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EV Schadenfreude
If you would rather spend your vacation hunting for charging stations, calling customer support to try to get them to reset the charging stations, hunting for places to spend the night when your Ford Lightning runs of out charge and has to be towed, or trying to figure out why a fast charger is only giving you a trickle charge, than attending a car show in Colorado, an electric vehicle is for you!
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Published in Environment
My brother has had the same problem with the latches on his Prius.
The main thing to remember about a hybrid is that even the “main” battery is far smaller, and far less expensive, than the batteries for an electric-only vehicle. (Which also means less heavy metal mining by child- and slave-labor, less to dispose of later, less danger in collisions, and so much more.)
Also a hybrid, at least if set up properly, can still be driven at lower speed just from gasoline power even if the “main” battery fails.
If the “main” battery for an electric-only fails, you’re not going anywhere.
Talking like that ain’t gonna get you elected; especially in California.
Our current president did his part with his ban on drilling.
It’s like I’ve described before/elsewhere, a lot of people seem to think that once someone like a Trump gets things humming, they can elect some idiot promising them more freebies and feeling good about themselves etc, and somehow nothing will get worse, only better.
Ramirez is gifted a saying much with one picture.
Yes, when I was growing up out in the sticks, every little country crossroads store had a gas pump.
Information like this is why I love Ricochet.
I’ve said for years/decades that electric cars just change the location of the exhaust pipe.
And in terms of the toxic heavy metals etc, the location of where (most of) the pollution takes place.
You would need a trailer to carry it. A Tesla battery pack weighs 992 – 1377 lbs., depending on the model. A Ford Lightning’s battery weighs 1800 lbs. And if you’re pulling a trailer your range goes way down, so you would definitely need a spare battery. And you would need a forklift to handle the old and the new batteries when you changed them out on the side of the road. Maybe another trailer to pull the forklift. And maybe another spare battery since you’re now pulling two trailers. And would your electric forklift (surely you wouldn’t use a forklift power by icky fossil fuels) also have a spare battery along?
Interesting how we have to bumble into the rocket equation to discuss EV range. That’s a powerful indicator of economic feasibility right there.
For a conventional electric car to have increased range, it requires more battery structure which is heavy and expensive and toxic – heavy metals to be mined, then disposed of later… – while an internal combustion engine vehicle just needs a larger fuel tank.
This demands a meme!
I do very much like the hybrid idea. My wife has a hybrid van and that thing barely sips gas. When I drive on fambly trips, I like to see how high I can get the average mileage
I like the recent Ford Maverick hybrid (although I have heard that they are in fact cheaply made). Good idea; better execution may yet happen.
Still, I will never displace my throbbing love affair with the late 1960s V-8.
And this is why I just bought a brand new gas-powered car, which should last me a long time. I traded in a 14-year old car for the new one.
Oh, and a big reason none of the new electric-charge infrastructure works well? RoHS (Regulation of Hazardous Substances), a law passed by the EU many years ago, eliminating lead from solder. Any device requiring a circuit-board is now much more fragile, with a shorter working life. My bet is those charging stations, outside in all weathers, deteriorate pretty quickly. And there is little, if any, cure for the problem.
Maybe, but the one in #19 already covers it pretty well.
The 60s V-8 is the perfect car to end it all in a closed garage. An EV would not do the job.
Have all the auto and truck manufacturing and the oil companies CEO positions been taken over by the finance and accounting types so that none actually has an understanding of the operations under discussion here?
Elon Musk maybe does. I seem to remember he expressed some concerns about Biden’s efforts to stop all functions dependent on fossil fuels and their production as well.
I’m sure the EV fans and lobby thought of all this when they were writing the new edicts.
Musk probably realizes that Teslas get to the dealerships via diesel-powered trucks.
Even if their buyers don’t.
Musk has bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics. He also worked on a farm and in a lumber mill for a year after he immigrated to Canada. None of that is your typical accountant or finance background.
And you can be certain of how much gas you have in your jerry cans, and you can transfer it yourself, along the side of the road, anywhere, But you have to rely on on-board computers to tell you how much charge you have, and you can’t pack more batteries like you can with jerry cans.
Made me do a spit take
I enjoyed the all-electric car I owned for a few years. I then lived in a compact urban area, worked in one location with a predictable home to work commute, and was wealthy enough to own a house in which I could install a charger and to own another car for trips. The electric car was great for commuting and errands.
A problem leading to the idiotic electric car mandates is that most of the lawmakers and bureaucrats creating those mandates live and work in urban areas where things are relatively close together and are wealthy, so buying access to what they want is relatively easy. When they travel, they fly point-to-point. It is another set of topics on which lawmakers and rule-making bureaucrats live lives completely different from many people, and those lawmakers and rule-making bureaucrats forget that they are not living the same as many people do. Even within states, most of the California and New York lawmakers and rule makers live and work in small parts of those states, and forget that both states have large rural areas. And then the lawmakers and rule makers make laws and rules that might be reasonable for their wealthy urban lives, but don’t make sense for large numbers of the people to whom they apply those laws and rules.
Not just on the electric car mandate, but on a number of other issues too, I believe farmers and ranchers in California hold that the legislature has positively no clue what life is like outside the city. California is a huge agricultural state but its lawmakers seem to have little regard for that industry.
You are assuming that you plan to replace the battery pack. I am thinking more along the line of a fast-charging pack that gives you ~20 miles of range once you plug it in. Sort of like a 1g can of gas.
Except an extra battery has to be an extra battery, with all the toxic chemicals and such. And there are losses involved both with charging the battery, and getting the charge back out. And the mass/weight – and cost – of all that material is considerable.
All that gasoline needs is a container.
The one gallon of gasoline = approximately $3.00 today, the new empty 2 gallon gasoline container = approximately $20.00-25.00 on the high end at the nearest fueling facility.
How much for the spare battery pack …. and did you remember to keep it charged for your next emergency.
Which is to say, instead of finding out every unintended weird consequence caused by taking this hard turn into a new technology necessitated by a fake existential threat from “climate change” …. why not simply keep improving the existing internal combustion engine technologies to lower emissions.
Yeah, if you buy your “gas can” at a gas station, that might be the dictionary definition of “sucker.”
Always smarter and usually much cheaper to get one at Walmart or the like, before you desperately need it.
Especially with diesel exhaust, which modern technology has already made so clean that you could basically breathe right off the pipe without damage.
By the way — buy your gas at Tractor Supply or Harbor Freight, if you want one without all the retardation installed.
HEre is the thing:
No such battery exists.
The best way to carry energy around is gas.
Oh, sorry, there is another way to have your EV run for ages, but no one wants to put RTUs in their cars. I mean, I would, but RTUs are scary.
Battery technology is simply not ever going to be as good as ICE. Never. I am not being a pessimist here: batteries are up against physics. What would be required is a completely new battery technology. We will have fusion before then.