EVs Are a Green Illusion
The process to manufacture electric vehicles is so environmentally toxic between the mining and assembly that it takes years of driving before emissions are reduced. …
Even then, the American power grid used to charge the car still relies primarily on fossil fuels. In other words, the car runs on coal. …
EVs Aren’t Cheap
The average transaction price for an electric car in September was $65,291, according to Kelley Blue Book, just $1,000 shy of the average luxury car. …
EV Subsidies Are Gifts to the Rich
The dubiously named Inflation Reduction Act extended up to $7,500 in federal subsidies for the purchase of an electric car. That only brings the price down to $58,000. …
Researchers at UC-Berkeley found in 2016 that “clean” energy tax credits have historically benefitted the upper class, with 90 percent of all credits on electric vehicles enjoyed by those in the top income quintile. …
EVs Are Vulnerable to Global Supply Chains
More problems with electric vehicles pertain to problems with American mining. China holds the world hostage when it comes to mineral refinement and battery production. Beijing presides over half the global electric car battery market while the U.S. lags behind and continues to shut down major mining projects.
EVs Aren’t Reliable
… drivers will be at the mercy of state regulators to travel once residents are prohibited from buying whatever car they want.
If residents can still charge their vehicles produced by China, they had better hope their batteries last. Replacing an electric car battery can cost between $4,000 and $20,000. The weight of the batteries, meanwhile, wears out the tires 20 percent faster than gas-powered alternatives.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/94857-in-brief-five-reasons-evs-are-a-boondoggle-2023-02-10
Electrically powered vehicles CAN be done right.
But NOT by using battery arrays as the storage medium for the energy needed for propulsion.
Two proposals, one of which is to make the fuel cell technology for hydrogen abundantly available. This can be done by making the production of hydrogen economically feasible, and one way to do that is to make the generation of vast amounts of electricity both cheap and abundant. For this, the use of nuclear atomic reactors is the quickest and currently most efficient way to accomplish this goal.
But not your grandfather’s uranium-fueled Light Water Reactor design, but newer, and much more sophisticated, very small nuclear reactors, which are safer, take up a lot less of a footprint for installation, and come in modular units that can be mass-produced on an assembly line, and hauled to the site on rail transport or semi-trailers. Because of its modular design, the plant can be up and running in WEEKS, not years, and because of the modular design, can be built in several different stages, as the increase of demand calls for expansion. These small reactors can run flat-out 24/7/365 for up to eight years, before the reactor module is pulled out, returned to the manufacturing facility, reloaded with a fresh charge of nuclear fuel, and put back in service.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-smrs
A second option is to mount the very small nuclear reactor directly on the vehicle, and use its heat output to drive a Stirling cycle heat engine to drive an on-board generation system that provides the electricity to propel the vehicle.
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/stirling-engine.htm
Nuclear power is not the only source of heat energy, as it only has to be a point source of heat, be it it a wood-burning stove, a propane flame, or even a compressed natural-gas burner. These fuels would be relatively cheap, widely available, and the conversion of heat into energy is far more efficient that any internal-combustion engine.
All done without reliance on battery arrays that may require some very exotic materials and sophisticated methods of manufacture to make them environmentally safe and of a decent lifetime expectation.