Can we talk about electric cars? Mrs. Reason's car is all electric, and my eldest has a plug-in-hybrid which she mostly uses in electric mode. We don't have a great solution for charging them, so they charge slowly from an outdoor plug. (It's actually been hard to get an electrician to come in to install a 30 or 50 Amp charger due to their local popularity and other demands on electrician's business.)
But I also wanted to start by talking about this:
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4844
Skeptoid's Brian Dunning is normally pretty decent about making coherent and logical science based arguments, but has a spotty record about making social and economic ones.
Here's part of the argument for "You're screwed if the battery dies."
Quote:
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Sure, just as an ICE car is screwed if it runs out of gas. But who is ass enough to drive someplace where they don't have the range and where there aren't any gas stations? Whether you're an ass isn't determined by what kind of car you have, so EV owners are no stupider than ICE owners. So running out of power in the middle of nowhere simply doesn't happen, and isn't a part of the EV experience. This is a false and made-up objection.
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This is basically saying, "People don't run out of gas, and if they do they're idiots." This works fine if you're middle class and can afford to get refilled whenever your energy gets low.
People
do run out of gas, something he obliquely admits. If you run out of gas, you can call someone you know (or a tow service), and they can bring a gas tank, give you a few gallons of gas, and then you can get to the next gas station. How does this work with an electric car? As electric cars become more prevalent, I'm sure there will be a solution, but it probably won't be as convenient or as cheap as for a gas car.
Quote:
I spent a couple days on a long highway where charge stations were 150 miles apart, and I got to one and the whole town had its power knocked out by the storm. [...]
When the power came back on, I was on my way after 15 minutes, while the vast majority of those ICE cars hadn't even moved up in line yet.
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That's because there were 2 electric cars and hundreds of gas cars. When there are hundreds of electric cars, you will wait even longer in line than the gas cars. This is just bragging that you are an early adopter.
For the most part, the rest of the arguments are sound, but unless you're a homeowner who can charge your car at home and have a credit card to pay for a charging station when you're not, electric cars come with additional worries that we don't (yet) have the social infrastructure to deal with in a lot of places.
Still, Mrs. Reasons is mostly pleased, and with my daughter's relatively low car usage, she has refilled the gas tank on her car once in the past year, and we have an electrician coming this week.