It’s not so much that the future is “electric.” It is that in the future they have planned for us, only the affluent will drive electric cars.
Everyone else will not be able to drive.
If that sounds extravagant, consider two facts. The first is that — aside from a very few, very small models like the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf — the entry price point of the typical electric car is about $50,000. Most “transact” — that is, sell — for considerably more than that. Leaving aside the fact that we are talking about electric cars, that price point defines luxury cars — which are cars that by definition are bought by affluent people only.
And there are only so many of those.
The price of these electric luxury vehicles is going up, too. Not down — as the electric car propagandists have insisted they would, when they were selling the gullible public on EVs.
They are not going up because of the devaluation of the buying power of money — what is glibly styled “inflation” by those who either do not understand or wish to hide the fact that the buying power of money is being devalued; i.e., that it is the result of deliberate policy.
It is because of natural market forces.
EVs, themselves, are the result of unnatural market forces — having been mandated, subsidized or otherwise artificially pushed onto the market. But the reason for the increase in the price of a new EV has to do with the upticking market prices of the materials needed to make electric vehicle batteries, without which an EV is the functional equivalent of a static display of an airplane that doesn’t fly.
Government can mandate EVs to be produced. It can mandate that only EVs may be sold. It cannot mandate the cost of the materials needed to make them be lowered. Price controls would only assure fewer would be made as it is economically impossible to maintain the building and selling of anything at a price lower than it costs to make whatever it is.
Interestingly, one of the essential materials used to make electric vehicle batteries is lithium, which is a non-renewable material that is also neither abundant nor inexpensive. Obtaining usable quantities of it entails a process not unlike that involved in obtaining a usable amount of enriched uranium. Immense quantities of raw materials must be extracted and then processed — in vast leaching fields, for lithium. It requires processing around 25,000 pounds of brine to obtain the roughly 25 lbs. of lithium used in a typical electric vehicle battery pack.
Unlike hydrocarbon fuels — which are massively abundant and economical to extract and refine — limited supplies of lithium are insufficient to keep up with the artificially induced demand for electric vehicles — and the cost involved in getting it and refining what lithium there is assures that the price of electric vehicles will continue to go up as demand for it increases.
Unless of course, a new type of battery that does not require lithium replaces the lithium-based batteries that store the power to propel almost all modern electric cars.
The same EV advocates who insisted that EV costs would go down now insist that such batteries are “coming.”
It is of a piece with “two weeks to flatten the curve,” based on the track record of EV promises so far unfulfilled. The fact remains that almost all EVs in production depend on lithium-based batteries.
Electric vehicle batteries also require large quantities of graphite, nickel and cobalt, the costs of which are also increasing. There is in addition to that the cost of the electricity, itself — certain to increase as demand for it increases as capacity to produce it remains . . . flat.
Part of the reason for all of this increase has to do with the fact that almost all electric vehicles are luxury vehicles. They have huge batteries, which are necessary to deliver the power/performance that people who spend $50,000-plus on a car — electric or not — expect. Just as people who spend $100 on dinner at a nice restaurant expect china and linen rather than paper plates and napkins.
There is very little to no effort being made to make electric vehicles affordable — which would entail making them less powerful, less luxurious. A 1,000 pound battery pack is the EV equivalent of a large V8 engine. Many EVs have even larger battery packs that are the equivalent of V12 engines. These require — and use — vastly more energy than is necessary for just getting around. They require — and use up — vastly more raw materials than would be necessary to build a battery sufficient to provide economical performance.
If — as the people propagandizing for “electrification” insist — the future is one in which everyone will drive an electric car, why is it that electric luxury cars seem to be the only future?
Why is it that there seems to be no future for cars average people can afford?
There is also the tangential fact that electric vehicles impose time costs on people that can least afford to pay them. The limited range and lengthy amount of time it takes to recharge and re-instill range in an EV all-but-forces the EV owner to drive less — and less far. In order for many people to be able to drive an EV every day, they would need to own two EVs.
One to drive while the other recharges.
Very affluent people can, of course, afford that. They can also afford to have more than one 240 volt “Level II” charger circuit wired into their garages — and have their home electrical panels upgraded to support that. It is merely a few thousand dollars more — in additional costs.
Average people cannot afford that.
What is happening — the outlines of the future are now visible — is a world in which a personally owned vehicle will be what it was at the beginning of the automobile age some 120 years ago. Which is to say, it will be what was depicted in the dystopian movies based on the Hunger Games books.
President Snow and his entourage — their real-world equivalents — will drive luxury-performance EVs.
The rest of us will drive very little, if we drive at all.
Eric Peters lives in Virginia and enjoys driving cars and motorcycles. In the past, Eric worked as a car journalist for many prominent mainstream media outlets. Currently, he focuses his time writing auto history books, reviewing cars, and blogging about cars+ for his website EricPetersAutos.com.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
