In the recent years we’ve been bombarded by propaganda trying to shove electric cars down our throat, regardless of the fact that nobody really wants them, so I’ll write some things about that.

First of all, I have to say that I actually like electric cars as a concept. The electric motor is much more reliable and easy to maintain than the internal combustion engine. It also has excellent performance curve. My problem is with other things: first, the Li-ion battery is simply unfit for purpose. It decays after a few years, which is a problem since it’s the most expensive part of the car. It uses up Lithium, which is a very rare element that has to be mined and transported across huge distances, it’s a much more limited finite resource than petroleum, the batteries pose an inherent fire hazard which increases with age, use and mechanical damage, in order to power a car a battery needs to have huge capacity, and in order to charge such a huge battery you need either lots of time, or you need to shove an incredible amount of amps into the battery in a very short period of time, in your garage during the night, and this makes me uneasy, because if something goes wrong you have an incredibly deadly mixture of high current, dangerous chemistry and fire. Some of the battery issues can be resolved in the future, but we are not there yet. Right now the towing companies outright refuse to deal with wrecked electric cars because they are such a hazard.

Also, the electric cars are incredibly uneconomical. They cost more and do less. Apparently, most people agree with me since adoption of electric cars was not widespread, outside the circle of rich hipsters at least. You see, there’s a much more ecological and economical option: get a diesel with a modern particle filter and you get something that goes fast, sips fuel, is so low emission it actually beats most sources of electricity and certainly beats the environmental impact of Li-ion batteries, and is comparatively a bargain. Which is why the eco-nutcases are now working to badmouth and eventually ban diesel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually in favour of outlawing the old diesel shitboxes that leave black clouds of suffocation behind them, but we are talking about cars that don’t have particle filters. Euro 5 and Euro 6 diesels are not only not a problem, they are actually the best solution available. Everybody should drive those and the ecological impact of cars would drop to the point of background noise. Also, natural gas makes great sense as fuel, since it’s abundant and cheap, and you can easily convert gasoline engines to run on it and reduce their environmental impact, not on the combustion side, but on the oil refinery side of the equation.

But when we get to the energy supply side of things, it’s not like electricity is actually an abundant resource. In fact, I don’t see additional nuclear power plants being built to offset the expected increase in power consumption caused by the electric cars. Everybody talks about those stupid windmills that are the most useless and dirty power source of all time, and solar panels which are basically toxic waste, don’t work in most places for the majority of time, and work only at the time of day when people don’t charge their electric cars; the peak expected consumption would be over night. And oh yeah, neither the windmills nor the solar panels are recyclable. It’s just terrible landfill fodder, which makes “ecological” electricity sources terrible for the environment.

Which is why I expect the following to take place.

Now it’s “diesel is nasty, has to be banned, electric cars are pure and clean and wonderful”. Let’s say everybody switches to electric cars. Then it will be “electric cars consume more power in a day than a normal household consumes in a year, how dare you drive those pigs!”, “electric cars use components sourced from poor countries/using child labour/consuming finite resources, you should all feel guilty and kill yourselves for driving them”, and so on, ad nauseam. The next step would obviously be to restrict private vehicle ownership and push us to public transportation, which would of course be as crowded as those Japanese bullet trains where people are packed as sardines in a can. Which brings us to the next step, where the eco-freaks will simply kill us all because that solves all problems.