.

I have not traveled anywhere in several years, so I do not know the current state of affairs.
However, I am fairly certain that Amtrak still has no service to Hawaii.

The one trip I have made to “the Islands,” as the SoCal surfers call them, was LAX to LIH via Hawaiian Airlines, approx. 6 hours, several years ago (BC, Before Covid). Was supposed to be nonstop, but HA put down at HNL to change equipment, out of an abundance of caution. Other than that, no hassles out of LAX, and none out of LIH except the routine “leave your fruits which have seeds” protocol.

The view from Kīlauea Point is, in a word, spectacular. The sea is indescribably blue, from that vantage. That alone is worth a trip to TGI (The Garden Isle). JMO. 🙂

A VCR is like an EV in that you push a button to make it go.

How can you market an EV as self-driving when the opposite becomes a hard reality?

How can Elon continue to sell an electric vehicle that is known to have glitches? Doesn’t do the job, actually creates a dangerous situation. Teslas can also auto-immolate.

Looks like fraud to me. The Pope must award Elon indulgences or something.

Not a sound footing for a self-driving car.

Not quite, almost, not even close, nice try, try again.

You couldn’t get me to buy an EV if you paid me.

Coal consumption is the highest its ever been, over 8 billion metric tonnes mined and consumed in 2019.

It’ll be even more in 2022.

Coal ash has rare earth metals. Union Carbide burned 50,000 tons in a rotary kiln to process the coal ash to extract uranium in the ash contents. Happened back in 1968. Nuclear power can be derived from coal.

Wyoming has decent coal and is shipped by the ton in coal cars on Union Pacific’s railroad tracks. A double mainline, one for returning empty coal cars, one for hauling fully loaded cars to Omaha in Nebraska. Warren wants his electricity.

When coal is gone, about 120 years from now with current consumption rates, is when consumption will stop.

Coal will be burned until the cows come home. Will include carbon capture technology to pump CO₂ into existing oil wells to rejuvenate the things.

You will get more oil from old oil wells, don’t have to spend six million USD to drill for oil to make it commercially viable, a double win-win.

You know, in certain communities, humble EVs quite similar to the ones made around 1920 have been popular for decades. Sun City Arizona or palm desert ca, as well as many similar places have been built for golf carts. Golf carts have excellent visability and are compact. They can be safely and reliably driven by geezers or teens. Maintainence is pretty easy. And many keep a classic low mile geezermobile to go on longer trips.

Really it’s kinda crazy that a large number of people are commuting 100+ miles a day in any type of vehicle while welfare recipients occupy the urban areas. And it isn’t a rational or free market at work anywhere.

A rent-seeking genius, all right.

It’s way too early for cars to be summarily shut off. That card will only be pulled out after that capability is imbedded in the vast majority of cars. Otherwise, it would be ineffective and act only as a wake-up call.

If “Covid” happened 10 years from now, there is no doubt in my mind that during the “lock downs” (that term is just so loathsome), cars would have been totally shut down, controlled in some manner (i.e. incapacitated during a “curfew”) or geo-fenced for only “essential goods and service” (more loathsome terms).

Well said, Eric. Elon is the anti-Ford in every way. Everything Ford did benefited America’s then burgeoning middle class, from providing affordable cars to providing well-paying jobs at a time when they were needed. Everything Elon does is for the well-heeled, from cars to space launches to digging tunnels. Even his merchandise is mainly for the rich (e.g., a $500 flame thrower that isn’t really a flame thrower). And as you pointed out, most of his extraordinarily expensive–and mostly unneeded–ventures require generous subsidies to get off the ground. Like Ford, he’s a perfect symbol of the times.

I’ve heard theories that characters like Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Jobs, etc. are simply actors playing front man roles for what are essentially gov’t run operations. They all pretty much have that beady eyed rubber head look. Regarding Musk specifically, I find it interesting how he is singled out for praise by Dept. “Transportation” head Buttplug. The all electric car fits so neatly into the control schemes. Also, the weird space travel fakery. As if the gov’t has decided to sub it out to quasi-private entities for some kind of perceived legitimacy and cost savings.

Henry Ford made it possible for the people who built the car to afford the car. A previously uncommon thing. Carpenters and masons most often did not live in homes equal to those they built. Seamstresses did not wear the fine clothing they made. I seriously doubt many of those making handmade cars actually drove one.
Elon Musk? Eh, not so much.

EV’s are green? haha
Batteries: a long read but very informative.
In case you are not aware:
What is a battery?’ I think Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That’s important.

They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.

Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?

Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, (tesla batteries go up to 1800 lb. ) about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.”

Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”
When the green morons are virtue signalling with their coal burning tesla they should think of this…Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material.

I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. “Going Green” may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye, for sure.

If this had been titled… “The Embedded Costs of Going Green,” would you have read it?
Going Green” may sound like the Utopian, but it is not.

Remember the Nazi empire in 1939 was the greenest empire on earth, the green/eugenics agenda.

Lots of problems with EV’s

Worldwide 80% of electricity is produced by oil, gas and coal. electric cars aren’t zero emission they are remote emission. In China most teslas are coal powered. In the U.S. 40% are coal powered.

The new gas powered cars run so clean they have very very low emissions, very close to zero like .00001% contaminants. The exhaust coming out of a modern diesel is cleaner then the air in a big city. ICE engines will be banned because they are not zero emission, .00001% contaminants is too high, this is leftist insanity.

EV’s pollute more
NOTE: The biggest pollutant emitted from new cars because they have so low emissions are from tires wearing out while driving, tire particles.
ATTENTION: Electric cars weigh 30% more than gas powered cars so have higher tire wear, so EV’s pollute more.

Below 90% charge EV performance keeps dropping, at 10% charge it is down quite a bit. ICE cars on a quarter tank are quicker because they got lighter.

operating Li-ion batteries outside the safety zone (i.e. 20%–80%) state of charge, a loss in conductivity can be observed
You can only use 60% of the advertised range, in cold weather subtract 20% more, so what is the real world range?

ATTENTION: Only 5% of electric car batteries are recycled, a huge pollution problem.

Green EV? The only sort of green electric cars, are the ones that use lead acid batteries, 98% of lead acid batteries are recycled. One small business converted small pickup trucks to electric power using lead acid batteries, backyard mechanics would convert ice cars with broken engines to electric power, if a 60 mile range was adequate they worked.

In their entire life cycle including manufacturing, electric cars in total pollute far more than gas powered cars, people don’t seem to understand that the vast majority of a car’s carbon footprint is made during manufacture and scrapping. Running the car, not so much. EV’s pollute far more, the leftists lied to you.

Most electric cars are designed as performance cars so they use far more energy and resources than they should. (the government regulations don’t allow the manufacture of small light electric cars which would make more sense, china does).

Recharging costs:
The grid can’t handle large numbers of electric cars recharging, if all cars are electric the grid capacity has to be increased 500%. There is already power shortages, blackouts in many countries with electricity costs rapidly rising, when electricity prices go up 400% your old ice vehicle will look cheap to run.

Open pit lithium mining for battery manufacture, often done with child slave labour, is worse then tar sands mining.

The biggest problem…….EV fires:
Enormous amounts of water are required: tactically, this may mean using a master stream, 2½-inch or multiple 1¾-inch fire lines, to suppress and cool the fire. Vehicle fires don’t typically call for surround-and-drown tactics, but these are not typical vehicle fires. so you need multiple fire trucks to put out the fire, this is insanity.

One example: the flames on the Tesla were extinguished, it reignited again. Firefighters began hosing it down with copious amounts of water, up to 200 gallons per minute, but “that did not extinguish the flames,” according to the NTSB. At approximately 9:13 p.m., nearly three hours after the first alarm was received, firefighters had to pour out more than 600 gallons of water per minute. In the end the agency used 20,000 gallons of water. these should be banned from the road…..

Then the fire still isn’t put out……..Batteries can be expected to reignite after being put out because they still have stored energy. 15 hours later it catches fire again…
“Battery fires can take up to 24 hours to extinguish”….. the vehicle must be parked under “quarantine” for 48 hours, so that no new fire can break out.
Batteries are difficult to extinguish, and they can burst into flames again several hours later –ATTENTION: in some cases, right up to a week later
……… and they allow people to buy these abortions.

ATTENTION: EV’s can’t replace ICV’s because………global capacity for the materials for EV batteries can’t replace even 3% of fossil fuel vehicles.

Electric cars are expensive, they are only for the rich, but they are heavily subsidized by the government with taxpayer’s money, including taxes from the poor, the poor subsidizing the rich. the poor can walk. electric cars, toys for the rich.

NOTE: The first people to buy electric cars were the most sold on the idea, the biggest believers, 20% of them are switching back to ice powered cars because of the inconvenience factor, the charging time hassle.

Another problem EV shares with new ice powered vehicles: Electronic components have a limited life, even if you do not use them. It’s the nature of the P-N junction that forms a transistor.

During the first three months of ownership, EVs were 2.3 times as expensive to service as gasoline-powered cars. At the 12-month mark, repair costs were about 1.6 times what owners of gas-powered cars paid.
It’s Not Parts. It’s Labor

Electric cars depreciate over two times faster than their internal combustion engine counterparts, a serious black mark when it comes to tallying up your actual yearly cost to run your vehicle!

So the new electric vehicles like the new computerized ice vehicles will have a limited lifespan, when these electronics fail the car will be scrap, too expensive to fix, more recycling and waste. Only buy cars with no computers.

A 1913 Bugatti type 22 is 108 years old and daily driven. A Tesla is scrap after 10 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVl3cEkSSo0

But mechanical systems, like Jay Leno’s 1832 steam engine can last for centuries, get a steam powered car, they run on wood.
Steam powered cars have the same advantage as electric cars, instant torque.

‘It [the EV] was a kind of moral necessity. In order to forestall what is now styled – oilily – “climate change.” — eric

And still the green heathen rage:

‘In a letter Monday, five Democrats on the House Oversight Committee asked the agency’s inspector general to investigate whether the Postal Service complied with the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws when awarding a 10-year contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense to supply up to 165,000 new mail trucks.

‘Only 10% of the initial order will be for EVs; the remaining 90% will use traditional gasoline-powered engines. The new vehicles are greener than current models, which have been in use for three decades or more, but most will be powered by gasoline.’

‘The USPS review “underestimates greenhouse gas emissions” of the new fleet, “fails to consider more environmentally protective feasible alternatives and inadequately considers impacts on communities with environmental justice concerns,” the EPA said in a Feb. 2 letter.’

https://wgnradio.com/news/political-news/house-dems-seek-probe-of-usps-plan-for-new-mail-truck-fleet/

‘Communities with environmental justice concerns’ is codespeak for ‘diversity hustle.’

Do Amazon or Walmart need a NEPA review to upgrade their delivery fleets, whether with gasoline or electric vehicles?

Hell no! Such gratuitous interference is one of many reasons why USPS was just bailed out, at an ultimate cost of tens of billions. So what’s a few billion more to go green? /sarc

Eric,

Since I retired from a Tesla partner, I’ve known of Tesla and Elon Musk long before most did; I’ve studied the man, his company, and his marketing strategy. Elon’s marketing strategy is following other, once expensive, cutting edge items like VCRs, cell phones, etc. He also did his cars the way he did so as to push back and counter the perception that EVs are glorified golf carts; this is a perception you acknowledge by posting the pic of the yellow CitiCar, which, prior to Tesla, had been America’s biggest selling EV.

Elon Musk has noted that, when VCRs, cell phones, and other disruptive products first came out, that they were high end items; they were luxuries. I’m old enough to remember a time when VCRs and cell phones didn’t exist; when they were launched in the late 1970s and late 1980s respectively, they were high dollar items; only the well heeled had them. Back in the day, VCRs cost upwards of $1,000-at a time when $1,000 was REAL MONEY! You had a few, high dollar examples of these things, and they got progressively less expensive and more capable with time.

Elon has emulated the marketing progression of these items. Elon first did the Tesla Roadster. It was a Lotus Elise with an electric drivetrain. The key was to get the EV out there; bring in enough money to do the Model S; and to start changing the perception that EVs are not and cannot be high performance cars. The less expensive, more numerous Model S followed, which got enough of this cars out there, so we started seeing them in public. The Model 3 and Model Y have since followed; though they’re not inexpensive cars, they’re less expensive; they’re at a price point where they’re becoming more common. I see Model 3s and Model Ys all the time now. In the near future, Tesla will be bringing out what some of dubbed the Model 2, which Elon says will sell for $25K. We’ll see; Elon’s promises of future product rollouts have been, shall we say, optimistic? Even if the the Model 2 is priced at $30K, that’ll make it competitive with ICEVs. I think that Elon’s marketing program is sound; by following the example of VCRs and cell phones, he’s following historic examples of how former luxury goods became common. That’s genius, I think.

Though EVs aren’t quite ready for prime time, they’ve made huge gains. Compare any EV to the CitiCar pictured in this article, and you’ll see how far they’ve come. If you’d told someone 40 years ago that EVs would have the range and performance that they do, you’d have been laughed at; you’d have been thought of as crazy. SO! EVs have made much progress in recent years. I look forward to seeing what the future will bring… 🙂

Musk is a contributing symptom to the disease of control.

He plays the game the rules have created. Unfortunately, the game is one of power and money at the expense of freedom, rationality, and choice.

Climate change is a con the same as covid & war.
Does it exist? Maybe or not.
At the level the fear mongers claim? No

Musk’s contribution is to provide the proof of concept that allows the pushers to corrupt the marketplace and force unwanted goods upon us all. He has done freedom no favor.

Musk and his endeavors are more aligned with that “wizard” of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison. Both dabbled in many different fields (or at least hire lots of people to dabble for them), both are the darlings of press and Wall Street, both are more showman than engineer.

Edison even helped create the military-industrial complex:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/thomas-edison-and-military-preparedness.htm

The irony, of course, is that Tesla’s namesake died penniless and alone in a New York hotel, while Edison’s companies still exist today. Heck, even mighty Westinghouse is no longer in business (although the various divisions still exist as part of other corporations, proving that bankruptcy isn’t the end of the world), but that’s more due to mismanagement than anything.

And much like Edison’s ideas for DC power distrubution, Musk’s battery cars are a dead end. Today’s engineering enviroment is far different than the one of 1880s America though. I don’t believe we’ll see a modern day Tesla come up with a superior technology, if only because so many are desperate to find it. Then again, the Wright Brothers came from nowhere and solved the powered flight problem when many well funded competitors couldn’t.

Some in the space nerd community posit that Tesla is just another arm of Musk’s Mars colonization dreams. He’s got the spaceflight infrastructure; development/test of Starship; experience building electric vehicles (no ICE in near vacuum, ya know); the Boring company experience lends itself to escaping radiation.

All three have been to some extent funded by government, climate alarmists, other and ne’er do wells.

People think Musk is a “genius” because they can’t distinguish cunning from intelligence and duplicity from wisdom.

Electric cars have a place in the automotive landscape but there overall practicality is doubtful in my opinion. I’ve driven in everything from -40 to +85 all day long and unless things have changed I don’t see how an electric car could do it unless you spent at least 1/4 or more of the day charging the battery, and electric transport trucks? ROTFLMAO! None of this will stop .gov from imposing this on you but would you want to own a class of vehicle that catches fire so often that even the Pinto doesn’t come close? Lets not forget the HD Livewire motorcycle, I watched a video on it and in sustained use it was dead on the road in about 75 miles. Heck I’ve ridden further to get lunch.

Link showing a restoration and interview with a Baker owner:

https://www.electric-cars-are-for-girls.com/baker-electric-car.html

Hi Eric,

Just to note what I am seeing on my end. Tesla is seeing repeat customers…without the tax credits. I have had numerous customers purchase one in the last year. The Tesla credit expired at the end of 2019. More of my clients are purchasing them without the incentive for a tax reduction. I recently just had a client purchase her second one. The older one (around seven years old) was donated to hubby.

The only electric car credits that are out there are the new Ford series (like the Mustang, heaven help us), Volvo, Audi, and BMW. Tesla is no longer being subsidized and her patrons are still sticking around. I would say 10% of my clients have one and there are more and more on the road each day.

Musk may not be a genius but he is a savvy businessman. The tax credit may have been the push to get people behind the wheel, but they are returning and referring.