Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
Electric vehicles are great, unless you want to go someplace in a hurry like, you know, the emergency room or maybe take an evacuation route while looking in your rearview mirror at a wildfire, flood, or tornado.
They’re also terrific, unless you want to take a road trip to a wilderness area, a national park, mountain range, desert, a hunting or fishing preserve or drive through Nevada.
In California if you going to go into labor or get appendicitis don’t do those things between 4 pm and 9 pm because that’s when the state’s grid operators issued warnings to avoid charging your electric vehicle. Schedule all personal emergencies outside of those times please because the state is running short of electricity.
California Democrats, for all their efforts to make electric vehicles the only viable option for transportation, aren’t addressing these issues. Instead, they’re saying these vehicles are the solution to global warming, climate change, and vehicle emission. But that’s just stupid.
While touting the environmental impact of these vehicles the orange-haired, “green” fanatics and climate alarmists with bolts in their noses who live with five cats in their parents’ basements, and drive mom’s Tesla ignore a variety of issues such as the effects of electric cars on the power grid, their material intensive nature, and the environmental impacts of battery waste. Oh, EVs also have a tendency to unexpectedly blow up and inconveniently burst into flames when wet.
And it’s not just these bothersome issues that are keeping mainstream consumers away from EVs, but also their practicality and astronomical prices. Hotcars reports that 69 percent of American consumers would rather not buy an electrical vehicle.
The EV movement is running on fumes. It needs a superannuated nerd to breathe life into its crusade, the way the Covid drumbeaters used Dr. Fauci, who became the archetype of masks, questionable vaccines, and unwarranted business and school lockdowns until a wised-up public yanked away the raspy-voiced little weasel’s curtain.
They need a re-energized Reddy Kilowatt….a dancing sparkie, maybe a gay cross dresser like the ones they drag (pun intended) in to read to your elementary school kids then dare you to criticize because they’ll label you a homophobe.
Much to the green freaks’ chagrin, gasoline and diesel are undisputed winners when natural disasters whack the electricity grid.
Many of the evacuation roads are through remote areas and the countryside, and few of them have charging stations. And even if the evacuation road takes you on the highway, expect to get stranded because of traffic jams.
Last year , CNBC established that “the U.S. EV charging network isn’t ready for your family road trip.” Kristina Swallow, the Director of the Nevada Department of Transportation, said in a letter to the Federal Highway Administration that “there are a lot of areas in the American West, including Nevada, that do not have any type of electrical service.”
When Hurricane Ian hit Florida, many people stayed put, believing that their neighborhoods were secure. However, after the hurricane made landfall, they recognized that it would have been safer to leave. At this point, it was too late to evacuate because of power outages. Families could no longer charge their electric vehicles and were stuck.
CNBC, for example, pointed out that it takes “about 45 minutes to fully charge an EV, sometimes longer.” By contrast, filling your tank with gas takes just a few minutes. If you live in California, which will ban gas-powered gas car sales by 2035, you’re in deep doo-doo as the University of California at Davis estimates that state alone will need 1.9 million charging stations to accommodate the influx of mandated electric cars. Good luck. Oh, and if you’re driving an EV try and plan your escape route by avoiding Nevada.
And unless it’s a hybrid folks can’t lug cans of electricity in the trunks of their cars like they can with gas or diesel fuel.
There are also several other risks associated with having an EV during a disaster that have gone unnoticed until now.
Some Florida homes that escaped Ian faced a new danger: electric vehicles catching fire due to their batteries being corroded by the floods.
Florida State Rep. Bob Rommel and state Fire Marshal Jim Patronis were particularly vocal about the threat of EV fires in the aftermath of Ian.
Rommel described a house that had managed to outlast the hurricane but couldn’t survive the EV fire that later started in the garage.
“On October 6th, I joined North Collier Fire Rescue to assess response activities related to Hurricane Ian and saw with my own eyes an EV continuously ignite, and continually reignite, as fireteams doused the vehicle with tens-of-thousands of gallons of water,” Patronis wrote.
“Subsequently, I was informed by the fire department that the vehicle, once again reignited when it was loaded onto the tow truck. Based on my conversations with area firefighters, this is not an isolated incident. As you can appreciate, I am very concerned that we may have a ticking time bomb on our hands.”
Traditional means of stopping the fire, like dousing it in water, are often insufficient to put out the flames because the battery packs are hard to reach and retain enough heat to reignite over and over again as soon as the water stops flowing. In 2019, it was reported that firefighters in the Netherlands were forced to submerge a BMW i8 in a tank of water for 24 hours due to a particularly persistent battery fire.
Since the current fleet of EVs obtain their electricity from coal and gas and get their battery materials from mines in impoverished African countries and China it’s understandable why folks are less than enthusiastic.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Director of Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, put the belief that electric vehicles will save America to rest saying: “American consumers are being asked to pay higher prices for electric vehicles — which depend on higher prices for less-dependable electricity that may not be available during peak demand or in the aftermath of wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes. This is not a resilient, prosperous future.”
DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW
Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!
- Thinking of buying an EV? Maybe it’s time to think again - March 30, 2024
- You might be a Democrat if… - March 1, 2024
- It’s time to take the schools back - February 9, 2024
Comment
We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.
BPR INSIDER COMMENTS
Scroll down for non-member comments or join our insider conversations by becoming a member. We'd love to have you!
