Policymakers Want to Ban Gas Cars—But Have They Tried Charging an EV?
The Unseen Challenges of an Electric Vehicle Paradise.
Photo by Michael Fousert on Unsplash
The joys of renting a car—once a straightforward affair now feels like a game of vehicular roulette. You go online, pick your dream car, and by the time you reach the counter, it's like an episode of "Let's Make a Deal" but without all of the fun. "Sorry, we're out of the compact, fuel-efficient model you reserved. How about a Sherman tank or a Flintstones-style footmobile instead?"
The scene below was very close to what happened to me in San Francisco yesterday, almost as if it was pulled straight from this "Seinfeld" episode
"I don't understand. Do you have my reservation?"
"Yes, we do. Unfortunately, we ran out of cars."
"But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the reservation!"
I reserved a gas-guzzling mid-sized car for a day trip down to San Jose but was told I had to take an electric vehicle at that moment, or wait two hours until other gas powered rentals were returned. I opted for the EV rental and hopped in a 2023 Subaru. It was a bit overwhelming due to the 5,393 buttons and switches surrounding me. After five minutes of getting around to the basics, I was off to Silicon Valley.
My mini-SUV was quite smooth, with lots of power. The sound system in the car was nice, the ride was quiet and I was even promised to be waived re-charging fees if I returned it with a charge above 70%. It sounds simple, but it really isn't.
Charging an EV isn't like pumping gas; it's more like assembling IKEA furniture while blindfolded. Well, maybe not that bad, but it took a while to figure it all out. After fumbling around for what felt like an eternity, I managed to get it plugged into a charger station at a high-end mall in San Jose.
While it charged, I strolled around the mall, gawking at stuff I knew I couldn't afford - like the EV I was driving. An hour and $12 later, the mini-SUV was charged from 50% to 90%. It was a small victory, but then it got me thinking.
States like California, New York, Vermont, and Oregon are vying to ban the purchase of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. The aim? To catapult us into an electric vehicle utopia. But here's the deal: If I, a seemingly competent adult, struggle to navigate the current landscape of EV driving and charging, what awaits us in this brave new electric world? It's worth pondering whether policymakers have fully considered the practical implications of these mandates.
Will charging stations become the new Starbucks, and will we see them on almost every street corner? Can we expect human guides to assist at charging stations as they do at grocery stores and Target self-checkout lanes? When it comes to urban logistics, how will we integrate charging stations into cramped city spaces and densely populated apartment buildings, especially when parking is already at a premium? Regarding their environmental benefits, will EVs become more affordable, and what sorts of incentives could be put in place to promote their purchase? Might tax breaks be part of the equation? And finally, what kind of impact can homeowners expect on their electric bills?
We're already grappling with an underdeveloped network of fast-charging stations and an electrical grid that may melt down with a nation of EVs plugged in. The sticker shock of EVs and potential job cuts in fossil fuel-related sectors add an economic layer of complexity.
Have policymakers thought through the moral dilemma of battery production, ecological issues with battery disposal, the technical headaches of limited driving range, and the drop in performance when the thermometer nosedives? Then, we'll have the bureaucratic swamp of regulations that come with massive changes like this. Making the switch to EVs isn't just a matter of unplugging gas cars and plugging in the electric ones; it's a jigsaw puzzle that demands a well-thought-out strategy.
So, while the road to hell may be paved with good intentions, let's hope it's also dotted with plenty of EV charging stations—and maybe a few with attendants who can tell a kilowatt from a kitchen sink because I sure couldn't. Because if we're racing toward an all-electric future, we'd better make sure it's not a comedy of errors. Then again, I suppose that would at least keep things interesting.
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
As with so many of the idiotic fads that have caught on and become everyday near-necessities during this Century of Stupid, this EV craze has all the signs of becoming quite possibly the stupidest thing the human race has done to itself for no good reason to date.
Your mention of the availability of charging platforms given a vast increase in EV usage only barely touches the tip of the iceberg. According to some sources I've examined on the development of battery-powered transport in China, on a far more massive scale already than our nation of a few dozen million drivers may ever face, the problems that have emerged are almost too many to count.
As I understand it, what seems to be occurring in China, where the state has undertaken to promote an EV future both suddenly and rapidly around the nation's largest cities, the troubles apparently arise mostly from the creation of a whole new industrial mega-complex, tasked specifically to mass-produce what amounts to experimental and far from debugged technology.
This has given rise to problems of supply simply not being able to keep up with demand, unless no end of the component parts required are farmed out to a fast-growing semi-legal marketplace of sub-sub-sub-contractors and reverse-engineering of other brands' products in order to fill the orders for the thousands of different parts that have to go into these gimmicks.
This of course has led to disastrous economic, legal, environmental and public-safety after-effects, such as entire lines of not only automobiles but scooters, delivery vans, urban buses, and any number of utility vehicles and equipment types (backhoes and cranes and farm tractors run on fossil fuels too, until they aren't allowed to....), one after another having to be recalled and banned from lawful sale, owing to performance and safety issues, which look to be led by millions of cheaply-made batteries and circuitry parts, either not working at all or just up and catching fire.
I've seen videos of multiple spontaneous-combustion fires in parked and non-running vehicles on city streets, along with aerial shots of huge graveyards of thousands of near-new cars and scooters which had been removed from use by government order, and I doubt that what I've seen even scratches the surface of this type of problems going on, just in one country.
Also there have been a number of EV fires which had set off shipboard blazes in car-carrier vessels, both on the high seas and at anchor in ports. According to Sal Mercagliano of the What Is Going On With Shipping channel on Youtube (one of the most exemplary and credible sources of daily information in the whole content-creator mediasphere), what happens when EVs catch fire is that the batteries burn at some five times the temperatures of conventional fuel-based vehicles, take far more water and time to get them under control, emit toxic gases, and generally make the firefighters' job in containing them far more dangerous, difficult, time-consuming and expensive, per blaze. And, in the case of oversea carrier vessels hauling thousands of units per load in multi-deck ships which Sal describes as 'bumper to bumper, door to door, floor to ceiling, with chains securing them to the deck', once such a fire starts, the physical obstacles to even getting to the hot spots become overwhelming, and fatal in more than one instance, where fire crew personnel lacking the training and equipment to fight shipboard EV fires have lost their lives, in conditions they simply don't have the resources to deal with.
The whole idea of EVs is so unspeakably, and obviously, stupid, and for such a long list of very substantive reasons backed by mountains of solid evidence, that given the era we live in, it's sure to catch on and become the next big stupid thing making life way more difficult for everyone and solving none of the problems it is advertised as addressing.
Remind me again why I got rid of my last automobile and went back to only using a bicycle?
And no, it isn't powered by a battery. My pantry, refrigerator and kitchen stove are the only 'charging station' that vehicle will ever need, and for good reason.
I'm told that there is no cure for stupid. God help us, I do hope there are at least some countermeasures for it, because we'll being seeing a whole lot more stupid ideas exploding into permanence before anybody decides to, you know, think things through (!) before starting whole new industries on the basis of silly Thunbergian superstitions, and the need to signal one's putative virtues based on them because apparently everyone else is.