“For more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being standardized.” – THX1138
Patton never colored his hair, because my heroes never dye.
Electric cars are a scam. A really, really big one, and in ways that most people aren’t talking about. My original sentence that I typed said, “in ways that moist people aren’t talking about” but I feel moist today, so that didn’t fit. Let me explain. About the cars. Not why I’m moist – this is supposed to be a family-friendly blog.
Electric cars are, in most ways, absolutely inferior to cars powered by Oil, Our Slippery Friend™. Why? The technology is relatively new, the first electric car (really a locomotive, but who’s counting) having been invented only in 1842 in Edinburgh by engineer Robert Davidson. It traveled at the breakneck speed of 4 miles per hour, which is roughly 4 miles per hour faster than Davidson could move after a fifth of something that John Walker® (yes that one) might have been selling back then.
So, it’s not fair to judge electric cars, since they have been only developing for 180 or so years. It’s still an infant technology. Oh, wait.
How can you say it’s not an infant technology? It sucks.
But California has decided to ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035. Hurray, California! You’re geniuses beyond imagination! You’ll single-handedly solve global warming.
Or . . . will that pesky math get in the way?
Let’s see – in order to get California girls to the beach, it takes 13.8-15 billion gallons of gasoline. We’re skipping diesel for now, and just dealing with gasoline. I’ll use 15 billion gallons because in the immortal words of the captain of the Hindenburg, “Close enough.”
Let’s do the math.
15 billion gallons of sweet, sweet gasoline is 500 TW-h (that’s terawatt hours, which is the metric equivalent 5,000 bushels per fortnight). California produces in electricity, in total . . . drumroll please, 277 TW-h. So, California produces slightly more than half the electricity needed by its stunning new fleet of cars.
All I can say is that’s shocking!
To keep just the same level of energy production available for homes (because, presumably, all new citizens between now and then will live in tents) that California will need to triple the amount of power it produces. If you count in increased uses for the iAndroid™ Eleventy-X® and GameBoxStation 2000©, the grid will have to multiply by four or five times. And, remember, we skipped diesel engines, so it’s nearly certain that my estimate is low.
And if they tried to make those cars run on PEZ® (normal PEZ©, not PEZ™ made of anti-matter) it would require 278 quadrillion PEZ™, if you assumed that you could burn PEZ™ at the same efficiency that you could burn gasoline. And that would be 278 quadrillion PEZ© a year. Every year.
Hey, if this PEZ™ idea works out I could mint money.
To quote Monty Python on a related matter, “Where’s the fetus going to gestate? In a box?”, we’ve reached a point where politics cease in any reasonable fashion to correlate to reality. As I’ve seen in recent years, California’s electrical grid is in a shambles, so much so that, rather than be blamed for creating the periodic apocalypse-level fires, the various utilities have been hiring homeless people to burn forests so they don’t get blamed for all of the fires.
In reality, it’s not their fault. Californians keep using electricity, but the process for building reliable infrastructure is so Sovietized that to upgrade their transmission lines requires more paperwork than conductor wire, by weight, and takes longer than Biden does to remember that John McCain died half a decade ago. And this is a state that’s going to quintuple energy production?
Using what?
Seriously, where do they think energy comes from? Oh, I forgot. Outlets. “Why do we need more power plants?” I can hear President Kamala asking, “There’s always power when I plug something into an outlet. Besides, if we lost electricity we could watch television by candlelight.” The answer is that the energy has to come from someplace, like the dams they’ve been destroying, the nuclear power plants they’ve been shutting down, or the coal plants that they won’t allow to be built.
Perhaps they could use the power of the Void?
If it were just that level of stupid, it’s survivable. But it’s more than stupid, it’s greedy stupid, and here’s the rub: they’re doing this to soak the folks buying cars.
Let’s take, me. My newest car is (I think) a 2016. It was paid for in . . . 2016. My daily driver is a 2010. It’s got a 130,000 miles on it, and I replaced the engine in it at 115,000 miles, and it cost $5,400. At 5,000-10,000 miles a year? It might last another decade, easily. It’s not complicated, the air conditioner works, and it’s comfortable.
Try that with an electric car, I dare you. My 2010 had the engine blow up. $5,400, plus tax, and I was back to happy motoring. A Chevy® Volt™ had a bad battery. $29,842. Snopes™ even confirmed it was the real deal. But they tried to put a good spin on it. “It was an antique car” that was two years younger than mine, “and the battery technology was old.”
I hope the car bought her a drink first.
I have one car that is now 20 years old. How many batteries would it have had to go through? And you can be certain that the latest bill to replace it would have made the entire car worthless. Period.
This is an odd game. Cars had become very, very reliable, some lasting 300,000 or more miles with only routine maintenance. There’s a reason that, aside from the AK-47, the Toyota® HiLux© is the brand of choice of insurgent armies everywhere. They last forever, and you can mount multiple heavy weapons on them.
That just won’t do. As a consumer, you have to be made to consuuuuume. Me? With my old car, I’ve more than offset the “carbon debt” caused by making it, so replacing it will actually be damaging to the climate (if you believe in that sort of thing). And electricity will have to involve tossing more carbon into the atmosphere and will cost a lot more, so it’s not that, either.
Joe Biden is making helping stop energy usage – every time he’s on TV people turn it off.
No, the root cause is that cars are too reliable and people are using them far too long. If you have a paid-off car, you’re not paying interest. You’re not paying for new car plants. You become an economic black hole and the powers that be will do anything (and I mean anything) to force you to consuuuuume. Remember digital TV? I saw several articles where economists were calculating the economic uplift from forcing everyone to junk their old televisions for new ones.
Let’s consuuuuume! And with electric cars, use ‘em or not, they rot away so you’ll have to pay $29,000 for a new battery or consuuuuume a new car. Emissions? Who cares? We’ve got to keep people slaving away, paying interest, and buying the new thing. Insane? Certainly.
What did Californians use to light their homes before they had candles? Electricity.
Thankfully we have television and commercials. I’m sure that they will be used for good and not to convince everyone that the point of their life is consumption.
Well, I guess now you know why I’m moist. Too much time consuuuuuming.
