by John F. Di Leo, American Thinker:
Wherever we drive nowadays, we see electric vehicles (EVs) amid the normal internal combustion cars and hybrids.
Maybe one in ten, maybe one in twenty, maybe one in a hundred. It all depends on where we live and where we go.
They are no longer the noticeable rarity they were just a few years ago; you no longer turn your head in surprise when you see that Tesla logo beside you.
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The modern Left has a dream – that soon, very soon, every vehicle in the world will be electric, running on a heavy, cobalt-laden, lithium battery that needs to be charged up somewhere with electricity derived from an out-of-sight coal plant.
Every few trips, we old-fashioned ICE-drivers stop at a gas station for a quick fill-up. It takes two or three minutes, maybe five or six if we need to go into the store for a soda or a coffee; then we’re back on the road.
We rarely see the EVs charging up while we fill our normal cars with fuel. It takes too long, so they don’t usually do it at the gas station.
The EV’s current average, we are told, is eight hours to a “full charge,” whatever that means. It might be a couple hundred miles, maybe less, maybe more. Some chargers charge faster, some vehicles take longer. If it’s like any other kind of rechargeable battery (and they’re too new to be sure, but it makes sense), then as each battery ages, it will take longer and longer to charge up, and the mileage per charge will slowly decrease. That’s just how batteries work.
The EV advocates are legion. You see them in politics and newsmedia, at work and at school, singing the praises of their clean cars that never break down and meet all their needs perfectly.
Having installed a charging station at home, and/or working at a job that has a charging station just for them, their day-to-day lives are perfectly convenient. The challenge of the daily routine, in which we have to seek out an affordable gas station in the age of Joe Biden’s daily attacks on the oil industry, has been completely conquered.
Park the car and plug it in, and it’s fully charged for another normal day.
But… what about days that aren’t normal?
It’s summertime… for most of us, an exception to the routine. Let’s study a few typical summer days for a typical American family.
Many of us – hundreds of thousands of us, certainly, maybe millions – visit a cottage of our own, or a brother’s or cousin’s place, somewhere in the country, maybe on a lake, maybe on a river. There might be no electricity there, but that’s okay; the oven works on an oil generator or a propane tank. Great place to spend the weekend, doing some fishing, swimming, camping, waterskiing, or jet-skiing.
If this cabin is a hundred miles away, or a couple hundred, how do you get out of there, when you’ve run your EV out of power on the way in?
Many of us – hundreds of thousands, maybe millions – take city vacations too. We’ll take a weekend off, or a whole week, and visit the sites of New England, or drive up the Pacific coast, or hit the lakeshore towns of the Great Lakes, or any other such multi-stop vacation. The EV acolytes have an answer for this; “your hotel will have charger stations so you can charge up every night.” But will it? These systems are awfully expensive. And they take up space.
Hotels have never needed to be in the power business before. Now they’ll have to add a charger outside, essentially, for every single room. The fifty-room hotel will now need fifty chargers in its parking lot. The 200-room hotel will need 200 of them. Will the local electric grid support that draw? Is there room in the hotel’s parking lot for all those cars? If not, is there more land for the hotel to acquire to facilitate an EV-forced expansion?
Perhaps it’s time to say goodbye to the cheap hotel, the Expedia or PriceLine deal, the room that becomes affordable with your AAA or AMAC discount. If every hotel has to rip up every parking lot to install these chargers at a few grand apiece, they’re going to have far fewer parking spaces, and they’re going to have to charge you a lot more for your room.
Many of us, millions every year – visit amusement parks from Six Flags to DisneyLand. The range is wild; Cedar Point draws about 20,000 visitors per day, while DisneyWorld draws some 160,000 per day. The same goes for trips to great downtown centers like Chicago, New York, Boston and St Louis, where millions drive in for a day or a weekend of museums and zoos, theatres and restaurants.
Many stay in a hotel, many others drive in early in the morning, park at the event, and expect to drive home that night. There’s no place to charge during the day; if you hoped for that trip to be same-day, you’re out of luck. You won’t be able to recharge on that day trip, so you will need a (now expensive) hotel whether you like it or not. From the perspective of anyone over 1.5 hours away from your destination, the days of the “day trip” are over.
Perhaps you have relatives to stay with when on vacation. We’ve all spent a night or two with brothers or sisters, or cousins or uncles. Maybe they will eventually install a charger of their own, which they’ll need for their own EVs. Can your car hook up to it simultaneously, or will one of you have to face the morning without a charge?
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