The trouble with battery-operated cars

Motor Trend ran a story, “What Happens When a Rivian EV Runs Out of Battery Charge?” Well, anyone with a laptop or cellphone knows what happens. You are SOL for a long time, buddy.

But the story inadvertently pointed out another problem with electric cars is the lack of infrastructure to care for them. But just add that defect to the pile of problems for these vehicles.

The unworldly press and the deceitful deep state keep pushing the battery-operated car — which they call electric vehicles — on an increasingly wary public. But there is hope the propaganda falls on deaf ears because “experts say” has become a red flag that what you are about to hear or read belongs on the manure heap.

The first falsehood is that they are EVs — electric vehicles. Not so because they are not directly linked to a power plant. They run on big and expensive batteries that have to be recharged. If they were EVs, they would run without being recharged, like your refrigerator.

This distinction means that instead of running directly from a power source, the car is wastes energy on transferring the energy from the power plant to the battery and then from the battery to the motor.

But of more importance, the battery-operated car is dependent upon recharging stations that are haphazardly arrayed within a nation larger than 3 million square miles. On top of that, motorists must invest hours of time while their vehicle recharges — time that gas-powered cars do not require.

The second falsehood is that gas-powered cars are dirty. We have had 200 years to refine and improve the internal combustion engine since Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially in 1823. Response to the pressure of free markets forced improvements in efficiency to lower costs and hence, price.

Battery-operated cars had their heyday in the 1920s but the Great Depression and the convenience of gas-powered transportation placed the electric car next to the Stanley Steamer in the junkyard of automotive history.

The third falsehood is that Americans want battery-operated cars. The government has had to bribe people to buy them, paying buyers to buy them with tax credits, which are a federal lipstick applied to these pigs.

Energy 5 reported, “Initially, the credit was only available for hybrid vehicles and was capped at $3,400.

“In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expanded the credit to include plug-in electric vehicles and increased the maximum credit to $7,500.”

But $7,500 is not enough to get people to buy these cars. They make lawn ornaments at car dealerships across the country. Axios reported, “Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots.”

The story said, “The auto industry is beginning to crank out more electric vehicles to challenge Tesla, but there's one big problem: not enough buyers.

“Why it matters: The growing mismatch between EV supply and demand is a sign that even though consumers are showing more interest in EVs, they’re still wary about purchasing one because of price or charging concerns.”

The irony is this is exactly what car companies did 40 years ago when they shipped gas guzzlers to car dealers who did not want them in the wake of an oil embargo.

Oh, there are buyers for these battery guzzlers, just not that many.

Enviromentalist Georgette Kilgore gushed, “Cumulatively, manufacturers have sold over 2,500,000 battery and plug-in vehicles in the last 12 years.”

That is not even 1% of the “278,063,737 personal and commercial vehicles [that] were registered to drivers in the U.S. in 2021.”

The fourth falsehood is that these battery-operated cars are good for the environment.

Malcolm Earnshaw-Osler wrote, “Lithium is a crucial component in the production of lithium-ion batteries, which power many modern devices, electric vehicles, and renewable energy systems. As the demand for these products grows, so does the need for lithium mining. While lithium mining has the potential to contribute to the development of renewable energy technology, there are concerns about its environmental and social impact.

“One of the concerns with lithium mining is its environmental impact. The process of extracting lithium consumes significant amounts of water and energy, and lithium mining can pollute the air and water with chemicals and heavy metals. In addition, mining lithium can disrupt wildlife habitats and cause soil erosion, leading to long-term ecological damage. Efforts are being made to develop more sustainable mining practices, such as using renewable energy sources and minimizing the use of water and chemicals.”

Cobalt is another element used by electric cars.

The Guardian reported, “In the case of cobalt, 60% of the world’s supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where large numbers of unregulated mines use children as young as seven as miners. There they breathe in cobalt-laden dust that can cause fatal lung ailments while working tunnels that are liable to collapse.”

But the newspaper also dismissed this return of slavery and environmental damage as a price “we” pay for a greener future. We pay nothing. Kids in Congo pay the price.

Then there is the transport of these vehicles. They have a tendency to self-immolate like a Buddhist priest in Saigon protesting the war in the 1960s. The latest ship to catch-fire-at-sea is the Fremantle Highway.

Matthew Guy at The Truth About Cars reported, “Astute readers know fires involving lithium-ion batteries are notoriously difficult to extinguish, often burning with ferocious intensity exceeding that of a blaze fueled by traditional materials. It is worth noting local authorities have yet to pin down the fire’s exact cause, so it would be irresponsible to say with certainty that a faulty EV is on the hook for this disaster. What can be said with certainty is that any fire, regardless of its source, in a confined space containing hundreds of electric cars has the potential to be one hell of an inferno.”

We are dealing with the devil’s new plaything.

Mind you, all these problems come when only 1% of the cars are battery operated. Multiply those problems by 100 and you get the world Joe “Bribed” Biden and Chairman Xi want you to live in.

Which brings me back to the Motor Trend story.

It said, “Once the truck stopped moving, we pushed the SOS button on the ceiling to summon help. That button is really meant for emergencies, so we got passed around to four different operators (including a Subaru Roadside Assistance operator accidentally) as they realized we weren’t in a crash and weren’t suffering a medical emergency and just needed a tow.

“Once connected to Rivian Roadside Assistance, the friendly operator first asked if it was possible to bum a charge off a sympathetic household in the neighborhood, but our truck was way too dead for that. A tow truck would be dispatched, but in the meantime, we were advised to turn off the radio, seat heaters and coolers, and avoid using any other power accessories to preserve the power left in the 12-volt batteries. (EVs still have 12-volt batteries like gas-powered cars. They run all the systems aside from propulsion and are charged by the big powertrain battery with an inverter. With the big battery dead, there was nothing to charge the 12-volt batteries, of which the Rivian has two.)”

Now then, when a neighbor hit my Mustang backing out of her driveway, I didn’t call Ford. I called my insurance company and within hours it was on its way to the shop.

But if she backed into a battery-operated Rivian, the call would have been to the manufacturer. And who would repair it?

I like that the first advice was to ask a stranger to run up his electric bill recharging the battery. That’s the backup plan. The backup plan for running out of gasoline involves a gas can and a pair of shoes to hike to the nearest filling station.

The Motor Trend story said a tow truck arrived about an hour later, which is pretty good time. The problem was finding the nearest filling station.

The story said, “Rivian's roadside assistance had already picked our destination, an EVGo fast charger 21 miles away and had also dispatched a mobile service technician to meet us there. On the ride over, we e-signed a work order from Rivian authorizing the work and agreeing to pay $130 for the tow.”

21 miles?

I live in West Virginia with a population of 1.8 million people spread over hills in a state that is 75% forested. There likely are places where it could be maybe in some really outback area like Pocahontas County there might be 10 or 15 miles between filling stations. But the Rivian truck ran out of juice in suburban California and still was 21 miles away from the nearest charger.

The problem was even bigger than they thought when that didn’t work and the vehicle had to be hauled 62 miles to a Rivian Service Center.

The story ended, “The good news is, this whole ordeal was avoidable. The truck did everything it could to warn us and get us to a charger. When that was no longer a possibility, it kept driving until every last electron was gone, 3.5 miles past 0 range and 0 battery, allowing us to choose exactly when and where we wanted to park. Rivian roadside service was highly attentive and got us a tow to a charger where a mobile technician met us and got right to work on the truck. All in all, had we not tried to solve the problem ourselves, we might've been on our way home six hours earlier.”

Rivian even paid for the tow and the re-charge for the unusual call.

But what happens when all vehicles are battery-operated and instead of 1 call a week, Rivian is getting 10 an hour? Will the operators be just as friendly? Will there be enough battery-operated tow trucks to meet demand?

I suppose we bitter clingers can hang on to our Mustangs till hell freezes over but tell me, where will we get the gasoline or the oil filters we will need? What happens when all the parts manufacturers fold? What happens when car companies give up on servicing gas-powered cars?

There are two ways to get the USA to 100% battery-operated cars and trucks. One way is to force everyone to buy an electric car.

The other way is to eliminate the gas-powered cars and trucks by not building them and dropping the system of support we built over the last century.