We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars

Business Insider;

Axios reporter Joann Muller said her husband took the electric car on a 1,500 mile road trip — she joined him part-way through — to see if the US is truly ready for mass EV adoption. While electric cars are becoming more prevalent, charging infrastructure isn’t quite what it should be, Muller wrote.

“We were constantly thinking about where to charge next,” Muller wrote of her experience during the trip. “It occupied our minds more than where to eat or spend the night.”

They stopped 12 times to recharge the car, which has an estimated battery range of 274 miles, over the course of the 1,500 mile, four-day journey, and that charging times were between 20 to 55 minutes.[…]

Muller said her husband drove the car alone from Detroit to Washington DC, where they met up to head to Florida. During his solo portion of the trip, he said he was so “anxious” about the drain cold temperatures would have on the battery that he didn’t use the cabin heat, choosing instead to rely on the heated steering wheel and seats.

25 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars”

  1. 1500 miles divided by 12 stops means that they were able to go about 125 miles between charges. My F150 could easily have made that same trip with one stop and I would have cabin heat and I wouldn’t be spending 11 hours refueling and I would have no trouble at the pump with my cash or credit card nor would I have to have some sort of special GPS to tell me where to refuel since there are lots of gas stations along the road.

    1. Will the government solution be to limit gas tank capacity (25 L?) and impose a regulator on gas pumps (1 L / minute)?

    2. But because of a-holes like these,you are paying at least 3 times as much for the fuel,and food for your trip.. And stories like theirs are the norm. Any e-car stories are all the same. Total range anxiety.Screw that.. Like most males, I don’t like shopping. And thats what this is.. A shopping trip that doesn’t end until you have made it home.

  2. Surprised that the self satisfying glow and comfy cloak of moral superiority wasn’t enough to keep them warm.

    Leftists would rather freeze to death rather than admit their moral and intellectual superiority is based on obvious and self evident lies.

  3. “Range anxiety” is worse than worrying about the destruction of the planet, apparently. And it’s not even their fear of the local gun range. I don’t care what brings these lunatics around to rational thought…if this is what does it then I’m fine with it, I just hope they keep writing about it for all their insane zealot friends to read.

  4. So not NEWS. Charge station anxiety is obvious on every EV road trip / tow test video I’ve seen on YouTube. Cold weather range anxiety has been mentioned for years up here in winter-ridden western Canadia. EV is the new word for Constant Anxiety. Own one and experience it.

  5. he didn’t use the cabin heat, choosing instead to rely on the heated steering wheel and seats.

    Those heaters probably use as much or more battery power than the cabin heater.

    Juggling heaters in your EV to battle your own stupidity for buying such a troublesome vehicle.

    1. “Those heaters probably use as much or more battery power than the cabin heater.”

      C’mon…this is a “progressive” we’re talking about here, and they have that new, much better non-racist math.

      Don’t try to distract them from their virtual signaling using loaded terms like “more”.

  6. HaHaHa

    Virtue Signaling GARBAGE for the terminally ignorant. Let them all FREEZE in the dark….Zero F’s given.

  7. I don’t know what your talking about.

    This is real world stuff, it doesn’t count. You know, like masks.

    The best, sciencey stuff, is in the lab. And there are lots (that’s a very, very sciencey term) of lab results that show, in a very, very sciencey way (see, you have to repeat very to get the full sciencey effect) that EVs work.

    And the very, very best results are on computers. You know, models.

    In fact, I don’t know why they even need to test EVs, the models are so good.

    1. With the models so good we should hook up to Elons Neuralink and live in The Matrix , at lest then the ‘ science ™ ‘ will work.
      The ultimate in transhumanism .

  8. The article would have been a lot better if she would have made the first leg of the trip with her husband! The heated arguments about how cold she was riding in the car would have made for a much more exciting article.

  9. With and IC engine, there’s plenty of waste heat from the combustion process for all one’s vehicular heating needs. Think about the conversion inefficiency of using electrical resistance heating in a sparky car. It’s essentially like using an electrical space heater in your home.

    1. Resistance heating is 100% efficient, less charging losses, less transmission losses, and less power generation losses… you’ll have to estimate what those work out to.

      If you run your charger off a power plant that has 32% efficiency, then you are already behind if you believe the EV advocates that claim ICEs give you about 40% efficiency.

      Coal 32 to 42%
      NG 32% to 28%
      NG combined cycle up to 60%
      Hydro 85 to 90%
      WInd 27%
      Solar thermal 20%
      Solar PV 12% on a daily basis
      Geothermal 35%
      Nuclear 38% thermal cycle

    2. It’s actually WORSE than that. Your home electric space heater operates on electricity delivered across transmission lines, and step-down transformers before it hits your heater and makes an oil fluid or metal bits glow with heat. So there are transmission line and transformer losses.

      Your EV heater experiences those same losses but then adds battery storage/transmission, recharge station losses, and Internal EV losses

  10. Range anxiety? They couldn’t think of where to eat or sleep for constant worry about where to charge their car? Don’t be silly. Their eco-car has a GIANT touch screen that provides ALL that information in real time … spoken in a neutral-female robo voice. And it’s all automatic! Surely, no EV driver has to actually be bothered with such a mundane, blue collar, task as to decide where and when to refuel? EV drivers were promised their automobile would handle every mundane task, such as turning the steering wheel, applying the brakes … and when to stop for a nice hour-long masturbation sess. … every 125 miles

  11. The one-day road trip becomes the one-week nightmare. Even if there were sufficient charging stations, the time required to recharge is a minimum ten times greater than refuelling.

  12. jd: No, the energy used to heat your interior is waste heat already produced by the combustion that would be exhausted through your front radiator, if it wasn’t directed to your cabin. In that sense, it is almost 100% efficient, in that you get the heat for free and the only energy draw is the pump to move it around from the engine casing to your interior rad.

    It seems to me a clever entrepeneur up here in the Great White North might find a way to fit a propane cylinder and heater under the hood of your EV, and pump that heat into the interior. Probably be illegal though.

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