Electric car

Everyone should know how I feel about electric cars, they are tits, and gay at the same time.

Shai Agassi’s company, Better Place, for example, has generated glowing magazine profiles, but it has managed to lose more than $500 million while selling astoundingly few cars. He stepped down as the chief executive, and his replacement lasted only a few months. It turns out that the things that are sexy to politicians and paradigm-shifting to conference audiences are not necessarily attractive to consumers.

As I blogged earlier another gay car company bled $100M off of the back of some bad reviews.

From proper cars to gay cars now.

It is certainly no secret that I hate electric cars and the sanctimonious creeps that drive them. Now people are starting to wake up to the dirty little secrets these gay cars have:

Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of “zero emissions,” and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars’ limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it’s truly green, right? Not really.

For proponents such as the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, the main argument is that their electric cars—whether it’s a $100,000 Fisker Karma (Mr. DiCaprio’s ride) or a $28,000 Nissan Leaf—don’t contribute to global warming. And, sure, electric cars don’t emit carbon-dioxide on the road. But the energy used for their manufacture and continual battery charges certainly does—far more than most people realize.

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.  Read more »

I fail to see why standing around for hours waiting for a charge is desirable. While there are three fifths of five eights of stuff all electric cars driven by smug people it is all fine and dandy, but as soon as you have to start queuing for a charge it will be the death of them.

Then of course there is the simple fact that they won’t solve suburban transport issues at all, in fact they will make them worse:

Electric vehicles have been touted as the dream technology to solve our suburban transport challenges and rescue us from oil dependence and environmental threats. Yet technology use occurs in a social context. Almost no discussion of electric vehicles has addressed the uneven suburban social patterns among which electric vehicles might be adopted.

The evidence that my colleagues Neil Sipe, Terry Li and I have assembled suggests the socio-economic structure of Australian suburbia, in combination with the distribution of public transport infrastructure, constitutes a major barrier to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, especially among the most car-dependent households.

Relying on electric vehicles as a solution to energy and environmental problems may perpetuate suburban social disadvantage in a period of economic and resource insecurity.

The people most affected by poor transport options would be even more affected by a transition to gay electric cars.

It makes sense that households who are most car dependent and least able to afford higher fuel prices would be the most eager to switch to an electric car. But, it turns out, the social structure of Australian suburbia means these groups are poorly placed to lead such a transition.

In our study of Brisbane we created datasets linking vehicle fuel efficiency with household socio-economic status. In our analysis, high vehicle fuel efficiency, including hybrids, serves as a proxy for future electric vehicles. We linked motor vehicle registration data with the Green Vehicle dataset on fuel efficiency, plus travel and socio-economic data from the ABS Census.

Our analysis builds a rich picture of how the spatial distribution of vehicle efficiency intersects with suburban socio-spatial patterns, using Brisbane and Sydney as case studies.

We found that the average commuting distance increases with distance from the CBD while average fuel efficiency of vehicles declines. So outer suburban residents travel further, in less efficient vehicles, than more centrally situated households. Outer suburban residents are also likely to be on relatively lower incomes than those closer in.

The result is those living in the outer suburbs have relatively weaker socio-economic status but are paying more for transport. For example, one-third of the most disadvantaged suburbs in greater Brisbane also have the most energy-intensive motor vehicle use.

A socially equitable transition to highly fuel efficient or electric vehicles ought to favour those with the highest current exposure to high fuel prices. Yet our research finds it’s not likely to happen.

What a dilemma for the green taliban, who are in reality a bunch of socialists. They insist on moving to electric this and electric that, but in doing so isolate and perpetuate the poverty trap, which of course would lead them to claiming the poor need subsidised cars…and on it would go.

I make no secret of the fact I hate electric cars, and hybrids. Sanctimonious green taliban type full of smug drive them….they are like minis..taking up way more space on the road than they deserve. The only thing worse on the road are cyclists.

Robert Tracinski thinks they are abomination…and I agree with him.

Electric cars never really made any sense. They are cloaked in the sanctimony of the green movement, because they don’t use nasty fossil fuels like gasoline. Instead, they use electricity, which is sent out through power lines from big power plants, which generate this electricity—how? Oh yes, by burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. This is known as the “long tailpipe,” which goes from the car charging up in your garage all the way back to the smokestack of a coal-fired power plant. And don’t forget, electric cars also have giant batteries made from nasty toxic metals like lithium and cobalt, the manufacture of which frontloads carbon dioxide emissions.

So the electric car was always more an exercise in green paternalism—it is the future, as selected for us by our betters—than a serious attempt to solve any real or imagined problem.

What makes even less sense is the stupidly ridiculous time ti takes to charge the stupid things. What are you supposed to do while it charges…sit there and smugly tell other smug pricks around you just how smug and cool you all are.

Then there was the fuss over the failed Tesla test drive and the social media disaster that befell Tesla:

The folks at Tesla, flunking Public Relations 101, decided that they would respond to this bad review by drawing a lot of attention to it. Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed the review was a fraud based on data taken from the car’s internal logs. Tesla had an unhappy experience with a segment on the British automobile program “Top Gear” that they claimed was misleading. (I am shocked, shocked to discover that Jeremy Clarkson could play fast and loose with the facts.) Ever since, Tesla switches on a monitor whenever they loan one of their cars out to the press. So they claim the Times reviewer purposely drove the car in a way that ran down the battery and then deliberately lied about the results.

Musk’s rebuttal is less than convincing. He brays that the reviewer was lying when he said that he had to drive at 45 miles per hour—and points to logs showing Broder driving at about 50 miles per hour. Similarly, he declares that Broder turned up the heater to 74 degrees at the very point he supposedly had to turn it off—but the graph he uses to verify this shows that Broder did turn the heater way down a few minutes later. In other words, Musk is seizing on technicalities, while the data he presents more or less verifies Broder’s account.

I’m all for never trusting the ink-stained wretches of the press. But if you read through Musk’s argument, the real heart of it is that Broder took too many detours between charging stations and didn’t wait long enough at the stations for his battery to take on a full charge. In other words: the car is OK, it’s just that you drove it wrong. Excuse me? Is Tesla really marketing a product which relies on the consumer to coddle it to get it to perform just right?

More smug.

[S]ince when is driving a car supposed to be so complicated? The whole point of technology is to use the machine’s energy and yes, to burn up natural resources, in order to save human effort. The machines are supposed to work for us; we don’t work for them. This is especially true of the automobile, which is all about freedom, independence, going out on the open road and deciding on the spur of the moment where you want to go—not about filing a flight plan and having technicians talk you through your trip.

I understand that the first round of a new technology doesn’t always work well and early adopters may have to make tradeoffs and accept limitations. But the Tesla is supposed to be the electric car withouttradeoffs. This is supposed to be a mass-market car, the first wave of electric vehicles that can be manufactured and sold in truly industrial-scale quantities. It’s not supposed to be for hobbyists who don’t mind tinkering around with an experimental vehicle for the sake of technology curiosity.

But the folks at Tesla have gotten swept up in the quasi-religious hype of environmentalism. They’re not just manufacturing a curiosity for hobbyists. They’re saving the planet, one preening and sanctimonious upper-middle-class driver at a time.

Smug, smug, smug…I agree with Tracinski, the electric car is an abomination.

A reader emails about my post earlier on Tesla electric cars:

I have a friend in Germany who has a Tesla.

It is bright yellow, not green, and unbelievably fast.  Read more »

Russel Norman and the rest of the Green taliban constantly bang on about “green jobs” and “green tech and other such weasel descriptors. What they really are is way to waste money on green shit:

You should know Fisker because you have helped to finance the Anaheim, Calif., company that makes — well, has made a few — electric cars. Its only model, the Karma — really; Obama administration green investments are beyond satire — costs $110,000. Your subsidy helped Justin Bieber, the fabulously rich Canadian teenager (he sings), buy one. No one ever said saving the planet one electric car at a time would be easy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that despite Fisker’s $192 million in Energy Department loans, the Karma “has been hobbled by recalls and quality problems” and the company has sacked half its employees. But perhaps Fisker’s biggest problem is that its source of batteries, A123 Systems, has gone bankrupt in spite of its $249 million Energy Department grant. The administration that in the fiscal cliff drama is demanding control of much more of the nation’s wealth is the author of many Solyndra-style debacles.

Wonder no more. Electric cars are a useless expensive waste of resources:

U.S. federal policies to promote electric vehicles will cost $7.5 billion through 2019 and have “little to no impact” on overall national gasoline consumption over the next several years, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report issued on Thursday.

Consumer tax credits for buying electric vehicles, which can run as high as $7,500 per vehicle, will account for about 25 percent of the $7.5 billion cost, the CBO said.

The rest of the cost comprises of $2.4 billion in grants to battery makers and projects to promote electric vehicles as well as $3.1 billion in loans to auto companies designed to spur production of fuel-efficient vehicles.

Many of these initiatives were initiated in 2009 under President Barack Obama, but the loan program was authorized in 2007 under the Bush administration.

Producing all-electric cars and plug-in hybrids is part of the auto industry’s solution to reach increasingly stringent fuel economy standards designed to cut emissions and lessen the United States’ dependence on oil.

U.S. government standards mandate that by 2025, automakers to show corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) of 54.5 miles per gallon or about 39 miles per gallon in real world driving.

The tax credits will increase sales of EVs, hybrids and more fuel-efficient gas-powered models and help boost the average fuel economy of automakers’ fleets, the CBO said. The federal tax credits apply to the first 200,000 electric vehicles sold by each manufacturer.

But these sales will leave room for automakers to continue to sell models with low fuel economy, the CBO said.

“The more electric and other high-fuel-economy vehicles that are sold because of the tax credits, the more low-fuel-economy vehicles that automakers can sell and still meet the standards,” according to the report.

As a result, tax credits will have “little or no impact on the total gasoline use and greenhouse gas emissions of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next several years.”

ᔥ Your Local Guardian

One thing green loons know how to do really, really well is waste taxpayer or ratepayer money:

An electric car charging point that cost £6,018 to install has been used for just five hours since it was first installed in 2009.

The charging point in Putney Leisure Centre car park, Dryburgh Road, Putney, was created to allow drivers to use more environmentally friendly electric cars.

In Mapleton Road, Wandsworth, a charging point installed in 2008 has racked up 74 hours, 54 minutes since it was installed at a cost of £5,500.

There are a total of five electric car charging points in the borough, with others in Spencer Park, Wandsworth Common, St John’s Avenue in Putney and Coverton Road, Tooting, which were  installed in June this year.

ᔥ Sydney Morning Herald

This is the question Nissan is really asking….Are you an idiot?

Some customers have “failed” a Nissan test to see if they were suitable for the new Leaf electric car.

Nissan has knocked back some customers interested in purchasing its first electric car, the Leaf, because they have been deemed “unsuitable” for ownership.

The plug-in electric vehicle officially hits the market on June 1, but interested customers need to pass a two-stage approval test before being issued with a certificate that will allow them to purchase the $51,500 car from one of Nissan’s special EV dealerships.

The test involves answering five questions about their intended usage for the car, followed by a visit from Nissan’s electrical supplier Origin Energy for an assessment of the suitability of the customer’s home electrical network.

Electric cars suck, and American’s hate them and don’t want them, so says Joel Johnson:

Electric cars are terrible. They just are. They’re a solution for a problem we don’t have. Or rather, they’re a solution for a problem we aren’t about to change: our sprawling, big-ass cities filled with things we can’t afford to buy yet must haul around. (Like kids.)

Modern electric cars make about as much sense as rooftop airports. They’re fairy tickets to a more-or-less inevitable future that hasn’t actually arrived. For most of the American market, the only advantage electric cars offer over gasoline-powered vehicles is the permission to daydream about a time when their decision to drive in the first place doesn’t hurt the environment.

Even auto executives agree with me (as much as it pains me to say so): two-thirds of a couple hundred auto executives think electrics and hybrids combinedwon’t make a dent in the market until 2025.

Not just American’s think they suck, I do too.

You can abstract almost every discussion of energy down to raw power. And you should. There is a finite amount of condensed sunlight on this planet and a finite amount of raw materials. In 2010 the United States still made 83% of our energy from fossil fuels—much of which we burnt to generate the electricity that was sloppily sent down a creaking, inefficient power grid to fill up the batteries of our electric cars. Batteries which we made by expending more energy to pull lithium, copper, and aluminum out of the ground.

It’s not that I think electric cars are doomed forever. It’s inevitable that in another couple of decades, their range will increase as battery capacity improves. Maybe by then battery capacity will approach the astoundingly high energy density of gasoline. There’s simply too much money being poured into battery research to stop innovation. (Even if it will just as likely come from companies focusing on making a better iPad battery: car battery companies are approaching market saturation in the current economy.) Plus, if China’s any example, solar should be as cheap as coal in another five or ten years. At that point, the hazy sky’s the limit.

But today, right now, in the middle of a terrible recession and a miasmatic material hangover from decades of unchecked consumption, I can’t look someone in the eye who’s about to buy their first car and say, “Look, buy this electric vehicle. It’s not very fun. It’s not what you want. You can’t really haul anything. It’s very likely not any better for the environment. But it is very, very quiet. Especially for the hours and hours it takes to charge.”