Several recent articles in the Wall Street Journal have told of the embarrassing cornucopia of Chinese electric vehicles in European auto shows, and the glaring absence of any German or European candidates for a new “peoples car” in the coming electric nirvana. Other stories, such as that by Kim Mackrael and William Boston regarding “EU launches Probe of Subsidies Of China’s Electric-Vehicle Makers” illustrates the typically irrational response of a non-market based economy to unmeetable competition. Other stories, such as that of Jennifer Hiller in that same September 14 edition, reveal “U.S. Plans Push to Upgrade Fast Chargers”. It seems that, even if we buy batteries and assemble cars from China in the U.S. as our own automotive behemoths desperately lurch toward erasing tailpipes from our highways, we may enter an unknown period of Soviet-style queues. Only this time it won’t be for Saudi or Venezuelan or Russian oil, since our ample domestic supplies are democratically off limits. We will patiently wait for our turn at the slowly expanding and slowly charging EV stations.
As detailed by Ms. Hiller and others, charging stations for EVs are few and far between. Also often inoperative. Or fitted with charging connectors that don’t match your vehicle’s plug-in site. Naturally before mandating absolute conversion to EV from gasoline or diesel, our sagacious government standardized the charging methods, electric loads, connectors, etc.. Just like they did many decades ago with nozzles at fuel stations. Or maybe not. Those few charging stations that do exist and are operable and connectable will cost you a few hours of roadside bliss. Unless you own a Tesla with its proprietary methodology and map your non-neighborhood trips carefully (anyone old enough to remember driving the interstates Stuckey’s to Stuckey’s, or Howard Johnson’s?). Those seeking to travel in winter in colder climbs won’t need a block heater anymore. But their chilled battery will shorten their range in unpredictable amounts.
While the sun won’t be available to sustain the grid or your winter travels, wind should be plentiful with those blizzards and fall hurricanes that we all are told are increasing with climate change. The giant solar farms and battery farms will, of course, also come from China. Our recently discovered Lithium deposits in Nevada are off limits—here again “conservation” really means “no future use”. Meanwhile we can cluck disapprovingly at China and India as they build evermore coal-fired and nuclear power plants to feed their own expanding lifestyles and industries as we devolve ours.
Back in Detroit our automotive equalizers that may have done more for American freedoms than any other single industry have, figuratively speaking, missed the boat. Decades ago General Motors ran a live experiment with EVs. Their EVA vehicle, completely electric, was a solid hit with all its users. I say users since the vehicles could only be had for leasing, not owning. They were limited in production, and almost distributed on a lottery basis due to the high interest of early adopters. Then, despite almost universal praise by the users, GM recalled them all and destroyed them, without clear explanation. This despite wide and loud public protests by those that had leased and driven them for many thousands of miles. The technology was apparently shelved until government mandates forced a reluctant industry to search out and dust off their archeologic asset. Why did EVA’s die?
General Motors killed the electric vehicle industry in its infancy for the same reasons they colluded with tire companies to end public transport by bus in many cities (according to urban legend). Selling lots of cars to the increasingly affluent post-WWII generation was more profitable than selling a few buses, and more automobiles meant more tires. As regards EVA’s, we must depend on hearsay. Years ago on a family trip to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, I was struck by the presence of two pristine EVA’s in their collection. I tracked down a silver-haired docent to ask about them, as I was sure all had been recalled and destroyed. He told me that a few were saved with the company’s permission in various collections. We discussed its storied attributes, and he then told me of a conversation he had had years before with a retired GM engineer. That individual said that he personally had driven an EVA for his daily commutes and family life for 85,0000 miles without difficulty. That was the difficulty. It seems that the EVA needed little or no service other than tire changes. GM quickly ascertained that would bankrupt their extensive dealership network, and shelved the project. When the EVA came about, the tradition of a new car every three years was already fading fast, and a dependable vehicle that didn’t need much service would take a huge bite out of dealerships’ thinning profit margins. And so GM’s expertise in practical electric vehicles remained locked away.
The countervailing forces of American self-sufficiency in oil with falling gasoline prices and a rising economy in the twenty-teens were overcome by a longer new governmental folly of climate change. As Barbara Tuchman stated in her 1984 book regarding our government’s misguided efforts in Vietnam, folly is “the pursuit by government of policies contrary to its own interests, whose adverse effects are apparent in real time, with the availability of feasible alternatives. The perpetrators are a group whose leadership spans longer than a generation.” We have been led by virtually the same progressive generation that mired us in the quagmire of Vietnam through the stickier and more deadly defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan into the domestic quicksand of climate change hysteria. Granted, after the more intense equivalent hysteria of Covid, many wiser and more truthful public authorities are beginning to make their voices heard. The true realities of climate change policy they reveal and its adverse effects, over the very long term, will destroy our post-industrial way of life. These same policies will deny the developing world its intrinsic rights of material progress. That has not yet deterred the administrative, unelected state from bypassing Congress in expanding the “rule by regulation” well beyond the rule of law.
Thus our current folly of creating electricity out of thin air and sunlight to fuel a mandated, non-market based fleet of purely electric vehicles. The perpetrators will force through, via regulatory, not legislative, diktats, fully electric trucking, and have dreamy eyes on fully electric trans-oceanic shipping and aircraft. All will travel through the smog produced by other more self-interested nations using fossil and nuclear fuels to power past the American culture. None of the proposed technology required by our government is financially feasible in the private market. Like “affordable housing”, it can only come to fruition via massive government subsidies direct and indirect. Financed by excise fees, carbon taxes (which are intended to be self-extinguishing), and massive increases in government debt, all to be borne by direct costs to our citizenry and the indirect costs of inflation to us and our progeny. Oh, but again, there is the small matter of supportive infrastructure to charge all the new vehicles. And the new delays in transport of all kinds required for repetitive charging. What possible feasible alternative could there be to this folly?
Strangely, once again General Motors, that bastion of greedy capitalist oppressors, was prescient in the fray, but has again ignored their own genius. For many decades ocean-going ships have used diesel-electric drives to move massive cargoes efficiently and somewhat cleanly. Forty-five years ago my wife and I cruised in the Pacific aboard a ship whose engineer (before the security precautions post 9/11) proudly toured us through his engine room, explaining that the ship produced little or no visible smoke from its stacks because the diesels ran at their constant most efficient speed and fuel/air mix, powering the electric generator that actually propelled the ship via electric motors. The result was massively reduced air pollution and markedly improved “nautical miles per gallon”. This same method powers virtually all the railroad freight in the U.S.A. and is recognized as the cheapest way to ship goods because of its fuel efficiency. While diesel-powered electric generator/motors are well suited to move heavy loads commercially given their superior torque and simplicity compared with gasoline engines, their exhausts will require expensive upgrades to maximize their cleanliness. But this is far cheaper and more immediate than transforming all railroads to fully electric, or requiring all truck transport to become fully electric (and for the latter requiring new long delays for recharging).
As noted, GM had already paved this road for passenger vehicles years ago The Chevrolet Volt, a compact passenger car, debuted without fanfare in 2011. Unlike all other hybrids plug-in or otherwise, the Volt is an “extended range electric vehicle”. It has a battery powered electric motor that powers the car till exhausted. Then the gasoline powered motor automatically takes over and runs the generator whose electricity continues to feed the electric motor actually moving the car. This allows, as in the ships and railroad engines noted above, the gasoline motor to run at its most efficient speed and fuel mixture. Throughout its production the Volt had improved battery range and combined mileage. My personal Volt, a 2017 model, gets about 50 miles purely from the battery, and another 350 miles from gasoline/electric power for a total range of 400 miles. Over the last six years, driving the car for work and pleasure with occasional road trips my overall miles per gallon have averaged between 200 to 225 miles per gallon of 87 octane gasoline. And although while employed I knew of and used a few public charging stations for short periods while working, I never had to worry about finding a charger on trips or wait during work or trips for charging. The majority of my charging went on overnight at home via a 110 volt circuit during the lowest tier cost hours. My Volt is, until it dies, the perfect automobile to massively reduce pollution in a highly economic way. And, by the way, its only service needs so far have been oil changes for the little gas engine, a new “regular” `12 volt car battery, and new tires. At those infrequent service calls I have met other Volt owners who are on their second or third version, as dedicated to the vehicle as any EVA user of old. And yet GM has committed the same folly again. The last Volt was produced in 2019. All GM vehicles since are of the regular hybrid variety or purely electric in recognition of our governmental folly. Those new EV’s will continue to be ever more expensive and more dependent on foreign resources.
While pure EVs may be the ultimate goal, after build-out of a standardized infrastructure, how much could be attained by an intermediate generation of extended-range electric passenger vehicles? Superficial data available on the internet indicates the average American automobile gets 20 mpg. Overall there are about 300 million vehicles of all types on the road; let’s guestimate that 250 million are passenger cars. The last estimate for total miles driven that I could find was just over 3.1 trillion miles in 2019; based on its prior rate of rise let’s use a figure of 3.5 trillion miles currently and forego adjusting for non-passenger vehicles. Our spit-ball estimates would calculate out at about 14,000 miles yearly per car which agrees with another figure I found on the web. They would each consume about 700 gallons of varying octane gasoline yearly, overall about 175 million gallons of gasoline for the fleet yearly. Had those automobiles all been Chevy Volts with an average of 200 mpg of lowest cost 87 octane, the total consumption would have been 1.75 million gallons. A roughly 90% savings in fuel costs and fumes. With virtually no time lost to public charging and almost exclusive use of nocturnal, cheaper electricity. Feasible and available in real time, but forgotten.
Our government’s longer term policy goals should be cleaner air, reduced dependency on fossil fuels foreign or domestic, continuity of commerce on its most economic basis, and freedom of its citizenry to own and use private transportation. Their actual policy actions are contrary to these interests. Much of any new wind or solar infrastructure comes from foreign nations whose carbon footprint undoes any immediate or long term climate benefits from our actions. All newly required electric vehicles of all types will continue to use materials from those same foreign fuel fossilemics. Almost all those vehicles will belie Henry Ford’s coda of affordability for the average working person and require partial funding by the populace at large via various government subsidies. Domestic commerce will become vastly more expensive to recover the costs of new technology where useage and competition for same is controlled by government, not the market . New taxes of “time delays”will be applied to all supply chains for the sake of recharging commercial vehicles. Massive areas of open land will be covered with wind turbines and solar farms, and new toxic dumps of giant battery farms and disposal areas will need to be created, all without any definable need for economies of the markets or the public.
These are the massive pyramids our administrative pharaohs foist upon us now. We each, as individuals, can choose to not miss the boat as they and their corporate partners have done. The fee for passage on our ship of state is direct continual involvement in government at all levels. We the people can return our delegated authority and power to our elected officials who truly represent our own interests. The utopian future of this folly’s perpetrators will otherwise cause immense dystopian adversity for us all.