'What happens when pie-in-the-sky government agendas clash with boots-on-the-ground reality'
In May, my husband and I embarked on a second honeymoon. It was almost the only trip we’ve taken together since our first honeymoon 34 years ago. Because we’ve owned livestock for most of our married life, we haven’t traveled together in over three decades.
We rented a car and embarked on a leisurely, planless trip around the Southwest. We visited parts of Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana before returning, tired but happy, to our snug North Idaho homestead. We avoided cities and instead focused on exploring the vast beauty of the West’s wide-open spaces and visiting small towns, roadside attractions, lesser-known museums and other destinations that gave us a sampling of America’s flyover country.
The one overwhelming factor during this trip was how unpopulated so many areas of the West actually are. Traveling through interior Nevada, for example, it was not unusual to go hours without passing through a town, and then the town might be no more than a couple hundred people. Because of these large tracts of unpopulated areas, we made it a policy never to let the gas tank get below half full.
Over and over and over on this trip, my husband and I remarked to each other how useless an electric vehicle would be on such a journey. We traveled through vast – vast – stretches of road without a gas station, much less an EV charging station. Yet politicians think we can transition to EVs with nary a problem. My only conclusion is these politicians have never set foot outside of the crowded urban areas of the East or West Coast. I know this may come as a surprise to them, but there’s a lot more to America than big cities … and most places DO NOT have EV chargers. Many don’t even have gas stations.
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But even places with EV chargers does not mean electric vehicles are efficient in either time or money. My friend Lisa Bedford (“The Survival Mom“), who resides in Texas, relates a road trip of 475 miles to Dallas she and her husband took using his company vehicle. “His job is in the emerging technology niche,” she related, “so currently his company car is an all-electric Chevy Silverado. Price of truck: $83,000.”
The trip was not the euphoric hassle-free “green” experience promised by politicians. She related to her readers some of the complications on the road.
“My husband made sure the truck was fully charged before we left for Dallas,” she wrote, “but the day before returning home, he was already checking a couple of phone apps to locate charging stations. The Silverado has the bigger battery size, 450 mile range (supposedly), and we had only driven 250 or so, but there was no guarantee we’d have enough battery power to get home. This shortfall is due to losing 25 to 33% of the battery range on the highway, because you can’t capture any of the regenerative braking you get with city driving.
“Unlike finding the closest gas station for an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle, charging stations can be many miles away and most have just four to six chargers. Currently, Tesla charging stations only power-up Teslas, so that wasn’t an option for us. Arriving at the first charging station, one person had parked their large BMW SUV horizontally in front of two stations. Another person was sitting in their car and hadn’t started charging it yet.
“Complication No. 1: The totally predictable stupidity of people. At a gas station, there might be one person who parks their car at a pump and then goes into the convenience store for a bathroom break – but there are still multiple pumps available.
“Complication No. 2: Few charging stations. Since a charger at this first location might be available in five minutes or five hours (no way to know), we moved on to the next closest station – 30 minutes away.
Complication No. 3: The battery was at 31%. I asked my husband, ‘About how long will it take to fully charge the battery?’ He said two hours. TWO HOURS!!! Keep in mind, this is a top-of-the-line EV with the extended battery. He said, ‘We can park the truck, charge it, and then grab an Uber and go get some dinner.’ We are now almost an hour into this process and our choice is to sit in the truck for two hours or pay even more money for an Uber, which is guaranteed to be an ICE vehicle.
“But this is going to be cheap, right? I mean, it’s just electricity, and gas costs so much more! Nope. Complication No. 4: To charge the battery from 31% to 90% (not even a full charge) was $77. That’s about what it would have cost for gasoline.
“Why am I telling you this?” Lisa concluded. “Mostly because few people have had actual experience with the realities of owning an EV, and because it’s a product being forced upon car manufacturers, car dealerships, and a skeptical public. It’s a boondoggle of mind-blowing proportions.”
This is what happens when pie-in-the-sky government agendas clash with boots-on-the-ground reality. Do YOU have two hours in the middle of your journey to sit and charge an EV? Yeah, me neither.
President Biden’s plan was to have 50% of cars sold in the U.S. be electric by 2030. Aside from the logistical nightmare involved, the fact of the matter is America’s power grid can’t handle it. Rep. Thomas Massie, an electrical engineer, told Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that if the average U.S. home adopted electric vehicles, it would be the equivalent of running 25 refrigerators per home. Can the power grid handle that? Of course not. Pie in the sky.
Here’s the truth of the matter: EVs are not green; EVs can’t compete without government support; oh, and EVs are mobile spying machines, collecting unimaginable amounts of data on the drivers.
In short, EVs are little more than a progressive hallucination. Had my husband and I been foolish enough to rent an EV for our trip, we would have been stranded innumerable times out in the middle of nowhere.
Yes, electric vehicles have been “a boondoggle of mind-blowing proportions.” Unfortunately, it has cost trillions of dollars, imposed untold misery in Third World nations where minerals like cobalt is mined under inhumane conditions, requires impossible (literally) amounts of copper to produce, and perform abysmally. Who else but Democrats could think of something this dumb?
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