“Like a REAL car”
- Best explanation I’ve seen. Barber was telling me yesterday about a “green” customer with an Electric that drove down to Gulf Shores last winter and then came home complaining of the number of stops they had to make, how hard it was to find (and get into because of other users) charging stations and how long it took to recharge. In a Real car you just “go”. I suppose electrics are spiffy if you never get far from home, but to travel any distance they remain novelties/toys. Right now I can hop in either our TDI VW Touareg or my Ram 1500 Ecodiesel, fill ‘em up, and drive nonstop to my BIL’s in PA (600 miles)-orat least I could if my bladder had that kind of range
. Oh yeah, I can also run heat or A/C for the entire trip
Yep, you can do all those things with a 'REAL' car! Not so much an EV.
A very close friend of mine who aspires to being a planet saver recently bought a Tesla and touted it's glory for months. Then he decided to make a trip to visit family in NY. So, he and the wife loaded up much like they had almost every year past and started out in
their his new Tesla. Well to make a long, sad story short she refused to ride back home with him in HIS car. She flew back and when he finally got home several days later, she swore she'd divorce him before ever riding any further in HIS car than her mother's house which is about 3 miles from theirs. It seems there were so many unexpected reasons for stopping so often, obviously the recharging every couple hundred miles instead of a direct route to your destination, or maybe a planned route to go by to see some famous landmark etc, but having to plan your route so as to be in proximity of a charging station when it's needed over a long distance trip, how much time is lost in driving a route that includes the necessary charging stations, the crowd awaiting a charging line while you're waiting and wasting valuable time on your planned trip, and the intense panic when realizing the next charging station is still 5 miles down the road, traffic is bumper to bumper, and your charge meter says you have approximately 3 miles power left. Well, you get the idea.
I'm an admitted 'push the button and go' kind of guy and love the small of gasoline. It's peaceful to know there's likely a gas station just around the next corner regardless of what route I take, and even if I change my mind at the last minute. So, there will be no EV for me ever in my life time (although that threat of divorce is something to think about) and I resent the hell out of my gov't subsidizing a product the American people simply do not want with my tax dollars. Yep, I still remember the 'Solyndra' Solar Energy debacle from a few years ago. EV's for fleets like city police, district school buses, city/county utility companies, some first responders maybe, and a few other close in, typically short distance uses. Even these few possible uses are contingent upon recognizing the actual environmental impact including the mining or the rare earth materials to use in battery manufacturing and the human health costs related to this mining, the environmental impact of using fossil fuels to generate the electricity to run the charging stations (these charging plants do not work on wishful thinking no matter what they tell us), the lost time and efficiency of having to deal with finding and getting to a charging station, and last but certainly not least, the actual cost of handling the disposal of all parts of the EV. It's definitely These things a not a god-send under any definition for anyone. The most they are is a status symbol for those who need a status symbol, and in truth I guess they do provide a certain amount of peace of mind for those who buy into all this BS.
