Our Bourbons

By Eric Peters

There isn’t a single EV available in this country that costs less than $40,000 that can go more than about 250 miles on a charge. This makes them impractical for people who do not live in or near cities, where there are “fast” chargers.

As well as unaffordable.

All of the EVs for sale in this country that cost less than $40,000 are compact-sized vehicles that aren’t suitable as family cars – even if they could go 500 miles on a charge. And never mind that most families cannot afford to buy one anyhow. Let alone two – in order to make up for the fact that a family would need more than one of these things.

In plain language, electric vehicles are elitist vehicles.

All of the models that can go 300 miles or more cost $50,000 or more. All of the mid-sized and larger models cost that much or more as well.

What will happen when the only vehicles available are vehicles like that – as the Biden Thing’s EPA intends to assure, having just issued regulatory fatwas that effectively outlaw alternatives to them, without actually outlawing them? The regs don’t say a manufacturer cannot build a given kind of car; only that it must comply. The cost of the latter being too high to make it worth building.

That’s how the government outlaws something without the bother of having to pass a law.

I was discussing this on the radio the other day with my old friend Henry Payne, who writes car reviews for the Detroit News. Henry owns a Tesla. But he also owns several other cars, which he can afford because he’s a successful writer (and cartoonist). He can afford to indulge, in other words.

But he recognizes that most Americans cannot.

And it’s not just the cost of the EV, itself. If you cannot afford a single family home, owning an EV is difficult because you haven’t got a place to garage it. More to the point, you probably don’t have a place to charge it.

At least, not at home.

People who live in apartments and condos can’t run an extension cord out to their EV, parked on the street below. And even if they could, they can’t – because normal extension cords cannot be used for that. The cabling isn’t the right size and the transmission losses over the distance involved are such that it just won’t work – even if you could run a normal extension cord 100 yards from your apartment window to the street below.

Also, if you haven’t got a garage your EV will get cold sitting outside in the winter – and the battery will lose charge trying to keep itself warm overnight. The only way to avoid this is to keep the EV in a warm garage – and plugged in – neither of which you can do if you have to park it outside.

Never mind.

Or rather, never think. At least, one hopes.

Henry and I talked about the probability of out-of-touchness as regards what you might call our Bourbon Class, in reference to the ossified court and courtiers of pre-revolutionary France circa 1789. One of them – the king’s wife, Marie Antoinette – supposedly (and infamously) said, Let them eat cake when told the peasants were starving due to lack of bread. Apparently, this was not meant maliciously. The woman assumed that cake was available if bread wasn’t.

Didn’t everyone have plenty of cake?

She was out-of-touch. And for that, she eventually lost her head (along with the king and lots of other Bourbons, too).

Our “Bourbons” are similarly out-of-touch and for similar reasons. Like the French Bourbons, they do not have to worry about bread (as in money) because they have so much of ours. The Biden Thing is a multi-millionaire and so are most of the rest of these things. Such things do not sweat the cost of a $40,000 EV.

Doesn’t everyone have one?

Well, in their circle – probably. But – like the French Bourbons, they do not see that the people who are not in their circle don’t. Such “deplorables” are as invisible to our Bourbons as the starving peasants were to Marie Antoinette.

And it may be something worse than that. Our Bourbons do see – and don’t care. They know perfectly well that most people cannot afford a $40,000 vehicle – especially one that only goes maybe 200-ish miles before it forces them to park it at a “fast” charger nowhere near where they live and which is much harder to live with if they haven’t got a cozy single family home and a warm garage with a 240V outlet to plug it into.

They know it – and they continue to push for more of it.

That makes them much worse than poor Marie Antoinette, who was probably a nice (if vapid) woman who meant no harm.

They might stop to think how she – and the other Bourbons – ended up once the people had enough of them.

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