Last week the Chinese announced what could be a great leap forward in electric car technology when the Chinese firm BYD announced a five-minute charger. They claim their new technology, it is not just a charger but a battery system as well, will allow a driver to get a 250-mile charge in just five minutes. No one knows if this is true, as Chinese companies are almost as dishonest as American media. Even if it is an exaggeration, it could still be a big deal.
The reason this is viewed as a potential game changer is that it is assumed that the main obstacle to widespread adoption of EV’s is the long recharge. It is unreasonable to expect people to take an hour to recharge when on a road trip. Even a thirty-minute recharge time is unappealing. Decades of needing just a few minutes to fill the tank have conditioned people to expect it. Getting EV technology to this point, therefore, is assumed to be the final boss in the game.
That is not true, but the faithful believe it. The main problem with EV’s is that they do not solve a problem. They are a solution in search of problem and so far, the problems they claim to solve have proven to be either nonsense or grotesque boondoggles executed by the worst people in society. Making the weather potato happy is not motivating anyone to buy an electric car, especially when the total cost of ownership remains significantly higher than conventional vehicles.
The electric car is a lot like the electric book in that the engineering challenges somehow blind the proponents to the central problem. Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Electronic messaging has displaced written letters because the former is better, cheaper, and faster than the latter. If email came with a small risk of electrocution, we would still be writing letters. If every email cost a dollar to send, there would be no such thing as email.
That was the problem with eBooks. They were not better in any way that mattered to people, and they were not cheaper. There were some advantages, like speed of acquisition and the availability of obscure texts. You could also load up on out of copyright material at a pittance. The trouble is not many people need ready access to Summa Theologica, so these advantages made little difference. It is why the old-fashioned book remains dominant.
The same problem plagues the electric car. For ninety percent of drivers, the car is a practical way to move humans from one place to another. Current technology does that as well as anyone could need. Therefore, the new technology is simply trying to match what the old technology does. Outside of enthusiast and technologists, the electric car will always be pointless. Add in the expense and it becomes an expensive solution to a cheaply solved problem.
There are other reasons why the electric car will remain a niche item. The biggest is the cost, which can never be overcome. The cost of powering an electric car is about three times that of powering a normal car. This is despite the fact that we subsidize electricity in America, and we artificially increase the price of gas and diesel. Strip away the policy choices and electric cars have no market. Natural gas-powered cars would have far more promise as an alternative.
Then there is the cost of production and disposal. For generations old cars have been sent to the scrap yard to be stripped for parts and recycled. We have become amazingly good at recycling our cars. Electric vehicles require special handling due to the batteries. Of course, the cost of production is much higher, even with government subsidies all along the way. Then there is the added cost to the power grid that comes in once adoption reaches a certain point.
Enthusiasts insist that all of this is wrong or can be addressed, but the point here is that the charge time is the least of their worries. If the EV was better, faster, and cheaper than regular cars, the charge time would be ignored. The truth is they are not better in any important ways, they are certainly not cheaper. The eclectic car is certainly faster, but outside the enthusiast niche, this does not matter and what we see is that it does not matter to the sports car enthusiast either.
Now, of course, there is a new problem. The electric car is not cool. It was never really a cool car, but the beautiful people embraced the idea, so that provided the necessary social proof for upper-middle-class white people. The trend setters are now vandalizing Tesla’s, so the cool factor is gone. In fairness, the novelty was wearing off before the kooks took aim at Elon Musk, but now the coolness is gone. The ridiculous looking cyber truck did not help either.
The bigger issue may be a social one. Cars in general, but eclectic cars, in particular, make the “owner” into a serf. Fixing your own car is now an expensive proposition, meaning you need to depend on the repair system. This is deliberate. Car dealerships make more profit from the repair of cars than the sale of them, so the game is to make the owner dependent on the dealer. Electric cars are the worst for this as they are terrifyingly dangerous to repair.
The most terrifying part is you may not even own the car. You pay for it and have the title, but features are increasingly dependent on the manufacture agreeing with your lifestyle and political choices. Tesla can disable your car remotely. Other car makers are going down this same path. Soon, features like heated seats will be software as a service, meaning you must get permission to use them. The eclectic car is the face of this dystopian future of man and machine.
None of this means the electric car is dead. There is a place for the technology, just as there is a niche for eBooks. The developers churning out corporate housing projects could install fast charging stations for the soulless automatons who move into these God-forsaken eyesores. Urban areas could be a good use for electric microcars that only go short distances. Young people could also benefit from cars that can be speed limited and tracked at all times.
In the end, the eclectic car is going to follow the path of other clever engineering projects in that its primary benefit is secondary. The quest for the electric car has made batteries much better. The hunt for new features to justify the cost premium has led to better electronics, information displays and safety features. The dangers of disposal have been a good lesson in reality. The cars themselves may be niche items, but the industry will have benefitted from the exercise.
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I agree with all of this. The only thing you left out is that the high cost of ownership is a feature not a bug to elites pushing EVs. They hate sitting in traffic as much as the rest of us and would like fewer cars on the road. One idea on the best way to implement that is to make it prohibitively expense for proles to own cars and force us into public transportation. That most places don’t have sufficient public transportation for the majority of their population is of little to no concern of theirs. They won’t personally… Read more »
In 15-20 years, most places in the US will look like Old Havana, with people driving restored/repaired jalopies and pickups. The most valuable cars will be 6-cylinderd Honda or Toyota with minimal electronics and old F-150s. Somebody just like Castro will be in charge…..
Have you all noticed that the more we rely on technology and computers, the more the quality and overall experience goes down? I think we’ve been conditioned to accept bugs and tolerate glitches because of technology and this has forced us to accept mediocrity. Have you noticed how nothing works anymore? I remember when AT&T used to advertise the dependability of their networks. They used to run commercials about how you could rely on old Ma Bell in the event of an emergency. Nowadays, how many drops before you get through the 911? We’ve really become very third world-ish in… Read more »
i cannot tell you the horrible thoughts i have, when i have to reboot my fukkin’ TV?! having all the apps run in the tv is convenient (one remote to rule them all) but it comes with attendant costs.
Roku’s don’t work, phones freeze up, I have to reboot three times and sometimes have to reinstall software to get a reasonably expensive Fujitsu scanner I own to work … Nothing freaking works anymore. Then we have all the Chinese crap we buy at Walmart you have to pitch once the switch on it breaks.
People used to complain about the big three automakers back in the 1970s and 1980s. Compared to what we have today, that was leading edge quality.
a good chunk of those incredibly crappy cars are still on the road (esp the 70’s woo bad) way more than most of the crap being produced today will still be working in 40 years.
And if you read Bob Lutz’s book, his take on it was that the government forced all kinds of emissions technology on the automakers that was unproven and that the automakers didn’t have time to test. Without government intervention, American car quality would have been adequate. Just another business important to the economy that the US government has wrecked.
In addition they want us completely dependent on handheld electronic devices that are designed to degrade sharply in performance in 12-18 months. In order to access any electronic communication or financial account you now need to authenticate your ID from a phone. There seems to no pressure on these companies to improve reliability.
I’m pretty sure BMW already charges a subscription fee for heated seats in newer models, and I still see plenty of those hideous machines on the road.
I saw weather potato and thought of the weather rock. I guess you could swap them with the same results…
the current EVs are limited as you say, but the Tesla auto-drive feature seems to be a real game changer. what is needed is a new energy technology to replace batteries. something that converts fission directly into electricity (no heated water) would be swell. there are such devices now (thermistors); NASA uses them to power deep space probes. but they currently have pretty limited output.
where is Nikolai T when you need him.
we already have auto drive cars
They are called buses.
I wonder if anyone has done an honest study to learn the amount of mal investment that has has been done in the U.S. I am sure it would be staggering.
If all of the social problems were somehow solved could we survive the mal investment?
Which is it? Electric cars or eclectic cars?
Z needs to disable his spell-check or word-completion function. In numerous places, the piece says “eclectic” where the context clearly calls for “electric”.
Battery driven power tools have seemingly taken over corded versions. At some point I realized they were the clear choice for me when price, power and liberation from looking for available sockets came to be. Cars are no where near that in any category. if they were, more would simply buy them.
Amen. The fact that I no longer have to run a 100′ extension cord off my house to trim my hedges makes cordless tools a no-brainer. Cordless tools are liberating, while the opposite is true of electric vehicles.
Battery powered tools are great, but they cost a LOT more and sooner or later they stop making the batteries and your entire investment in that battery ecosystem is lost.
Meanwhile Grandpa’s corded 1955 drill still works.
Battery for things you use all the time and are going to wear out anyway. Corded for things you use rarely and only need every few years. Corded is also significantly cheaper so that tool is worth getting now.
I still have all corded tools, didn’t throw them out. Rarely used but definitely a backup. Go to a job site for more real world data on this.
One of the car guys I follow on YouTube had a good video on where the automakers are taking this – https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KKEkUs8MTnQ&pp=ygUNdG9ueSdzIGdhcmFnZQ%3D%3D His premise is that they are shutting out the ‘tier three’ buyers. These are the folks buying used vehicles from the people how bought them when the original new car purchasers. For example the third tier is kids getting first car or family buying second vehicle for Mom. These cars will need repairs and replacement parts. However, all new cars with computerization are much too expensive to fix. He talks about cars today that cost $8,000 to replace… Read more »
I continue to believe that the market for a low-cost ($10k to $12k), no frills car with as minimum of electronics as possible is huge. With modern factories and parts, a basic ICE which basic maintenance could run for 100s of thousands of miles easy. By keeping down the electronics, you reduce the main things that go wrong in new cars.
China absolutely could and does produce these cars, but they’re not allowed in the US.
There are trucks under 20k available that are not allowed in the US because of efficiency and safety standards.
It’s a racket. There’s no reason a basic new vehicle should cost more than 10k.
Yes. So does Japan, Mexico and Brazil. Every time we go south of the Border or to South America, we drool over the Toyota Hilux. It’s basically become a dissident meme on social media. On a recent hunting trip before the election, we were all figuring out how to go down and buy one, disassemble it, send it home in pieces and reassemble it for our hunting place. But we were fearful of what Sec. Buttplug would do to us if he caught us……..
Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to an end…
The “Prometheans” who run tech do not believe such to be the case: they have enshrined “tech-for-tech’s-sake”, and are quite fanatic in their devotion.