Let’s Buy Electric Vehicles We Cannot Afford

1905 electric car

I’ve been trying to purchase a new Toyota hybrid car for quite a while. The dealer lots are quite empty.  Customers are told that they must “reserve” a car in order to purchase. That never happened before in America in any previous administrations.  In the meantime, Toyota recalled a few thousand electric cars before they rolled out to the dealers.

The environmental “Green” politicians and our government have tripled the price of gasoline through its anti-fossil fuel economic policies from day one of this disastrous administration, in hopes that Americans will rush to buy their expensive and unaffordable electric vehicles (EVs) as mandated by the Green New Deal which is neither green, nor new, nor a deal.

To use a phrase that the globalist left and the United Nations have concocted in 1992, “sustainable,” to describe just about everything we do in life and in any economy, EVs are not “sustainable” for many reasons. They are just a toy for the rich and for young Americans with trust funds or money to burn on the latest fad.

You don’t have to be an engineer to realize that there are huge problems with the total replacement of fossil fuels and combustion engines with electric cars powered by lithium batteries.

Young engineers claim that the United States would only need to increase its energy production by 30 percent to accommodate all the possible EVs Americans would drive. But the theory of energy needed is quite short-sighted and leaves out a large swath of our giant economy and its commercial needs. The calculations only take into account private driving and not our industrial and transportation needs, i.e., big trucks, ships, airplane fleet, military, hospitals, schools, businesses, etc.

Few mention our aging grid that needs huge upgrades in order to prevent crashing. The patch grid currently in use fails frequently during power surges and larger needs due to inclement weather and heat/cold waves.  Blackouts are already occurring without millions of EVs in use and in need of charging.

Lithium batteries have a lifespan of 7-8 years and the cost of a new battery is $10,000. The rare metals are not in endless supply and lithium must be mined in certain countries where pollution is rampant and child labor is used.

Construction and disposal of lithium batteries is controversial as they are seldom recycled, they must be buried.

Producing such lithium batteries is certainly not carbon neutral at all even though the engine of an EV may not pollute the environment.

We know that time is money and the downtime between charges, somewhere along the highway, is certainly an issue that must be taken into account. There is a huge opportunity cost to such collective downtime that nobody has bothered to calculate.

Gas stations service hundreds of cars a day, filling the tanks quite rapidly. In order to have a large electric station that could charge even a fraction of cars in much longer time, one needs acres and acres of space to accommodate EVs sitting there for half hour or more at each station terminal.

People living in high rise condos and apartments would be unable to charge their EVs overnight unless they run electric cables out the windows which is totally impractical or park in garages that are retrofitted with electric chargers for each parking space, a cost that would be collectively astronomical to invest in.

EVs draw serious amps to charge, thus popping transformers like corn in a kettle.

The electricity for charging stations is generated mostly by fossil fuels, not carbon neutral fairy dust as claimed by proponents.  To say that solar panels could provide the electricity needed for EVs is ludicrous when you consider that a town of 45,000 people would need 15 square miles of solar panels to support its electricity needs.

Owners of EVs, if they can afford the high prices, will become slaves to a designated dealer for service. Insurance rates for EVs are certainly higher, and first responders to an accident would need specialized equipment to deal with a crash or the ensuing lithium battery fire.

Are there enough rare earth metals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel to produce just batteries for EVs?

Without fossil fuels, how do the “Greens” propose to mine the metals for the EV batteries, with picks and shovels?

What happens when the metal resources for EV batteries dry out?

Until all of the above problems are solved, hybrids are a good interim solution to cut back on air, water, and soil pollution.  

Until such time that the grid is seriously updated and not patched, and the proper infrastructure to accommodate EVs is established, EVs are just more expensive toys for rich people and millennials to virtue signal what good earthers they are and what dangerous polluters the rest of us are.