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To: FarCenter

I absolutely despise the concept of electric cars. Bikes however seem to have a purpose. A couple months ago I was in San Antonio for ten days for work. Having hurt my foot, I wasn’t looking forward to a lot of walking and used Bird scooters a lot.

They were handy and remarkably quick and nimble.


11 posted on 05/18/2023 5:20:48 AM PDT by cyclotic
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To: cyclotic
I'm with you on electric bikes having a place in the U.S. in some situations. However, for regular use (as in buy one vs renting the scooter for a day as you did), I believe San Antonio would be miserable on a bike more than 30 minutes in the summer for regular commutes. That's not an electric bike vs gas bike thing. That's a bike vs car thing. Especially if you want to arrive at your destination without being a sweaty mess.

Near Birmingham, AL (almost as hot as San Antonio) our EV car works great for us. Part of that is because my wife is retired and I work home a lot (thus our solar power often charges the EV in the day for free on many days). Another thing, and this is a situation Birmingham might be better than San Antonio at: most of our road trips have good chargers in almost any direction we travel. However, if I lived in San Antonio I believe there's a large absence of chargers for road trips west of there, thus all of those trips would require driving our ICE pickup. That's okay for a few trips -- one reason we have only one EV is because the ICE picks up the slack for when EV's aren't good. However, if I was in a situation where the ICE pickup had to often pick up the slack for the EV, it wouldn't be worth getting the EV. Our purposes for the EV are: 1) to save a lot on gas by doing most of our driving in it, and 2) give us some level of energy independence at least in our local driving and first few hundred miles of a road trip (I can provide power for an EV with my own solar, but I can't drill and refine my own oil to make gas for my ICE). I do that in recognition of the Dims tightening the screws on energy more and more to control us, mainly for now with financial pressures by increasing energy costs. I wouldn't be surprised if soon the Dims require a mark of the beat type permission pass for energy.

So it depends entirely on one's demands for cars. In other words, like everything else, EV's are a good reason to push for free markets instead of government policies making decisions for us.

29 posted on 05/18/2023 6:34:00 AM PDT by Tell It Right (1st Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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