eople are wondering what life will be like if we're all forced into electric cars.
Some think we'll be riding electric buses and living in little urban housing
projects—the infamous “fifteen-minute city.”
Others imagine they'll keep their old internal combustion engine vehicle
running forever, like they do in Cuba. But what will it really be like?
To answer that question, we need to understand how young people, who will be
the target market, view technology.
Kids prefer to rent everything
Young people rarely if ever buy books, blu-ray disks, music CDs, or even TVs. They rent them, just as they are perfectly happy to rent computer software. The idea is that these things are always available on the Internet whenever they need them. They will never be bowdlerized or censored, and the Internet will never go down. Renting software like MS Windows and MS Office means they no longer have to buy a new copy. Storing all their data on the cloud means they never have to worry about losing their files.
Your view for the next 130 hours thanks to an AI misunderstanding
which Birmingham you wanted to go to
Image by Gordon Firestein - Seacology USA, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source
They think that way because they never lived in a time when Internet connections were unreliable. They don't consider the possibility that their cable could be snapped off by an errant truck and the company can't be bothered to repair it. They don't care if Amazon or the government can reach into their phone and erase or change things that have suddenly become controversial, as Amazon has done in the past. So they happily pay their bills online. As for books, they don't see the need for them at all: if they should happen to want to know something, they'll just do an Internet search: they'll “Google it.”
We of the Shakes-Fist-At-Cloud tribe might think this is dangerously naive, but young people are used to this mode of existence because it's just like their childhood. They forget about that time all their toys mysteriously disappeared and that time their parents locked them out of their favorite social media site because they were bad.
Old cars
They'll treat cars the same way. There won't be a fleet of Cuba-style classic cars. New government mandated emissions standards will see to that. Besides, once the refineries go out of business, you'll need a special license to buy gasoline and it will be hard, and maybe illegal, to get. We have this already with chemicals. Methyl ethyl ketone (a less irritating solvent than the ethyl acetate they replaced it with) and methylene chloride (which was great at stripping paint) were once sold in hardware stores. Now you must be an approved lab to get them. At the moment, Amazon is the cheapest vendor for technical grade hexanes, at $38.00 a gallon. Thanks to our drug laws, chemical suppliers won't sell to individuals, but if they did you'd pay what we pay in the lab: $441.59 for a gallon of 95% hexanes.
Thirty-eight bucks a gallon for gas. Assuming Auto Zone, Advance, and O'Reilly still exist, maybe you could keep an ICE vehicle running for a while. But what good is it if you can't afford to go anywhere? Who will tow you if it breaks down? On top of that, the government will ensure that no mechanics will be allowed to work on them. You wanted independence, they'll say, so stew in it.
Old grid
We all know the grid can't handle a nation full of electric cars. Apartment dwellers won't be able to charge them unless their landlord sets up charging stations, which will never happen. The alternative is to lay a cable across the sidewalk, a safety hazard that will certainly be illegal. But the biggest issue is this: even if battery technology improves to give us reasonable range and vehicle weight as low as an ICE vehicle, the laws of physics will not change. There's no escaping the basic laws of physics. To get faster charging, you must use either huge amperage or huge voltage. With huge amperage comes huge cables. With high voltage comes arcing. Even a small arc at high current will quite spectacularly weld the cable to your car. And as somebody who once worked with a nerve-racking 30 kV, which can jump a surprising distance to you through the air, HV is not something the average person should have to deal with. Soon enough insurance companies will figure this out and the cost will shoot up.
This means that while battery capacity may increase, the physics of energy transmission makes it impossible to transfer a specific charge to any battery at rate much faster than is possible today. Even if a battery of the future could store ten times as much energy as a car battery of today (≈200 kWh), it will also take nearly ten times as long to charge it. The amount of power needed is fixed by the capacity of the circuit, not the battery. A 200 amp 240 volt circuit in a home can only provide 48 kW. At that power, 48 kWh battery will always take 1 hour; a 2000 kWh battery will always need at least 41.6 hours. Therefore, a central charging facility is inevitable.
Old buses
No one who's ever been on an urban bus will voluntarily repeat the experience. When I lived in the Southern US, I occasionally rode a bus. To get from 23rd Street to 49th Street—a five-minute drive—would take about an hour. The bus would go up 20th Avenue, down 21st, up 22nd, and so on. It was much faster to walk, though exhausting in the heat. When the bus stopped at the projects, as it always did, there was always a fight at the bus stop. The bus driver and every single passenger would get out to watch the fight for twenty minutes as I sat alone wishing I'd brought a book.
In northern cities, buses are even worse because of the crime and harassment. Electrification won't change that.
The future will either be UberLyft or LyftUber
This means there are only two possibilities: centralized charging stations or self-driving rental cars. Because kids like to rent instead of own, our future will likely be the latter: driverless rentals. If you want to go somewhere, you'll tap on your cell phone and a self-driving car will be routed to you. Afterwards, the car will go back to a garage owned by some big company, conveniently located near an electrical transmission station. The inside of the car will be hosed out to get rid of all the nasal mucus and marijuana ashes and the battery recharged for the next person. That big company will have an enormous high voltage electric feed and trained operators who can recharge multiple cars at the same time without causing a horrific explosion, so that half the cars are recharging at any one time.
Suppose you wanted to go on a long trip. Your car will automatically plot a route from one charging point to the next, where you'll hop into a different one instead of waiting. So, if you wanted to go from Chicago to New York, your car would calculate a zigzag course through Toledo, Columbus, Roanoke, or wherever it could string together a sequence of charging companies with available cars. On a bad day, it might take you through Atlanta or Las Vegas. You won't know or care, and you won't get a choice. If the self-driving car breaks down or explodes, another will be dispatched to take you to the next stop (or to the nearest morgue, as the case may be). It will take longer, but you won't be inconvenienced about range anxiety and no worries about being murdered on a bus; your car will handle that automatically.
If you happen to need a pickup truck one day, a self-driving pickup truck will appear. Most importantly, from the point of view of young people, you won't have to know anything at all about maintaining your car or driving a truck. Let the computer handle all that, they'll say.
Sure, there will be problems. It will cost a lot more. Cars will be hard to find during rush hour. They may suddenly go all splodey. Or one day you tell the nav system you want to go to Birmingham and it routes you through the Atlantic Ocean to Birmingham, UK. Or a bridge goes out and thousands of self-driving cars commit their passengers, one after the other, to a horrible fiery death. But once these things become routine they're boring, the press won't cover them, and people will think they never happen anymore.
The news media will play an important role in this. The press will clamor for government to nationalize charging companies. Remember, young people are taught that government exists to “help” people and they'll think this is perfectly natural. If someone accuses you of a terrible crime like, say, misgendering somebody, the self-driving car will lock its doors and take a little detour so you can assist the police with their enquiries, as they put it in England, because there will be a law that says they must do that. You wouldn't want insurrectionists or terrorists on the roads, would you? No, of course you wouldn't.
After all this is in place, only then will the press and government admit that ‘global warming’ was just a ruse and this was their goal all along. When they admit they were lying and only doing it to control you, it means they're laughing at you off camera because you were a chump. That's what Anthony Fauci did with masks, and the press never once criticized him for it.
If you're deaf or vision-impaired, you'll think it's great. If you're someone who can't be bothered to get their oil changed, you'll find it convenient. If you have a libertarian streak, it will feel like hell on earth.
The best approach, it seems to me, is to think like a kid, and challenge his assumptions: Is it really more convenient? Where I live, getting an Uber is next to impossible during rush hour. That won't change. Another is cost. Kids are poor, so why pay forever, as they'll have to do with subscription software like Windows 12, when you can own something real and use it for one-tenth the cost for the next twenty years? The challenge is that the government can make parking nearly impossible and create ultra-low emission zones to penalize people who don't conform. So the first goal would have to be to make ULEZs illegal. But before these arguments can stick, you'd have to convince a kid that a life without owning anything is just a fantasy and it won't do a darn thing to save the Earth.
aug 19 2023, 5:07 am
