{"id":32993,"date":"2018-03-30T16:10:39","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T21:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32993"},"modified":"2018-03-30T16:10:54","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T21:10:54","slug":"not-so-happy-motoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32993","title":{"rendered":"Not So Happy Motoring"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Not So Happy Motoring<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It hasn\u2019t been a great month for America\u2019s electric car fantasy. Elon Musk\u2019s Tesla company \u2014 the symbolic beating heart of the fantasy \u2014 is whirling around the drain with its share price plummeting 22 percent, its bonds downgraded by Moody\u2019s to junk status, a failure to produce its \u201caffordable\u201d ($36,000 \u2014 Ha!) Model 3 at commercial scale, a massive recall of earlier S Model sedans for a steering defect, and the spectacular fiery crash in Silicon Valley last week of an X model that may have been operating in automatic mode (the authorities can\u2019t determine that based on what\u2019s left), and which killed the driver.<\/p>\n

Oh, and an experimental self-driving Uber car (Volvo brand) ran over and killed a lady crossing the street with her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, two weeks ago. Don\u2019t blame Elon for that.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot to like about electric cars, of course, if, say, you\u2019re a Google executive floating through life in a techno-narcissism bubble, or a Hollywood actor with wooly grandiose notions of saving the planet while simultaneously signaling your wealth and your \u201cgreen\u201d virtue cred. Teslas supposedly handle beautifully, ride very quietly, have great low-end power, and decent range of over 200 miles. The engine has something like twenty moving parts, is very long-lasting, and is easy to repair or change out if necessary.<\/p>\n

Are they actually \u201cgreen and clean?\u201d Bwaahaaaaa\u2026.! Are you kidding? First, there\u2019s the energy embedded<\/em> in producing the car: mining and smelting the ores, manufacturing the plastics, running the assembly line, etc. That embedded energy amounts to about 22 percent of the energy consumed by the car over a ten-year lifetime. Then there\u2019s the cost of actually powering the car day-by-day. The electricity around the USA is produced mostly by burning coal, natural gas, or by nuclear fission, all of which produce harmful emissions or byproducts. But the illusion that the power just comes out of a plug in the wall (for just pennies a day!) is a powerful one for the credulous public. The cherry-on-top is the fantasy that before much longer all that electric power will come from \u201crenewables,\u201d solar and wind, and we can leave the whole fossil fuel mess behind us. We say that to ourselves as a sort of prayer, and it has exactly that value.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Not So Happy Motoring It hasn\u2019t been a great month for America\u2019s electric car fantasy. Elon Musk\u2019s Tesla company \u2014 the symbolic beating heart of the fantasy \u2014 is whirling around the drain with its share price plummeting 22 percent, its bonds downgraded by Moody\u2019s to junk status, a failure to produce its \u201caffordable\u201d ($36,000 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[14964,13275,5096,16000,449,674,19604,16733,5094],"class_list":["post-32993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-clusterfuck-nation","tag-electric-vehicles","tag-elon-musk","tag-evs","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-renewable-energy","tag-self-driving-cars","tag-techno-narcissism","tag-tesla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32994,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32993\/revisions\/32994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}