A cold El Nino winter reveals yet another problem with electric vehicles

Have you ever driven a Tesla? I have. It’s a lovely car to drive because it accelerates quickly, handles well, and is stocked to the brim with cool gadgets. In a sane world, rich people would buy it and other electric vehicles (EVs) for fun and, as competition drove the price down, ordinary people would think about them, too. But we don’t live in a sane world. We live in an insane world in which our governments are forcing us to buy EVs to “save the climate.” That’s why it’s important to focus on just how awful EVs are, and this winter is forcing that focus on a lot of foolish people.

Let me count the problems with EVs:

  • The batteries require child slave labor.
  • Mining the materials for the batteries is one of the most violent environmental acts around. To sound like a leftist, you’re almost raping the earth, and it’s a burden borne by third-world countries under heavy Chinese influence.
  • The batteries, when they die, are often too expensive to replace, killing the cars.
  • When the batteries catch fire (and they do, often), that’s it for the car.
  • If you think ordinary batteries are terrible for landfills, EV batteries are worse, way, way worse.
  • The electricity for EVs must come from somewhere, which usually means fossil fuels.
  • Repair costs are incredibly high (which also drives up the overall cost of car insurance for everyone as EVs flood the roads and insurance companies have to adjust to deal with these costs).
  • EVs are generally less reliable than traditional gas-powered cars.

And then there’s the entire charging issue. When I’m traveling, and I see that I’m low on gas, I pull into a gas station, and it takes me less than five minutes to fill my tank. That’s not how recharging an EV works.

Image: EV charging (edited) by frimufilms.

When I was readying myself to travel across the country a few years ago, I decided to check how long it would take to drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Eastern Tennessee if I had a Tesla. It turned out that the Tesla would add 40 hours to the drive time, a combination of finding Tesla chargers along the way and then waiting at those Tesla chargers while my “tank” filled. Charging is a slow process.

It’s especially slow when it’s cold. Not only does your battery drain much more quickly (killing efficiency by as much as 41% when temperatures drop below 40 degrees Fahrenheit), but your battery also recharges more slowly. This problem is exacerbated if you’re in a place where you need to use your car as shelter and warmth from the cold during the slow charging process. Just ask Jack (John) from Kelowna, Canada:

If EVs were just another vehicle in a competitive marketplace, I wouldn’t squawk about them. The marketplace would force them to become better, or they’d drop out entirely, except for a small band of enthusiasts. The reason they deserve to be exposed, denigrated, and ridiculed is that our government hasn’t just put its thumb on the scale in favor of EVs. Instead, it’s put its entire jackboot on the scale in favor of a car that’s inefficient, dirty, environmentally corrupt, and dangerous for drivers.

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