Those Awful EVs

 Andrea Widburg had another excellent post yesterday at the American Thinker, this one about problems with EVs entitled A cold El Nino winter reveals another problem with electric vehicles.

Have you ever driven a Tesla? I have. It’s a lovely car to drive because it accelerates quickly, handles well, and is stocked to the brim with cool gadgets. In a sane world, rich people would buy it and other electric vehicles (EVs) for fun and, as competition drove the price down, ordinary people would think about them, too. But we don’t live in a sane world. We live in an insane world in which our governments are forcing us to buy EVs to “save the climate.” That’s why it’s important to focus on just how awful EVs are, and this winter is forcing that focus on a lot of foolish people.

Let me count the problems with EVs:

- The batteries require child slave labor.

- Mining the materials for the batteries is one of the most violent environmental acts around. To sound like a leftist, you’re almost raping the earth, and it’s a burden borne by third-world countries under heavy Chinese influence.

- The batteries, when they die, are often too expensive to replace, killing the cars.

- When the batteries catch fire (and they do, often), that’s it for the car.

- If you think ordinary batteries are terrible for landfills, EV batteries are worse, way, way worse.

- The electricity for EVs must come from somewhere, which usually means fossil fuels.

- Repair costs are incredibly high (which also drives up the overall cost of car insurance for everyone as EVs flood the roads and insurance companies have to adjust to deal with these costs).

- EVs are generally less reliable than traditional gas-powered cars.

And then there is both cold and hot weather. EVs are notorious for both taking longer to charge, and having less range when the temperature goes down, and A/C eats a lot of range. And this is after one spends sometimes hours waiting in line for a charging station, then hours to actually charge the vehicle. This compared to 15 minutes to fill your internal combustion car and get a cup of coffee to boot.

It’s especially slow when it’s cold. Not only does your battery drain much more quickly (killing efficiency by as much as 41% when temperatures drop below 40 degrees Fahrenheit), but your battery also recharges more slowly. This problem is exacerbated if you’re in a place where you need to use your car as shelter and warmth from the cold during the slow charging process...

When the internal combustion engine powered cars were replacing the horse and buggy, there were no government subsidies. Rather, men with vision looked at the situation on the ground and grew both the automobile, and gasoline stations organically. If EVs were as good as those pushing them claimed, everybody would be clamoring to get one. The fact is, though, that the technology is awful. It was awful 120 years ago, and it hasn't improved much since.