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What Will You Do When Your Favorite Carmaker Goes All-Electric?
The EU has instituted onerous fuel-economy and carbon-emissions rules, causing many European automakers to declare that soon they will be building only electric cars. The EU determined that cars propelled by batteries emit no carbon that could be destroying Planet Earth; so they are prompting carmakers to quit making gasoline and diesel-powered cars. These changes are imminent, with Volvo (now owned by a Communist Chinese company) having announced last year that by 2030 they will only be producing electric cars. Just last week, Daimler, which makes Mercedes Benz cars, also announced that it will go all-electric by the end of the decade. Jaguar has announced that it will be all-electric by 2025.
So, what if you have aspired to own a Jaguar or Mercedes. Will you buy that electric car and risk being on foot if the power goes out? What if you will never be able to trade in that gas-powered Volvo for the newest model? Are you looking forward to the government essentially owning your car? Most electricity is provided by government-sanctioned utilities, so you will have few options for fueling up if all you are allowed to own and drive will be some kind of electric car. General Motors and Ford have also announced that they will be moving to building mostly electric cars. California and Washington have already passed laws against gasoline-powered cars.
Note, however, one of the big holdouts. Toyota has announced that they will not be building an all-electric fleet.
Nearly every week, I read a new article describing how this or that automaker has declared that they will be only building electric cars in the future. Not one of those articles has yet addressed what I think of as the most important question. What if the people don’t want electric cars? What if all those buyers and drivers out there are not one bit interested in driving a car which they have to constantly worry about running out of charge?
What will you do?
Published in Economics
The right way for government to get involved in the auto market is not subsidies for purchases, but subsidies for research in batteries and fusion power generation. If we had electricity “too cheap to meter”, then people would switch to electric cars and increase their prosperity.
remember, the social cost of carbon (dioxide) is negative.
Owning physical media is ideal to keep full ownership and so Amazon can’t decide you can no longer hear things you paid for, or they change the versions to have approved language or whatever. (You know, like George Lucas did with Star Wars, and like Steven Spielberg did with ET…)
But for car use, people end up owning 2 copies of everything: one for home, one for car. (Or maybe 3 copies if you have 2 cars…) Otherwise you have to schlep everything from home to car to home to car…
It’s not difficult to copy (“rip”) CDs to something like a USB “flash drive” and then plug that into your car unit for playing. Many mobile sound systems have that option. No CDs to get scratched etc, and you have a lot more than 6 or 10 or whatever CDs worth of material to choose from.
No, but right now the only CD player I regularly use is in my car. And if my car didn’t have one, I wouldn’t have an excuse to make CDs.
I put music on my phone and play from there.
Our archive is ripped and on a remote server and is in no way mixed other people’s archives on that remote server.
My husband has done that for me get it is easier to select CDs to play on the multidisk then to plow though a thumbdive menu while driving.
I had a 2012 Camry Hybrid whose battery was rated for 100,000 miles. At about 170,000 miles it started having problems, throwing codes that advised me to take the car to a dealership. I reset the codes a few times and traded for a Subaru Outback rather than pay $50o0 for a main battery replacement. The battery did last much longer than promised but was just too expensive for the car at that point, at least for me.
Well, there *were* steam-powered cars…they ran on oil or kerosene, though. Several years ago, I saw an actual Stanley Steamer, heading down the road at about 65mph.
Just remembering that the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad marketed themselves as a cleaner alternative to those other railroads, because they used cleaner-burning anthracite, and Phoebe Snow’s clothes would be much cleaner after she made that trip.
Oh, the trivia that I have in my head!
$5,000 seems optimistic now, and of course if we became dependent on electric cars, China could demand whatever they wanted for the batteries and/or the materials to make them.
Since you guys are so smart about vehicles, do any of you have an opinion on how to see better in the rain? Coatings (RainX etc.) or better wipers?
I think my new car is far more finicky about bugs and grime on the windshield or something.
While I’m here: BMW announced today it will not be going all-electric and their CEO openly mocked both VW and Daimler for being dishonest about the prospects for an “all-electric future”. BMW will continue making hybrids and is developing an affordable hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. That’s at least what he said in the paper.
Hydrogen fuel cell is still electric, it just stores the “electricity” as hydrogen rather than in a battery. On the plus side it avoids the rare earths etc that are increasingly controlled by China.
I want to buy a particular Hyundai Plug-in Hybrid, but they’re not selling them in Wisconsin. I think the closest state is either Rhode Island or Colorado.
Only if by “before long” you mean 60 years.
Rain-X is great.
I wonder if that could be climate-related somehow? Although RI and CO get plenty cold too.
Lidar.
Since you mentioned “Rain-X” I will give you my experience with it. It works wonderfully in the rain because the raindrops just kind of blend in with the coating rather than make squiggly streaks on the windshield. Oftentimes you don’t even need to use the wipers, you can see the road fine without them. It only works properly however, if you apply it as specified in the instructions. You must thoroughly clean the windshield of any dirt or grease before applying the coating with a microscopically thin layer, and then it needs to be buffed-out. You could just use the rain-X windshield washing fluid which goes along with the coating, and it helps a bit, but it is not as good as putting on the windshield coating combined with their windshield-washing fluid.
It was explained to me at the dealer when I asked about it that they [Hyundai] haven’t been able to build out their public charging infrastructure as fast as they planned.
Which I care about not at all. The whole point of a plug in hybrid is it can be electric or gas. I’ll plug it in at my house.
I bought a ton of this to try on my shower doors and prevent soap scum, but I never manage to apply it properly.
Too much work. Do this.
1: Wash the windshield with Windex (or the equivalent).
2: Take a paper towel, fold it into fourths, pour rain-x on it, wipe around on the windshield. Repeat until the entire window is hazy. I usually go over the whole thing a second time just to be sure.
3: Let it dry for ten or so minutes.
4: Take a garden hose (with nozzle) and spray the window thoroughly to clean it off.
Done.
It’s basically just wax in an alcohol solution.
I’m driving a ’93 Volvo 240. Halfway there.
Just don’t rainx wipers. Mine haven’t been the best.
Her older hybrid is a Hundai Sonata. She is going to sell it but might have second thoughts since there is a car shortage on dealer lots right now. If some crazy hits her Honda, she would be in a pickle. I told her to drive the older car locally to reduce risk.
An interesting take on the future of electric vehicles, riffing off the waste in the infrastructure bill:
the “infrastructure” bill includes $7.5 billion dollars for electric car charging stations. When the US went from horse and buggy to gasoline cars, the government didn’t build the service stations. Why is the government in the charging business now? To make Elon Musk even wealthier, I suppose …
And that $7.5 billion is on top of existing things like tax rebates for charging stations, which can run up to a rebate of half the cost of the installation … paid for by you and me.
In any case, a Level II commercial charging station costs on the order of $10,000. So that’s enough to install 750,000 charging stations … paid for by you and me, of course. They charge at a rate of about 20kW, and if they’re running say a third of the time, it will take five new 1 GW nuclear plants to power them.
And how much will that change the charging equation? Well, Level II commercial chargers charge at a rate of 25 miles of driving per hour of charging. Assuming again that they are used a third of the time, that’s 54 billion miles worth of driving per year.
Which sounds like a lot … until you compare it to the 3.13 trillion miles driven in the US annually. Those chargers will cover a percent and three-quarters of the miles driven. And that in turn means that to switch over to 100% electric, the charging stations alone will cost almost half a trillion and will require 285 one gigawatt nuclear power plants to provide the power. And those plants will cost about $9 billion each, so toss in another $2.5 trillion for the plants.
Please remember that the government is the main electricity provider in most places, and heavily regulates the rest. Of course, it’s the government’s responsibility to provide charging stations. Our local big mall has a bunch of brand new free charging stations. I resent their providing free fuel for the rich who own Teslas, while the rest of us pay over $4 a gallon for gas.
Last August when I was leaving Arizona, it was $1.61 in Alamogordo.
Yeah, but at least we don’t have to read mean tweets anymore.
It’s still a lot cheaper there, than in People’s Republic of California etc.
An hour of waiting in order to drive 25 miles doesn’t sound like “a lot” to me.