Grumpa Joe's Place

This morning after taking my wife to her doctor appointment I stopped to fill up the Death Star with fuel. I remember when gas was 18 cents per gallon, and I could drive, and drive, and drive on a buck’s worth of gas. That won’t happen again, my bill for a fill-up came to $51.64. Even when I drove a motorhome across country I never spent fifty dollars for a tank of gas not even in California where they are noted for high gasoline prices. Match that to my current grocery bills and the old pocket book is getting pretty thin. I don’t spend much money on anything except food and gas. Fuel for the car and fuel for the body. All of this is because the government wants to dictate what we do and how we do it. Instead of allowing natural capitalistic market forces drive prices according to supply and demand they insist we need electric cars and we need to become vegetarians like in Neanderthal days.

I almost see the electric car thing becoming a reality, but I don’t believe it would get very far if it weren’t for Uncle pressing his Green New Deal on us. I watched a lecture by Jeff Brown, a financial guru, who is predicting that two very significant technologies are about to explode in what he termed TechShock. His claim is that artificial intelligence by itself is a very strong tech sector, and the electric car is the second. Putting the two together will produce a synergetic new technology of the self driving car. This concept will make so many new things happen it will make our heads spin. So, his advice was to invest in companies that will produce things for the self driving cars. Lithium batteries will be key in this new industry, and all things lithium will become hot.

I have written about the electric car before citing that history repeats itself. In the very early days of automobiles electrics were being made to compete with Henry Ford’s Model T. It failed because of the problems with batteries. At the time I wrote it was my opinion that battery technology was not advanced enough to provide reliable power for cars. Granted it is getting better, but the infrastructure needed to support a world of electric cars will be the stopping block. Jeff Brown cited that Volkswagen is broadcasting that their electric car will have a range of 310 miles and promises to have ten minute recharge. It sounds great until one realizes that these super charging stations will have to replace gas pumps or at least work along side of them. Three hundred and ten miles is a decent range on a fill up, but finding a charge may be near impossible, and will be for many years to come. Remember when cell phones first came out and all was well as long as one stood within the range of the local cell tower? It has taken over twenty years for the phone services to provide the towers needed to cover the population and then only if you stay along interstate highways and cities. Try finding a signal in the boonies away from the highways.

Let’s say that the fuel companies overcome the charging station shortage, will we have enough power coming through the lines to give us what we need when we need it? My prediction is that the need for power will reveal the Herbie that dictates the progress of electric vehicles. Finally when all of these impediments have been addressed and overcome, then I believe we can safely junk our gas hogs for an electric.

In the mean time, I am driving my sixteen year old Death Star with 172,000 miles until I can order up a self driver to take me where I want to go.

Filed under: Cars, Conservative, family | Tagged: Electric Cars, Jeff Brown, Lithium, Tech-Shock, Tesla |