Most everyone has looked down at the fuel gauge and suddenly realized the tank is very close to empty. Maybe it is the idiot light going on as you pass the sign that reads “last stop for food or fuel for X miles.” The worst one is when this happens in a rural area or at night. The prospect of being stranded on the side of the road for a very long time quickly crowds out other thoughts. It is a terrible feeling. Almost all of us are conditioned to make sure this never happens.
Running out of gas used to be a common thing in America. In the early days of the automobile, care did not have a gas gauge and gas stations did not always have gas, so it was a common scene. The first “gas gauge” was a marked stick the driver would stick into the tank. Until very recent, gas stations used this method to test how much water was in their tanks. Eventually, more sophisticated solutions were invented and then manufacturers install them at the factory.
Running out of gas is not very common these days. For starters, we have gas stations everywhere people live. They are about 120-thousand gas stations in America. If you live in an urban or suburban area, finding a gas station is not a challenge. The cars are also vastly more efficient today than the old days. Even sports cars get over 20 miles per gallon, so when the light comes on, you have about 40 miles to find gas. It is why it is very rare to see someone walking down the road with a gas can.
This old concern will become a feature of life shortly. Every car maker is determined to abandon the internal combustion engine for electric in the next decade. All of them have a five year plan to ditch the IC engine. Even the sports car makers are planning to drop the old engine and use electric motors. The roar of the engine will soon be replaced by the high pitched hum of the motor. Whether we wanted or not, the electric car will be forced onto American roads over the next decade.
The problem is that electric cars need to be charged. Right now, there are about five thousand fast chargers in America. The term “fast charger” is a little bit of inside humor the EV people enjoy. It takes about forty minutes to charge a car on a fast charger, so the word fast here is sarcasm. There are more slow chargers available, but slow should be interpreted as glacial. Those slow chargers take hours to charge. They are only useful as at-home options or at office parks.
Replacing the gas stations with fast chargers is no easy task. There is the cost, obviously, even if one assumes they could be profitable. That is not an assumption you can make at this point. The economics of EV charging stations are wildly different than those of a normal gas station. You do not need a lot of space for cars pulling into the pumps, fueling up in five minutes and then pulling away. You need vast spaces for cars pulling in and parking for an hour as they charge up the batteries.
Then there is the power grid. The current estimates say the cost to upgrade the power grid for electric cars is between four and ten trillion dollars. That is not money to be spent all at once, but it is real money. In modern America, most streets look like the surface of the moon and our bridges are literally collapsing. Like all aging empires, America is struggling to keep the plates spinning. How realistic is it to think we can upgrade the power grid over the next decade for electric cars?
Like the automobile makers, the nation’s utility companies have five and ten year plans for upgrading their part of the power grid. One cannot help but appreciate the Gosplan nature of this project. Like the car maker’s five year plans, the utility company plans always has a line in there for free money from the Federal Reserve. Unlike the car makers, the electric companies have not secured their free money. Slipping tax breaks into the code is a lot easier than printing trillions of dollars.
As with the Soviets, the central planners in America just assume whatever they dream can become a reality. The Soviets were sure they could find the right math to replace the role of prices in the market. Once they conquered that problem, the system would literally run itself. American central planners are sure they can find the right moral language to make their dreams pop into existence. If electric cars become who we are then all of the problems will solve themselves.
The electric car fetish is a good example of how markets are an illusion, at least in the broad sense the Austrian school economists argued. There never was a market for electric cars and there is not one now, at least in the organic sense. Instead, the market has been manufactured by government policy. Massive subsidies to the production side and subsidies to the demand side have created the market. Take those away and Elon Musk is back selling monorails to midsized cities.
It is also a good example of how elites have the dominant role in society. As with other things like immigration and the Covid panic, your opinion is never solicited, and it is never wanted. These are decisions made by a small cluster of policy makers at secret retreats and over cocktails at parties you will never attend. The American elite has decided the electric car is the future, so that is that. The fact that it could turn out to be another disaster like Covid is not a worry.
The argument against central planning has always been a simple one. It is impossible for the planners to account for all of the variables. Even the most basic of human systems is maddeningly complex. The truth of this is never a deterrent to the elites, especially those who are sure they are on the right side of history. The comically insane outcomes from the Soviet system never deterred the planners. The metric system did not teach American elites a lesson either.
Finally, the electric car fetish is a good example of what happens when an elite class enters into decline. They become rapacious and impractical. On the one hand, they seek to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, because no one in the elite feels a loyalty to the elite class or the society over which they rule. Everything becomes a smash and grab. On the other hand, they have become so insulated from the society over which they rule, they can no longer see their own folly.
America probably needs to spend five trillion over the next ten years to get the infrastructure back to first world standards. We need a Marshall plan for the roads, bridges, and utility systems. An aspiring elite would focus on that, rather than frivolous nonsense like electric cars. It would also be more scrupulous about who gets the money for the projects. That is not the future. Instead, it will be abandoned EV’s next to massive potholes and collapsing bridges.
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I’m surprised that ICE for boats hasn’t been a target for the elites. They love their yachts as much as their jet planes but hate deplorables boating around with American flags. The enviro Gestapo smelt protectors will enjoy targeting marine engines.
I think power boating in general has contracted quite a bit in recent years.
The number of high-end powerboat makers is a good example.
If you go back 10 or 15 years there were many companies building and selling cigarette boats.
At present, many of these firms have closed their doors, been absorbed into a conglomerate, or had their product line completely watered down into comfort models.
I don’t have a particular beef with EVs. I’ve been looking forward to driving the new electric F150 for a few years now. Looks like it’ll roll off the lines next year. Figure I’ll let the early adopters wrong out the bugs, maybe get one in a couple years if the country still exists then.
Far as gas stations go…yes, more “pumps” would be needed. But, chargers are not nearly as difficult to install as huge gas tanks. Expect to see EV stations popping up at stores, restaurants, etc. And especially people’s homes.
Go in, get a coffee, hop on the WiFi to do some work, charge your car. I don’t think it’ll be altogether bad. The big difference will be that actual gas stations would have to change their delivery model to more if an “eat while you wait” system. They sell all that food and pop because they make very little on the gasoline itself. Imagine the same gas station but EV with many tens of thousands of dollars per year less overhead…
I think energy production/distribution will be the issue for them. However, I can get a 4kW solar on my roof for about $15,000. My neighbor has an EV and solar. He generates electricity for the grid which the utility company buys. At night, he plugs in his car, and the utility company credits his electricity back to him. He hasn’t paid an electric bill more than a few bucks in the past 3 years. The car gets >300mi, which is a trip to the mountains for the weekend and back with charge to spare. I think he figured out that his payoff for the solar in terms of gas and electric savings puts his payoff at 7 years which isn’t too bad.
And the Starbucks in Silverthorne has chargers while he’s there anyway.
EV are going to wind up like LED bulbs. Everyone was pissed when the government banned the old bulbs. But then again, I haven’t had to change the LED floodlight bulbs in my kitchen in 5 years…and they’re brighter too.
Man you are so wrong.
Time will tell. I’ve had my F150 for 8 years, absolutely love the truck. It’s not like I have to get rid of it any time soon.
Living in Colorado, solar is a legit option due to no clouds 300 days a year. If I can invest a little and not send money to the local government energy monopoly, that’s a good move.
They can’t shut off my electricity for violating their speech codes, for example.
I grew up cutting logs and splitting wood with an ax from Aug—>Nov. I have no problem finding options that save me effort and money.
Hokkoda your view is the correct one. With electric cars we are not tied down to the monopolistic oil companies. Solar is and will get cheaper and cheaper. Cells are coming out this year that have 40% efficiency. These new cells use perovskites on top with silicon below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_solar_cell
Lots of work being done on these and the basic materials being dirt cheap means that solar cell prices will plummet.
Batteries are next. The guy who invented the modern lithium battery has patents on a new solid state battery that can use lithium or sodium or potassium. The sodium cells will be super cheap over time and very suitable for mass storage for filling stations. So any gas station could cover their roofs with cheap cells and storage batteries to charge the cars.
This won’t happen overnight but seeing what Musk has done if you get a guy who knows what he is doing and is vigorous enough it could happen very fast.
There’s also carbon batteries. A Guy named Robert Murray-Smith makes these. He sold one set of patents made of graphene to the Edison company but is now working on basic carbon batteries that will be super cheap. We will not run out of carbon anytime soon.
I have no idea why so many people discount Musk. If I’m not mistaken he’s selling cars without subsidies now. And let’s not mention the massive bailouts of next to free cash for Ford and GM. He did collect subsidies because the government realized that national security demanded that we be able to power cars and trucks off of electric instead of being monopolized by foreign countries. I agree with this.
Electric cars great liberators. At the very least you could tow a trailer with an IC engine behind to charge as you drive if you needed extra range.
what made up bull crap. and the pentagon has 60000 of these guys?
they should have jus used AI and saved the money.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/pentagon-secret-army-soliders-congress-b1849963.html
LED lamps put out ultraviolet light in addition to the visible wavelengths, which causes cataracts and also will fade many organic fabric dyes.
I’ve found that the LED lamps I buy are only lasting about 1-2 years before they go bad.
I can only speak from my own experience. I used to buy 12-packs on incandescent floodlight bulbs, and one box would last maybe a year. I replaced the 6 bulbs in our kitchen with LEDs about 5 years ago. We were joking the other night that two of them are the old “wait 5 min for full brightness” models…but I won’t replace them because the damn things won’t die.
Encouraged by this, I replaced 6 more in the living room in 2017. Those all still work too, and are in a high use area.
When I bought them, I knew they’d have to last 4-5 years to make it worth the extra cost.
The new smart bulbs that you can change colors and brightness from your phone (some have a remote) are pretty cool.
Keep in mind that no matter what kind of mess is created the cloud people will prosper from it. That 5 to 10 trillion that the infrastructure will cost? Guess which group’s pockets that will end up in thanks to taxpayers who don’t want it and never voted for it.
One of the outcomes will be the likely death of the American tradition of long car rides on the weekends and vacations to visit grandma or go to the lake. Nothing like repeated 40 minute stops to recharge a battery to make a car load of kids simmer down and quietly enjoy a trip.
That is probably all by design. The peasants should be staying indoors to honor mother Gaia.
“…Nothing like repeated 40 minute stops to recharge a battery to make a car load of kids simmer down and quietly enjoy a trip…”
From empty to charged on a tesla supercharger is 20 minutes.
https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/tesla/2021/model-3
California is expecting electricity shortages this summer, during peak wildfire season.
The remaining hydro dams won’t have enough water to turn the generators, so the firefighters won’t be able to pump their water supply….
Instead of more dams to hold water during entirely regular droughts, the West coast has been dismantling them since the 90s.
This is what happens when Club of Rome visionaries decide to invest in anything other than the future of the native population that elected them- such as roads, dams, power.
Our brilliant leaders, led by foreign values, see selling off the wealth to overseas as a bigger bang than growing the local pot at a reasonable, sustainable pace. We are ruled by the mind of alien raiders.
So, a local downtown country bar went full Vaxstapo because they don’t have enough space to accommodate the jabbed and unjabbed.
At work, I’m noticing strong jab uptake among the managers. That kind of makes sense because they are Mr. Global’s foot soldiers.
I’d love to know if they have an internal incentive program based on the %age of people under them that are jabbed.
Alas, we won’t know without major lawsuits and in-depth legal discovery.
Just more degradation and harm to the commons. For all the talk about Ireland we’re missing the penal laws being imposed. 800 years is a long time…
I don’t agree with Z that this is madness. It would be madness if there was a common good. The chief good for the elites is to harm the commons.
Madness is to keep thinking in terms of the common good.
“Finally, the electric car fetish is a good example of what happens when an elite class enters into decline. They become rapacious and impractical. On the one hand, they seek to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, because no one in the elite feels a loyalty to the elite class or the society over which they rule. Everything becomes a smash and grab. On the other hand, they have become so insulated from the society over which they rule, they can no longer see their own folly.”
This.
The looting has been breathtaking and is accelerating. Honestly, while it is heartening to see Fauci reduced to rubble, for example, the elite is fragging him seemingly to ignite a war with China, which would be the mother of all grifts and the ultimate cash out. The garbage tier elite really is wasting its time with the Electric Car Grift, naively assuming its elite betters will give them the time to complete the scam. I think the Upper Elite fully apprehends its folly and is operating on a short-term time table. Despite his jack and largesse, Bill Gates, for another example, was not one of them and is as dazed and confused as everyone else. Plant meat will be hard to peddle when supply chains collapse.
Invest in Bolt Holes.
An actual shooting war with China would be interesting because it would demonstrate who has more vulnerable supply chains.
It would also help confirm that the globalist orange juice farmers are running DC.
It would not be fun, and certainly could put the US on the road to the 99 million Deagle population estimate for 2025.
Sun Tzu says “ The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
they won with the release of the covid. our country lost all freedoms , their paid off henchmen took charge, and they will continue the madness until the last of us are gone
Yup. They’re getting money to run.
The paragraph you quoted was great.
Also: Z: “American central planners are sure they can find the right moral language to make their dreams pop into existence. If electric cars become who we are then all of the problems will solve themselves.” That was spartan perfection. The “who we are” bit was hilarious.
Z: “There never was a market for electric cars and there is not one now, at least in the organic sense.” Qualifying “a market for”, with “in the organic sense”, is important. Because there’s grey area and it gets tricky. People lose sight of how artificially manipulated we consumers are into thinking that what we desire comes from within.
Roughly speaking:
Organic want: Playboy magazine (sexuality). Kung pow pasta. (Sweet, salty and sour-loving tastebuds). Guns (love of things that go BLAM and destroy). Music (obvious)
Artificial want: Electric cars. $5,000 purse. Skinny jeans. Light beer. Hair dyes.
It’s more likely that horses will, again, be the next form of mass transportation than total implementation of electric vehicles.
Off-topic kinda: Just a word of caution. Some time ago I was at the gas pump. For various reasons I drove off with the pump still in the fuel hole. Dumb, but we’ve all done it. After about 15 yards I realized the hose was dragging behind my car. So I stopped and gathered it up and tried to click it back into the safety-release valve overhead. I couldn’t do it. So I laid the hose down and drove away. I figured the attendant would come out and click it back in the clicky thing because he knows how.
I ran some errands and came back to the gas station to get a soda. The Chinese owner confronted me in a civil manner. He said he had me on video and my license plate. He said he’d called the fire department. I told him I thought it was simply a matter of knowing how to click it back in. He said no. It does damage, and is expensive to fix. So I gave him my insurance info. And I contacted my insurance company. I think it cost around a thousand bucks.
Just saying, be mindful when pumping. This mistake is not just a matter of clicking the hose back in. It’s expensive. Unless he was BS’ing me. And I don’t think he was.
He wasn’t- I worked at a gas station. That hose alone cost $200 30 years ago, he dealt with you honestly- as you did with him, a credit to our people.
Thanks. Most of the Asian-owned businesses in SoCal are Chinese. But I think this guy was Japanese. He didn’t know me but I’d been to his station many times. He’s low-key, slim, smartly dressed. Walks like a Westerner. Looks like a Japanese executive. As opposed to Chinese who seem courser, and walk kinda floppily, with pelvis forward and legs splayed outward. They walk loose and rubbery. Where the Japanese walk more self-consciouly and proper. In my experience a Chinaman would have gone crazy on me.
In the song Red Barchetta, Rush predicted the outlawing of the IC engine post 2112. Our betters aim to accelerate that with their pixie dust dreams.
I thinks fords wife drove an electric car, when back in the day before electric starters one had to get out and crank the car by hand. Ford quit making electric cars around 1930, I believe. Just like the death of the Concorde we are technologically regressing.
Hope they got electric hearses to cart off the brain dead jewjabbed motherfuckers.
Like soccer is the always the “sport of the future” in the US, so too EVs are “the transportation of the future” … and always will be.
No the next big change in mass transportation is a return to horses.
Dunno, in my town I see a lot of valued new Guat immigrants walking along the roads with laundry bags. At the end of the week, same guys, with Corona®.
Looks like feet are the transport mode of the future.
That free money, those Bidenbux, people staying home?
They’re preparing us for a reduced population.
Well, good. At least somebody’s thinking about reversing the dangerous emphasis endless growth.
Come to think of it, I prefer an emphasis on endless virtual growth- Bidenbux, Karenjobs, Elonprojects, Zoomcommuting, Youtube videos, Hive living- instead of consumption by and breeding of relentless locust hordes.
Dang. Sorry. Hive life increases the value of competent physical producers- White people, in other words, who invented 97% of everything since the flint axe, and the best fraction of the others.
I watched a You Tube video with a 20 something guy taking a road trip from Texas to Chicago with his buddies in a six seat Tesla. He documented every stop for charging. It added about 10 hours to the trip without waiting for an open charging station. What happens when you roll up and all the charging stations are occupied, essentially doubling your recharge time. On a positive note, Americans could learn the meaning of the phrase “stop and smell the roses”.
Heh, when everyone was cowering at home last year multiple teams did the Cannonball Run with ICE cars in about 25 hours.
The current Tesla record is something like 57 hours due to the charging requirements.
Hard pass for me, thanks.
Automatic transmissions put me to sleep. I can’t imagine what it would be like without engine noise. Hard pass.
I get that cars are little more than transportation for most people, and they’d be perfectly happy calling an autonomous EV on an app to get around, but I actually enjoy driving,—the noise, the feedback, working the machine. Maybe I wouldn’t be so anti-progress if it was fun. There’s no good reason for the future to be so dehumanizing except that the people creating it must hate their own humanity imo.
In their Tesla review, the Savage Geese (no relation) reviewers on YouTube noted the lack of engine noise was odd.
They also noted that, because the noise floor was so much lower, one can hear *every* little creak, rattle, pop, and groan in the interior.
Electric cars could work if they could make nuclear reactors small enough. Thorium ideally. Even if they could the Karenati would object because that would merely solve the problem, not make them *feel* good.
Nuclear/electric hybrid FTW! Works for the Navy.
Lack of effort on small, liquid salt based reactors (Thorium preferably) is my tell that the inmates are running the asylum. We are not a serious country. Another tell is the lack of consideration for end of life of the batteries in these vehicles. In any event, as Z-man said, we will proceed merrily along the path of producing these vehicles come hell or high water *until* we meet reality. Then we’ll have a new “problem” for our leaders to distract us with.
Seens like reality has taken an F it, I’m outta here stance lately. Keep waiting for that monumental slap upside the head that never comes…
That’s the funny thing. Just like the virus and the vaccine no normal people seem to take it serious. The elites care and intend to make us care, but the average person just seems to not be falling for it.
I have complete confidence in future President AOC’s leadership ability
Some time look into Cybersyn, the computerized command economy the Chilean government of Allende was trying to beta test before the unpleasantness. People who lust after control over other people can always squint at their harebrained schemes until these appear feasible
I always assumed the electric car was nonsense, but was too uninterested to investigate. Thanks for laying out the madness of the whole operation.
Speaking of elites, what about the Stonecutters?
“Who holds back the electric car?” A good example of how social programming works: it’s the people who want electric cars, and the elite (Big Car or Big Oil) are “holding it back”. Just like they “keep down” the metric system.
https://youtu.be/dSpOjj4YD8c
Who made Steve Gutenberg a star?
See, that’s how you know they’re evil (although I will admit a certain fondness for the first “Police Academy.” Scraping the very bottom of the humor barrel in the early 80s; I’m sure it looks like Moliere now).
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“On a dark desert highway…” a Tesla S’s energy utilization will release 0.23 kg of CO2 per mile whereas a Ford Fusion Hybrid will release 0.21 kg of CO2 per mile. That’s if the electrical energy is collected near the powerplant so line losses can be neglected. A lot of the remote chargers are run by diesel generators.
Going from ICE vehicles to electric vehicles is going from something more energy dense to something that’s less energy dense. One of the laws of nature and the universe is that life in any form will always attempt to maximize the most energy dense utility if it is capable of doing so. You don’t see a lion going vegan. You don’t see a humming bird trying to switch to a sugar fee diet. The EV is in fact abhorrent to nature itself. But so are so many things the left does. Trannies are abhorrent to nature, etc. Even if you don’t believe in God, you should at least believe in universal laws of nature that we should respect to maximize our happiness. Perhaps one of the laws of nature is that as an elite ages it becomes more and more artificial. The bug man is an artificial lifestyle. Satiation without fulfillment. And entire lifestyle that boils down to masturbating into a sock. That’s how I see EVs. The cult of Elon is strong. Many people have gone bust short selling Tesla, which has never made a profit, other than a few off quarters where they sold some “carbon credits” to Fiat. The carbon credit is yet another total violation of the laws of nature. It goes on and on. Reality is dead. Coinbase added DogeCoin, a joke, to its lineup. All the world has embraced fantasy. But the laws of nature remain in tact and ready to pounce.
Reality is so dead we have articles like this:
https://www.newsweek.com/italian-artist-sells-invisible-sculpture-more-18000-1596608
Upvoting simply for the phrase “satiation with fulfillment.” That describes them more aptly than than a 300 page polemic could.
The biggest blind spot in the electric vehicle craze is that petroleum companies have more products than just gasoline and diesel fuel. There are a ton of by products from oil that are pretty essential to various markets (plastic is the big one, but most architectural coatings cannot be produced without the by products of crude refinement). Thus, it would not surprise me if, once everyone drives an electric car, someone starts an electric generation plant that runs on… diesel fuel. Hopefully Gaia will be merciful to us if the gas we put in our cars traverses copper electrical lines first, this purifying it.
Climate activism against Western producers is already driving business to benefit Saudi and Russian producers:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/saudi-and-russian-oil-producers-benefit-climate-activism-lobbed-western-producers
Your article on EV cars is indeed correct in its focus on the infrastructure to produce and deliver electricity. I have recently written a book about these same issues, and I encourage your review. My book is a speculative novel about creating a simple small mobile device that splits water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen using almost no energy.
The book is a “what if” speculative novel about two life-long friends who accidentally create a simple, compact, and mobile device that efficiently splits water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen. The main story is about how energy is easily created from water and changes everything about our world. Energy usage no longer needs refineries, electricity grids, or distribution systems. Coal, oil, wind, solar, hydro dams, and nuclear plants are no longer necessary.
The book follows the completely disruptive effects of free energy for individuals, corporations, political entities, and entire countries. The book clearly shows how innovation and technology can significantly increase human flourishing for all individuals. My book is entitled “The New Energy Epoch” and can be found at this link on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Energy-Epoch-Creative-Destruction/dp/B08F6TXV5L
“My book is a speculative novel about creating a simple small mobile device that splits water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen using almost no energy.”
Violating fundamental laws of physics is fun!
Easier to just use dilithium crystals, they work for the Enterprise so should be able to power a car no problem.
Do you know the mining costs of those crystals? Not every planed has them.
Will the sequel be focused on the 150 MPG carburetor?
I understand that your book is a work of fiction, but I have to ask whether you have any background whatsoever in chemistry, physics, or thermodynamics?
Put simply, there is no such thing as an energy-efficient mechanism to split H2O molecules to free hydrogen for use as fuel, and there never will be. As a matter of pure physical chemistry, a significant energy input is required to separate an H2O molecule into Hydrogen and Oxygen, and no amount of human ingenuity or luck will every change this.
I won’t bore readers with the physical chemistry and math, but it takes roughly 50 kilowatt hours of power to produce a kilogram of H2 from H20, and that kilogram of H2 carries approximately 33.3 kilowatt hours of energy. Even in an ideal system the reaction is a net energy loss of approximately thirty percent. In a real-world system, the energy losses are probably double that.
I find books like yours somewhat dangerous because even though they are fiction, the moronic liberal arts majors who dominate our political elite take the fictional psuedo-scientific jibberish in them seriously. The comments on Amazon from readers of your book are disturbing to read–these people honestly believe that something like this is possible. Some dimwit congressional staffer with a degree in political science is going to read your book and start pushing more funding into the electrolysis industry.
I quite enjoy how people try to repackage simple electrolysis as some whizbang new tech every few years.
Then there was Witricity, which was the most novel of the, “old wine in new bottles,” scams of the past few years.
It’s one of life’s little ironies that it was an asshole like Rockefeller who stumbled across the real sources of the most indispensable raw material.
(there’ll now be a brief pause while the dimwits cry for water.)
The closest existing technology to what you describe is the “fuel cell”, and Toyota leads the market in this area. Current generation fuel cells use hydrogen, but it may be possible to develop a fuel cell that runs on natural gas. The distribution network already exists, easier to store, relatively clean, etc.
The electric powertrain is superior to the IC engine model, but “battery only” electric vehicles are not practical at mass scale as noted above. Fuel cells can deliver the best of both, and are also scalable for larger applications:
https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/34799439.html
Here’s another article on a Toyota fuel cell prototype which uses natural gas instead of hydrogen. It seems that the “battery-only” design may soon be as obsolete as the compact fluorescent light bulb.
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/9738/toyota-experimenting-with-natural-gas-fuel-cells
This situation reminds me of the self-driving craze. It is easy to forget but 10 years ago, the Cloud People were going around telling us the age of the personal automobile was over. Cars were going to drive themselves and we would just get in one, which would drive from the central lot to our house. That car would take us to work and a different car would take us home. The cars would drive faster and more tightly because they would all be AI controlled. We would get to work faster and could even take a nap on the way in – we will own nothing and be happy.
The timeline on this was 5-10 years, 10 years ago. In other words, not pie in the sky, but this was happening and it was time for us to get on board. Silicon Valley was spending billions of dollars on this, and the incredible valuations of Uber were based on the fact that they were transitioning to an all-robot fleet soon. Articles were coming out constantly to discuss the implications. Arizona was thought to be the new hotspot of a brand new industry because they were laissez-faire about testing while the dullard bureaucrats in California weren’t seeing the future.
Well, it’s obvious the elites’ plan didn’t play out. Self-driving tech really has gone nowhere and Tesla “Autopilot” seems to be getting involved in accidents with increasing frequency. Arizona bureaucrats got skittish after some homeless woman got hit by a car while illegally crossing a street late at night (in other words, the exact type of case that makes AI so difficult to perfect). It now seems we would have to re-engineer our entire road system for the elites’ dream to happen. Companies have all scaled back their efforts in response although a few continue to waste money on it with the hopes of getting some limited rollout at some point, in some way.
In any case, it’s obvious the elites have a true hatred of personal automobiles, probably because of the level of freedom and autonomy it provides to the proles. They have been railing against personal automobiles for decades. Making cars less useful to the average dirt person, whether by forcing them to rely on a central lot or by making them plug the car into the electric grid more often, seems to be a feature not a bug.
I remember when they effectively closed Market Street in SF to personal autos. Another “oh, they hate us and want us to suffer” moment f realisation. That’s also the point of bike lanes, roundabouts, etc. When I first heard the phrase “traffic calming device,” I actually laughed out loud. They really, really hate us.
“It now seems we would have to re-engineer our entire road system for the elites’ dream to happen.”
This sort of stuff always reminds me of Alan Watts’ story of the Indian king who wanted to benefit his people by covering the roads with leather. An advisor said “Oh King, live forever, but would it not be better to just give everyone shoes?” There’s always an aggrieved group — blacks, women, trannies, the handicapped — and the solution is always redesign society around them, (affirmative action forever, ramps in every building) rather than just making a few adjustments ad hoc. It’s simple!
“… a few adjustments …”
1. expel
2. deport
3. repatriate
4. liberate (Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii) from being ruled by Americans by giving them back their independence
“The elites have a true hatred of personal automobiles, probably because of the level of freedom and autonomy it provides to the proles.” That hits the nail squarely on the head. Internal combustion vehicles are set to be phased out in 2030 here in Blighty, just nine years away. You Americans will at least have the luxury of seeing how it plays out this side of the pond before you commit yourselves to anything.
“In any case, it’s obvious the elites have a true hatred of personal automobiles, probably because of the level of freedom and autonomy it provides to the proles.”
This. The inferiority of electric automobiles is a selling point, just like using insects as a replacement for beef. Another of their pet projects that only makes sense from the perspective of “they hate us and want to watch us suffer”.
Another loss already is the teenager tinkering with cars. Guys used to grow up learning how to fix a carburator or change the sparkplugs. Good training for thinking spatially. And a way to be different from girls, who appreciate a guy who has wheels and can keep them running.
To sing my own praises, I taught the neighbor’s boys how to change a water pump on an LS this spring.
Electric cars are as useless as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to long trips. They’re also damned expensive. Another downside is that unlike an internal combustion engine car, once the batteries are gone, the car is now junk. I think this represents a way for the automakers to reduce the average mileage of cars on the road since they will now be disposable after 100,000 miles or less.
The reason this figure keeps increasing is that new cars are unaffordable and larded up with extra weight foisted on us by the safety nazis and extra tech garbage that most people, outside Millennials and Zoomers, don’t use. My BMW has this confounded screen with all of the functions of the car on it and it took this old engineer days of study to figure out all of its functions. How about just good, old fashioned dials to control the radio and A/C and leave the tablet-like screens at home?
I think what our elites want out of this deal is control on our freedom of movement. They know we’re never going to be able to afford to build the infrastructure of charging stations to support the number of cars in this country. They also know that most people won’t buy these glorified golf carts because they’re a retrograde step as transportation devices compared with the ICE cars they’ll replace.
All of these electric cars can receive updates over LTE or WIFI. What’s to stop the government from going to the automakers and asking them “there’s a riot going on or a natural disaster that we can’t evacuate everyone, so can you shut down the cars in city X?”
They’ll do it and those frightened people will be stuck. Also, what about traffic. In the ATL metro, we have traffic jams that put the interstates at a standstill. What if you run out of charge in one of those? Our national IQ is dropping like a rock and most people are so daft they’d get onto an interstate running out of gas or charge when it comes to an electric car.
And let’s talk about rural areas. I live in northern Georgia in the Blue Ridge Mountains and there are gas stations, but not as many as the suburban and exurban areas to the south. The population density here is so thin (except on the weekends when our roads fill up with granola-chewing, Birkenstock wearing hippies in their Subarus from the ATL metro) that we just can’t support many gas stations. If you’re not careful, you can run out of gas here. It’s even worse in the West.
How you’d build acres of charging stations (can’t be good for the environment) in mountainous terrain is beyond me. Batteries don’t like temperature extremes and our country has plenty of that.
And when I see electric trucks, like the one being driven by that pedo gasbag puppet, I laugh heartily. Towing any load in my Toyota truck reduces gas mileage precipitously. Doing so in an electric truck would render the range in the double digits and what would be the point of that? Also if you have an off-road vehicle that’s electric, what do you do if it runs out of charge in Moab? It’s not like you can carry a jerry can or two of charge out into the desert or woods to recharge your golf cart on mud tires.
The commenters on the car enthusiast magazines are all a flutter about the stupid glorified golf cars, even though they represent the antithesis of a fun car. Sure, a Tesla can do 0-60 to 2.5 seconds or whatever, but it does so with anodyne precision devoid of soul or character. There’s no sound unlike a nice V-8 or V-6. The handling is ruined by the heavy batteries. Car companies embracing this “electric” future will find it’ll be impossible to differentiate their offerings from other companies. I think there will be a great winnowing and we might be down to two global automakers when this chaos finally ends.
I think what will happen is that the government will start out with tax incentives. Then they’ll just start eliminating gas stations and confiscating ICE cars. When that happens, I hope I’m not around because I’ve said that they can pry the keys to my ICE cars from my cold, dead fingers, which I think is the general idea.
All that tech is tracking you and is probably being sent to GM/Toyota etc, not to mention the phones tracking you. The over-complication of the giant screen is a feature, not a bug. There is a certain type of bugman that just loves over-complication. The more complicated and unintuitive, the more they like it. That’s why they love Linux so much. That is who is designing it and that it is who it is aimed at.
Tesla has never made a Nickel selling cars, including in the last few supposedly profitable quarters. Before the sales of their pollution credits, they operated at a net loss.
I drive a 15 year old Japanese shit box. A/C is broken. No gps, no tracking, no screen. I get 35MPG and depreciation costs are almost zero. I don’t care when a vibrant idiot dings me with his door or hits my mirror.
I can totally afford better but I just never saw the point. Globohomo isn’t entitled to my money. Never had a girl complain either.
You deserve to have AC.
As for no complaints from the gals, one can assume that you haven’t had any fatties in the passenger seat on hot and humid days.
No, I have standards.
I think we have flushed out the car enthusiasts. Lolz. Anyways where i live. The roads mostly appear in good shape. Regional differences? Interstates are ok everywhere, are they not?
I’m in Z’s Lagos-on-the- Chesapeake, and most definitely the roads are NOT ok… I have worked all over Africa for years, and I swear the real Lagos has better roads than in this city. Pure crap on top of a crumbling water mains infrastructure.
I used to go into DC on a regular basis. There was this one street that they started to repair, but then lost interest. It was nothing but craters, so they removed the rest of the paving down to the dirt/rock base and left it. It was a dirt road in the middle of the imperial capital. I suspect we start seeing more of this in urban areas. That and the abandonment of whole areas into no man zones.
Yep! Re-graveling roads looks like a good indication of “catabolic collapse”. Another might be de-automation, here in England most of the automatic car washes have been replaced by gangs of Bulgarians with buckets and sponges. Finally when we start to see landfills being mined for stuff that earlier generation were able to simply chuck away, then we will know that the end is really nigh.
Absent the enthusiast market, the ICE has been Apple-ized so hard that unavailability (I would say replacement, but that’s not in the cards; no one is replacing their $25k Tacoma with a $150k tesla truck) will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one can or will keep any of the affordable, reliable IC cars around; in 10 years, 90% of the cars sold this month will be in a scrap heap (not a junk yard, there’s no demand). The market is already heavily managed into planned obsolescence as it is.
And no offense, but I find driving any new-ish beamer to be a thoroughly emasculating experience; you have to grab a “female self-pleasuring device” to change gears (after asking the ECU permission to do so).
“…Sure, a Tesla can do 0-60 to 2.5 seconds or whatever, but it does so with anodyne precision devoid of soul or character. There’s no sound unlike a nice V-8 or V-6…”
Trains sound nice too but I don’t see a huge groundswell to move all travel back to trains.
This must be the suburban elite. Anyone who lives in a city knows there is nowhere to charge them at home because most city dwellers do not have a garage or a spot that they own or really even defined parking spots. You park where you can and in some places, that can mean you park 3 blocks away. Every charge would have to be a fast charge and that would drop the battery longevity by over 50%.
I’ve come to believe the real fascination with EVs is because it makes them very sad to see birds with oil in their feathers or turtles and other sea life covered in oil. Whenever there is an oil spill of some sort, there is ‘endless animals with oil on them’ porn on network TV as often as possible. Of course, none of them have ever had to rely on PT, which is what they REALLY want for us.
Right now, marginal EV use soaks up excess capacity. Electricity prices have not needed to skyrocket to meet a new and much higher demand as of yet. They want to bring on all this new demand while also closing nuclear plants. The price of gasoline will drop a lot if a significant number of electric cars are sold. Because other uses of different portions of the oil will not go down (like diesel), there are limits to how much less gasoline can be produced (while producing other petroleum products). Eventually, there could be a glut of gasoline on the market. So right around the time electricity prices are soaring, gasoline prices will be dropping.
“I’ve come to believe the real fascination with EVs is because it makes them very sad to see birds with oil in their feathers or turtles and other sea life covered in oil. Whenever there is an oil spill of some sort, there is ‘endless animals with oil on them’ porn on network TV as often as possible.”
Funny, those great big windmills they love slice and dice birds that fly into the blades like a Ginsu knife.
Because electric power is difficult to hand carry like a gas can, what happens when the army or navy has to recharge? Will they be forcing homeowners to provide available sockets to recharge the battle wagons? What happen when the sub runs out of power or the torpedo tubes won’t open because the power level is too low-oh wait nuclear power is good but not for thee? What about air force jets—oooh all that bad nasty jet fuel!! And obviously because supply (read “diesel”) trains and food transport trucks don’t currently run on batteries, on and on and on, oh the stupid, it burns..
You know what would be really funny? If they started selling portable DC fast-charge generators you could take with you in the back of your electric truck. That way if you run out of charge, you can pull over and pull start a 3 liter gasoline engine and plug in the EV to it.
This is actually what I expect our New Soviet America to look like. The government will still be powerful enough to control the behavior of large corporations in things like forcing them to produce EVs whether there’s a market for them or not. It will not, however, be strong enough to keep millions of people from circumventing the “spirit of the law” by towing a “generator wagon”. If our insane bug-people manage to stay in power for another 10 years I fully expect to see this, especially in rural areas. Everyone will have an EV dragging a generator wagon with a power cable going between them.
Efficient? Practical? Safe? Hell no! The effective gas mileage on these things will make your dad’s old big block Cadillac look like an economy car. The wrecks will make spectacular crash vids on YouTube too will all that poorly protected fuel splashing everywhere and igniting when the EV batteries short out after they burst.
Then again, just as the Covid panic and heavy handed government response created new “industries” that shouldn’t exist (like custom mask companies) there will be entrepreneurs of a sort here too. Someone will improve on the basic U-haul wagon with a Home Depot generator and market a special purpose rig designed for just this. Someone else (probably me) will start a video streaming site for all those morbid crash videos once YT bans them.
This is what the intersection of capitalism and communism looks like. Figure out what insane thing the globalist elite is going to force on us next and then market something that helps people circumvent it and get on with what’s left of their lives.
Mebbe when the amazing and talented Kamanimal Hairiest gets done solving the border crisis and protecting election rights she can be assigned to go around the country and electrocute an elephant to prove the promise of electricity.
Just think of the tittering the dweeb leftist men could do with this, “elephant, GOP, te-hee…” Same dweebmen that want electric cars but cannot change their own oil on their mother’s, er, their cars.
OTR trucking is actually one of the more viable options for EV and autopilot. The routes are preplanned, well plotted, and involve much less in the way of the critical thinking needed with surface streets. Thus, susceptible to autopilot, and the can do something like swappable batteries for the big rigs.
“The routes are preplanned, well plotted…”
Someone should invent a set of rails, on the ground, that big groovy things could ride along to carry stuff.
works great until someone figures out how to switch the “rails” and crash the train, cool pickins then.
See this article on fuel cell powered trains. Same tech can be applied to large trucks. The “battery-only” design for vehicles is not practical for many reasons, as noted above.
https://blog.ballard.com/hydrogen-train
Charging such large batteries, especially quickly, will require a switching station for such a large charger. The EVs tend to be around 50kwh. So I would think a truck would be an order of magnitude larger, say 500kwh. To charge that in an hour means a 1/2 a megawatt just to the charger! The voltage and amperage are multiplied together. In order for the price to be reasonable, it would have to be very high voltage (high amps require heavier conductors). The problem with high voltage is that it REALLY wants to cross a conductor (Voltage is electromotive force and you can think of it as similar to the strength of a magnet) and, more importantly, over non-conductors.. I wouldn’t want to be the idiot who has to be the one connecting and disconnecting them.
Governor of the sanctuary state of Colorado signs bill to hand out professional licenses to illegal invaders:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/02/sanctuary-state-colorado-professional-licenses-illegal-aliens/
The value of the dark blue passport is now less than zero.
I keep hoping that when, ahem, the rubber makes the road that some practical people in the process will put the brakes on it. There is no public demand for the conversion to EVs, and unlike other insane enthusiasms of our ruling class the effects of such an imposition on a short time scale would be obvious and horrific.
Stuff like the gay and transgeder agenda doesn’t actually effect most peoples’ daily lives and the immigration invasion has been slow-rolled for more than 55 years, but a rapid transition to electric vehicles forced by commissars from the top-down is a civilization collapse waiting to happen.
I could start listing technical and logistical problems here and go on pretty much all day. And I don’t even know what I don’t know. Fortunately I’m aware enough of the Dunning-Kruger effect to understand that I don’t know enough to rework the entire basis of our way of life by mandate. Unlike the utter clowns in charge now.
The most ironic and least important problem is that it won’t even accomplish the desired goal — reducing carbon emissions. Powering a car from a remote coal, oil or gas plant is less efficient than using gas due to all the inefficiencies in transporting the electric power to your car. “Clean” energy sources are utterly incapable of meeting the sort of non-stop 24-hour demand that an electric vehicle society would require. Most charging would be done at night. Buh-bye solar farms. The wind blows unpredictably.
The effects on construction, manufacturing, heavy industry, agriculture and transportation would be devastating. Virtually all sizable factories that remain in the US would relocate to places like China that aren’t embarrassed about using coal. Even things like computer data centers would start off-shoring, because of the immense increases in the cost of electricity and the reduced reliability of supply due to lack of capacity.
We’ve said that people aren’t likely to get off their couches while life is good. Well, if we want to look at the bright side, the destruction of the petroleum-based economy will cause life to cease to be good for a lot of people.
My way of life on my ranch would be utterly impossible with out gas and diesel engines.
“rubber *hits* the road” Really, how did I do that?
Rubber meets the road is what i’ve always heard.
It’s “hits” in my parts.
But we all agree that it’s not “makes!”
Electric cars also take alot of planning on an individual level. With the short range, and longer charging time, I frankly doubt vibrants could figure it out. You also can’t floor it or all the charge goes away. Again, vibrants don’t have the awareness to drive it properly.
It also takes massive iq to manage the electrical grid and finicky infrastructure properly. If this were 1950s america, it’s possible. 2021? Not a chance.
“Stranded vibrant antics” would become a new class of viral video.
They’d just carjack their next ride…
That something the EV fanatics always leave out. They love bragging about how fast the car is. Your Tesla can go fast or it can go far, but it can’t do both. The Mach-E can fully drain its battery in like 3 minutes. From full to empty in some insanely short time (I calculated it a long time ago when the famous Mach-E commercial first came out, I don’t recall, but I remember it was really short and would overheat the batteries)
there was a reason the USN and the Soviet Navy moved from diesel-electric submarines… Exactly that.
Sam problem (mileage) occurs with turbo assisted gasoline cars. Use a light foot, or mileage tanks. I know, I’ve go one—but how else can you lay rubber in a truck with a 4 cylinder engine?
We’re going to see a resurgence of nuclear power in the US for sure. It’s the only way to do all this EV stuff.
You’re assuming rationality. See, that would be a sensible response to the conundrum.
Now, go look at Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Nancy Pelosi and crew and come back and tell me what you think reason has to do with it.
I gotta believe that a few cold nights for spoiled american asses will lead to reason. Like 72 hrs of no food leads to revolution.
About 18 months ago I would have agreed with you on this “There is no public demand for the conversion to EVs, and unlike other insane enthusiasms of our ruling class the effects of such an imposition on a short time scale would be obvious and horrific”
Then a bad cold from China got here and everyone took a year off from work and started wearing Halloween masks everywhere. Sadly, I think the ruling class has indeed learned from the Year of the Coof – they’ve learned that people (at least the urban masses which is the only “focus group” the elite cares about) will tolerate having their lives turned upside down for essentially ridiculous and frivolous reasons.
On the other hand, all that delicious Free Money has to run out sometime so the effects of the Coof madness have been somewhat delayed and blunted so far. Additionally, they may have shot their wad with Covid and will not be able to subsidize the costs of the EV scam the way they have this time. Good news for the accelerationists if they try it anyway and it blows up on them.
Impossible?
A great big pain in the ass; but not impossible.
You would be relying on horses and hand pumps.
The previous comment was for Vizzini.
You come back and tell me how to do my job by muscle power when you’ve tried it.
Well, they talk about replacing the ICE in five years. Like fusion, it will always be just five years away. The auto companies fall all over themselves to announce to the masses how they’re going to save Mother Earth from the dread GLOBAL WARMING (er, CLIMATE CHANGE). Announcements are cheap. This is something that the real USA could have accomplished, in whatever time it made economic sense to accomplish it. But the real USA no longer exists.
“CLIMATE CHANGE”
Climate CRISIS! Get with the program!
Eh, there are at least a few automakers claiming they are on their last intro cycle of ICE vehicles.
Assuming fuel will remain somewhat available, ICE pickup trucks will become more valuable than gold.
Fuel ain’t going away. Gasoline is a natural constituent of oil, especially American tight oil which is unusually light. Back in the 19th century they just threw the gasoline away into rivers and such. As long as we need other portions of the oil like diesel, kerosene and fuel oil, we will have gasoline. They might export it though.
No, internal combustion pickups will be cheap and plentiful. OPERABLE, running pickups will be worth their weight in paper currency (if we still have that).
Agree with the comment about the elites. I reject the fear p0rn about E-cars being the norm in 10 years.
Florida gets hurricanes. On a GOOD day, it’s 5 hours to the northern border from CENTRAL Florida, not to mention Naples/Miami.
An E-car mandate is a death sentence for Floridians. Imagine 1,000,000 cars recharging on the border asking Mr/Miss Hurricane to please just wait before landing and heading north. Nope.
NO, Democrats will not persuade/coerce Floridians to “just move.” And spare the comments about “oh, they’re totalitarians who will move you.”
Agreed.
“Electric Cars?”
No such critter. It’s a coal/oil/natgas/nuke powered car.
A 3 gig power plant must be built every 2 weeks to power the demand…by the numbers…no matter what you ‘wish’ them to be.
Seen any of these new power plants being built in your neck of the woods?
Lenin’s folks can’t seem to grok that you can’t make ‘Science’ your new church…
…while kicking it’s High Priest, Math, to the curb. Pun intended.
The upside to the Great Electric Car Folly is that it could well become the Last Bender of an aging alcoholic (read Federal Government gone mad with spending & printing money it doesn’t have). The faster we collapse and get to the bottom, the higher the bottom will be. And that is no trivial thing.
If we wait too long, the bottom is effectively death. As in, rampaging violence in the cities, chaotic civil war, draconian Jackboot counterattack, and lots & lots of dead bodies in the streets before the smoke clears. Conversely, a sooner & higher bottom probably looks a lot like a surgical purge of the diseased cohort of the population followed by a resurgence of sanity among those allowed to take positions of power in society. IOW, a return of real accountability. In this scenario, most of the diseased cells will have left voluntarily after some number depart this Earth expeditiously & thankfully. This too is the resumption of real accountability.
Do keep in mind that draconian Jackboot counterattack will be mounted by Negroes, lesbians, and men in sundresses.
Sorry, but the models suggest otherwise. The USA Jackboot Corp does now (and will in the near future) largely consist of Caucasian males who have been recruited & selected based upon their proclivity for following orders and willingness to kill on autopilot. Nearly all successful military organizations throughout history have relied upon these attributes because it “works.” These are, by-and-large, good & decent men who believe they are doing the right thing on behalf of a just cause. Yes, they are being setup and will be mislead into doing great harm to innocent people, but they will do their duty nonetheless. And they will be formidable and lethal. And fighting them head-on is both stupid and will leave a bloodbath in its wake.
The Jackboots are neither the enemy nor the core problem, and should therefore be avoided if at all possible. If you have it in you to fight back, then focus on the root of the problem. It’s much, much smaller and the odds of success are much, much greater.
Re 5 Year Plans: Hard as it is to believe now, I used to semi-preside over the doing of them for a brief moment in corporate career time several decades ago. The key to them not being a complete waste of time just to impress the BoD on behalf of the Boss, was modest process expectations, some BoD realism and some Boss skin in the game.
IOW, it was widely accepted that it was not a waste of time to require upper management to spend an hour or so a year actually thinking about how their salary was to be justified a few years hence instead of the constant putting-out-of-fires and political-jockeying-for-promotion that they so much enjoyed and would much rather be doing. It was also widely accepted that year 5 was strictly notional. The main point was that the out years had to make *some* economic and numeric sense based on the current year’s actual results else the BoD would eat the Boss alive when *he* presented *his* plan to them. And if the circle couldn’t be squared no matter how creative the accounting, a serious re-think was widely accepted as being in order ahead of BoD time.
Of course, it also helped a lot that year 1 of the exponential business growth required to be shown to the BoD in year 5 as a required expression of proper enthusiasm was automatically going to be the Bosses’ next year’s profit (and hence bonus) plan, first pass at least.
Then came the Powerskirts (love that one Z) to the BoD and hence AA to the planner staffing and diversity directives to the bossing. So any and all discipline was removed from the process. No BoD could even think about eating any presenter of gender or color alive any longer, even for the strongly implied insult of their obvious frivolousness of ‘thought’.
The electric car 5 year plan makes it seem like that’s where we are now as a country: Obvious frivolousness of ‘thought’ that nobody dare call out. But it doesn’t matter to the bosses because none of them have any skin in the game any longer. The real ‘tell’ of elite degeneration will be if they actually try it
Based on experience, if any cynical realism remains with the bosses, I expect the electric car plan will go nowhere. Otherwise, it really is Collapse of the USSR 2.0.
I think that there’s so much of a cocoon surrounding the elites that it’s virtually hermetically sealed. The danger of any reality seeping through is minimal. As has been previously noted, the success of the Branch Covidian Cult was such that they are almost certainly emboldened to go Full speed ahead and damn the torpedo’s on the rest of the Great Reset.
We need a Marshall plan for the roads, bridges, and utility systems.
—
It’s interesting in a way since if they built out the proper infrastructure, lots of power plants and cheap three-phase power to everyone’s abode, the electric car might then be something that sells itself (*might*).
I’ve talked with my dad about this before and he keeps saying that 110-115 years ago – horse riders were saying the same thing about cars. I find that to be some type of non sequitur. The automobile was something that was developed naturally and people of there own free will gradually made the jump to the car. It’s not like the government just said “its car time now. Horses BTFO’d”.
Also, what is this going to do to the CDL people. Like how can they realistically hope to move commodities from Point A to Point B when they have to stop to recharge there cars every so often. Like that is the kind of shit that could cause a famine.
“They said the same thing about X” is a logical fallacy. Sure, people have been wrong in the past and they will be wrong in the future. That has no bearing on whether they are wrong now. A century ago, people said the steam car and the electric car would never work. They were right.
This is part of the great reset plan by Klaus Schwab
Take travel as onerous as possible in order to keep everyone in one place
Of course, the rules don’t apply to the ruling class
Also, the gasoline-powered automobile was not a sudden shift. Various sorts of self-propelled vehicles had already existed for about a hundred years before there was a spate of practical development that made it suitable for the masses. And even then, wide adoption didn’t happen until the proliferation of paved roads and abundant cheap fuel made it practical for Everyman.
I do find it instructive that we’re to be forced to electric vehicles on the same timetable as the electric grid is to be crippled by forcing it to wind and solar.
It’s possible that mix is intentional to limit pleb mobility.
The remaining plebs permitted to commute for work and little else can easily be controlled via features built into the electric cars themselves.
Yes. And add to this that Our Elites are pushing for a cashless society, something that permits instamonitoring of expenditures (EFT) as well as the location of the “spending”. It’d be like ankle bracelet monitoring for parolees; if they leave some circumscribed perimeter, alarms go off. When that happens we’ll all be clearly seen as parolees, and individually tailored permissions will be harnessed to the necessity of travelers to frequently recharge, something only available through EFT which will pinpoint the location of the travelers. And why not just shut down the vehicle, and tell the police where to go to pick you up?
Future’s so bright I gotta wear dark glasses.
Pbbbbfffbfbfbfbftttt!
As far as scams go, electric chariots are small potatoes! The alternative energy technologies to drive them is where the real scam is. Up here in Alberta’s oil patch we catch the very hell of it from every stripe of environmentalists – from the egg headed profs and self proclaimed intellectuals, right on down to rock stars. Neil Young would come up here to run his mouth about Big Oil and carbon footprints. We’d tell the old fag to go see a lithium mine in Africa. Or see how the chinks are building his swanky solar panels. Maybe he could run his mouth at the chinks and shame them for their use of non-existent health and safety practices in their manufacture, and the use of slave labour…?
But nah – the coold kids are all down on Big Oil
Electric cars and alternative energy are really the same ball of insanity, not separate things.
Pretty much I suppose. I heard a wank on Blab say it similarly: “there are only two genders: male and female. All the rest are various shades of gay…”
😂👍
Instead of magic-ing up a whole new transportation system that will never work but cost unaffordable trillions, why not just pour a pittance of the cost into carbon sequestration technologies?
The EV isn’t about climate fixing. It’s about locking down freedom of movement.
The internal combustion engine is freedom…the ability to live, to work, and to move away from/to wherever you want inexpensively. White flight to the suburbs, or inter-state fleeing from blue to red states becomes impossible for the average Joe with EVs.
It’s meant to.
So it seems a Northern man don’t need Neil Young around either.
I’ve done some consulting work in this space for a automotive supplier trying to figure out how to prepare for the expected uptake in EVs.
The funny thing is that there is actually a reasonable economic use case for EVs – as someone’s daily commuter for getting to work and running errands, maybe putting 20 or 50 or 100 miles per day on it, and charging it at night on a slow charge in your garage when the power grid sees significantly lower demand. The economics would lead to many families having a daily commuter car along with a combustion engine car for longer trips, hauling stuff, etc.
But the elites cannot leave well enough alone, and must force everyone on to their religion.
And nevermind where they are going to dispose of all these batteries at the end of their useful lives.
12,000 miles a year seams to be the average for private car usage in the US.
That works out to 33 miles a day. Even triple that is doable with an electric car. The problem will arise with much longer infrequent to rare trips – which are plannable. So maybe you rent a car to for a long road trip instead of using the electric one. Cheaper that having a spare car just in case.
Gawd, you guys are idiots.
What’s your power bill going to look like at the end of the month? How are you going to make the electricity to meet the surging demand? Fossil fueled power plants are out because Gaia hates them. So what then? Nuclear? Oh I’m sure the greenies will be just peachy with that!
GAH. We deserve what is coming. North America needs a cull.
My power bill would roughly triple. Assuming I could still get enough juice to both run the house and charge the EV. Not to mention that I’d be saddled with a $700/mo. payment that I don’t currently make, cuz the gas-powered truck is paid for (and I still need hauling power).
Methinks what this will really lead to is the proliferation of EV-charging generators… which run off fossil fuel. Oh, wait, none available. Guess you’ll just have to stay home.
That’s like buying a $1500 iPhone and only being allowed to use it to send 30 texts a day…and nothing else.
No apps, no calls, no social media, no photos, no navigation software, no games, no internet, no emails…BECAUSE 99% of the time the phones daily use is a few texts to the wife on what to get at the grocery store or when to pickup the kids.
The modern $30k car has enormous utility. The modern EV costs $30k and you get to: drive 30 miles a day….and nothing else.
The average person has one testicle and one breast. But have you seen anybody fitting this description? Average is one thing, but what about the non insignificant number of data points on the right side end of the curve?
“as someone’s daily commuter for getting to work and running errands, maybe putting 20 or 50 or 100 miles per day on it, and charging it at night on a slow charge in your garage when the power grid sees significantly lower demand.”
I believe you, but the problem will be if everybody has an EV, that “Significantly Lower Demand” won’t be “Significantly Lower” for very long. Also, while the heaviest draw in the summer would be A/C in warmer areas, A/C also runs at night (granted, not as often as during the day, but here in the Flatlands of the Midwest, running fans and the A/C at night from May – September makes a comfortable night’s sleep), lights stay on at night until people go to sleep, people veg in front of a TV at night, the fridge runs 24/7, you might have an electric water heater that runs 24/7, etc.
And then you have the reality that the money that went for a few gallons of gasoline now hits you in the bottom line of your monthly electric bill.
“The economics would lead to many families having a daily commuter car along with a combustion engine car for longer trips, hauling stuff, etc.”
The economics fall flat when you compare your average compact car to an EV. Let’s take the standard for small, generic car: 2021 Toyota Corolla, the smallest compact car Toyota sells as an Internal Combustion powered vehicle. (You can get a hybrid Corolla to escape the stigma of a Prius, but let’s not talk about that now).
Being of Cheap Eastern European stock, I went to Toyota.com and priced out the Corolla L. This is the “Alright you cheap bastard, you want a cheap car, HERE’S your cheap car!” model.
1.8L I4, CVT, $20,025 to start. EPA 30/38 MPG. 13 Gallon tank, 390 miles around town, 494 on the highway. EPA tells me you’ll average 33 MPG, 429 miles in a tank (presuming you drive to a sputtering halt on E)
Then I went to Tesla.com and asked “Elon, what is THE CHEAPEST Tesla I can buy?” Elon said: “Model 3, Standard Range Plus, two wheel drive”.
Model 3, $39,990 Purchase Price (Elon plays a little trick called “Potential Savings” where he deducts the estimated price of gasoline off the MSRP, go to Tesla.com and look), EPA 263 Mile Range.
Now, I am a realist: No Toyota Dealer in the continental US has a base Corolla L for sale. If they do they’re going to use it to upsell you to a nicer Corolla, Prius, or Camry. So let’s say for $24/25 grand I roll out of the Toyota dealer with the Corolla SE edition. I’m still $15 – 16K under what Elon wants for a Model 3. And add in what Elon thinks I’m going to spend for gasoline in a year ($4,300, per Tesla.com), I’m still ahead roughly $10K. And I have to plug the damned Tesla into the wall once a week, maybe more.
I agree with your final statements, but running the numbers show we ain’t there yet. And I know: I’m a man, I’m logical, and this is all feelz.
I remember one time I was driving on a rural highway at night. Fuel light on, 150km at least till a decent sized town. Every station I passed was closed I was panicking, and called the person I was visiting and said I might need them to bring me gas etc.
I pulled into a closed gas station, to stop and make another call. I realized DUH YOU CAN PAY WITH CREDIT CARD. Just because the shop is closed doesn’t mean you can’t pay at the pump. So I filled up, and crisis averted.
Total Boomer moment. Moral of the story? I dunno. Don’t be lazy and neglect filling up the tank I guess.
Stop at 1/4 full!
yeah i guess i’m a tight ass but i’ve never run out of gas in my life. not once. My daughters have several times 🙁
I run my cars on the top quarter of the tank, my boy, on the bottom quarter of his. I mention this from time to time but only experience will make him see the light.
It happened to me once, 40 years ago.
@B125. Similar story to yours. For whatever reason I was on the run in the early 1990s. No money, no credit cards. And just like you I realized, DUH I can pump my gas and take off really fast.
“For whatever reason I was on the run”
Frip: “I swear, sir, I didn’t know your daughter was only 16!”
“Gimme three steps, gimme three steps, Mister….”
Summer of 1990, my cousin and I drive from western New York to visit another cousin, who’s stationed at the New London, CT Naval Submarine Base. It’s an 8 hour drive and we didn’t leave until after dinner. We took my uncle’s Caddy, which had this science fiction gizmo that actually told you how many miles of driving you had left in the tank! We were hoping we could make it all the way on one tank but after we got into Connecticut we realized it just wasn’t going to happen. It’s after midnight now, we get off the next exit and there are no gas stations. Get back on and drive a few more miles to the next exit. This time it’s one of those where the exit is two miles outside the actual town. We get down to the lone gas station and they’re out of gas until the morning. The guy gives us directions to another station down the road. So we follow the directions and it leads us into nothing but farmland. After a few more miles we finally turn around and within a hundred yards the car conks out.
We start walking back toward this podunk town, but after about 15 minutes two guys our age pull over and tell us they spotted the car down the road and ask if we need help. They were doing the white guys on summer vacation thing — just driving around back roads, listening to tunes, getting a buzz on. They wind up driving us about 10 miles to a gas station, where we fill up a container and then head back to our car. As we fill up, local sheriff pulls over to investigate and cites the guy for an expired registration, ticketing him and impounding the car. It was fucking 2 in the morning and these guys had just pulled the Good Samaritan act for us and that was a priority for this prick cop. We gave the guys what money we had in our pockets to help defray the costs.
Just goes to show you that white people will look out for each other…unless they fancy themselves part of the cloud or its local variants. If it’s a case of the latter, they’ll go out of their way to put you in your place.
Good story. You and your cousin (and probably the guys who helped you out) will remember that for the rest of your lives. An interesting and meaningful experience!
An even better example of the detachment from reality is the elites love of bicycles a s high speed rail.
The dump shit loads of money into both based on romantic notions of Europe or something, for transportation means that are inefficient as hell and have been obsolete for going on a century.
At least electric cars will work for most people most of the time. Bicycling for anything other than misguided recreation is a joke. Hi speed rail is a complete fantasy that precisely zero people will actually use, even if it could be built which is proving i practices.
As enriching diversity increases, public transit viability decreases. I suspect that Europe’s trains will be increasingly rejected by citizens in favour of cars.
How’s the public transit system in Brazil? They taking the train to save the planet? Lol.
Good white fantasies can only work in a majority white (or asian) society.
Z is wrong about this in an important way.
The elite are absolutely pushing these fantasies. But the sub elite – merely wealthy white people buy into the fantasies and support them. Up until reality punches them in the face. The elite can insulate themselves from that, but their supporters can’t.
In America, precisely no one wants to use public transportation (outside a few weird outliers like central NYC). Not poor people and certainly not the UM whites that keep pushing it.
Marxism is proof that elites can remain stupid longer than you can remain alive.
Put that apothegm in your book.
I used to think that the practical realities of electric vehicles would preclude actually seeing ICE vehicles forced off the roads. I thought people would demand the freedom of movement EVs can’t provide. This last year has convinced me otherwise. I don’t know how states that don’t have their own infrastructure for supporting ICE fuels etc will defy the federal gov choking everyone off.
The Good People drive electrics cars, just like The Good People wear masks and Do The Right Thing by voting for Joe Biden.
Easy. Never in history has there been such a weak and pathetic being as the white liberal.
is the problem of high speed rail the fact that environmental regulations means that what might take 2-3 years in japan takes ten years in the U.S.? Or is it a bad idea in and of itself?
The problem is that the U.S. is many times larger than Japan, distances are vastly greater (and terrain is tougher), and running proportionally the same amount of rail might connect a few major metro hubs, but if you’re going to Amarillo and the nearest rail can take you is Dallas, now what??
And do you have enough riders to pay for it? at what ticket price? Did the math on expected ridership vs projected costs for the California boondoggle, and it worked out to $1500 per one-way ticket. What idiot would pay that when you can fly the same route on Southwest Air for a couple hundred bucks?
And some of our cities already have Japan-sized “high speed” rail; it’s called the subway system.
Well, Eisenhower’s interstate project made most rail transport obsolete.
Rail requires an exclusive, hard to maintain infrastructure, requires high-level coordinated traffic management and can’t easily support ad hoc, individual on-demand route and capacity changes.
Meanwhile, we have a national multi-use interstate system that is accessible equally to local and nationwide traffic, individuals, government and corporations, requires no route management or coordination, comparatively simple maintenance compared to rail, and is vastly more flexible.
Add air cargo and passenger transport to that and it’s really hard to understand why anyone would think rail technology is a good idea.
I feel rail would be best used as a luxury or novelty item. Look at the lone star state. No one’s idea of an area that is built for HSR. Nonetheless, I could see there being a rail line that goes from Houston to the metroplex, then to Austin/SA, and then back to Houston with few stops in between. So if you live in Houston and want to watch the UT/OU football game, you can take a 90 minute train to Dallas.
Or you can take a plane from Houston to Dallas in half the time.
People see the glorious shinkansen picture but never look at the math. Despite a much higher population density the project still has to be subsidized and is still pricier than regular old rail such that many will opt for the slower, much cheaper, ticket. On top of that Japan’s roads can feature some pretty hefty tolls and then there’s the NY-level parking nightmare that must be faced even if you still brave the travel via car.
Viz;
Freight is why there are still railroads. Military Logistics 101 ball park values: Water-bourn is and likely will always remain the cheapest per ton-mile because water holds up the weight and is low friction.
Rail is next cheapest, about 2 – 3 X per ton-mile, because of low friction. Bases are supplied by rail to the extent possible. Major military movements are by rail.
Highway is 5x per ton-mile
Air cargo is 15 – 20 X per ton-mile, only used for high urgency supplies.
The only thing I see rail used for much in Ohio is coal. Coal is extremely heavy, has very predictable production, transport and use profile and very limited sources and destinations. It’s a unique use-case. Because it’s so predictable, it’s also okay that it’s slow. Loaded coal trains don’t move much above 35 miles per hour even on a straight stretch.
Republicans refuse to raise enough taxes to fix the basics of civilization and Democrats refuse to fix the boring stuff and keep dreaming of the next great innovation.
The problem with infrastructure isn’t tax rates, it is getting the work done. Major projects take much longer than they did just a couple of decades ago and costs have been rising faster than the rate of college tuition. The actual work done is of an incredibly, almost unbelievable low quality. Driving surfaces are terrible and even after repairs are crumbling again within a few years.
I think the roads are intentionally poorly made now so the entire road-building grift can repeat every few years.
So you’ve lived in Chicago then?
Is it because I don’t live on one of the coasts or in a crumbling outdated urban area? The roads in central and SE Ohio, especially the state highway system, are really nice. Yeah, local roads in some of the poorer small towns or rural areas can get a little rough, but pretty much any of the rural state routes I use to get anywhere are very well-maintained, and Columbus’ major roads are not bad, considering the volume of traffic they get. They’re finally even resolving the big I-70/I-71/I-670/SR-315 downtown snarl which was ultimately just about too many cars and too little space to expand the highways (the solution was vertical!)
The federal tax share of output in the US has been steady for the past 70 years.
The Saudis and the Kuwaitis might have something to say about this to their purchased American politicians. After all, being a degenerate oil sheik depends on that dinosaur juice flowing into gas tanks worldwide. The only thing that makes the Uniparty dance to a foreigner’s tune other than the Israelis is the Saudis.
Maybe we could all “get behind” (in honor of rainbow flag month) a new type of automobile for every family.
A car for “the people”.
We can give it a fancy, European name like, “Razamobile” (Spanish), or,
“Manniskervan” (Swedish), or,
“Nazionecar” (Italian…um, “N” word issue…)
It is such an obvious and great idea, I can’t believe this was never tried before.
Can you make it look cute, like a little beetle?
No. I demand a sonderkraftfahrzeug…
https://ww2db.com/images/vehicle_sdkfz234_3.jpg
“They have no intention of upgrading electric car charging capacity so that everyone who owns a car now will own one in an all electric environment. The elites want to force as many of the middle class as they possibly can into public transportation. Even for the plan they have, the grid upgrades will not provide enough power to meet their needs. All this is being done in the name of stopping global warming. The Mrs. Jellybys who want to save the planet don’t care how much it costs you to heat and cool your home or if it takes you an hour of travel time to get groceries now. This is a plan that has to fail.”
The problem with the elites that Z and others point out is they’re so ignorant they’re SURE anything they do WON’T affect them. It’ll only affect those Evil Deplorables.
Until it does, with a vengeance.
Ex #1:
City Dwelling Rich White Liberal: “DEFUND THE POLICE! THEY’RE RACIST!!!!!!!!”
Police fall back
High Rise Apartment – Condo building gets vandalized in riot / Car gets carjacked / Thug sticks gun in Rich White Liberal’s chest and steals cell phone and wallet / Thug plays “Knock Out Game” and Rich White Liberal ends up face down on sidewalk
City Dwelling Rich White Liberal: “OMG!!!!!!! How did this happen?!?!? Why is everything so violent?”
Lather, rinse, repeat, always repeat.
So Mrs. Jellyby and her ilk push for electric cars and simultaneously refuse to pay higher electric bills from Greedy Capitalist Power Companies and then wonder why they sit in a candlelit apartment, condo, or house with no heat in the winter nor cool air in the summer, puzzling on when the power will come back on.
“What’s happening with the world these days??? Ugh, people!”
But in all seriousness, they just move to red states, or whiter, smaller cities and towns when things get bad.
There is a mass exodus of white leftists from Toronto into surrounding cities and towns at the moment. I’m sure that they feel the hick towns lack diversity, spicy food, homos, gang violence, hobos, and rape gangs so they’ll be voting to import that shortly.
Several years ago a lib turned your last paragraph into an op-ed about the things Bozeman, Montana needed to make it just perfect.
Wish I had the link handy.
It’s interesting that in just three generations or so the automobile has changed from a literal “horseless carriage” to a mechanism with more electronics than the original lunar lander. At the same time, the infrastructure on which these machines operate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1821 when McAdam began paving roads in the British isles. In fact, Babylonian and Roman roads were substantially identical to the highways being built today. The improvements, if there’ve been any, aren’t readily apparent.
The Netherlands government has introduced a program that uses waterproof plastic in new road surfaces. They’re optimistic but it’s yet to be proven.
https://icexp.com/reader/a-road-full-of-bottlenecks-dutch-cycle-path-is-made-of-plastic-waste/
“plastic” == “petroleum product!”
Almost every modern product requires some kind of petrochemical input.
Regarding Tesla, I think you could have made an argument 5-10 years ago about Tesla being artificially propped up by subsidies, but a lot has changed since then. I see a lot of teslas on the road and in parking lots. People are buying them for reasons that do not involve subsidies. Tesla cars as of 2021 are no longer eligible for the federal tax credit anyway. GM, Ford, and Chrysler were thrown a major lifeline in 2008 so it’s not like tesla is the only car co. to benefit from govt. intervention .
The subsidies remain in place, so nothing has changed, other than more snouts in the trough.
In just the first quarter of 2021, Telsa made $518 million in sales of regulatory emission credits. Governments issue the credits to push car makers to make EVs. Tesla gets the credits for the cars that it makes and sells them to other automakers who can’t meet regulatory mandates.
Tesla gets the credits for free, so it’s a 100% profit.
With other automakers getting into the EV business, Telsa will lose that source of income. In Q4 2020, Telsa had net income of $270 million with $401 million in sales of the credits. Take away the credits, and Telsa lost ~$130 million.
For the time being, Telsa relies on government subsidies to be profitable.
One financial exercise I like to give the Tesla fanatics is to go to their SEC filings and find the Net Income of the company for its entire history. Take those numbers and then, add them up. And, then tell me what you get. The next question is, where did all that money come from and where did it go? And, then, you find a very deep and dark rabbit hole, and then, it hits you. How do they get away with this? You wonder. Then, you find plenty of other rabbit holes just like it.
Telsa’s books would be fun to look at. Granted, it’s been killing short sellers for years, but everyone who looks into the company comes away aghast at its accounting.
Besides the credit subsidy, there’s the question of future costs associated with warranties. And those are just the obvious, well-known issues. People who know what they’re doing go on and on about Telsa’s books.
Anyway, it’ll be fun to see how this all turns out. Telsa’s shareholders are pretty die hard, but sustainable profits are what matters in the long run.
If you live in Havre, MT, the nearest dealer and service for Tesla is in Salt Lake City, UT, about 683 miles away.
Twenty years back a bunch of local politicians and their developer cronies and other buddies bought up acres and acres of tumbleweed well outside the city limits.
Soon after there was a desperate need for a new, massive airport. Where oh where should it be built? Who was best positioned to deliver that kind of infrastructure way out there?
Now the Blvd is named after that mayor. Consumer tax credits are iceberg tips.
Creating a market that doesn’t exist for the benefit of fellow elites with new shiny solutions to the “problem” – and greasing megacorps to scuttle their perfectly good products in favor of “innovation”, and then demanding “progress” toward solving the various problems of a market that does not exist; that is the subsidy.
Turning the needs of that market over the axle of a religious cult literally based on vapors is required because the entire impetus is at odds with reality; that is a subsidy.
And the lawsuits and engineering fixes to the roof and foundations of said facility continue to this day….so much trough, so many snouts.
My recollection is that Ford took no government bailout during the Great Recession.
Don’t know about y’all, but I get a kick out of watching the Elite’s fantasies trickle down to the wannabes… and fail miserably. My last tour of academic duty before retirement, the school put charging stations, one per level, in one campus parking garage. High comedy ensued – the ones with EVs could fight each other over access to the chargers (racist! sexist!) while the bike snots could now sneer down at a white new class of peons. One got the sense that nobody really cared about EVs, and that this — the endless, bitchy drama — was the entire point.
(Because, of course, College Town was exactly that – a college town. I, myself, pleased Gaia more than any of them, because I walked everywhere. There was simply no need to drive, and on the rare occasion I had to go to the far side of campus, there was always the bus. That the eggheads never, ever walk or take their precious public transportation tells you everything you need to know).
Wrath of Gnon on Twitter has some great threads on city management and how the push for accessibility for cars in cities is a lot of the reason for our current woes. It’s no coincidence the urban renewal policies to allow such access destroyed many cities.
Of course, this would require a massive social upheaval, as people would no longer be able to commute 45 minutes to work, which means that urban areas would have to become livable and affordable.
That is the center of gravity for this sort of thing. It is completely true that developers have abused us so much that the kind of places we all want to live in (think something like Bedford Falls) are literally illegal to build. On the other hand, were we to build them, we would live cheek-by-jowl with vibrants.
Suburbs are refugee camps for white people.
He has a great site! Nice mention!
OTOH, my area in Brooklyn has given up hundreds of parking spaces so the restauranteurs could build shacks in the roadway for “covid-safe outdoor dining”. The Brazilian Favella comes to New York. Nothing like having dinner while trucks and buses trundle past your table.
In the future, pedestrians will share the fate of the protagonist in the short story, “The Pedestrian.”
Unfortunately, I remain imprisoned at institution of Heir Learning; I’m at the tail end of my career with only a couple years before retirement with full health benefits. One thing I’ve noticed about this and the past couple of undergrad generations, is that if they perceive any inconvenience, they will bitch and moan to administration like stuck pigs. For example, several residence halls, maybe two-thirds of a mile away, all with immaculate and sunlight level illuminated (they very scared at night know) walking and biking paths to core campus, require 10-minute fossil fuel bus runs. Almost annually they want more and more bus runs to their halls because having to wait 10 minutes or even walk is just too much. They need to be free to bus into core campus for Climate change demonstrations asap. Don’t get me going on the Dining Hall food diversity. Inconvenienced undergrads now will be the change agents of the future once they experience even minor deprivation.
Yep. And that’s just at Big State and Directional Tech! Most of the SPLACs* I’ve taught at had bespoke transportation past sundown — as in, you’re at a bar off campus, and you can call up the central line and have a campus bus dispatched, just for you. That was the case 20 years ago and more, though back then the stated rationale was to cut down on drunk driving…. then it went to “rape culture,” and now, I imagine, it’s simply for convenience, because Kayden and Jayden and Khaleesi are too good to walk anywhere.
*That’s “Small Private Liberal Arts College,” a.k.a. the kind of school that charges Ivy League prices to the kind of parents who are rich enough to pay for the Ivies, but not rich enough to get their kids into the Ivies, thanks to things like “White privilege” and “the kid’s drug habit.”
I’ve heard that the origin of the Grand Guignol tradition goes back to the French Revolution, that after many of the elite were killed, their bodies were literally rigged up to string so that they could dance like marionettes for the amusement of the people they’d tortured, imprisoned, and allowed to go hungry. Surely apocryphal, but it makes me wistful. Pelosi’s had so much botox that she’s practically embalmed, and could dance on a string for weeks before she started to putrefy. Her and Fauci (or Schumer) would make one hell of a Punch and Judy act on stage.
On a more serious note, Matt Taibbi has a really good piece up about “the Boy Mayor” Dennis Kucinich’s fight against the private-investor owned utilities who just pretty much raped the cities. I suspect the electric car caper is going to be a crime on a similar or even larger scale. Just like the Kennedy family with bootlegging, or the Roosevelt’s with smuggled opium, we’re getting ready to create a new class of ultra-rich, government-connected plutocrats with big plans for us all.
One of “boy mayor”‘s biggest blights was his inability (or perhaps lack of desire) to reform a power plant that the city ran. It had become a boondoggle where the inept cashed in while rarely performing work. As I recall it basically became a reseller that had to import power from out-of-town and then invoiced their own customers for it (with a markup, of course).
Yes, this is grade A insanity that I keep pointing out to peers and get blank stares i n return. Our infrastructure is in no way configured for this type of switch but full speed ahead seems to be the default setting for these lunatics.
They are squeezing this on multiple fronts, including using the corporate boards of the oil companies to go ‘carbon neutral’ in the next decade due to supposed climate change. WSJ reports that something called Engine No 1 is the deciding vote on who gets a seat on the board at Exxon and it intends to be an activist seat for addressing carbon imprints. Royal Dutch Shell just got ordered to pay billions in fines or reduce its carbon imprint by 45%.
This is all directed by the useful idiot crypto commies in the Green movement and the hedge funds that have massive leverage on the alternative energy start-ups. As our host mentions, it’s unadulterated greed powering this end phase of the economy.
These people deserve the destruction they’re bringing upon themselves.
You mean the destruction they are bringing down on us all.
They have no intention of upgrading electric car charging capacity so that everyone who owns a car now will own one in an all electric environment. The elites want to force as many of the middle class as they possibly can into public transportation. Even for the plan they have, the grid upgrades will not provide enough power to meet their needs. All this is being done in the name of stopping global warming. The Mrs. Jellybys who want to save the planet don’t care how much it costs you to heat and cool your home or if it takes you an hour of travel time to get groceries now. This is a plan that has to fail.
> The elites want to force as many of the middle class as they possibly can into public transportation.
With intensifying regulations, major car manufacturers get almost no profit from new standard 4-door sedans and such, and only make a good profit on trucks. They see this, and are taking advantage of the shift to develop automated electric cars that run like Uber services. They are planning to pick people up at their homes, drive them to their destination, and go back to the depot for refueling.
For city people, this will be an improvement. For people with longer commutes, not so much.
Also, this does not address the massive infrastructure changes that need to happen, nor the environmental devastation that is required to create these batteries. Most of the environmentalists I talk to seem to believe electricity is created by magic, or are under the impression windmills and solar panels can make up the difference (they cant’).
For anyone outside urban city centers who values freedom of movement it will be a disaster. Yes, they have given no thought to how the electricity will be produced or what kind of waste will be caused by that production. That they think they can even attempt this with coal being a major source of production is a total fantasy.
It may be a feature rather than a bug.
Remember that the WEF watermelons want to force us all into smart cities going forward.
Yeah, it’s just magic. Out here in Flyover Country, we’re required to believe in the magic of ethanol. When you factor in the impact of growing and harvesting the stuff, ethanol is actually worse for the environment… but corn, like weed, is from the earth, which makes it good. But oil is NOT from the Earth – it comes from big tanker trucks, you silly! — and is therefore bad. Ditto “corporate profits” — Archer Daniels Midland good, Exxon bad, because the Left can recognize “Exxon” but doesn’t know what “ADM” means. And if they don’t know it, by definition it doesn’t matter…
It not only has to fail, but those pushing this crap down our throats must be made to pay – dearly.
Yes, the plan is to force the masses out of their cars, electric or otherwise. The “Freedom of the Open Road” will just be another “freedom” tossed into the fire.
Eat your Cicada Stew, swallow a pill, smoke a spliff, and stream the latest degenerate corporate schlock into your “device,” Prole. And don’t forget to ” let your voice be heard” and VOTE!
why do they want us having less stuff? If you watch old commercials from six or seven decades ago – it’s all about the great new things you can purchase. Think of the “see the usa in your chevrolet” as an example. People liked cars so much that hot-rod rock became a subgenre (if you remember, some of the beach boys songs were about cars).
Why/how did the elite change directions on consumption? The ruling class was certainly liberal back then too.
Sumptuary laws.
Elites had:
– Big Houses with staff to attend to them
– Said Big Houses residing on big lots either on “Millionaires Row” in the city or in the bucolic rural areas (but mustn’t be too rural, wrong sorts of people old boy, you see)
– A summer cottage or winter get away to deal with the heat or the cold
– Fancy carriages or fine motorcars to take them to and fro.
If your dead commoner can afford:
– A McMansion with maids and gardeners
– Heat, air conditioning, televisions, computers, etc.
– A lot in the tree lined suburbs
– A timeshare or condo where elites holiday
– A car with all the features of a luxury car of old
– A lease on a luxury car
Well, what then distinguishes “Us” from “Them”?
These commoners have ideas above their station. Shan’t fly sir.
That’s exactly it. When “living like the bourgeoisie” was very difficult indeed, Commies promised that, come The Revolution, everyone would live like the bourgeoisie. But then Capitalism made “living like the bourgeoisie” not only possible, but a reality, for vast swathes of the former proletariat… and we can’t be having that, because if everyone has nice stuff, how can the members of The Party signal to each other who’s Outer Party and who’s Inner?
So now we all have to live in mud huts, eating bugs, occasionally taking the bus, because Gaia commands it…. Gaia, who of course gives dispensations to her Elect, depending on one’s position in The Party.
I remember the common visions of the future, with flying cars, planetary colonization, personal space travel. Those were visions of an optimistic society that is looking forward to its future.
Instead, we are getting never ending propaganda about the coming end of the world, because we have been baaad, very very bad. But if we debase ourselves, live in shit, eat shit and do shitty things… or if we kneel down in front of some hood rat, we may feel better for a moment, according to our masters. The future is still doomed, though. This is the “emotional” state of a dying society.
Negroes, Asians, and Latin Americans can’t drive.