Saving the World With Electric Vehicles

Just kidding. Willis Eschenbach quantifies the amount of fossil fuel usage that electric vehicles actually save in the U.S.:

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab has just released a study showing that in 2021, US privately-owned plugin hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) “saved about 690 million gallons of gasoline.”

But that is a huge exaggeration because fossil fuels provide 61% of the electricity in the US … so only about a third of that apparent savings is a real reduction in fossil fuel use, the equivalent of maybe 130 million gallons.

The Argonne report also says that from 2010 to 2021, EVs have saved 2.1 billion gallons of gas. So let’s be generous and say that in 11 years, EVs have saved about a third of that, the equivalent of about 750 million gallons of gas.

Now that sure sounds like a lot of gasoline, three-quarters of a billion gallons.

However, as always, a sense of perspective is required. The US uses about 370 million gallons of gas per day … so that’s only about two days’ worth of gas.

I say again. Over the last eleven years, electric vehicles in the US have saved Two. Days. Worth. Of. Gasoline.

At enormous cost:

Direct taxpayer subsidies for EVs have cost you and me $10 billion dollars to date, and we’re on the hook for more. The government just extended the EV subsidy until 2032 and removed the cap on the number of vehicles eligible for the subsidy.

It gets worse. The US government also just approved spending an additional $7.5 billion of taxpayer money on EV charging stations.

So to date, we’re spending TWENTY-THREE DOLLARS for each gallon of gasoline saved … economic suicide.

And all of the world’s worst countries are laughing at us.

Electric vehicles have been around for well over a century, but they lost out to internal combustion vehicles because gas-powered cars are cheaper and better. That is still true today, regardless of how many billions of dollars governments shovel at subsidies for electric vehicles.

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