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Electric China?

After decades of having the worst air pollution in the world, the Chinese have discovered that this idea of ‘all-electric, all the time’ is not as simple as Democratic politicians make it out to be.

After decades of having the worst air pollution in the world, the Chinese have discovered that this idea of ‘all-electric, all the time’ is not as simple as Democratic politicians make it out to be. Is there anything we can learn from the troubles they having… like, just maybe, NOT buying an electric car?

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38 replies on “Electric China?”

I bought a 1993 gmc 3/4t diesel 2 yrs ago for $3k. I can sell it now for almost $5k. Thing is I can’t sell it and find something else as reliable as this pre electronic vehicle. 8km per litre does hurt a bit but that is my only real expense for our vehicle.

Told some friends recently that I’ll never buy an EV. That I thought it was an environmental hazard. And that why were being charged off of the very power that they objected to. Met with silence. Enough said.

You are so right. From the making of the steel in the car itself, to the making of the steel for the mining tractors to get the coal or the coke or the iron ore, to the steel in the transportation vehicles or rail cars to get it from the mine to the smelter, the rails the rail cars run on, it goes on and on. The coal can be hidden but nothing can happen without it?

Bill made a brilliant point to juxtapose the “which came first” question. If electric cars were what we had had for a century, then the internal combustion engine would be the new LED lightbulb.

First electric car was built in 1890. Limited range and took a long time to recharge. Minimal improvement in 130 years all things considered.
But yes, that was a good point he made.

I bought a trashed 2001 F250 from a mine site cheap and can already flip it for another 8k. I need it for a farm truck and as a farm truck, it performs exactly as needed. No electric vehicle can four-by through a muddy field moving pumps and generators.

Won’t buy an electric vehicle – just not practical in a farming environment – can’t handle equipment pulling – no real range – no real application outside of the city. Plus they catch on-fire and I’m not convinced there is a recycle mechanism for the spent batteries yet.

How dare they exercise their own brains and make decisions counter to the wishes of their rulers. An example must be made.

Gasoline is portable and the government has no way to control what vehicle you put it in and where you go with that vehicle. Electric vehicles offer a way for government to control your freedom of movement. I don’t know if they already do, but I am sure all charging stations will read your VIN number and be able to control your access to energy.

I laugh when people say that electric cars are great for urban settings. They must not have driven in Atlanta. It could take 2 hours to drive 9 miles. Let’s say you had a quick drive to work and counted on 4/5ths of the charge remaining. It’s 92 degrees and 92% humidity. You enter the expressway and get behind a wreck that blocks three lanes. Sux4U. I’m sure that there’s things that have been done to make the risk of being out of fuel ameliorate, but, ….
As a frequent past owner of sports cars, I laugh at people who want a car that goes fast. The vast majority of the time, it’s like being married to the sexiest woman on earth and never getting past second base. Entering the expressway is basically the only time it’s fun, and then you have to brake.

The vast majority of the time, it’s like being married to the sexiest woman on earth and never getting past second base. 

That’s funny, right there!

Keith, I have a 2018 SMART Eq electric. A whopping 17.7 Kw worth of batteries. I have a 10 mile each way commute and CA Hw1 from my house to work and is only matched by the 405 through Santa Monica or maybe Boston during the Big Dig. It sucks. I have a home level 2 charger. Top speed on my drive is usually 14 mph on a great day. It can take 45 min to an hour to get to and from work. Surface streets are clogged too. Thanks Silicon Valley!
The difference between what I go through and what you described is the 92 deg F and 92% RH. I’m lucky to get to 70 degF and 50% humidity, any day, every day, along the coast of central CA. And maybe that’s why I don’t get range anxiety. Oh, and when I’m sitting in traffic not going anywhere, neither are my electrons. I get worse “milage” when I’m cruzing along at 65. Much worse.
My little SMART electric is the perfect 2nd car, which for me, it is. It would Sux4me if I didn’t have my Ford 150. But I do. I use the pickup when I need to go over 90 miles, tow something, carry anything, get to the airport, or make a trip to the dump, and get there fast. But the SMART is nearly 5x more efficient for every dime used to purchase electrons or gas. So on the short, traffic laden to and from work commute, it’s the electric that get’s the call.
And speed? I’m faster than a Lambo or a Corvette….for the first 15 feet!
At least I have that going for me, which is nice….

I can no longer grasp that level of traffic in my once NYC/Tri-State resident imagination. I have 22.5 miles one way. It takes 30 minutes. It is part local part interstate. If there is an accident on the interstate, particularly in the afternoon, all that traffic dumps to local and it take 45 minutes of stop and go, with the expected ranting accompanying.
I have had many opportunities for “better” jobs living in more crowded areas. I long since stopped equating higher pay with better life.
I like my little town and the fact that if on occasion we forget to close the garage door, I am not going to get murdered.
I have seen people in SMART cars on the interstate and always wonder if the tractor trailers even see them or feel them when they run over them. Looks like a small golf cart.
Now, the F150 I am jealous of. Can’t find one used for sale anywhere and the new ones, please. The lowest price at the local dealership is a cool 50k for what used to be a basic pickup.

2016, Ford was offering 19,950 price tag on a NEW base version of the 150. The salesman said “Oh you ARE cheap” when I insisted of the basest of base models. Hey, it’s got a radio, heater and AC . THAT’s it. Hand crank windows (I prefer!) 7 years later, Same stripped down model but 2022 year- 31K. Don’t anyone tell me there is no inflation…..

You’re one of those people the guys are talking about, who actually can benefit significantly from the things an electric vehicle does well.

I can only afford and own one vehicle and I have no use for an electric, I’m one of the people the government is taking a dump on when they mandate electric vehicles for everyone.

I own a Jeep because I need to be able to go where I need to go no matter what. I live on a family owned acreage and there is a pickup, a full sized van and a car available here. We’re none of us spring chickens and we get bad weather and even hurricanes occasionally. If one of us needs to get to the hospital I can get there no matter what. When there’s a serious weather threat there’s a chainsaw in the back of my jeep for cutting trees and power poles that may have fallen across the road.

My neighbor is a retired lineman. He nearly crapped himself when I said I’d cut up a power pole if I need to. I told him “I know how electricity works. If I need to cut a pole to save a life that’s just too bad for the power company.”

None of the family living here or nearby needs to commute anywhere. An electric vehicle is useless to us. The idea that everyone should only own electric vehicles to ‘save the planet’ is absurd. When our government insists on absurdities we’re in serious trouble. Which is where we find ourselves today.

I read an article recently that some EVs have bi-directional chargers. If the grid needs electricity, it can take it from your vehicle. Wouldn’t that be nice to think you’ve been charging your car all night to go to work the next day and find out it’s DOA?

Possibly, even probably but “the greater public need for your electrons” is a better excuse to drain batteries on a large scale. See what I said to Susan above. Her observation may have considerable merit for the reasons I expanded upon.

It would be pathetically easy to monitor the line feeding the car charger and prove that they were sucking your batteries dry. So if it got to the point that they’re doing that with impunity and without fear of repercussions we’d all be pretty much screwed by then anyway.

EDIT:

I thought about this some more and came to the conclusion that I hope the government and power companies do try to do this. Electrical energy has no politics and abides by the laws of physics. It would be pretty simple to wire up an adapter with some diodes (which are one-way electrical “check valves”) and maybe a couple capacitors to keep everything at max load. I could make a fortune selling that sort of thing as a hobby. My market would be everyone who left their car plugged in to charge and came back expecting a full battery only to find themselves stranded.

I have no doubt the technology exists to use the batteries of thousands, or tens of thousands, or more, electric vehicles to act as a sump for power that can be tapped at need.

One of the biggest problems with “green energy” like wind and solar is storage of the energy harvested for when it’s needed. The sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind may or may not blow no matter what time of day it is. So there’s a need to store power created when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing for times when those things are not happening.

A whole lot of very large high capacity batteries hooked into the power grid by necessity, bought and paid for by people who have either been duped or forced into buying electric vehicles — Would supply a large ready pool of accessible electricity.

Most of America has been quietly switched over from the old style electric meter to a new style that communicates with the power company via digital data piggy-backed over the power lines of the electrical grid. These would likely only require a firmware update to be patched in when an electric vehicle was added to the service address of an electric meter.

The technology to pull power from a service address already exists also in the form of “sell back” power from solar and wind. I.E. You can put in a solar or wind system on your property and then sell any surplus you create to the power company. This could as easily pull power from the battery on an electric vehicle as from solar or wind power generating equipment.

So I’m afraid you may be on to something here. The government doesn’t care about whether you can get to work in the morning or not. The government cares about how many votes it can buy.

Road Rider is an exception not the rule. He has a specific application for an electric vehicle that works out for him economically advantageous. He’s in the market for that sort of thing and that’s as it should be.

Let the market drive the demand and you get people like Road Rider. Let the government drive the market by fiat and law and you get a huge “green energy” storage system.

I had been puzzled about how the powers that be could be so unobservant and out of touch as to think we all need to buy and drive electric vehicles. When electric vehicles are so abominably unsuitable for most of us. Now thanks to your observation we have at least a partial answer and surprise, surprise — It has nothing to do with saving the planet.

Good catch.

I am about to hit 200,000 miles on my primary vehicle. I would replace it if I could but have elected to just spend on upkeep (just replaced the starter after 18 years, not bad). Replacing it in kind with an equivalent new model at the same trim level is over 50% more than previous. Nearly $1000 per month payment. Yea, if I had that I would up my membership level here.
I drive about 60 miles a day on the days I go to work. Would be fine for an electric vehicle that I could then plug in at night. But who can afford those.
I find myself nearing retirement and having to downsize the type of vehicle I drive simply due to outrageous costs of new vehicles.
Can’t find a used pickup truck for sale at all that isn’t almost the price of new. Crazy Years as RLH would have said.

I have always been ‘poor’ in that if I had the money for a brand new vehicle I had other things I had to spend that money on, or wanted more than I wanted a new vehicle. So I generally end up being the last owner of a vehicle.

Which is fine, I can drill holes and cut holes to mount radios, antennae and computer/tablet mounts and other things because resale value is not something I need to worry about. When I can’t afford to keep a vehicle on the road its next home is a junkyard.

Because a vehicle nearing the junkyard is a pain to maintain and costs a lot more to keep running reliably than a new vehicle I have out of necessity become a fair-to-middlin’ shade tree mechanic. I hate working on vehicles but I hate paying a shop double or more than it would cost for me to do the same thing.

I would love to have a building or even a shelter of some sort to do that kind of work but there again the matter of expense comes into play. If it’s build a shelter to work on my vehicle or go fishing, I’m going fishing. Life is too short not to go fishing every time the opportunity presents itself.

So I buy used vehicles and consider them largely disposable.

I too have often thought we’re entering RAH’s crazy years. He projected they would start with some sort of religious underpinnings and I think he missed the mark there. But he certainly got the rest of it right because a lot of what’s going on now is just plain nuts.

He projected they would start with some sort of religious underpinnings and I think he missed the mark there. 

Not so sure. The Climate / LGBT+ Mafia / Green Energy etc crowd sure have a lot of similarities to religion in that they value faith in their betters over facts and insist on unwavering adherence to the cause.
Maybe not strictly a religion, but it’s pretty close.

Yep – whether you refer to them as the Climate Cult or other name, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, . . . 😉

Yeah, and the signs and symptoms betray a religious belief for the actual religious belief it is. By which I mean that many modern Leftist cultists would deny they have any religion at all. All the while behaving in an obviously religious manner.

Same goes for anti-theists no matter what politics they expound. They’re some of the most blatant religious zealots on the planet and it’s a bit hilarious that everyone can see that but them.

Which is why I love pointing it out to them, in depth, at length. They really, really hate it when you turn the tables on them and instead of them making you defend your faith you make them defend their religion. For me there is high entertainment value in doing this.

You can spot an anti-theist the second he rolls out his piety. Same goes for cults of the Left. The more attention they try to draw to themselves, the more piously they are practicing their religion. Not admitting their religious views are religious is an evasion not a fact. It’s all the same family of skunk, the striped are just arraigned differently.

Excellent point. What those people do is an ersatz religion. It’s the religion you end up with when you make up your own religion. It’s the religion you get because you think you’re so damned smart that you can abandon out-of-hand millennia of religious thought and study by minds greater than your own.

I stand corrected and bow to your insightful interpretation. You got it right.

Acts… I need help with a ground fault on the 7-way connector on my F-150…… 38th wedding anniversary camping trip coming up…
Can I bribe you to make a 2k mile trip out west? Great trout fishing in the Sierras?!?

Kidding.

Lol, I hate working on vehicle electrical systems even more than I hate mechanic-ing on them.

There’s an electrical ghost in my tractor that I’ve been trying to nail down and kill for over a year. It’s a diesel engine. Instead of a failsafe manual fuel stop on a sensible cable the tractor has a fuel stop solenoid that activates when the key is turned off. Turn the key on, solenoid opens the fuel flow, turn it off, solenoid closes the fuel flow.

It will just stop randomly or it will fail to start randomly. In either case if I wait for a few minutes with the key on, sometimes less, I’ll hear that solenoid “CLICK!” and then I can go back to what I was doing.

I’ve verified all the safety switches are working properly, replaced the solenoid, the relay that controls it and the ignition switch. The next thing is the OPC (Operators Presence Controller) module that coordinates all the safety switches. That’s about a $200 part so I don’t want to buy a new one just in case that’s what’s wrong. So the next step is to yank that module and put it on my bench to see if I can determine if it’s working correctly or not.

Electric systems are a PITA, you have my sympathy.

One thing I can tell you from years of pulling trailers commercially and recreationally, if you have a problem the place to start is with the grounding. If there’s no physical damage it’s usually a failure to complete the circuit because of a bad ground. Stationary AC current almost never has this problem, mobile DC current has this problem more often than any other issue.

If the circuit is faulting and blowing fuses or popping breakers it’s a dead short. That’s fairly easy to find with a continuity check.

If the problem occurs only when the trailer pigtail is connected, it’s aft of the connector.

If it occurs when the trailer is not connected it’s usually the connector itself but can be somewhere forward of the connector. If it’s not a factory installed connecter the odds are high that the problem is the connector itself or where the connector was spliced into the existing wiring.

It’s really hard to make a really good splice into existing wiring that won’t degrade over time due to corrosion. Most aftermarket installers don’t go to the trouble to create something that will last indefinitely. I usually solder all my wires, give ’em a dab of dielectric grease and heat shrink ’em. Once I fix a wire I don’t ever want to have to mess with it again.

There’s a really great system for this that has heat shrink, solder and a sealant all in one little tube. I use this a lot —

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B09BQZLJXG/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_plhdr=t&aaxitk=5ad8cc695ab92e6e0b07c6666e952d63&hsa_cr_id=8683158650101&qid=1693403863&sr=1-3-9e67e56a-6f64-441f-a281-df67fc737124&ref_=sbx_be_s_sparkle_lsi4d_asin_2_img&pd_rd_w=ygepY&content-id=amzn1.sym.cd95889f-432f-43a7-8ec8-833616493f4a%3Aamzn1.sym.cd95889f-432f-43a7-8ec8-833616493f4a&pf_rd_p=cd95889f-432f-43a7-8ec8-833616493f4a&pf_rd_r=CSEG2FQE0XX36KZSRAZW&pd_rd_wg=jFrXR&pd_rd_r=d47243fe-9f87-4ae3-9292-35195d86d5a8&th=1

You don’t need to get in there with a soldering iron, a heat gun works great. I often just use my cigar lighter which is always in my pockets somewhere. The cigar lighter is a little bit intense so all it takes is a couple careful passes to melt the solder and shrink the heat wrap. I usually run another tube of black heat shrink over the connection just to be certain it’s permanently sealed and a permanent fix.

It’s very rare for factory wiring to fail in an inaccessible place where it was routed during vehicle construction. The failure will almost always be at one end or the other of the wire that’s being a problem.

If I could find a pick up I would. none for sale anywhere close and new ones are just crazy priced.
I have an older model SUV-ish vehicle that allows for enough of what I need from Lowe’s or other of that type to keep me out of too much trouble. Doesn’t work for stone or that type of thing but plenty of folks will let me borrow for a day at the inexpensive price of refilling the gas tank and a six pack of not Bud Light.

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