Those EV Shortcomings Aren’t Shortcomings at All

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August 17, 2023

Wherever we drive nowadays, we see electric vehicles (EVs) amid the normal internal combustion cars and hybrids.  

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Maybe one in ten, maybe one in twenty, maybe one in a hundred.  It all depends on where we live and where we go.

They are no longer the noticeable rarity they were just a few years ago; you no longer turn your head in surprise when you see that Tesla logo beside you.

The modern Left has a dream – that soon, very soon, every vehicle in the world will be electric, running on a heavy, cobalt-laden, lithium battery that needs to be charged up somewhere with electricity derived from an out-of-sight coal plant.

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Every few trips, we old-fashioned ICE-drivers stop at a gas station for a quick fill-up.  It takes two or three minutes, maybe five or six if we need to go into the store for a soda or a coffee; then we’re back on the road.

We rarely see the EVs charging up while we fill our normal cars with fuel.  It takes too long, so they don’t usually do it at the gas station.

The EV’s current average, we are told, is eight hours to a “full charge,” whatever that means.  It might be a couple hundred miles, maybe less, maybe more. Some chargers charge faster, some vehicles take longer.  If it’s like any other kind of rechargeable battery (and they’re too new to be sure, but it makes sense), then as each battery ages, it will take longer and longer to charge up, and the mileage per charge will slowly decrease.  That’s just how batteries work.

The EV advocates are legion.  You see them in politics and newsmedia, at work and at school, singing the praises of their clean cars that never break down and meet all their needs perfectly.

Having installed a charging station at home, and/or working at a job that has a charging station just for them, their day-to-day lives are perfectly convenient.  The challenge of the daily routine, in which we have to seek out an affordable gas station in the age of Joe Biden’s daily attacks on the oil industry, has been completely conquered.

Park the car and plug it in, and it’s fully charged for another normal day.

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But… what about days that aren’t normal?

It’s summertime… for most of us, an exception to the routine. Let’s study a few typical summer days for a typical American family.

Many of us – hundreds of thousands of us, certainly, maybe millions – visit a cottage of our own, or a brother’s or cousin’s place, somewhere in the country, maybe on a lake, maybe on a river. There might be no electricity there, but that’s okay; the oven works on an oil generator or a propane tank. Great place to spend the weekend, doing some fishing, swimming, camping, waterskiing, or jet-skiing.

If this cabin is a hundred miles away, or a couple hundred, how do you get out of there, when you’ve run your EV out of power on the way in?

Many of us – hundreds of thousands, maybe millions – take city vacations too.  We’ll take a weekend off, or a whole week, and visit the sites of New England, or drive up the Pacific coast, or hit the lakeshore towns of the Great Lakes, or any other such multi-stop vacation. The EV acolytes have an answer for this; “your hotel will have charger stations so you can charge up every night.” But will it? These systems are awfully expensive. And they take up space.

Hotels have never needed to be in the power business before. Now they’ll have to add a charger outside, essentially, for every single room.  The fifty-room hotel will now need fifty chargers in its parking lot. The 200-room hotel will need 200 of them. Will the local electric grid support that draw?  Is there room in the hotel’s parking lot for all those cars?  If not, is there more land for the hotel to acquire to facilitate an EV-forced expansion?

Perhaps it’s time to say goodbye to the cheap hotel, the Expedia or PriceLine deal, the room that becomes affordable with your AAA or AMAC discount. If every hotel has to rip up every parking lot to install these chargers at a few grand apiece, they’re going to have far fewer parking spaces, and they’re going to have to charge you a lot more for your room.

Many of us, millions every year – visit amusement parks from Six Flags to DisneyLand. The range is wild; Cedar Point draws about 20,000 visitors per day, while DisneyWorld draws some 160,000 per day.  The same goes for trips to great downtown centers like Chicago, New York, Boston and St Louis, where millions drive in for a day or a weekend of museums and zoos, theatres and restaurants.

Many stay in a hotel, many others drive in early in the morning, park at the event, and expect to drive home that night. There’s no place to charge during the day; if you hoped for that trip to be same-day, you’re out of luck. You won’t be able to recharge on that day trip, so you will need a (now expensive) hotel whether you like it or not. From the perspective of anyone over 1.5 hours away from your destination, the days of the “day trip” are over.

Perhaps you have relatives to stay with when on vacation. We’ve all spent a night or two with brothers or sisters, or cousins or uncles. Maybe they will eventually install a charger of their own, which they’ll need for their own EVs.  Can your car hook up to it simultaneously, or will one of you have to face the morning without a charge?

Countless millions of Americans visit their state fair every year (your friendly correspondent went twice this year!).  Let’s look at the Wisconsin State Fair as an example.  About 100,000 attend each day, up to double that on the weekends if the weather cooperates.  Attendees come from as little as a mile away or from as far as 400 miles away, because the fair is at the far southeast corner of a large state. It’s a day trip for those of us in northeast Illinois; it’s a multi-day commitment at least for exhibitors and attendees from Wausau, Eau Claire, Superior or Ashland.

People park at State Fairs on lawns or fields;  there isn’t even a parking lot to wire for charging stations.   Hundreds of homeowners in West Allis, WI rent out spaces to fairgoers on their own front lawns. Restaurants and clubs close for the day and rent out their parking lots; it can be more lucrative than their usual business.

How are most people going to do state fair in the age of the EV?

We’ve only scratched the surface, of course. Summertime in America is filled with special occasions – music festivals and sporting events, neighborhood festivals and church parties, each of which draw thousands, even tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of attendees.  Country Thunder, Summer Camp, Wander Down – a host of new multi-act events crop up every year. They take place in fields, state parks, even on working farms between harvests.

Where are these rock, alternative, and country music fans supposed to charge their EVs for eight hours, or even get a “quick charge” in three or four, so they can go home when it’s over?

There is an answer to all this. Don’t worry.  They haven’t forgotten all these things.

The elites who advocate the sole production of EVs have an answer for this:  You just won’t be able to do these things anymore.  That’s all.

They don’t believe you need to do these things.  They want you to watch your entertainment on your smart TV or your laptop, on your streaming service, from the comfort of your apartment.  If you want to attend a live performance, you can take public transportation to the nearest official venue, staffed by union members, ticketed by Ticketmaster.

You don’t need to go visit a river or lake, or travel to explore American heritage through Civil War or Revolutionary War sites.  You don’t need fishing trips, hunting trips, road trips for baseball or football, college tours, family bonding drives.

Stay home.  Stay safe. Stay still. Stay where we can watch you.

The conclusion is inescapable: In the final analysis, the EV pushers don’t see any gaps or contradictions.  All the needs you have that EVs simply don’t meet, can’t meet, will never meet – well, these aren’t really needs at all. 

You’re wrong to want to gather in groups of thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. All those EV shortcomings aren’t really shortcomings at all.  Freedom of assembly, as described in the obsolete First Amendment, is dangerous, don’t you see, from the perspective of your betters.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

Image: U.S. government image via RawPixel // CC0 1.0 public domain

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