In this episode of free-for-all-Friday, Trent looks at what is slowing the green movements push for universal adoption of electric cars.
Transcript:
Am I going to get an electric car? Nah, I’m not going to do that. But it turns out I’m not alone. A bunch of other people don’t want to get electric cars as well. And we’re going to talk about that today here on the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Trent Horn. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. But Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And today I just want to talk about electric cars and the dream of the electrified automobile being deployed widespread is not happening as fast as environmental activists would like. So there’s different reasons that people might want to have an electric car. And I understand the convenience behind it. In fact, for some of my, in fact my commute is I don’t have a commute really. My office is only about five minutes away from my house.
So of all the people who could use an electric car, I could really use an electric car, but I don’t really feel like getting one, because I have a car that’s reliable, gets me from point A to point B, and I don’t need anything else until that car gets stuck at point A and won’t turn on anymore.
But a lot of people who want electric cars, I mean the big contingent right now, especially among the government passing regulations related to it, is to combat climate change. People are worried about increased CO2 gases, greenhouse gases, climate change, automobiles are a source of that. And so you have the government, federal and at certain state levels, passing these laws, like California is saying that they’re not going to allow the sale of gas automobiles in the state after 2035. And the Biden administration wanting to have 30, 50% of all new sales to have targeted benchmarks like by the year 2030, 2035, 2040.
I love by the way, when presidents and governors set goals for things beyond their own terms, so they can’t be held liable when it doesn’t happen because they’ll have been out of office for a long time before the deadline arrives. And by the way, if you want to hear more about my perspective on climate change, check out the episode on my podcast with Tony Annett is his name. Yeah, Tony Annett. He’s the Catholic economist. We had a debate on my podcast. We had a debate. It was on Reason and Theology, and then I mirrored it on my show where we discussed climate change offering two Catholic positions.
Tony’s position was basically, “Do whatever the government says. This is an existential disaster and we have to do everything possible to reduce CO2 levels.” I took more of a moderate position in the debate saying, “Yeah, humans are causing climate change and maybe reducing CO2 levels would be a good thing, but we have to be feasible about that. This isn’t something that can be accomplished by 2050 and we have different ways to mitigate climate change that also has to be factored into account.”
So I would definitely be opposed to requiring everyone to buy an electric car, for example, because there’s no good reasons to adjust that. First of all, electric cars are not carbon-neutral. You have to drive them. I think there have been estimates anywhere between a hundred thousand and 400,000 miles. You have to drive them to offset the amount of carbon they create. Electric cars require a lot. They produce a lot of CO2, not in their operation per se, but in two other areas.
First in powering them up, right? You plug in electric car in your garage, you plug it in and juice it up with electricity. Where does that electricity come from? You’re using more electricity than you normally would. And if you live in the US most of your electricity probably comes from sources that produce CO2 levels, be it coal or natural gas. Now, some areas you might get hydroelectric, maybe you’ll get nuclear, but odds are you’re causing more CO2 to be burned in electrifying your car.
So it’s not carbon-neutral, but also in the creation of the car, you have to have these giant trucks and mining operations that are working to produce the rare earth minerals to make the batteries. These electric cars require huge batteries in order to function and the batteries have to be replaced, by the way, at a decent rate because they’re really the heart of the vehicle. And so that creates a lot of CO2 as well. So there have been estimates showing that electric cars don’t really reduce CO2 by that much, by negligible levels or levels that would justify the inconvenience of trying to mandate that everyone these uses these kinds of sources. So that’s how it’s pushed. But other people, not everyone buys electric cars. A lot of people like that. It’s sleek. I admit it’s cool. I’ve ridden around in electric cars. It’s pretty cool to hear they drive around.
I love how some of them have to add the fake engine noise so you don’t run over people. And the Tesla has really cool features. One of my friends has give me a ride in their Tesla and they push the fart button, makes it sound like your seat emits a fart noise. I’m like, “Really? That’s what we’re doing with our space age technology nowadays?” But I could see, I mean, I have an office that’s just a few minutes away from my house, just plugging in my car, driving a little bit to the office and driving back. That would be great. But most people are not sold. So that’s why it’s so funny. The government will have these mandates saying, “Oh, we got to have electric cars by 2030, 2040.” But government can mandate all kinds of things, and I’m glad we at least still live in a somewhat free country.
They can mandate all they want, but if the people won’t go along with it, it’s just not going to happen. Remember COVID? There were some governors, I felt like they would’ve kept the mask mandates forever. New Mexico talked about keeping them just to deal with flu season, but people eventually everywhere said, “No, we’re not going to do this anymore.” And even though there were health departments that wanted to keep this, they would’ve wanted to keep it on planes forever. People just won’t go along with it. So it is nice to at least see that here in America. We have still somewhat freedom when people wake up and realize what’s going on with them. So that’s what’s happening. People don’t want to go along with it. And I was reading this here from Reuters saying rental giant Hertz dumps electric vehicles, including Teslas for gas cars. I was reading that it said that they were dumping.
Well, it says right here, Hertz is selling about 20,000 electric vehicles, including Teslas from its US fleet about two years after a deal with the automaker to offer its vehicles for rent, another sign that EV demand has cooled. So it’s interesting. So it’s not just buying the cars because one reason people aren’t buying cars. There’s another article here from USA today saying, EV sales slowing. It says, “Here’s why people aren’t buying EVs electric vehicles in spite of price cuts and tax breaks.” Why aren’t they? Well, because they’re still expensive. Even with the price cuts, they’re still much more expensive than a gasoline powered car. And it’s not just the car itself that’s expensive. You have to spend thousands of dollars on a charging kit to put into your home to be able to charge up your vehicle. And that’s the reason why the most people who buy these electric cars, they’re relatively affluent people who have their own garage to be able to charge an electric vehicle.
I remember when Laura and I were starting out, we did not have a garage. When did we have? Even the first home that we bought, it had a carport. It did not have a garage. The first home that we bought that had a garage was in 2018. So five or six years into our marriage. Before that, we were living in apartments. We lived in these apartments, and I remember one of them, we had to park along the street and it was hard. It was a busy San Diego neighborhood was I had a hard time finding street parking sometimes. Now, what would I have done to keep my electric car charged? There are lots of people who have to park on the street. They don’t have a garage to park their car in. How are they going to juice up their car when they need to go places?
You got to find a charging station, I guess. But charging stations, they’re kind of few and far between. That’s the other reason people don’t want rentals, right? Because even if you don’t buy an electric car, you might think, “Oh, electric cars are super fun. I’ll rent one. I’ll rent one while I’m on vacation or I’m on this business trip. Sure, I’d love an electric car. That’d be fun to drive around in, do my part to help the environment.” But then you suddenly realize, “Oh, wait a minute. If I drive around in my electric car, even without GPS, it’s not that hard for me to come across a gas station.” There’s hundreds of thousands of gas stations in the United States and probably millions of gas terminals if you want to call them that, the nozzle to plug into your car. But finding charging stations is a lot more difficult, especially if you use a non Tesla electric car because they can’t use the Tesla superchargers, at least not yet. I think they’re trying to switch that over.
So if you get a rental car, you start to think to yourself, “Oh, what a hassle. I got to find a charging station.” And it’s not just finding a charging station either. You try to go and make sure that it works. I mean, think about this. When you go to a gas station, how often does the gas pump not work? I go to gas stations a lot. I would say somewhere between 1 and 3% maybe don’t work. And when I go to the gas station, at least if there’s a pump that doesn’t work, I can usually drive over to a pump that does. But normally nine times out of 10 when I go get gas, I use a pump and it works just fine. It works fine. A lot of you report that in charging stations around the country somewhere up to 25% of the units don’t work.
And they especially don’t work in cold weather. And the thing with charging units are so inconvenient, they’re still working on the superchargers to get them to go fast. But if you go to a place to charge, you got to set aside what? An hour, maybe 45 minutes to get charged up to be able to go. Who has the time to spend to do something like that? I was reading a report from some environmental activist saying, “When you plan your road trips, we’ll have charging stations at these rest stops where you can spend an hour and get lunch and enjoy your time.” Really? Have you been to rest stops along Interstate 10 going across Western Texas? Not where I want to spend an hour, especially in the summer when I’m trying to get anywhere. At least in the summer though, the battery should run okay. In cold weather, electric cars suck.
The cold weather saps the battery, 20% less performance and you have to use the battery even more. Like when they test it. Oh, it works fine in cold weather. Those tests rely on the battery. You’re just testing the car, you’re not running the heater because in a gas car you get free heat from the engine block. In electric car, you have to use the battery to also generate hot air to heat the cabin, which also drains the battery a lot. So if you’re driving, it’s cold, what could be a 300-mile range could turn into a 100-mile range really quickly. You go and charge it. There are people during that big freeze we had a month or two ago, they were charging their electric vehicle and the charger got stuck. It gets stuck in there, it freezes over and you can’t get it out.
Whereas a gas tank filling it up in cold weather, it’s not that hard. Maybe your gas cap freezes a little bit, but you can pour some water over it and get that figured out. But yeah, so that’s what we’re seeing right now with the electric vehicle market. So that’s what I wanted to share with you all. It does seem like when you look at the news, it is slowing. There was a big uptick. People are like, “Oh look, everyone’s buying cars.” Yeah, the people who don’t really need them are buying it. But now if you want a cheap electric car, by the way, you can get, I think Tesla 3s from Hertz used for what? $20,000.
But we’re seeing the slowing demand. I really think electric cars I think will take off in the future. There will be a positive growth rate. The thing is, you’re just not going to have it until they get the charging problem solved. Until they get it where you can go to a charging station, 10 minutes, get a full charge and be on your way. And the charging stations are as ubiquitous as a gas station and they’re as reliable as gas stations. Well, we’re nowhere near there yet. We may get there one day, but let innovation run at its own speed. Government should not try to centrally plan it, because when government tries to centrally plan these sorts of things, well central planning, look up East Germany, look up the Soviet Union. You see the headaches people have underwent through things like central planning.
All right, well thank you guys so much. Hope you enjoy my little rant against electric cars. If you have an electric car and you enjoy it, leave a comment for us at trenthornpodcast.com where all of our episodes are hosted. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.