Is There Anything Good About EVs?

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EV sales are collapsing like Pfizer’s clot-shot revenue. Both for essentially the same reason. People have figured out the truth about them and for that reason, want no part of them.

Who, after all, would knowingly want to receive a “vaccination” that not only fails to do the two things a vaccine is supposed to do – i.e., prevent you from coming down with the sickness you’re supposedly being “vaccinated” against and prevent you from spreading it to others – but that also might give you heart problems, among other problems?

Who wants to buy a car that makes it less convenient to drive? That costs not just a little but thousands – even tens of thousands more than an otherwise similar car that is more convenient to drive?

Who wants a car that effectively requires a garage to keep it in – since if you haven’t got one to park it in, you may not be able to plug it in?

Extension cords don’t work – even if they reach – due to impedance issues. You can only park as far away from the electrical outlet as the factory-supplied cord will reach – and that’s about 12 feet. And if you haven’t got a garage to park the car in, it will be much more difficult to “Level II” charge it because there aren’t any 240V outlets outside of most houses. If you live in an apartment or a townhouse, you will have to drive somewhere to charge, just the same as you would need to drive to a gas station to fill-up a non-electric car.

With the difference being how much time you’ll be spending waiting there.

Ironically, the ability to avoid having to spend a few minutes at a gas station is one of the Greatest Things touted about EVs. But it’s only Great if you are affluent enough to own a single family home with a garage in which to park and charge the EV. Affluent enough to be able to spend the money to hire an electrician to run a dedicated 240V circuit on its own 30 amp breaker to allow “Level II” charging, which gets a battery-powered vehicle back on the road in a mere 8-11 hours – as opposed to 24 or more hours, if all you’ve got is a standard 120V household outlet to plug into.

Assuming the factory-supplied cord can reach.

It’s remarkable that the economic elitism of EVs goes largely unremarked. Young people and people of lesser means not only cannot afford EVs, they generally cannot afford to own the peripherals necessary to keep one operational, other than occasionally. This, of course, is part of the point of pushing EVs – which is to make driving more onerous for the young and those of lesser means while at the same time conferring elevated status upon those few who have the means to afford them and the peripherals that are necessary to allow for their use more than occasionally. 

The cruel irony being that EVs are most popular among the cohort that can least afford to own them and the necessary peripherals; i.e., young people. They do not own EVs – but they approve of EVs. That is to say, they approve of their own diminishment – which they have yet to fully understand is the point of all of this. 

But wait – isn’t there anything good about these EVs? Other than their tediously talked-up ability to accelerate quickly? Briefly. Other than the specious claims regarding their “zero emissions”? (Assuming one regards the non-reactive gas carbon dioxide – which is not a pollutant – as an “emission.”) 

Well, there could be. If the objective of those pushing EVs weren’t to reduce driving and car ownership, especially for the young and those of lesser means.

EVs have the potential to be less expensive than the least expensive gas-engined economy car because (as is often touted) EVs have fewer parts and can be manufactured with less expense.

Electric motors aren’t necessarily hugely expensive – and neither are electric batteries. Provided they are small  – which they both could be, if the EV were not designed to deliver “ludicrous” speed or sustained high speed. Those attributes do require a powerful (and so, large) electric motor and a very large (and so, very heavy) and very expensive electric battery pack. And that is why all of the EVs available are beyond the means of most young and all people of lesser means. Few such people can afford the minimum almost $30k it takes to purchase the least expensive EVs on the market, plus the single family home needed to house and recharge one at home. 

But none of that is necessary.

Or – rather – it is only necessary if the EV must be able to do the things expected of high-performance and high-priced vehicles; i.e., the things people of means expect a vehicle to be able to do.

On the other hand, people of lesser means – especially the young – would probably be very enthused about a vehicle they could afford to buy, even if it didn’t offer “ludicrous” acceleration or have the ability to operate at sustained high speed. These attributes are for those who can afford them. Once upon a time, there were vehicles that didn’t offer such attributes but did offer affordability.

They were called economy cars.

They were the first cars – often, at second or third-hand – a young person got to drive, on his way to being able to afford something fancier (and faster) if that’s what he wanted, once he was in a position to be able to afford to indulge such wants. But an economy car met his needs.

It put him behind the wheel.

And that is a problem – from the point-of-view of those pushing affluent-only EVs. It is why there are no economy EVs. These would put more young people behind the wheel – and on the road. They would also apply market pressure to produce lower-cost non-EVs, to compete for the dollars of the young and those of lesser means. Such vehicles would also reduce the consumption of natural resources and “emissions” of the gas that isn’t a pollutant.

Problem solved.

But – you see – that is just the problem.

. . .

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30 COMMENTS

  1. Here is a new meme for EVs – “thermal runaway”

    ZH – Electric vehicles flooded by a storm surge produced by Hurricane Idalia have spontaneously ignited in the Big Bend area. This underscores a lesser-known safety concern for the thousands of Americans who recently purchased EVs and reside in coastal regions vulnerable to flooding.

    In the aftermath of the storm, fire officials in Pinellas County, west of Tampa, reported at least two incidents of EVs combusting after lithium-ion batteries were exposed to the saltwater.

    “If you own a hybrid or electric vehicle that has come into contact with saltwater due to recent flooding within the last 24 hours, it is crucial to relocate the vehicle from your garage without delay,” a Facebook post by Palm Harbor Fire Rescue reads.

    “Saltwater exposure can trigger combustion in lithium-ion batteries. If possible, transfer your vehicle to higher ground,” the post continued.

  2. I think youth could afford a used one….they depreciate so fast at 8 years old, but they will have to contend with the automotive equivalent of a RC car with a Nicad battery. Strong for a few minutes, then a slow decline to paperweight.

    I’m not arguing for it, they suck so bad that is the only way youth could get one.

    Plus, WHY would you want to charge it in the garage? That’s asking for a fire. Park that thing out away from the house! Or a separate garage like the old days when leaky carbs could gas it up and explode….at least the house will still be there.

  3. Here’s how you buy compliance, using the victims’ own money:

    ‘The Biden administration will make $12 billion available in grants and loans for car and truck manufacturers and suppliers to retrofit factories to produce electric vehicles and other advanced models, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced Thursday.

    ‘President Joe Biden will also offer $3.5 billion in funding to domestic vehicle-battery manufacturers, Granholm said. Part of the total funding announced Thursday will come from the Inflation Reduction Act.’ — Marketwatch

    https://archive.ph/fYqKP#selection-369.0-377.1

    This is Soviet-style state industry — building capacity, regardless of demand or profitability, to shove a substandard product down the nation’s throat.

    No surprise that Hahhhhhvid lawyer Jenny Granholm, who wouldn’t know an electrolytic capacitor from a douche nozzle, is ‘administering’ this ghastly malinvestment, which only serves to impoverish her subjects.

    • Just came here to post that myself. You peasants will have EVs whether you want to drive them or not, and if if you don’t want to drive them your taxes will be used to pay for them anyway.

      I practically retch my guts out when I hear deluded fools talking about “‘Murica, the land of the free.”

    • Cabinet ministers are selected for fealty, not expertise – spend a few minutes listening to Granholm and this becomes clear.

  4. During the 1920s bubble, when electric utilities were a growth industry like Artificial Intelligence is today, Alabama Power introduced Reddy Kilowatt, a cartoon-figure electrical servant intended to promote electricity usage.

    No more: the US electrical grid regularly approaches capacity. Drowning in debt, the decadent US empire has no hope of achieving the vast upgrading needed to charge an EeeVee in every garage (for those who HAVE garages, mind).

    Obviously, something has to give. Currently, the plan is to install ‘smart’ two-way chargers that can suck power back out of EeeVees when the grid is teetering. It’s diabolical: EeeVee buyers will pay to upgrade the grid — at the cost of finding their ride drained dry on heat alert and freeze alert days.

    Trouble is, folks aren’t that stupid. ‘Pay more, get less, cool your fool heels’ is not a winning formula.

    If elected preznit, I will announce a Cash for EeeVee Clunkers program: buy them back, then crush the living daylights out of them. This program was inspired by a youthful acquaintance, Ronnie G, who memorably declared that ‘I like to get drunk, drive fast, and tear things up.’

    • Well, now I’m obligated to add my 2 cents! 🙂

      Overall generating capacity (actual, not “name plate” potential production from unreliable sources) peaked in the 1990s. The DOE’s stance since its inception is that efficiency is more beneficial than more production. Electric companies were happy with that plan because they didn’t have to build new generating or distrubution capacity, just raise rates and collect the profits. What is never accounted for is what benefit excess production will be to mankind as inventors and entrepreneurs come up with new ways to capitalize on the cheaper feedstock.

      Now that those efficiency gains are played out and demand actually is falling, futures contracts are in flux. Thanks in large part to Enron the “deregulated” electricity markets is more interested in maximizing auction price than providing consistancy. And electric companies are now cut so thin they can’t (or won’t) maintain their equipment, choosing to wait for failure …or fire.

  5. One thing EV’s are good for is self cremation. Should the battery catch fire while you’re inside it will lock the doors and proceed to turn you to ash. I know it’s happened a few times to Tesla owners, not sue of the exact total.

  6. Even if you have a house with a 240v outlet in the garage for level 2 charging, then you have to worry about a fire breaking out. Who wants to do that? You’d have to have a separate garage well away from your house.

  7. A friend of mine would rent vehicles for road trips because he didn’t like getting bounced around in his Jeep for hours on end. That’s an option for EV owners too, if they can get to the rental agency lot easily, or can leave their vehicle there, like at the airport (assuming you don’t void the vehicle’s waranty by failing to properly “store” the thing).

    And of course there’s always flying then renting at your destination.

    But all that needs to get back to customer friendly business practices. Yea, we know it sucks that people prefer attractive friendly airline stewardesses over today’s angry diversity hires, and we know that people prefer not being treated like criminals being checked into Rikers Island just because that guy did that thing that one time, and we know that adding on ass-rape tourist taxes to car rentals is going to piss off everyone… yet they all do it anyway. And travelers put up with it (or like many people here, they just don’t participate). If you’re not playing the game they don’t want you as a customer, and won’t take the very minor steps required to make you one. Airlines in peticular are so complacent they seem to take sadistic delight in seeing just how far they can push their customers, but the entire industry is designed around milking the basic product’s obvious benefits.

    Trains and busses are no better. All the hassle of sticking to timetables without the benefit of speed- in fact it’s worse than a private automobile because they usually stop more often. And you’re sharing a space with folks you might not want to spend hours with…

    There was a time when you could walk into an airport, purchase a ticket (with cash), walk to the gate and get on completely on a whim. Hell, on the Eastern Shuttle you didn’t even have to buy a ticket until you were on the plane! Want a Nathan’s hot dog for dinner but you’re in Boston? Just hop on the shuttle, there’s one leaving every hour. But then the “terrorists” started highjacking planes to Cuba. Instead of the obvious solution of letting the passengers and flight crews defend themselves (or hire security guards) and securing the flight deck, the solution was to “screen” everyone for terrorist tendencies. Absolute bullshit but somehow that was the path. But because of the government and industry’s actions there’s now a group of people who will never take mass transit again, no matter how good the basic product is. And they have no use for EVs.

  8. ‘the economic elitism of EVs goes largely unremarked.’ — eric

    True; and Eric is changing this. C. Wright Mills wrote in The Power Elite (1956) about its three pillars: several hundred giant corporations; the metastasized, micromanaging public-facing branches of the US fedgov; and the national security state, now called the Fourth Branch of usurper government.

    Mills would have seen EeeVees — a costly, exclusionary propulsion technology — as a social signaling device for the quasi-hereditary ruling caste, along with their Hahhhhhvid educations, their palatial estates and yachts, and their high-end charity balls.

    Authoritarian populism scares the power elite more than anything: it would break their Ming dynasty rice bowls. This year’s coordinated prosecutorial conspiracy against Donald J Trump, coming on the heels of the absurd, groundless ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ diversion during his presidential term, illustrates just how desperately extreme is the elite’s scorched-earth defense against the Revolt of the Deplorables.

    When our cities burn, will EeeVees be first in line? And because of self-ignition, or because the sans culottes attacked them as hated symbols of elite oppression?

    Replace the guillotine and the tumbrils with weaponized EeeVees, converted into home-brew electric chairs, and authoritarian populism will acquire its defining symbol of creative destruction.

    You need cooling
    Baby I’m not fooling
    I’m gonna send yuh-huh
    Back to schoolin’

    — Led Zeppelin, Whole Lotta Love

  9. Is there anything good about EVs?

    Yes. It gives a concrete example of how environmentalists harm the environment. And of how despotic central planners devastate an economy.

    It also affords an opportunity to laugh at, again, candy ass soy boys.

    • I don’t laugh at any of these candy ass soy boys as long as people like them are running the administrative state. I view their very existance, all of them, as a threat to my own.

  10. I test drove a 2024 GLE 450e (i.e., the PHEV with a 2.0T I4). Not because I was interested in that configuration but because they didn’t have a 2024 GLE 450 (3.0T I6) at the dealership.

    They said, “this is about the same HP wise, so you can get a good feel for what the I6 is like.” (greatly paraphrased).

    But more importantly, the salesman told me that “we’re advising our customers to lease electric vehicles for 2 years because the technology will improve greatly and then they can turn over the lease and buy one! They’re gonna have technology were 110V charging will only take 4-5 hours… (etc., etc.)”

    I told him that, while I don’t mind the “mild hybrid”, there’s no way I’m doing PHEV, never mind EV. Ever, if I have any choice.

    IMO, only really clueless or straight-out dumb people would buy a nice ($$$) car, any model, and put up with that stupid bullshit. But hey, I hear they pair well with a booster and a mask perfectly.

    • That salesman talks like someone who knows nothing. It’s like the guy who says that his 440 4 bbl with 4.57 gears will do 160 mph and get 30 mpg highway, all bullshit.

    • There’s no way 110 VAC charging will ever get better than it is right now. The US is full of 10 and 15 amp circuits. I’m sure somewhere in the owners manual they warn you to not to try to use a low rated circuit for charging, and for sure as soon as you plug in to a 5A circuit the breaker will pop (actually the old glass fuse will blow, causing a round of cursing while you try to find one in the dark). Of course many will just “uprate” the fuse without thinking, because that’s what you do when you’re an idiot. Then when the EV draws max current for hours and the outlet melts, the wire insulation melts and gets black, you might pause to think about where your life went wrong… but I’ll bet there will be plenty of people who won’t give it a second thought. They might not notice the skid mark forming on the wall either. But they will notice the red flashing lights on the fire trucks as they rescue them from their own stupidity.

      I grew up in a home with an old 100A fuse panel. We couldn’t run the toaster or dishwasher at the same time as the microwave. It would blow the fuse, because the kitchen outlets were on the same circuit and it was only 10A, like all the other circuits in the house. It was built in the late 1950s or early 60s, so electricty was pretty well known by then (and the developer lived in it for a time so he didn’t cheap out). My house has 20A breakers and 12-3 romex but the outlets are all 15A, which apparently is code in Colorado. That’s better but the car is still only going to draw 15A max even if I replace the outlet because that’s the most common wire/breaker size in the country. That extra 5A would help (every little bit), but even if I did all that I’d start popping breakers while charging if I ran anything else in the garage. So back to a dedicated circuit.

  11. “Ironically, the ability to avoid having to spend a few minutes at a gas station is one of the Greatest Things touted about EVs.”

    That aspect of EVs goes pretty far here in Central Texas, where memories linger of the Labor Day Weekend gas “shortage” in 2017, an artificial event arguably created by the media and, in particular, one major talk radio station in the wake of a hurricane and refinery explosion shortly after picking up Gas Buddy as a major new sponsor.

    This weekend is the sixth anniversary of the event. I’m sure the gas stations would love a repeat since, according to state analysis afterwards, they sold 50x a normal volume of gas for the weekend as everyone topped off in a panic about not being able to get to work on Tuesday after the holiday.

  12. When someone figures out the battery storage problem there will be a reason for electric cars. Oh wait, they did, it’s called a hybrid. Wonder why we don’t have diesel-electric cars.

    I am looking forward to the day when we all have cars powered by “Mr. Fusion.”

  13. Other than the ludicrous speed, the only good thing about EVs is that they expose the intent of our Psychopaths In Charge. They present the POSSIBILITY of zero emissions, which puts enormous pressure on ICVs to get as close as they can. In fact, per projected CAFE standards, to get closer than they can, and pay a penalty for not doing so. They are elitist snobs who hate us. They would prefer us dead, but since simply killing us might cause a few problems, they just make life as insufferable as possible. Maybe they can get suicides up. Instead of “you will own nothing and be happy”, what they really want is “you will own nothing” and blow your brains out. Or try this new drug called Fentanyl. It’s not so messy.

    • EVs show that TPTB aren’t trying to control the climate…they’re trying to control YOU.

      EVs show that the elites really are the ones doing the most damage to the environment.

      EVs show that the elites really don’t care about poor people, especially poor people in what the Orange Man called s—hole countries.

      EVs show that there is a price to be paid for the elites’ failures in things like infrastructure—but we will be the ones who pay.

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