The world has truly gone crazy. I have a very hard time believing that so many companies are being duped by governments around the planet. Their commitment to company suicide is admirable but assinine. It surprised me when I heard car company after car company climbing onto the bandwagon of switching to electric cars. Have they gone mad?
Actually, when Henry Ford began making cars, he had no idea where the gasoline would come from. There were no gas stations around the country to supply fuel to the suckers who jumped at the chance to buy a motorized wagon. In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a famous line “Build it and they will come.” I guess the entire world now operates on that philosophy. It is not a bad directive, but I would like to believe that there has to be a tiny bit more behind investing billions of dollars in a technology that is still years away from fruition. I give Elon Musk credit for sticking his neck out to build electric cars, but I don’t give GM, Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and the many other car company’s any credit for rushing into this scheme built on the phenomenon of global warming being caused by humans. Yes, global warming can happen but it is far beyond our capabilities to make it so.
My intention with this post is to add to this fray of commercial suicide. I am proposing two of my designs for electric cars free to the world for use by humanity. Both are just as viable as the cars Musk and others are producing. In fact, these designs may be more reliable and cheaper to build than those in current production.
Design number one.
Cheby V110Diverse Energy Powered Personal Transportation Appliance
A good blogging friend posted a question to one of my recent posts. What will happen if we buy a sixty thousand dollar car and the government outlaws the same in favor of electrics? Well, for one thing, Uncle Sam would never be able to do such a thing without starting a civil war. That is something the liberals would be very unhappy about because they would be the unarmed bad guys that we, the armed conservatives, would be shooting at.
Americans would improvise to keep their cars running. It occurred to me that in January 1920, the government passed a federal law prohibiting the sale of drinkable alcohol. The law caused a lot of pain to the population, and ‘we the people’ began to improvise by bootlegging alcoholic beverages. The government was put into a sad state of affairs because the citizens didn’t pay taxes on any of the booze they drank, or produced. This era also spawned a huge gangster industry that has never been completely eliminated, much like the drug industry today.
Prohibition lasted for thirteen years before Uncle finally cried Uncle, and Congress repealed prohibition. If it takes that many years to prohibit electric cars, the roadside will be littered with millions of these cars abandoned without charge. I hope to live to see the day. Americans, being Americans, would sadly innovate and carry gasoline-powered generators to run their charge-less cars. No doubt, they would be using 100-proof vodka to run the generators.
Take a good look at this woman. She has her hands in your pocket, and is lifting your wallet and any loose change you may still have.
“During an interview aired on Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm responded to a question on whether there is a plan to address energy prices that have started to tick up by stating that “the better choice is to move to electrify transportation, because it is so much cheaper for you” and “moving to clean is moving to energy security and moving to affordability.”
I almost fell off my chair. I just Googled Biden’s electrification of transportation plan and learned that he is pouring money into electric charging station infrastructure. Will it be enough? Probably not for a very long time. His desire is to have 500,000 charging stations in place by 2030. The latest stat I found on the number of gas stations in the United States is 115,400. At first the number of charging stations sounds like it will be plenty, but I don’t think so. Most of the 115,400 stations provide up to twelve or more fueling points. It takes me about five minutes to fill my tank while a fast charge will take about 45 minutes. That means the electric charging depot will require nine times as many charging points to equal the fill capacity of a regular fueling station. My arithmetic tells me that the number of charging points is only half of what will be required. Another fact of life is that the current grid that supplies us with our spark is not capable of simultaneously charging more than about five cars per city block before it crashes.
At the same time Biden is planning to increase regulation of gasoline to make it more expensive and harder to get. Remember a few weeks ago when I stated that the current car shortage is a government conspiracy to force us into electric cars. Along with that, the pandemic taught us that we don’t need to drive. Anyway, I have veered from my point which is to state that this lady who has her hands in our pockets is a moron. She actually believes she can convince us that going electric overnight will be cheaper for us.
What Ms Granholm has left out of the discussion is where the electricity needed to spark those 500,000 charging stations will come from. Maybe she has a plan to install a huge windmill on the roof of every fossil fuel and atomic power plant across the country to give us a charge. While we hire the Dutch to design and build those windmills for us we will have to rely on something else. Maybe it will be hydro-electric, but wait, didn’t Lake Meade nearly run out of water this last year? Where will we build new hydro-electric plants. Niagara Falls already has a power plant. Actually, a better idea will be to buy all the old bicycles that the Chinese are no longer using, and we can use them to move around. Not only would that be clean green energy, but we would all lose weight and be healthier. Think of all the reduced health care costs that would accrue. Surplus doctors and nurses would need to be directed to keeping the millions of illegal aliens that have descended upon the USA healthy. The downside of healthy immigrants is that they will be buying up all the beautifully efficient gas powered cars that we had to give up for the electrics.
The bottom line is that we need more power pants
Jennifer Granholm’s stupid answer was completely political talking points. She did it so robotically, and kept repeating the exact same line so many times that I wondered if maybe she is a government robot with limited artificial intelligence.
is a nice easy to remember password that works for every site I visit, and for all the internet places I go to everyday. One would think this is an easy request, but it seems to be damn near impossible to achieve. Among the worst password requesters are Google, and Apple. Both companies demand using passwords, and that they be changed often. In the process they drive users nuts. Probably even worse than Apple is Norton password manager which requires it’s own password to enter before you can access your passwords.
Being memory challenged makes this particularly difficult to navigate. Just try reading the instructions offered by Google. They might as well be in Egyptian hieroglyphics as far as I am concerned. I am an Apple person, but if a simpler system becomes available I’ll dump everything Apple in favor of simplicity. I have an Apple user-id, but it seems that Apple can not recognize that id in any of it’s many discrete applications like iCloud, Apple Store, iTunes, iPhotos, iMovies, etc. Compound that with devices like iMac, iPad, iPhone, iWatch, and many more. I would think a simple droplet of blood applied to a device would solve the problem. I may go anemic or worse yet die because of a lack of blood, but it might be easier to use the devices.
Last week my internet service took a crap, and stopped working. In order to get it up and running I decided to reset the system by shutting everything down. I went too far, and shut off my iMac as well. That was a tragic error on my part. The most tragic was trying to re-enter my own computer after a shut down. It has been three years since the machine has been shut off, and that time gap caused me to forget the Apple id, and password for the machine. It took a full four hours of watching, and listening to Youtube videos made by two different guys from India who spoke a mile a minute with a strong Hindi accent, and tons of trial and error efforts using their recovery steps to finally get into this Mac which sits on my desk unused by anyone but myself. Success was finally achieved and unlike the woman who gives birth and forgets the pain immediately upon seeing her child my pain continues. Now, for whatever reason, in the great wisdom of Apple the Mac acts just like my iPhone. If it is unattended for a few seconds it requires, you guessed it, a password to enter again. I am positive that this useless feature can be turned off, but I may not live long enough to learn where the switch is. I will sleep easier now that I am protected from my wife getting into my computer when I’m away.
Man typing on the keyboard trying to log into his computer forgot password
In trying to understand why all this is necessary, I vision the workplace where every colleague takes over your keyboard when you turn your back, or go to the john. I would sooner booby trap that individual and spray him with indigo blue ink than have to reenter the password every time.
Throughout all this I keep hearing about how smart artificial intelligence has become, but in my opinion this problem is beyond the capabilities of AI. Maybe in another hundred years after electric cars rule the planet, and the air is thick with the smoke of hydrocarbon fueled electric power stations, AI will be smart enough to solve the password problem. However, there is no incentive for Apple, Google, Norton, and the others to solve it because they are making too much money selling updates to newer machines that need more passwords. Like I said above, I’ll reward the company who solves the pw problem permanently with my cash. In the meantime, I’ll keep asking Santa for a solution. His elves suffer from the same malady and may be able to make the miracle happen.
Today, my buddy Jim sent me an eloquently written scientific piece about the stupidity of electric cars. A while back I wrote a piece on what I thought about electric cars, and it is in total agreement with this more science oriented piece written by engineers. Great minds think alike.
THE ELECTRIC CAR ISSUES ARE GROWING IN CONTRAVERSY. HERE IS AN ANALYSIS WHICH MIGHT GIVE YOU A BIT MORE EDUCATED VIEW OF THIS TREND AND THE FUTUTE.
The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections to operate electric vvehicles (EVs) or the increased rates that they will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required, but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind nor solar can support any of it. Electric vehicles will never become the mainstream of transportation!
In part1 of our exposé on the problems with electric vehicles (EVs), we showed that they were too expensive, too unreliable, rely on materials mined in China and other unfriendly countries, and require more electricity than the nation can afford. In this second part, we address other factors that will make any sensible reader avoid EVs like the plague.
EV Charging Insanity
In order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, an EV charging station would require 600, 50-watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid. That is enough to power 20,000 homes. No one likely thinks about the fact that it can take 30 minutes to 8 hours to recharge a vehicle between empty or just topping off. What are the drivers doing during that time?
ICSC-Canada board member New Zealand-based consulting engineer Bryan Leyland describes why installing electric car charging stations in a city is impractical:
“If you’ve got cars coming into a petrol station, they would stay for an average of five minutes. If you’ve got cars coming into an electric charging station, they would be at least 30 minutes, possibly an hour, but let’s say its 30 minutes. So that’s six times the surface area to park the cars while they’re being charged. So, multiply every petrol station in a city by six. Where are you going to find the place to put them?”
In particular, the latest UK chargers will be pre-set to not function during 9-hours of peak loads, from 8 am to 11 am (3-hours), and 4 pm to 10 pm (6-hours). Unbelievably, the UK technology decides when and if an EV can be charged, and even allows EV batteries to be drained into the UK grid if required. Imagine charging your car all night only to discover in the morning that your battery is flat since the state took the power back. Better keep your gas-powered car as a reliable and immediately available backup! While EV charging will be an attractive source of revenue generation for the government, American citizens will be up in arms.
Used Car Market
The average used EV will need a new battery before an owner can sell it, pricing them well above used internal combustion cars. The average age of an American car on the road is 12 years. A 12-year-old EV will be on its third battery. A Tesla battery typically costs $10,000 so there will not be many 12-year-old EVs on the road. Good luck trying to sell your used green fairy tale electric car!
Tuomas Katainen, an enterprising Finish Tesla owner, had an imaginative solution to the battery replacement problem—he blew up his car! New York City-based Insider magazine reported (December 27, 2021):
“The shop told him the faulty battery needed to be replaced, at a cost of about $22,000. In addition to the hefty fee, the work would need to be authorized by Tesla…Rather than shell out half the cost of a new Tesla to fix an old one, Katainen decided to do something different… The demolition experts from the YouTube channel Pommijätkät (Bomb Dudes) strapped 66 pounds of high explosives to the car and surrounded the area with slow-motion cameras…the 14 hotdog-shaped charges erupt into a blinding ball of fire, sending a massive shockwave rippling out from the car…The videos of the explosion have a combined 5 million views.”
We understand that the standard Tesla warranty does not cover “damage resulting from intentional actions,” like blowing the car up for a YouTube video.
EVs Per Block In Your Neighborhood
A home charging system for a Tesla requires a 75-amp service. The average house is equipped with 100-amp service. On most suburban streets the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla. For half the homes on your block to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly overloaded.
Batteries
Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The great lithium battery in your cell phone weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1,000 pounds. And what do we get for this huge cost and weight? We get a car that is far less convenient and less useful than cars powered by internal combustion engines. Bryan Leyland explained why:
“When the Model T came out, it was a dramatic improvement on the horse and cart. The electric car is a step backward into the equivalence of an ordinary car with a tiny petrol tank that takes half an hour to fill. It offers nothing in the way of convenience or extra facilities.”
Our Conclusion
The electric automobile will always be around in a niche market likely never exceeding 10% of the cars on the road. All automobile manufacturers are investing in their output and all will be disappointed in their sales. Perhaps they know this and will manufacture just what they know they can sell. This is certainly not what President Biden or California Governor Newsom are planning for. However, for as long as the present government is in power, they will be pushing the electric car as another means to run our lives. We have a chance to tell them exactly what we think of their expensive and dangerous plans when we go to the polls in November of 2022.
Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.
Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute. He has 40 years of experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer, and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament.
