SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I decided a few years ago that I was sick of standing in the snow at a gas station waiting for the person inside the building to finish selling that lottery ticket and turn the pump on so I can stand there some more babysitting it while it fills up and I freeze. The answer, of course, was to buy a car that didn't need gasoline, one I could plug into the house and go inside where it's warm.
I'm not a rich man, I'm a pensioner who is still paying a mortgage, so I looked for an affordable EV. Used ones are almost nonexistent, and I found out why when I finally bought one: it has a ten year warranty. They haven't been making them much longer than that.
I swore off new cars decades ago when my month old VW stranded me ninety miles from home with a bad alternator, but if you want an EV, new is your only choice. I kept seeing the Chevy Bolt advertised, but could never find one for sale at all. Then I found that they had stopped making them two years earlier.
Why? Well, battery problems, they claimed. Why just the not so expensive one, $30,000? GM is still selling electric Cadillacs and Corvettes, why no cheap cars?
I discovered after buying an EV that the only two advantages of a piston car to an electric one are the lack of infrastructure for long trips, and the high purchase price of the vehicle. Why high? Because only their flagship autos have electric motors, the ones that formerly had V8s.
My car cost $40,000. It's absolutely the nicest, roomiest (except for the minivans) car I ever owned. My Dad had a Checker when I was about ten, they no longer make them. They were designed for taxicabs and I've never seen more back seat leg room than in one. My new Hyundai has more leg room except Dad's Checker than any other car I've ever seen, and although the '74 LeMans was a much bigger car, my new EV is much roomier. It's a lot roomier than the '02 Concorde that was the same size as my new car on the outside. Why aren't the auto companies advertising how roomy EVs are? I never realized how much space engines, transmissions, and gas tanks take up.
I started trying to buy one when I realized that you don't have to babysit them when you're charging. I didn't want to stand there in the snow filling a gas tank, but judging from most Facebook comments I've seen, I must be the only one who realized that. People seem to think you have to stand there when they charge. Why aren't they advertising this benefit?
Why aren't they telling you that your car can now heat your garage, unlike a piston car? Why aren't they advertising the fact that rather than the heat coming on when you get to where you're going, you have heat before you're out of the driveway?
Why aren't they telling you how well EVs handle, thanks to its crazy low center of gravity? Or how much faster they can stop, thanks to having two sets of brakes?
Why aren't they advertising the fact that electricity is five times cheaper than gasoline and diesel? The only way I found out was by buying one.
Why aren't they advertising all the advantages of EVs?
Why are only the top of the line autos like the Mustang or Cadillac EVs? That's an easy question to answer. The automakers are under laws from our and other governments that their fuel mileage average of all the vehicles they sell has to be under a certain number. The easiest way to do that is to make the expensive cars, the ones with big V-8s, electric. When your fastest car doesn't use traditional fuel...
But this, of course, begs a second question: why only the expensive ones? Because they don't want to make electric cars at all. The obvious reason is that they hate EVs. But why do they hate them and love the incredibly inefficient (my car will go 20 miles on the electricity it takes to refine a gallon of gasoline), obsolete Rube Goldberg device with thousands of moving parts to wear and break?
EVs threaten their business model. The businesses are set up so that GM makes almost as much profit from aftermarket parts, like spark plugs, belts, hoses, pumps, and so forth as they do on the cars themselves.
Gasoline and diesel vehicles all need periodic maintenance. They're needy things, expensive to maintain, and the car company gets a cut of every repair of every car they sell. The drive train is a Rube Goldberg mess with thousands of moving, interlocking parts, any one of which fails can cripple the vehicle. A bad fuel pump stranded me in the bad part of town last year, and the repair was nearly $900 not counting the towing charge. The repair shop got half, Pontiac and other companies got the rest.
My new car doesn't have a fuel pump. Or spark plugs, or belts, or fuel injectors, or any of the other moving parts all the other cars I've owned since 1968 had and needed replacing. The motor's shaft IS its drive train! When was the last time your ceiling fan needed servicing?
More than likely that new 1976 Vega that cost $3,000 garnered more than that for GM in aftermarket parts. There may still be some on the road still earning money for GM. An EV has few aftermarket parts; tires, brake pads, windshield wiper blades are all I can think of. Hyundai won't make any more money from my new EV like they would if it had a big six cylinder piston engine.
Which is a shame, because electric motors are all far, far superior to piston engines and transmissions in every way. But the nearly zero cost of maintenance is why the thieving billionaire car companies don't want to sell affordable EVs. In fact, they want to sell as few EVs as possible. If it wasn't for fuel mileage restrictions, Tesla and the Chinese would likely be the only electric cars you could buy.
But isn't this just a conspiracy theory? No, there was never a conspiracy, nothing needed to be said. Those people aren't moral, but they're not stupid, either. Ford and Chevy aren't making cars for a hobby, nor are they charitable organizations. All they care about is profit, and EVs threaten their gravy train.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 09 2023, @12:29AM (1 child)
Do a little research
Next time you jump to a conclusion you might want to at least ask Google. You would find that my EV will go twenty miles on the electricity it takes to produce a gallon of gasoline. The only infrastructure problem is chargers for traveling.
Are the Republicans really in favor of genocide, or are they just cowards terrified of terrorist twit Trump?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 09 2023, @01:10AM
>You would find that my EV will go twenty miles on the electricity it takes to produce a gallon of gasoline.
You're missing the bigger picture. Yeah, so you can go 20 miles on the electricity it takes to produce a gallon of gasoline - I'll give you that one.
Where is that electricity that's being used to produce our gasoline currently available? Not in Montana.
The current gasoline burning motor vehicle fleet in the US consumes as much energy from gasoline as we produce in electrical generation, that's what Google told me.
Now, even if the new EV fleet that replaces it just magically appeared tomorrow, with efficiency 5x better than gasoline (in MPGe), we'd need 20% additional generation and distribution capacity at the points where the EVs are being charged. 20% is significant. Maybe there's some time-slice chicanery (night charging) that takes the actual infrastructure upgrade need down to 10% - do you know what 10% of the US electric grid, built with broad government subsidies over the last 100+ years, costs? They're throwing around numbers like $21T for the cost to upgrade the US grid - those numbers are going to be wildly variable depending on a whole pile of assumptions, but $21T is around 4 years of the total federal budget - even if they've blown up their numbers by 10x what we actually need, $2.1T would be $6000 per capita for every US citizen of every age - that's more than our annual military spending (of $1.5T).
Yeah, your EV that you toodle into town once a month in doesn't raise your electric bill, I get that. My neighbors with teenage kids are putting 60K miles on their family vehicles per year with mom, dad, and now one or two kids spending several hours a day each on the road going here, there, wherever - it all seems very important, to them. Even if they get 120MPGe, they'll be consuming 500 "electric gallons" (33.7kWh) per year, which is 16.8 megawatt hours per year, 1400 kWh per month which will be boosting their electric bill by about $200 per month. That's a great deal, they currently buy around 200 gallons of gas per month costing them about triple that, but... their current electric bill is around $300 per month, so this will be a 66% increase in the average demand they're putting on the grid.
Our family? We drive big old V8s that ping if you don't feed them premium fuel, because we just don't drive that much to care about the cost of fuel - the cost of replacing the vehicles with something more efficient would buy all our gasoline for years to come, much more than the savings of the more efficient vehicle (though, I must confess, we went from a 5.9 liter V8 in the 1999 truck down to a (more powerful) 3.6 liter V6 in the 2019, and while they both get around 12mpg in town, the V6 will get 25mpg on the highway where the V8 was doing good to get 16mpg, and the new V6 doesn't pout when you give it regular gas - so that's a big savings there too.) If we switched to EVs, I think we might notice a 10-20% increase in our electric bill, tops... but we're not exactly typical.
Oh, and I'm building a carport for the 2019 pickup (+ our family sedan) so the 2019 doesn't get as stinky as the 1999 that lived under the big oak tree for the past 10 years. All in slab and structure will be less than $20K. I very diligently looked at putting solar panels on the roof of that carport and no matter which way I sliced it, the structure to hold a roof full of panels was going to cost $10K EXTRA over and above what the complete structure that doesn't hold all that would. A big kink was single slope facing south vs traditional gable that half faces north. The higher price options includes those bare frames that hold panels as the roof. Not to mention the added hassle of getting something weird like a solar carport approved by the local zoning board. Then, if those solar panels would do anything other than charge an EV (that we don't have yet), there would be another $5K in buried cable and power transfer equipment to get the solar power back to the house, $20K+ for the panels and inverters and maybe batteries thrown in on that too for another $10K. All that buys a LOT of kWh from the local utility at current rates.
Another fun figure I ran lately is the LiFePO4 pack + inverter by Anker I recently bought for $700. It holds roughly 1kWh of charge, and is rated for 3000 cycles. That's 3000kWh of capacity, and give the battery pack credit for only being $500 of the total cost. $500 / 3000kWh is $0.16/kWh for power that is stored and released by that battery pack - as compared to our electric rates that vary between $0.11 and $0.14 / kWh from the grid. Even if the pack gets charged for free, I'll be paying more for using the battery than electric power is currently costing from the grid. I imagine the same is true of electric vehicle battery packs, so take that 120MPGe and roughly cut it in half for your TCO when you start paying for the cost of the batteries you're using.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]