Electric Vehicles: The New Horse And Buggy

One of the marvels of White civilization that we take for granted is how easily one can travel enormous distances in a relatively short amount of time. I am not talking about air travel, that is a whole different beast also resulting from White ingenuity, but rather travel by car. 

For example, if I wanted to hop in the car and go see Big Country Expat in Florida I could get there is just over 16 hours, travelling a little over 1,100 miles. Let’s call it 17.5 hours to account for stopping for gas. That means that every hour I would go 62 miles. Back in the pioneer days, going 15 miles via covered wagon in a day was a solid day so I can basically cover the equivalent of four days of wagon travel every hour. For contrast, for me to walk to nearby Toledo, Ohio would take over a day on non-stop walking while I can drive it in about an hour and a half. Riding a bike, something I haven’t done since the 1980s, would take around 7 hours.

Automobiles, cheap gas, the intricate highway system and our travel infrastructure which includes gas stations every few miles on most highways make travelling across our nation a breeze. With a credit card and a reliable vehicle you can go anywhere in the continental U.S. of A in just a few days, even from Bangor, Maine to San Diego in just 48 hours of driving. Add in a built in GPS included with most phones and if you give me an address, I can hop in the car and land right at that doorstep with no preparation. 

No one really thinks about it. It just is, just as we rarely think about having unlimited potable water coming from the tap or unlimited electricity (except in California) when we flip a switch. Getting to that point where amazing conveniences are something we don’t even notice took centuries of innovation and hard work.

Undoing all of that innovation and hard work is taking a lot less time. As Spock said in the Wrath of Khan:

Allow me to pivot to one of my favorite topics, the Amish. Of all the quirky things about the Amish, the one that stands out is that they don’t drive cars. That doesn’t mean that they don’t ride in cars, they do so a lot and that pays my bills. Refusing the actual act of driving the car is the big difference. While it doesn’t seem to make sense, there is a reason for the prohibition on cars. As pointed out above, cars allow us to travel long distances very quickly, but also very short distances at the spur of the moment as well. If I want to go to the bank or a dollar store to get milk, I can hop in one of our cars and get there in just a few minutes. 

But if you are Amish? You have to get out your buggy, then get out the harnesses and the really fun part, you need to catch your horse if it is anywhere but tied or in a box stall. Say what you will about cars, I generally don’t have to spend 15 minutes trying to lure it close enough to grab it. Once you have the horse, you need to put on the bridle, the harness, hook it all up to the buggy and then….tear down the road at under 10 mph. In short, you have to really need to go somewhere to hitch up a horse. 

It is part of their lifestyle that is slower paced and focused on the home and the local community. A horse and buggy limits how far from home you can go and how quickly you can get there. Families tend to cluster together so married daughters can get home to see their mom more readily. In our local community it is already over 20 miles from the extreme ends of the settlement and that is about too far for a horse to go. Some of the young adults who are “running around” (aka rumspringa) will go halfway, stop at a family member’s house to switch to a fresh horse and then keep going but 20 miles by horse and buggy is almost a two hour trip, each way. Unless you get a driver, you are pretty limited in how far you can travel. This is by design. 

Now look at electric cars. 

The electric vehicle (EV) scam is ostensibly about “saving the environment”, a phrase used almost exclusively by people that haven’t been outside since the early 2000s. It is always the case that what They say is the opposite of what you are supposed to believe. The “Patriot” act was the opposite of patriotic, etc. 

Given all of the issues with EVs, from the issue of getting rare earth elements to disposing of old batteries to generating the electricity to power them, it is clear that the “environment” isn’t one of the factors behind the push to transition to EVs (see John Wilder’s excellent post: The One Where I Prove Electric Cars Are A Lie where he dismembers the EV myth like Jeffrey Dahmer).

What is the point then, why this insane move to get us away from the internal combustion engine that has made life so much easier for almost everyone in the world, and pushing us to EVs that don’t really do anything to “save the environment”? The answer is one word and it is the same word that explains almost everything They are doing:

Control

With an internal combustion engine, They have some control over you but not that much. Sure you have to pay for license plates and you pay tax on your gasoline and have to obey the traffic laws (some of the time) but like I said nothing stops me from jumping in my car and running to Cleveland, other than no one wanting to go to Cleveland. From here to Cleveland I would pass hundreds and hundreds of gas stations and even filling up my huge van with 28 gallons of gas only takes around 10 minutes. That means that for every 400 miles I go I have to stop for 15 minutes if I take a leak or grab a coffee.

What about an electric vehicle? 

Tesla claims that the Model S will travel nearly 400 miles on a full charge.

I assume that is with a brand new battery. As anyone with electronic devices knows, battery performance degrades pretty significantly very quickly so I really doubt it maintains that range for very long. But that sounds not so bad, although I wondered: how long does it take to “fill ‘er up”?

According to Tesla, you can charge at up to 44 miles per hour at most charging stations. The “up to” is critical because that tells me it probably isn’t even close to that in real life with a year old battery. Or you can use one of Tesla’s “superchargers” that allegedly charge “up to” 200 miles in 15 minutes. 

What I also don’t know: How much does it cost to recharge your Tesla to full capacity? 

So while I can fill up my giant 15 passenger van with enough gas to go 400 miles in 10-15 minutes, under the best of circumstances it will take you half an hour to do the same with a Tesla. A minor inconvenience perhaps but still on a long trip that adds up, again assuming it actually goes 400 miles on a full charge and only take half an hour to charge to 100%. Maybe the Tesla S is the way to go, if you can get by with a sedan…

Geez, only one hundred grand for a sedan? What a bargain! Maybe I will buy three. 

Let’s look at something the little people can afford, like a Nissan Leaf. That will only set you back around $28 thousand.

That is a significant drop-off in range. “Up to” 200 miles isn’t going very far and it sounds like while you can use Tesla superchargers, they don’t charge as fast on non-Tesla EVs. 

Of course the more “connected” your vehicle, the easier it is for it to be turned off by Them. 

My point being that this whole thing seems to be mostly about pushing people into vehicles that can’t travel very far and are a pain in the ass to recharge, not to mention that a replacement battery is hugely expensive so when they wear out, you have a vehicle with almost no resale value. Or better yet, forcing people to cram into cities to use public transportation as they flat out cannot afford any private transportation. 

This is something I frequently bring up, the idea of forcing rural Americans to move into the cities where they can be monitored, controlled and become reliant on government services. De-ruralfication has been a major push of the Chinese Communists, getting peasants and farmers out of the countryside and into virtual slavery making widgets for American consumers, working by the hundreds of millions for a pittance while a small Chinese oligarchy becomes insanely wealthy. 

What the Amish do for religious and cultural reasons, eschewing driving cars, is being done for far more malevolent reasons in America. People being mobile and somewhat independent isn’t helpful for Their plans, but forcing people to move into cities where they can be monitored and controlled certainly is. EVs are not “saving the environment” but they are creating leashes to keep people tethered to population centers. 

It would be smart to invest in the purchase and maintenance of a reliable older vehicle. Just in case you don’t have access to a horse and buggy….

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