Tag Archives: electric cars

The Wagen That’s Not for the Volk Anymore, by Eric Peters

Posted on April 11, 2022 | 1 comment

Volkswagen has lost its way. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Some people think that those who’ve been “vaccinated” are already dead – because they will be, soon.

Could the same be true of Volkswagen?

The manufacture of cars for the people – it’s literally what Volkswagen means, in German – announced the other day that it will stop making about 60 percent of the models in its current inventory, all of them the combustion-engined ones that people can afford to buy, in order to focus on “premium” cars, all of them electric, that only a few people can afford to buy.

“The key target is not growth,” said VW’s finance chief Arno Antlitz.

Well, that was tried before – though not intentionally.

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California’s High Power Prices Could Derail Liberal EV Dream, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

What happens when the operating costs for electric cars are higher than those for internal combustion cars? You know what the answer will be. More subsidies for electric cars. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

California electricity rates are increasing far faster than the rest of the country. Last year, electricity prices rose 1.7 times faster than the rest of the county, and residential prices jumped 2.7 faster.

These increases are terrible news for residents who want to swap their combustion engine vehicles for electric ones.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E), Southern California Edison Co. (SCE), and San Diego Gas & Electric’s (SDG&E) exceptionally high power rates make charging an electric vehicle very costly and could soon be as expensive as filling up a combustion engine vehicle at the gas station, according to Environment & Energy Publishing.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate business school. He said if people who embraced EVs begin to “tell their neighbors about their catastrophic electric bills” after charging up at home, “that’s gonna be a huge problem.”

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Pulling Your Plug, by Eric Peters

Posted on March 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Do you really want a car that can be disabled remotely by the car company? From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Electric cars don’t just plug in. They can also be unplugged – so to speak – and not necessarily by their owners.

Lost in the Oceania-is-at-war-with Eastasia mass formation psychosis now forming over Keeeeeeeev! was a telling Tweet that appeared – and disappeared – urging Elon Musk to remotely disable every Tesla in Russia, so as to teach the Russians a lesson.

One lost on Americans.

Electric cars will tether Americans not merely to electrical outlets but to a leash – the other end of it held by those who have the ability to yank it, at their pleasure. Like Elon Musk, who is considered by some to be a kind of libertarian techno-hero a la Tony Stark, the fictitious Iron Man. But if so, why would he design electric cars that are connected cars?

Cars that can be disconnected – for any reason – at any time?

Many such reasons can be imagined – among them that Elon is the scion of a family of managerial technocrats who have been working on ways to manage us for the past 100 years.

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What May Really Kill the Electric Car, by Eric Peters

Posted on March 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

If interest rates rise and cheap auto financing disappears, it will put pricey electric cars that much more out of the reach of many Americans. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Electric vehicles are just the ticket for short trips in between long recharge times.

Assuming you can afford one.

The new electric version of Ford’s F-150, for instance. It can go up to 230 miles on a full charge – a bit less than half as far as the base version of the gas engine’d F-150 can go (in the city; on the highway, where gas-engined vehicles go even farther than electric vehicles, the non-electric F150 can go more than 600 miles).

If you want to go farther in the electric F-150, Ford offers a version of it with up to 320 miles of range – for about $15k more than the just shy of $40k base price of the 230 mile version.

The good news is that each version will come with a real-time range-estimator that takes into account such things as the weather – which greatly affects an EV’s range – as well as the effect of towing or hauling a heavy load in the bed. Also the effect of using the truck’s battery pack to power tools and such.

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A Tale of Two Geniuses, by Eric Peters

Posted on March 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

Henry Ford goes down in history as the man who mass-produced cars. Elon Musk will go down in history as the man who mass-produced government subsidies. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Elon Musk is hailed as a “genius” by some.

And he is – but not in the way they mean it.

Like Henry Ford, Musk took something he didn’t invent that was essentially a curiosity and recast it in a different way. The difference being that when Henry Ford simplified the car by standardizing parts and mass producing them on an assembly line – as opposed to hand-building them, one at a time, as had been prior practice – the result was a much less expensive and far more practical car that almost anyone could afford to buy.

Musk did the opposite.

The early electric cars were simpler as well as more practical than non-electric cars; this was a big part of their initial appeal, 100 years ago, when they were (briefly) competitive with early non-electric cars. You didn’t have to hand-crank the engine and risk breaking your wrist – because of course there was no engine. Instead, an electric motor connected to the drive wheels and an array of lead-acid batteries. The car turned off – and on – and off you went.

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Let Them Drive Teslas . . . by Eric Peters

Posted on March 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

Can’t afford $5 a gallon gas? Buy a $50,000 Tesla! From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

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Every time there’s what is styled an “energy crisis” – the term in air fingers quotes to reflect the fact that the “crisis” is never about “energy” but rather about government, which makes energy harder to produce and more expensive to deliver via various edicts and fatwas – such as cancelling pipelines, for instance – the government makes transportation more expensive.

For instance, this Let Them Drive Teslas business, articulated by the Biden Thing’s equivalent of Marie Antoinette, Pete Buttigieg. This queen suggests that people being impoverished by the artificially induced spike in the cost of energy in the form of gasoline further impoverish themselves by – somehow – buying an electric car that costs twice as much as a current non-electric economy car.

Doesn’t everyone own a $50,000 Tesla – or a $35,000 Chevy Bolt?

Of course, no one would have to worry about the cost of energy – gas or electricity – were it not for the government and people like the Biden Thing and the Buttigieg thing.

Had the former not autocratically winnowed the supply of oil by cancelling a pipeline that – by now – would have been capable of bringing some 800,000 barrels of it per day to the United States from Canada – and encouraged rather than discouraged the production of oil here, in America – the cost of energy in the form of gasoline would probably still be closer to $2 per gallon that $5 per gallon. Even factoring in the cost of “inflation,” the sneak-term used by creatures such as the Biden Thing to get people to not think about the malicious devaluation of their money via the printing of more money.

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How to Make an Electric Car Make Sense, by Eric Peters

Posted on February 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

Who says there’s no serendipity? If the Biden administration gets its war in Ukraine, it should drive up the price of oil and consequently the price of gas, maybe to $6 or $7 per gallon. That in turn will drive demand for electric cars, another big Biden administration goal. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

An electric car may soon make “sense” – if the price of gas rises to $6 ot $7 per gallon. This might happen as soon as the next couple of days – weeks – if the Biden Regime is successful in turning an internal territorial squabble between the Russians and other Russians – or at least, between people whose territorial squabble poses a far lesser danger to Americans than $6 or $7 per gallon gas – into a “splendid little war.”

Oil – from which gasoline is made – already approaches the $100 per barrel mark. Without a “splendid little  war” to push it beyond that mark. The “media” – as the public relations combine for the corporate-government nexus styles itself – is working hard to egg that on.

“My guess is that you are going to see $5 (gas) at any triple digit (oil) price and you might get to $6.50 or $7, energy analyst Dan Dicker told Yahoo! Finance.

With a “splendid little war” – the term is associated with the contrived (by America) Spanish-American War – the cost to fill-up could rise so high it may seem “sensible” to charge up. And this might be precisely why the regime has such a woodie for war with Russia over a territorial squabble that could trigger exactly what the regime wants, for Americans.

Another “crisis.”

This being desperately needed as the last “crisis” wanes – and to salve the real crisis, which is the waning legitimacy of the Biden regime. The president selected is viewed by a majority – including many of those who may have voted for him – as a TelePrompted geriatric, a kind of American Brezhnev who barely has the stamina to walk under his own steam away from the podium, after having read the TelePrompter. It is not merely that he is old and obviously in decline, mentally as well as physically. It is that the country is obviously in decline. People – voters – care far less about Critical Race Theory and the merits of sexual fungibility than they do about how much it is costing them to live. How much it is costing them to eat.

It is incomprehensible – from a rational, national self-interested point-of-view – to fixate as it were some kind of emergency for this nation on the internecine territorial squabbles of the Russians while Americans are paying $10 for a 2×4 and  $3.50 for gas that cost $2 before the current president was selected. When the shelves at American supermarkets begin to resemble the shelves of Soviet supermarkets.

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What Does a Gas Station Cost You? By Eric Peters

Posted on February 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

Electric cars and their charging stations need government subsidies to ameliorate their high cost and inconvenience. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

How much do you suppose it costs to build a typical gas station? Wait. That’s not quite the right way to phrase it. Let’s try again. How much do you suppose it costs you to build a typical gas station?

The answer, of course, is  . . . nothing.

Well, nothing beyond what it costs you to fill up your car. And you’re getting something in return for your money there. Whoever built the gas station paid for the rest. The building, the pumps. The works. Using his money – or rather (probably) money he borrowed from a bank. The transaction, then, is between the builder/owner of the gas station and the financial institution which loaned the money to make it so. Which it did because it judges there is money to be made; enough for the builder/owner of the station to pay back the loan.

You – the person pulling in for a fill-up – pay for none of this. Or rather, you’re not forced to pay for any of it. The gas – and snacks – you buy pay for it.

This is called the free market – and it works because it works to everyone’s benefit. It is not necessary to force gas stations to be built by forcing people to pay taxes to subsidize their being built. As is the case with the electric car charging stations that Joe Biden is going to force all of us to pay to get built.

How much will we be made to pay?

The number in play seems to be $5 billion, the sum to be divvidied up as payola to the various rent-seeking entities which will get paid to build them by the forces of the not-free market; i.e., by the government.

This is called redistribution – and it doesn’t work, except to the extent that it benefits the rent-seekers at the expense of those forced to pay the “rent.”

The Biden regime wants you to pay for electric charging stations placed at intervals of one every 50 miles along every Interstate highway in the country and within 1 mile of the highway. No one asks the obvious question: If there is a market-driven need for electric charging stations every 50 miles, why is there a need for the government to subsidize them every 50 miles?

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PZEV Disappearing Act, by Eric Peters

Posted on February 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

There is a class of non-electric autos that achieved virtually zero emissions over a decade ago. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

 
 

You probably haven’t noticed that no one is touting the PZEV anymore. The Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle attributes of their new  . . . vehicles anymore. It was common until fairly recently – about ten years ago – to see “PZEV” badges affixed to new cars’ bumpers and tailgates.

Now you never see them anymore – except on one of those older cars.

Why would no car manufacturer want to advertise that they had all-but-eliminated the harmful emissions coming from the tailpipe of one of their new vehicles? This is precisely what “PZEV” means. It’s not just an advertising term – like “limited” or “special edition.” It has a very specific meaning – a very specific threshold – that must be met in order for that badge to be legal to affix to the bumper or tailgate of any vehicle.

What it means, specifically, is that the PZEV vehicle’s exhaust is within a hair – a fraction – of being as free of harmful emissions that it almost qualifies as a “zero emissions” vehicle.

Perhaps you see the problem here.

It cannot be admitted – the public must not be allowed to know – that non-electric vehicles – gas engined vehicles – achieved near zero-emissions more than a decade ago. Put another way, that there is no longer an emissions problem, if by “problem” one means emissions that cause problems insofar as air quality is concerned.

And that is a big problem for the pushers of electric cars. Which are also not “zero emissions” cars – notwithstanding the constant use of that false-advertising slogan.

It is true that electric cars don’t emit any unburned or incompletely burned hydrocarbons – the compounds that come out of he tailpipes of modern combustion-engined cars in fractional amounts.

But the claim that they do not emit any carbon dioxide – the “emissions” that have nothing to do with air quality is – is false.

Electric cars run on electricity and electricity has to be generated, which generally results in the emission of C02, via the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels such as natural gas, coal and oil.

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The Hulu Model as applied to Transportation, by Eric Rivers

Posted on January 10, 2022 | 1 comment

Who wants to own a car or anything else when you can pay for things offered as a service that you pay for over and over again? From Eric Rivers at ericriversautos.com:

The car companies plan to stop selling cars in favor of selling “transportation” – as a “service” – instead.

The main reason for this reorientation of their business model is simple: People increasingly cannot afford to buy cars – the average transaction price is now about $35,000 which is  a sum roughly equivalent to half the average American family’s annual income and thus, not sustainable as a purely financial matter.

Meanwhile, cars – themselves – are becoming soul-less appliances very much like cell phones in terms of their interchangeable homogeneity and their disposability.

People are for that reason losing interest in them.

But cars are very much unlike  cell phones in one critical way: their cost. It’s one thing to throw away a smartphone after a year or two; another to do the same with a $35k car after four or five. This problem is going to get much worse, very soon – for two more reasons.

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