Electric Cars for the Non-Politically Motivated

Great ideas unfortunately sometimes get politicized. Once the perception of an idea becomes slanted one way or the other, half the population will reflexively reject it, regardless of the merits of the idea.  Electric vehicles are one of these ideas that has been embraced by the left, and it seems like you can lose your conservative credibility by owning one. This pigeon-holing is really unfortunate for a couple of reasons. First, it’s debatable whether electric vehicles are any “better for the planet” than internal combustion. Second, electric power vehicles are actually a throwback to a ~140 year old design (~1880), and electricity is one of the few forms of power that can be generated at home by private individuals, which would make it a libertarian idea.

The Prius Hybrid carries some definite political baggage, but Tesla’s Elon Musk is more politically complex, and can’t be so easily boxed in either direction. Cadillac has a rather stodgy, conservative reputation, and they are going all electric. But these stereotypes persist, and people who know me look askance a little when I start gushing about electric cars.

To me it never made sense that all of the early electric cars looked really odd. The GM EV1, the Honda Insight, Prius. Everything just looked weird until the original Lotus-based Tesla. That was a car that I really wanted to own. It came out in 2008, and made all the other EVs just look weird. It has taken until the last couple of years for the automakers to start to realize that

To me as an engineer and tech nerd, the EV issue is a great idea. If you try to see this idea without the political lens – just look at it as technology – it becomes much clearer. You really don’t have to be a tree-hugging vegan to go electric.

Anyone who lived during the 70s or before has distinct memories of the smell of the exhaust from those big 1960’s era cars and trucks. Like a lot of people, I have a revulsion for the smell of gasoline. Until I was 35 I commuted a lot to work by bicycle. The most hated car on the road was the Mercedes diesel. Besides being loud, it stunk to high heaven and was inevitably covered with black soot.

These memories of noxious fumes from both the fuel and the exhaust from vehicles had an effect on me personally. You don’t have to measure parts per million at some distant time in the future when you are choking on car exhaust right now. I’m one person, and that was one car. But there are billions of people and millions of cars. The cumulative effect of all of this can’t be good.

By the time I was looking to start a career in the 1990s, the energy crisis was long gone, and there were few jobs in alternate energy. And to be honest, cars didn’t smell so bad. Alternate energy remained an interest, but never became a career. It was after I bought a 1997 Dakota pickup that I proclaimed that my next car was going to be either electric or hydrogen powered.

One of the arguments against electric cars as it seems to come from the conservative side of the spectrum sardonically feeds liberal tropes back at you, and tends to go something like this: Your “clean” electricity comes from environmentally damaging hydroelectric, or greenhouse gas-emitting coal plants. Your batteries require habitat and watershed destroying mining that is done in China to skirt American environmental regulation.”

There’s more than a little truth to that, but it assumes that your reason for buying an electric car is a fanatical quasi-religious hatred for fossil fuels, even though it took a lot of fossil fuels to create that EV in the first place, from mining iron to transporting all of those Chinese parts 8000 miles in a huge diesel-run ship.

Other weaker arguments have to do with price, range, charging, battery technology, and available options.

Wacky EVs

The first time I ever got to ride in an electric vehicle was in 2012 in Lynchburg, VA. I was writing a story on X-prize winner Oliver Kuttner. His company, Edison2 was developing an electric car. The $5 million X-Prize was awarded for the first viable car to top 100 mpg.  Some of the X-Prize entries looked like real cars, but the Edison2 was a ground-up purpose-built machine. Kuttner hired Ron Mathis, an Audi/IndyCar engineer to maximize the Edison2 and really stretch all the performance out of the format while still making it roadworthy. Getting into the Edison2 felt like getting into a kit airplane, but I was surprised at how confidently it handled the city streets.

Whether this design itself was really marketable or not isn’t the point. It became a testbed for a lot of technology and design ideas taken from race cars that actually worked.

The first EV I ever owned was a 2015 plug-in hybrid. This is the kind of vehicle that really makes sense for first time EVers. You can fall back onto gas if you need to, but for most daily tasks, you can get around on about 25 miles of charge. It was like a regular hybrid, but it allowed you to supplement the regenerative braking with battery power that you could recharge by plugging in. We bought gas for that car every six months, so we came close to using it as a straight EV. We rarely did long trips in it, but it was fully capable.

Riding around in a real car on electric power feels like you’re getting away with something. It’s like a golf cart, but with all the amenities of a real car, on the road. When the gas engine kicked in on the plug-in hybrid, you could definitely feel the difference. The car started to vibrate in a way that you get used to in a regular gas car, but tend to forget about in EV. How much extra do you pay even in a Mercedes for that smooth quiet ride?

Plus, it’s valid to go simple hybrid, plug-in hybrid (PHEV), or full electric battery vehicle (BEV).

Choices

Yes, it’s true that several years ago, you had the choice of a Tesla or a Prius. But that is all changing very quickly. And it’s not just the ridiculous 6-figure models (Tesla, BMW,  Audi, Volvo, Jaguar, Porsche, Lucid, Karma, Hummer, Bollinger, Rivian, etc…) that are available anymore, it’s stuff that people with jobs can afford. Ford has several full electrics available, including the compelling Mach-E Mustang SUV, and the F-150 which should start to deliver later this year. Chevy has the Volt (hybrid) and the Bolt (full EV). Chrysler has the Pacifica, a plug-in hybrid minivan. Kia (Niro), Hyundai (Ioniq, Kona), the Mini Cooper, Nissan (Leaf), Toyota Prius, VW ID.4, Fiat 500E and others.

I know people who have bought used Tesla Model 3 to get a great price on great and proven technology. Buying used is just another way of getting into it without a huge outlay of cash.

The list of what’s available changes monthly, and if you look out, one year all the really exciting new vehicles are going to be electric. They’re not just for weirdos anymore. Everybody’s doing it ;op

Independence

Electricity is one of those rare forms of energy that allows you as an individual to own the means of production. You can buy solar panels and even small wind turbines that produce electricity. You can store the energy in a set of car batteries or fancier Lithium ion cells if you choose. You cannot produce your own gasoline. Do you really relish being dependent on who ever is delivering your gasoline this election cycle? The US could be energy independent, but we are not due to political choices which center on oil production. You can rise above the fray by producing your own electricity, and powering your mobility with that. When you travel, you have to depend on others, but that is no different from what you’re doing now.

Also, when bad weather causes “the grid” to stop delivering power to your home, you’re ok because you can produce your own power, as long as the sun shines. Using the same power source to run your car as you use to power your home makes sense because you can use the available power where you need it, when you need it.

Cost and efficiency

When you are independent, the cost is less than when you depend on a big corporation. You can imagine that digging deep holes in the ground, extracting a flammable fluid, transforming it into something else, and then shipping it all over the planet is a very wasteful process. You wind up using a lot of energy just to distribute it in ships, trucks, pumped along pipelines, etc. And it’s dangerous. Just make it where you need it, and the cost of everything is much lower.

Your house gets too warm in the summer, so reducing the solar load on your roof can only be a good idea. Turn that solar radiation that usually heats your roof into electricity that you can use to run your car or your air conditioning. It’s a good idea all the way around.

And the brakes on your car? They just take all of that kinetic energy that you used gas to create and turn it into heat. That does nothing but cause problems for your brakes. Regenerative braking turns that forward motion into electrical energy, which slows you down plus it charges a battery. You can’t do that with combustion. Gas/electric hybrid makes sense, especially as a first step into the EV world. It gives you all the down-home comfort of a gas engine with all of the efficiency of regenerative braking.

Brakes actually turn out to be a big deal. They are the biggest source of direct waste in an automobile – intentional friction. Turning that back into usable energy is a great idea. Regenerative braking is why electric cars get better mileage in the city than they do on the highway. Around town, braking is the biggest waste of energy. At highway speeds, aerodynamics are the biggest source of lost energy, and we haven’t got a way to recover that.

Cost to Charge

The greatest cost savings is obviously if you have solar panels, and charge at home. There are no recurring costs for fueling your car aside from car and solar system maintenance. And you never have to set foot in a gas station again. Isn’t that benefit enough?

Next cheapest is to just recharge from home from your grid connection. If you have time-dependent rates, charge at night. You can get chargers that charge from a 110V line which takes about 6-8 hours for a 25 mile charge, or a 220V for faster charges. And of course new chargers are being developed that will get you a 200 mile charge in 5 minutes.

You can also run a 110V extension line when you go visiting, and pick up a few miles here and there. Yes, it looks a little miserly to run an extension cord out the window, so maybe only do it when you see close friends and family.

When you have to charge fast away from home, that’s when things get expensive. If you’re need to put 200+ miles back in your batteries at a commercial charging station, that can cost in the neighborhood of $20, definitely less than a $60 tank of gas. If you’re doing it at home, it’s in the range of $5. What’s ironic is that city dwellers benefit the most from electric cars, but they are also the ones who are going to run into the most inconvenience and/or the most cost to charge.

Charging stations are going in everywhere, especially in big cities. You can find them in shopping plaza and grocery store parking lots, behind restaurants, next to movie theaters. If you’re looking for a new business or investment opportunity, I’d look at ideas to convert gas stations into something useful…

Other Less Tangible Factors

The advent of EVs has given industry the ability to reinvent the automobile, and you have to admit there are a lot of cool changes happening in transportation right now. Change on its own is not always positive, but there are a lot of different motivations for business and consumers to finally get serious about EV technology.

If you’ve never driven or ridden in an EV, you can’t really overestimate the power of the quiet ride. Even at full acceleration, the EV is almost spooky silent. What a relief!

And speaking of full acceleration, have you ever ridden in an EV? Acceleration is really quite remarkable, and completely without the drama of the exhaust. I know a lot of people claim that the exhaust sound is part of the exhilaration, but really? I think all that racket detracts from the experience.

My last sports car was a Nissan 350Z. My wife wouldn’t take trips with me in it because it wasn’t big enough to carry 2 medium sized suitcases. Many full EVs have an enormous frunk (trunk in the front) in addition to the traditional trunk in the rear, and they still accelerate faster than the 350Z.

Summary

My point here is that you don’t have to be a tree-hugging vegan to drive an electric vehicle. You can do it for the comfort, the silence, the independence, the acceleration, the tax credit, the non-conformity, or even the fashion statement. There are so many new business opportunities around EV tech that they are going to need a bunch of capitalists to make sure things get done right, they will still need environmentalists to make sure Greta Thurnberg still has something to cry about, and plenty of libertarians to make sure the state of Montana and the concrete bunker industry don’t go bankrupt.