Electric vehicles
November 18, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Electric vehicles have been around for 100 years or so. They lost out to gasoline powered cars because gasoline powered cars are better. Is that ever going to change? At the Telegraph, Michael Kelly draws an analogy to the Concorde: The man in the street has failed to embrace BEVs for the same reason he failed to embrace Concorde nearly 50 years ago: the extra cost – of order £10,000
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November 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
How much does it cost to charge an electric vehicle, and who picks up the tab? Steve Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity has this: Uncle Sam pays the automakers billions of dollars to produce EVs. Then they write a check for $7,500 to consumers who buy an EV and many states kick in up to another $5,000. Now, the government is paying to charge the batteries for the rich people
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October 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Wind and solar are both terrible methods of generating electricity, both expensive and unreliable. The one thing that can make the situation worse is the drive to electrify everything, including motor vehicles. The impracticality of this “green” vision has become blindingly obvious, and the “green” movement has begun to fall apart. Steve noted this afternoon the collapsing share prices of renewable energy companies. Here are some more indications that the
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September 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The UAW is striking the Big Three American auto companies. On behalf of its members, the union is fighting the Man for substantially higher pay and substantially less work. One doesn’t read about it much, but one of the big reasons why the UAW is fighting right now is the shift to electric vehicles. See, for example, the Yahoo! Finance backgrounder here explaining “why the shift to EVs is such
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September 11, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The electric vehicle boondoggle rolls on. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm undertook a drive across the Southeastern states to demonstrate the viability of EVs. It didn’t go so well, even in NPR’s account. Granholm’s trip through the southeast, from Charlotte, N.C., to Memphis, Tenn., was intended to draw attention to the billions of dollars the White House is pouring into green energy and clean cars. The administration’s ambitious energy agenda,
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August 6, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The alleged transition to “green” energy is destined to crash and burn. A modern society can’t meet its needs for electricity with wind and solar sources that produce nothing a large majority of the time, supplemented by wholly notional “batteries.” The race to disaster is being accelerated by government-mandated use of electric vehicles, which will put impossible burdens on an already-inadequate grid. So it becomes a question of where the
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August 1, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Why do electric car batteries frequently burst into flame? In my opinion, EVs are essentially an obsolete technology even without this glaring flaw. But those who are trying to force them down our throats should be made to explain why this isn’t a serious issue. Most recently, a cargo ship called the Fremantle Highway burned out of control in the North Sea due to a fire caused by an electric
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May 9, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Governments keep trying to force us to drive electric vehicles, and it keeps not happening. From the thoroughly pro-EV Times of London: Fresh concerns have been raised about efforts to boost sales of electric cars after an industry trade body downgraded its forecast for demand. According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), high energy costs and insufficient charging infrastructure will dampen demand for new battery electric cars
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April 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Biden administration’s effort to impose electric vehicles on the car-buying public should at least be noted. It is taking place under power delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency by Congress under the regime of administrative law that controls so much of the way we live now. Forgive me for citing my own review “A new old regime.” Politico called on six reporters to celebrate the regulatory diktat intended to
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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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