Electric vehicles
April 1, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Electric vehicles are the South Sea Bubble of the 21st century. They are essentially obsolete, having lost out to the internal combustion engine 100 years ago. Yes, you can make a good car with a battery, like a Tesla. But the cost will always be too high, the environmental consequences are horrific, the drain on natural resources is unconscionable, and charging requirements will always render the vehicle impractical. This is
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March 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
As everyone knows, California is leading the bandwagon to have an all-electric car and truck fleet as soon as 2035. The assumption is that people will charge up their batteries overnight when electricity demand drops. The defect in this plan is that while electricity demand starts to fall later in the evening (except during heat waves), California’s supply of electricity also falls because it is lopsided toward wind and especially
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February 28, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Running low on gas? No worries. Find the nearest gas station. Pop the gas cap. Insert the nozzle into the gas tank opening, wait a minute or two and you’re good to go. The process gets a bit more complicated for drivers of electric vehicles. First they must find a nearby charging station. If they’re lucky, they may be able to find a fast charger where the process might take
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February 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The mania for electric vehicles is a fad that is driven 100% by government regulation. The consumer verdict on EVs has been in for a century. Some of the earliest cars were battery-powered, but they lost out to gasoline-powered cars because gasoline-powered vehicles are better. Those who have been paying attention understand that there is zero chance that our existing motor vehicle fleet will be converted to EVs. Mark Tapscott
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January 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Liberals want to electrify everything, from your car to your stove. But they also don’t want to mine copper. Like so many things liberals do, this makes no sense. You might as well believe in fairy dust as in “green” energy. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on this: The Biden Administration is heavily subsidizing electric vehicles, but at the same time it is blocking mineral projects needed
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December 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward
One of my favorite indicators of ignorance are the people who buy personalized license plates, or affix stickers, for their electric cars that say “Emission Free.” Even if you ignore the enormous environmental impacts associated with manufacturing an electric car (which are significantly higher than a gasoline-powered car), if you live in a state that generates a lot of its electricity from coal, you are essentially driving a coal-powered car.
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December 15, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I got a laugh out of a recent Wall Street Journal article that described “fast-charging” electric cars in which “fast-charging” was said to take 20 minutes to an hour. If that’s “fast-charging,” I’d hate to see what slow-charging looks like. Maybe we should look at charging in winter time for a clue. Today’s chart is a little hard to make out, but it displays the data showing that electric cars will
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December 6, 2022 — John Hinderaker
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
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November 21, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Governments at both the federal and state levels tell us we are in the midst of a transition from internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles. For a number of reasons, I don’t believe that is true, regardless of the level of bribery and coercion that governments bring to bear. I think the whole project will crash and burn, after doing enormous damage in the meantime. But the Wall Street Journal
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September 11, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Are people finally starting to catch on to the fact that electric vehicles are a terrible idea? I hope so. Bjorn Lomborg makes the case in accessible form in the Wall Street Journal. To begin with, EVs don’t even save much on CO2 emissions: Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is
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August 26, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times reports: If you read the fine print, however, the picture looks a bit different: California would fine automakers up to $20,000 for every car that falls short of production targets. The state also could propose new amendments revising the sales targets if the market doesn’t react as state leaders hope. In other words, California reserves the right for future Gov. Emily Litella to say “never mind,”
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July 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Ken Green returns with his patented snark on electric vehicle hype versus the evil gasoline cars most of us drive: For as long as I’ve been following EHS (Environment, Health, and Safety—the ESG of the last generation) and transportation policy (and that’s a long time, since my first days as a doctoral student/EHS policy analyst at Huge Aircrash Company in the early 1990s), there has been one kind of ICE
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March 8, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Spectator has published Peter Wood’s witty column “Bewilderment.” The Spectator has kindly made it accessible at our request. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars, a former professor of anthropology at Boston University and college provost at The King’s College in New York City as well as the author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2004), 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (2020), and,
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January 5, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has already mentioned the 48-mile traffic backup that occurred in Northern Virginia yesterday. Reportedly, cars were stopped on I-95 for more than 24 hours in freezing temperatures. It must have been awful, but it could have been worse. And, as Charles Lane explains, it would have been much worse if there had been many more electric vehicles (EVs) in the traffic jam. Lane writes: Sometime after 3 a.m. Tuesday.
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