Posted on 09/11/2023 6:41:49 AM PDT by Red Badger
There may come a day when America and Americans are ready for electric vehicles. Today is not that day and it seems like we’re not even close. Nonetheless, the Biden-Harris regime and state-level Democrat tyrants across the country are bent on trying to force us into them, which is why Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm took a PR trip with an NPR reporter in tow.
When they made the decision to invite journalist Camila Domonoske with them on their four-day trip, they didn’t expect the headline to be, “Electric cars have a road trip problem, even for the secretary of energy“.
According to the article:
But between stops, Granholm’s entourage at times had to grapple with the limitations of the present. Like when her caravan of EVs — including a luxury Cadillac Lyriq, a hefty Ford F-150 and an affordable Bolt electric utility vehicle — was planning to fast-charge in Grovetown, a suburb of Augusta, Georgia.
Her advance team realized there weren’t going to be enough plugs to go around. One of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied. So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy.
That did not go down well: a regular gas-powered car blocking the only free spot for a charger?
In fact, a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle — was so upset they decided to get the authorities involved: They called the police.
Clearly, it’s not what NPR was expecting nor what the White House was hoping to happen, but kudos to the radical left-wing state-run outlet for not killing the story.
A family with a baby in the sweltering Georgia heat were victims of White House privilege. It’s truly disgusting that they would be so desperate for positive press that they would cause harm to this family for the sake of good optics. Thankfully, those optics have been upended.
Regular people don’t have advance teams to reserve charging slots for them. But even without the advance team causing problems, this story would have highlighted the idiocy of the green push onto a country that has nowhere near the proper infrastructure for mass adoption of electric vehicles.
As Nick Arama from Red State noted, we may not have even heard about this story if the family hadn’t accelerated their grievance:
Good for the family who wasn’t taking that nonsense and called the police on them. The police couldn’t do much, however, because it’s not illegal to do what the Secretary’s team did. But realizing they had a potential PR nightmare on their hands, they “scrambled to smooth over the situation, including sending other vehicles to slower chargers, until both the frustrated family and the secretary had room to charge.”
Americans need to see how low the White House is willing to go to try to prove EVs are good. They tried to manufacture good optics. Leaving a family with a baby to suffer in the Georgia heat ain’t it, chief.
True that. A great example of how we're already seeing something like that is with natural gas. Obama forced a lot of power companies to shut down some of their coal plants and replace them with "clean burning natural gas" fueled plants. For my power utility that was a cost of over $1 billion passed onto us customers. Then later the Dims said, "Psyche!" and are now pretending natural gas is the bogey man trying to kill us all. They're making natural gas costs skyrocket, which makes our power bills skyrocket (because the power company adds a fuel cost as a rider per kWh). We haven't heard one apology from the Dims over that. Nor are they compensating us for the fact that they make us spend money every time they change their minds.
Bull crap like that is why I decided to go solar, convert my two natural gas appliances to electric, and since it was time to replace my wife's car anyway we replaced it with an EV. My past 12 power bills have averaged $73/month, even though I don't sell power to the grid --- I just pull a lot less power from the grid than I used to even before I went all electric and got an EV. I figured the best way to escape the financial pain of the Dims' stupid energy policies is to produce as much of our own energy I can feasibly do. I wish everybody else was in a situation like that so we could each be more self-reliant.
When it needs to be "recharged" I can do it in about 4 minutes at any one of 30,000 stations nationwide.
I'll walk before I own an EV.
I drove an EV from 2001 through 2015. It was wonderful. It was much quieter than gas powered alternates. I would play 18 holes easy 5 days every week, then park the EV in cart barn for charging. Next morning she was good to go. The batteries were a pack of lead acid batteries, not the fire hazard lithium type. I used distilled water only and the batteries lasted me 12 years before needing replacement. Golf card EV’s are great.
Wait until you find out how much it will cost to replace your dying Lithium battery in EV.
yeah i wish i knew more about stuff like that- converting to electric production i mean- though in our area, we are seldom sunny or windy (except in winter when storms come, then how the winds howl)
Not to mention that these EVs all have remotely activated kill switches.
Love your tag line. Stealing it.
Mine would cost $10K to $12K (hint: it's not an expensive Tesla) in today's prices if it wasn't under warranty. How much will it cost about 10 years from now when I have to replace it? Good question. Inflation makes me think it'll be higher. Or there could be after-market options bringing the cost down.
One thing I do know: last year when we bought the EV we at first were going to replace my wife's old ICE crossover with another used ICE crossover (we were committed to driving nothing but used cars for our entire marriage until this point when we decided to go EV). So how much was a used ICE crossover going to cost? $10K!! And I was replacing them on average every 7 years. How much would the replacement cost 7 years later? I don't want to know. By having one EV and one ICE car, I'll have options when the day comes that the EV's battery needs replacing. We'll decide if it's worth replacing the battery. If not, we'll drive the ICE car for long trips and use the EV only for local driving.
I like having options. The Dims almost always try to tell us we have to pick one or the other (in this case ICE or EV), when in real life our choices often aren't mutually exclusive. By us having both an EV and an ICE we have options to let us optimize how we satisfy our driving needs.
Jenny Grandstand was Governess of Michigan. She came into office with several billion in a rainy day fund. Squandered it in a year or so.
Her policies put Michigan in a full grown depression in 2009 while the rest of America was just in a recession.
In a speech, she looked at the camera and “in five years, you’re going to be Blown Away.”
About two years later, as my family was leaving our home and =moving to another state, thanks to that psycho and her lack of abilities, we had a big sign on the back of our cars that read” Another Michigan Family BLOWN AWAY. Thanks Jenny.”
the climate emergency will be forever
forever!
I have family in the northeast I plan to visit soon. They want to replicate what I did. I’ve already told them I’ll be happy to sit with them and crunch the numbers, but it probably won’t be worth it. However, they live close enough to the east coast to average 8-10mph winds. It may be that a few pico wind turbines (minimum 6 mph wind) would work for them to reduce a portion of their power bill. I doubt it’ll be worth going all-electric, though. Their winters are brutal. It might, however, be worth adding a heat pump rated for low temps as a kind of first step before temps get low enough to have to run the regular furnace. Especially since they don’t have A/C but are getting up in age and probably need some A/C in the summer (a heat pump can both cool in the summer and warm in the winter, though it has a limit on how cold the outside temp can be for it to operate efficiently).
This appears to be a total lack of planning. When you get into flyover country, DC fast chargers can be a little sparse. I live at the crossroads of 2 interstates. Electrify America finally put in 6 350KW chargers at the local Meijer. That is not a lot of chargers to handle non Tesla EVs.
yup- it will never end- no matter which way the wind blows- cold out? Climate change caused by man- hot out? same thing
Imagine the reactions of people in a MAJOR hurricane evacuation................
yep that is where we are- very cold in winter- hardly any wind or sun- we used ot live on coast where we did get wind- but again- sun was kinda rare-
And people that drive to town on football weekends in their EVs.
Thank you for your info about practical experiences. Very interesting.
“”Make sure the places you normally drive to on road trips have good chargers””
And make sure that when you are going to need to plug in, no one else will be using the chargers.
And make sure that all the chargers along your route are fully functional (no vandalism, brownouts, blackouts)
And make sure that no undesirable criminal types are anywhere near the charging stations.
And make sure that fast / super chargers do not damage the battery.
I spent a winter in Norfolk many moons ago. A cold snap came through and everybody with shallow heat pump piping froze their asses off. You didn't mention how old your aging relatives are, but room cooling AC window units can be purchased for a couple of hundred bucks or less.
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