The Democrats are doing everything they can to get Americans into electric cars.  However, those cars come with the risk of a serious loss of power — not just for the car, but for those who buy those cars.

We have to begin with asking, why is the governing pushing electric vehicles?  And it's not just cars; it's also trucks.  Why are they ignoring hybrid vehicles?  If something happens to the electric guts of a properly designed hybrid car, the vehicle can limp along with its smaller gas engine until it reaches safety.  What happens to a fully electric vehicle if its electrical system fails?  Nothing, of course!  You're stuck.  All you have is a hunk of metal and plastic.  And if you run out of electricity while driving, you can't just get a gallon gas can to fill the tank until you get to the nearest service station.  Again, you're stuck.

The next question is, "Are electric cars cheaper than gas cars?"  No, they cannot be cheaper, and that's even if you run them on renewables.  Take solar energy, for example.  Even if sunlight is free, the laws of thermodynamics still control.

Every time energy changes form, there is a loss factor.  Sunlight impinging on solar cells changes only 14–47% of the energy to electricity.  The forty-seven percent figure is state-of-the-art, so it is not available for everyday use.

Electricity is then stored in chemical-based car batteries (with a loss).  And then chemical energy is reconverted back to electricity (with a loss) and finally to mechanical energy, where the tire rubber meets the road (with a loss).  At a guess, not more than 5% of the original sun power turns the wheels of an E.V.  That's awful.  What this means is that it is more efficient to run a gas-powered vehicle.

You can do similar analyses with other renewables, whether wind or water power.  They simply aren't efficient.

Image: Broken down Tesla outside Berlin.  Photo by Ralf Roletschek / roletschek.at.

Moreover, renewables are available intermittently (when the sun shines, the wind blows, or the water flows).  Because we want to drive when those power sources aren't immediately available, we will have to store excess sunlight in chemicals or in other ways, always remembering that storage and later reconversion is never free.  And we will always have to maintain fossil fuel backup plants in case of renewables' failure.

This energy loss is not a secret.  Smart people know about energy losses.  Why, then, do so many favor a less efficient mode of transportation?

This analysis begins by recognizing that these smart people are fully aware of the above two points — namely, that fully electric vehicles are a riskier transport system compared to hybrids, and renewable power is a less efficient use of limited energy resources than gasoline.

Given this information, it is time for our conspiracy theory.  By favoring a transportation system that can fail at a single point, we confer upon those in power the ability to shut down an entire civilization.  And even if they don't completely shut it down, the price of electricity will be centrally controlled, allowing a chokehold on all the people all the time.

Redundancy is more expensive than efficiency, but redundancy at least leaves options.  With our advanced understanding of complex systems today, no engineer would knowingly structure a system where failure at a single point makes everything inoperative for the foreseeable future.  One broken gear in a clock makes it useless for its purpose, but we can buy another clock.  Remaking a resilient transportation system is a herculean task.

The proper conclusion here is that society, meaning each and every one of us, should fight like hell before we allow such catastrophic vulnerabilities to be built into our future.  One EMP explosion will eliminate most of the affected population within six months — and it won't be pleasant.  Starvation is a particularly nasty way to end our days.  And all the time we are starving to death, we'll have time to think how stupid we were to allow such things to be done to us.

Why would anyone trust the government to look after our welfare?  Just don't do it.  Just don't allow it!  Just say no to E.V.s!  Long live carburetors!

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