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Dealers don't want to sell them. To me, this is astonishing. Half of all Buick dealers would rather stop being Buick dealers rather than take on and pay for the GM requirement that they sell and service electric Buicks. Apparently GM plans to make all Buicks electric vehicles starting in 2030. I won't be buying Buicks any more if that happens.
There's a message here. Dealers are at the front lines of vehicle sales. They know what moves and what doesn't. They know what customers want when they walk in the door. They apparently don't want EVs. Is anyone listening?
GM buys out nearly half of its Buick dealers across the country, who opt to not sell EVs
No one wants used EVs. There's no market for them, which makes it difficult to use one as a trade-in if you want a new one after a few years. One thing a buyer of a used EV might have to face is replacement of the batteries, and that's apparently not cheap.
No one wants to buy used EVs and they’re piling up in weed-infested graveyards
Interesting concluding paragraph from the Yahoo article.
“Totaling all factors in, an EV will set you back $71,770,” Fix said. “A gas-powered car? $58,664. You will never make up the initial expense difference over the lifetime of your more expensive electric vehicle. Put another way, a gas-powered car will cost you $600 more a year to drive. But over an average of six years of owning an EV versus a gas car, the EV will set you back $13,000 more.”
Last edited by jaunty75; Dec 23, 2023 at 06:09 AM.
What is a battery? I think Tesla said it best when he called it an Energy Storage System. That's important.
Rechargeable batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an electric vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, It takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car. There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single use The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals. Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries to be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them. All batteries are self-discharging. That means that even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill. In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly. But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, take a closer look at batteries and windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs. Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject. In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas. Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car. A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one battery. Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car? I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why. The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled. Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weigh 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.If this had been titled… "The Embedded Costs of Going Green," I doubt that many would you have read it.
If this article is fairly accurate, might it imply that we are "barking up the wrong tree", energy-wise?
Well written although I would admit it is probably infalmatory especially when read by proponents of "clean energy" but possibly by objective readers as well. It's all in the wording regardless of the data, which I believe is accurate despite how the words are used to deliver it. I agree with what Olds64 says when he sees an EV, "look! a coal powered car!". As a society we are deluding ourselves by ignoring the obvious for fear of being offended or offending. What I mean by this can be explained by the well known thought "how many people would stop eating meat if the really, really knew how it got to them?". Many are offended by images of meat packing plants so they choose not to see them or view them but still eat their hamburgers, chicken nuggets, and steaks. By the way, I am a carnivore just as much as I am a proponent of fuel burning ICE's. Just saying...
Obviously that article was not written by me. No way I am smart enough to even begin to write that. The article was forwarded to my brother by a common friend of ours who is a retired aeronautical engineer and probably one of the smartest guys I know. He didn't write it either. One of the most alarming things to me is that 60% of the world's cobalt comes from the Congo. Just think of what the price of cobalt will do as the demand continues to increase.
The CO2 emitted by ice engines is plant food..they absorb it and need to grow. The fuel is fossil fuel…it’s the greatest natural recycling system man ever invented
The CO2 emitted by ice engines is plant food..they absorb it and need to grow. The fuel is fossil fuel…it’s the greatest natural recycling system man ever invented
More C02 less starvation. Why wouldn't the powers that be not want people to eat? Klaus? Are you there? Klaus?
I think hybrids are the future… I’ve had a hybrid for ten years, it’s great for what I use it for. And let’s face it, a pure EV is usually getting its charge from a power plant outside of town that’s powered by coal or natural gas .
these guys built the first hybrid electric semi truck in North America in a temporary shed. It’s a very simple truck built by a couple of truck drivers
they are going to start producing kits to convert your pick to hybrid like this semi but on a smaller scale.
As a taxpayer, I would just like to quit subsidizing these damn things with tax credits. Then they get a further subsidy by driving on roads and not paying any tax to maintain them. Ev's are okay, just let the market do its thing.
BINGO! I have nothing against EV's at all but the market needs to dictate the demand. In Indiana they charge $50 more for plated each year for a Hybrid and $100 more per year for an EV. This is because of the gas tax. Lucky for me, I drive an old hybrid Prius but I drive on expired plates. If I ever get a ticket for it, the ticket is less than the plates are.
More US auto buyers are turning to hybrids as sales of electric vehicles slow
If the "green movement" was really concerned about the planet, this is what they should be pushing. I started playing with the 2nd gen Prii (plural for Prius) and the majority of those are well over 200,000 miles these days and low priced. I have $2500 in my 2008 Prius with 250,000 miles and get 53 MPG summer and 44 MPG winter. On the interstate those numbers go down a little but not that much. Gas is no longer really a concern for me unless I am taking my truck for a long haul for something Oldsmobile related.
the only thing he missed at the end was that wind turbines and solar panels also require large amounts of fossil fuel to produce and the mining is the dirtiest type of mining there is.
Why is it always a Prius in the left lane going 5 under with a line behind them?
When you want hypermiles, you need to stay steady on the throttle. The lane least likely to have slower drivers is the left one. And if you drive slower than the rest, you can have a quarter-mile of space ahead to ensure you don't have to slow down and lose mileage. I've noticed it's more common in some states than others (e.g., more in CA vs. here in TX).
When you want hypermiles, you need to stay steady on the throttle. The lane least likely to have slower drivers is the left one. And if you drive slower than the rest, you can have a quarter-mile of space ahead to ensure you don't have to slow down and lose mileage. I've noticed it's more common in some states than others (e.g., more in CA vs. here in TX).
I learned to drive in Europe. Over there it is extremely rude to be on the left lane holding up traffic, unless you are passing someone. You drive on the right lane, quickly move to the left to pass and then quickly move back to the right. Sadly, a completely alien concept for most Americans.
Same thing when I want to go for a slow stroll. If I see traffic accumulating behind me, I pull over to let them pass me. Simple courtesy.
Why is it always a Prius in the left lane going 5 under with a line behind them?
Say what you will about the Prius, but I like them. I actually had the chance to use one on a trip once when the rental car turned to be, without warning, a Prius. Took us a little while to get used to it, but I grew to love it. Very well designed and engineered, and great gas mileage. While I would never by an EV, I would certainly buy a hybrid because you still have the advantages of a gasoline engine in that you don't have to worry about charging stations and range.
Why is it always a Prius in the left lane going 5 under with a line behind them?
I have seen people do this but for sure not exclusive tot he Prius from what I have seen. Well, Come to think of it, I have never seen a Prius doing this. The people that do it should be shoved off the road and license taken away. I get on their bumper so close if they even let of the throttle I will hit them. Would be my fault but so be it.
I agree with CANADIANOLDS. I think hybrids make way more sense. Electric Vehicle sales decline and non forced upon everyone hybrids sales are increasing.
I have seen people do this but for sure not exclusive tot he Prius from what I have seen. Well, Come to think of it, I have never seen a Prius doing this. The people that do it should be shoved off the road and license taken away. I get on their bumper so close if they even let of the throttle I will hit them. Would be my fault but so be it.
I know a few firefighters who hate going to an EV fire…they can’t do anything except stand there and watch. They have no idea what toxic crap they’re breathing in. They told me all they do is reroute traffic and call the works department to give them a heads up that the road under the Tesla will need to be resurfaced ..right now!
Here’s my prediction of what will happen in the EV fire world. Fire dept’s or specialists will have a portable water tank on hand that they can bring to the site of an EV fire and actually dunk the car in the tank.
leave it in the tank because they are famous for reigniting multiple times…take it away , while still in the tank and bring it to pre determined place to sit for about a week..still submerged
fire dept will need to have available to them a mobile crane and operator.
this will prevent having to shut down the road for hours, or days to repair the road surface form letting it burn itself out and prevent the release of black toxic chemical plume into the area
Last edited by CANADIANOLDS; Dec 28, 2023 at 12:09 PM.
I designed fire sprinkler systems and had my guys install. For many USGS (United States Geological Survey)buildings expansions. I do a lot of government jobs, even UFC (Unified Facilities Criteria) As a very curious guy. I have talked to a dozen field scientist. All give me the same answer. Freshwater fish all have tumors and harmful chemical in them. From the run off the road and highways. It is what it is! How many cars and truck drip oil alone? And whatever else comes out of the tail pipe. Where do you think its going? Bottom fish are the worst I was told. As the heavy chemicals go to the bottom.
The harm to fish is from brake dust and additives to tire rubber.
The whole training module for firefighters responding to an EV fire…., stand upwind and wait
Here in Phoenix they dropped one in a dumpster then buried it in sand for something like 3 days. And when they pulled it out it started burning again. That experiment wasn’t successful and last I heard they were still trying to come up with workable plan.
Here in Phoenix they dropped one in a dumpster then buried it in sand for something like 3 days. And when they pulled it out it started burning again. That experiment wasn’t successful and last I heard they were still trying to come up with workable plan.
Kind of tough to get around the fact that lithium batteries created their own oxygen source during combustion and fire suppression relies on removing oxygen from the fire triangle.
I know that lithium-ion batteries are in everything these days that we all use, including laptop computers and cell phones, and that's why airlines won't let you put them in checked baggage, but the batteries in EVs are several orders of magnitude larger and of potential danger. I seriously could never see myself parking one in my garage. So much for home charging.
Cargo Ship with Li-ion Battery Fire Diverted to Alaska by USCG
They cost more to repair. I've read from several sources that it doesn't take much damage to an EV, especially any damage to the batteries, for an insurance company to simply total it.
This pretty much says it all. He also reiterates an important point that I've made. Electric vehicles are not new. They have been around since the beginning of the automobile age. If they were destined to supplant ICE vehicles, they'd have done it by now. As it is, they're only around at all because of heavy subsidies and government dictates.
