Electric Cars are the CFL Bulb of Automotive History

 

Recently, Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary of the US government, compared people who are slow to adopt electric car technology to people unwilling to give up their landlines in favor of a cell phone.

This comparison is an excellent jumping off point to discuss the real problem with slow adoption of the electric car.

When a new product emerges on the market, once word has gotten round of the product’s existence, the people of the earth make the final judgement on whether or not that product is useful and effective. We no longer carry around scrolls, for example, because books turned out to be more useful for carrying information on the printed page. One doesn’t need to unroll their fifteen-foot scroll to find a specific passage, you simply turn to the correct page and there is your passage. Books were such an improvement over their predecessor the scroll, that adoption was rapid and unfettered. No global mandate was required for us to abandon our use of scrolls and begin using books instead. The new product, “The Book,” was a superior product, and human beings being very adept at recognizing efficiency and improvement in their immediate and daily existence, picked up the book with rapid acceptance. The scroll became an artifact. No mandate required. Just a better product.

As Pete pointed out, cell phones happened in a similar way. At first, they were a bit pricey, but even people who couldn’t afford one saw their utility, and as soon as the price came down, pretty much everyone bought one. Land lines began fading soon thereafter, and though the technology still exists and can be accessed, few people avail themselves of it, the cell phone basically killed off the landline in almost all cases. And again, there was no mandate, there was never a government demand that everyone ditch their landlines and instead pick up cell phones.

How is this possible then that everyone made the change without a government mandate? Well, that’s because cell phones are a better product. Everyone could see that. You didn’t need to propagandize people to make them believe cell phones were better, the cell phone was actually a better version of a phone. Anyone could see that being able to take your phone with you was going to free up untold amounts of time and allow for a more mobile population. This was appealing to people, so they adopted it. No mandate needed. Just a better product.

Sometimes, new technology arrives on the scene and it isn’t immediately and broadly adopted, even after the best efforts of central planners to encourage adoption. Many of you reading this will have the evidence of this type of historical error in judgment in your garage junk drawers: the CFL bulb.

The compact fluorescent bulb was hailed as the savior of the planet when it was first brought to market. The citizens of the world were going to save energy, save money, and save the planet by switching from those inefficient incandescent bulbs to the more efficient CFL bulb. So purifying and uplifting was this environmental cure that we began to divert our tax dollars to subsidize the purchase of the CFL bulb. Why did they need to be subsidized? Well, the cost of manufacturing a CFL bulb was orders of magnitude higher than manufacturing an incandescent bulb. Incandescent bulbs are cheap to make, because they are simple, using simple materials, requiring minimal energy inputs to produce. CFL bulbs carried in their chassis a mini ballast, highly technical glass manufacture, and of course, toxic gas. Never mind that those who decided to compel a shift from incandescent to CFL bulbs don’t generally consider the input energy and materials needed to manufacture a CFL bulb when they calculate how much “energy” such a bulb will “save.” Manufacturers were compelled to switch products, even to the point of incandescent bulbs being outright banned, putting bulb manufacturers out of business and leaving their employees looking for work. In this way, the CFL bulb was effectively mandated (though replaced by the LED bulb before the ban came into effect).

But why did the CFL bulb need to be subsidized, mandated, and have its competition literally banned from production? Wasn’t it a better tech? Why didn’t the people adopt it immediately and with joy?

CFL bulbs sucked. That’s why. The light they emitted was sickly, the length of time they took to warm up was unlivable, and to top it all off, if you broke one you had to call in a hazmat team because these new environmentally friendly bulbs were actually full of toxic gas. That’s why you still have some in your junk drawer, because you can’t just put them in the trash, and the recycle centers are inconveniently located, so we all have these permanent, fragile, toxic residents in our junk drawers and garage cupboards because we’re trying to save the planet!

This is the same future that awaits the electric car. So inefficient, so toxic, and so inconvenient are electric cars that no one wants them. They are not books to scrolls or cell phones to landlines, the electric car is a CFL bulb. Over engineered, inconvenient, toxic, and not readily adopted because the technology it is attempting to replace is known to be more reliable, more convenient, less toxic, and generally speaking, more affordable. And just like the CFL bulb, the electric car is being enabled through subsidies, mandates, and the abolition of competition, and even still, people aren’t buying it. It’s not that people are slow to adopt electric cars because they are too dumb to see the advantages, the electric car is not being adopted because the people are too smart to fall for such useless and expensive tech. People aren’t adopting electric cars because electric cars suck. Just like the CFL bulb.

Now, if you like torque and rapid launches, then electric cars are for you. No one can deny the incredible torque and launch times electric cars can achieve. But that’s not how the electric car is being marketed in the main. We are being told that the electric car is the future because it is more environmentally friendly. This is wholly and entirely poppy-cock. There is not one single thing about an electric car that is more environmentally friendly than a gas car. Not one thing.

There are lots of folks who buy electric cars because they are perennially in 2^nd or 3^rd place in the unending race against the proverbial Joneses. The fancy polished plastics and glittering widescreen tv in the dash bedazzles the simple mind into thinking they are modern and stylish for driving around in what amounts to a near-future heap of toxic waste. Like the CFL bulb, our yards and driveways will eventually be littered with inoperable electric cars, as they prove too expensive to maintain and too costly to recycle, they’ll sit like toxic bulbs in our junk drawers, slowly disintegrating into microplastics, and always remaining a terrifying fire hazard.

The electric car is not cut out to replace the gas car. There are a few uses here and there where an electric vehicle might make sense, so I see no reason to ban them as an option, but the people of the earth can see through the façade they’re being sold. No one wants to be trapped in the path of a hurricane awaiting a charging station. Anyone who has been without power for more than a couple days knows that in a post storm scenario, gas products work, electric products don’t, period, full stop. Gas products work, electric products don’t.

But aren’t electric cars more environmentally friendly when it comes to CO2 emissions? Well, they effectively move the production of CO2 from the tailpipe to some other location, either a power plant, or a windmill or solar panel manufacturing facility. It doesn’t reduce anything, but it does shift it to a different location. I will caution anyone concerned about the quality and cleanliness of the environment about maintaining a myopic focus on trying to reduce the quantity in our atmosphere of a life affirming gas that allows plants and animals to flourish on earth. If, in your concern for reducing this harmless and life giving gas, you are willing to strip mine cobalt and lithium in massive pit mines using child slave labor, pour massive concrete foundations in previously arable farm land to support toxically manufactured windmills that produce less energy than they required for manufacture, leaving toxic solar panels strewn about the once beautiful countryside, leaching toxic silicates into the soil as they deteriorate before ever producing more energy than they required to be manufactured, then maybe you have mixed up your priorities a bit. You aren’t going to save the planet through manufacturing. You’re not going to save the planet by building out new infrastructure. Extruding more plastics and strip mining more toxic heavy metals will never save the planet.

The electric car is either a short-term profit center for enterprising marketeers who will not be on the hook for dealing with the mass of toxic waste their products will have created before the public finally notices their being sold a Betamax, or, they’re a totalitarian government’s wet dream, in which no one can travel freely unless granted access to the electrical grid.

Gas cars are better. In every way. They provide more freedom, they are less toxic, drilling for oil is far less destructive to the environment than mining for battery commodities, gas cars can be worked on and repaired more easily, and maintaining a running car for many years is the most efficient way to maintain a car. Buying new cars every couple of years is the least environmentally friendly thing you can do. An electric car only becomes more efficient than a gas car after the 300,000^th mile. Find a used electric car that has that many miles on it.

Stop trying to make electric cars happen. They’re inefficient, toxic, and less reliable long term than any current internal combustion technology. If electric cars were better than gas cars, we’d all buy them within a year. It’s been a couple decades now that they’ve been trying to force electric cars down our throats and we simply don’t want them. To the Pete Buttigieg’s of the world, it’s not because we’re too dumb, it’s because we’re not falling for it. We’re actually able to discern a better product from an inferior product. Electric cars are an inferior product that are less environmentally friendly than gas cars when their whole lifespan is taken into consideration. Electric cars may relocate CO2 emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant (or the Chinese solar panel manufacturing facility), but for the tradeoff of re-locating our CO2 emissions we are asked to give up too much. We don’t like the risk of being stranded, we don’t like that we’re more likely to need a new car sooner, we don’t like that we’ll be more dependent on FEMA after a storm event, the list goes on and on. But mainly, we don’t like being told an outright lie: that there is something environmentally friendly about electric cars.

Human beings can analyze cost and benefit quite well when either their pocketbook or their safety is on the line. Electric cars make us less safe, cost more, and are more destructive long run to the environment. It’s time to park electric cars in our junk drawers so we, as a society, can move on. A more efficient tech likely exists, but to find it, we need to first stop spinning our wheels on the dead-end street of electric cars.