Here’s the latest reader question, along with my reply!
Ron asks: One more bullet for your anti-electric car position. For obvious reasons, electric cars make more sense in urban than rural settings. However, urban settings are overwhelmed with apartment buildings. And on those streets every night, every parking space is full. So are those electric car owners going to run extension cords out to the street? Does anyone think the apartment owner is going to add interior charging stations = $$$$. And even if a few are added it is first come, first serve – and those there first are unlikely to move their cars once charged. This limitation is enormous and hard to imagine being overcome. Thanks for your excellent presentations.
My reply: It’s the “throughput” problem again – only worse.
There are rarely lines at gas stations because the car ahead of you only needs about 5 minutes to fuel and then the pump is free. Half a dozen or more cars can be fully fueled and on their way over the course of even half an hour at just one of the station’s pumps in the time it takes to partially charge a single EV.
The wait compounds if you don’t get there first.
You wait for the EV ahead of you – and then you wait for your EV. Even if the wait is “only” 30-45 minutes per car, it is now twice that (or longer) if you’re not first in line. You are stuck for an hour or more to accomplish what can be accomplished in a non-EV in 5 minutes.
The EV advocates’ solution is more “fast” chargers. But it will take a lot of “fast” chargers” to deal with the throughput problem. Where will they be installed? How will the cost of these be paid for?
By whom?
In urban areas, the problem is much worse because parking space is already limited. Even if every available slot could be transformed into a “fast” charging parking spot, there would still not be enough of them for the number of cars.
And as you say, people aren’t going to give up their parking/charging spot after 30-45 minutes or even after many hours because where are they going to put their car? Are they going to drive around the city all night?
Musical EVs!
Will new high-rise parking/charging buildings be erected to solve this (sigh) problem? Who is going to pay for it?
Doesn’t it make your teeth ache, too?
There are so many problems with EVs it boggles the mind – because they’re self-imposed and unnecessary problems. EVs are a “solution” to problems which do not exist – energy scarcity and “climate change” (catastrophic and man-caused, I mean).
But they are the means by which the average American’s mobility will be limited. Physically, by dint of the EV’s limited radius/recharge issues. Economically, via the EV’s exorbitant cost and much shorter service life (a function of inevitable battery deterioration and exorbitant battery replacement costs).
. . .
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The commie left seeking to RULE US envisions a world where NO member of the hoi polloi will own the means to travel independently. It’s just ONE of the many ways the seek to impose TOTAL control over ALL of us. EV technology is just a red herring, a distraction to be used to drive a stake through the heart of gas/diesel vehicles. Once the evil carbon burners are dead they will then pull the plug ( sic) on EV’s, charging stations etc. We will ALL be herded onto mass transit where we will be disarmed and controlled….kind of like those boxcars in Germany.
RE: But they are the means by which the average American’s mobility will be limited.
For the government, this is a FEATURE, not a bug. The goal, not a bump on the road.
Everyone is done in 5 minutes. Oh, I wish that were true. People have no courtesy now. When I fill up, I move my truck out of the way if I need something from the store(I can imagine 40 years ago saying that and somebody saying “But wouldn’t you HAVE to move your truck to get to the store?”.
I’m not above going into the store and telling the clerk and her woman friend, I need to fuel and the driver needs to move her damn car/truck. Oh, they do get mad but no madder than me sitting there cooling my heels and wasting fuel waiting for the possibly 30 minute conversation to be over.
I wish I had that “wayback” device. Do your lights work? Does your horn honk? You’re good to go.
It is the pussification/self absorption of society. Back in the early 1970s I remember people being called out for inconsiderate or rude behavior. If it was a legitimate issue, the majority would understand they screwed up, apologize and likely self correct. Shame still existed. Right crosses for the few shameless assholes too.
Now, entitled and self absorbed seems the norm. Me first, Fuck you. Shamelessly and thoughtlessly.
Worse, apparently calling out obviously bad behavior is viewed as rude, oppressive or hurtful. WTF?
Bring on the societal collapse. We need a good Darwinian culling of the herd.
I do recall seeing signs telling you to move your vehicle after fueling. You don’t see that anymore even at truckstops where truckers are now fat little hispanic women, guys wearing middle east clothing and speaking no English(how the hell do they get a CDL?) and various other foreigners who seem to think manners are not needed.
When you’re fueling a truck, you have time to run your card into the cashier and wash your glass. No trucker’s going to complain when you are taking care of your truck. However, wandering around inside, looking at the worst food you can find to put into your body and looking at the plethora of plain old bullshit for sale, is very much not appreciated.
Back in the day, O/O’s were of a sort they didn’t hang out at the truck stop. Many’s the time I had another trucker offer me food. No, go ahead, I have plenty. This comes from the wife’s restaurant(and it was real food)and I do this to keep a cash flow going. Lot’s of us old-timers didn’t do much but eat a piece of pie and drink a cup of coffee. I did almost none of that. If I wasn’t carrying food, I did without, days at a time sometimes and after the first day you didn’t even notice it. I only really enjoyed eating food hauling oil field equipment to La. and running with a bunch of “coon-asses” as they called themselves. Back then the food was homegrown and damned good.
Hauling grain during the south Texas grain harvest we often loaded in Edna, Texas on highway 59 where a restaurant called Buck’s Place had local farmers delivering fresh food every morning and you could see your future meal in the big field right beside it full of cattle. Go in and have fresh okra, black eye peas, beef raised within sight and shrimp from right up the road near Houston. Crawfish and fillet gumbo. In La. it was even better food with more fresh seafood. Now I could EAT that.
Hi Anonymous,
Yup. I was there, too – and saw the same. And I see a different thing today. The general incivility is astonishing. From people bellowing on dey sail fawns in public places to the meatheads at my gym who leave hundreds of pounds of plates on a bench (or all over the floor). Behavior that, in my youth, was rare and performed only by a relative few arschlocks is now almost the rule.
We now live in a society built by aholes for aholes. If you’re not an ahole you’re a loser by default.
But that’s what happens when politics gets into everything and people are handcuffed from fighting back like it’s junior high.