Electrical Power to the People!

There are probably 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 idiots -- approximately, give or take -- raving full-time about how EV's don't have enough range. They're wrong. I could fill whole posts with the details of the ways in which they are wrong, but if we could somehow distract them from this topic, and get them raving full-time about how there need to be more charging options instead, that could really do some good.

I'm not just talking about fast-charge options -- the public places where you pull up in your EV and plug it in and then pay when you're done, like a gas station except with electricity instead of gas. This is cheaper than putting gas into a conventional car, but it's not as cheap as plugging an EV into a regular wall socket overnight. I'm also talking about houses with garages. A lot of people who own EV's seldom or never use those public charging stations, because they plug their cars into regular sockets

 

overnight. This takes longer than the public charging stations, but it's also much cheaper. 

So people who own their own houses save money by plugging their EV's in overnight, while poor people who can't afford the price of a new EV to begin with also tend not to own their own houses, and usually don't have any wall sockets which they can easily plug their used EV's into overnight. Maybe they could get a 100-foot extension cord and run it from their 2012 Nissan Leaf parked on the street up the side of their apartment building, in the window of their 3rd-floor apartment and into the wall socket and charge their electric cars while they sleep the way that rich people do. Maybe. But it would be difficult, and the problems would be much greater still if they lived on the 10th floor. 

Similarly, many employers offer free EV charging to their employees, but we're usually talking about employees who are already well-paid. Similarly, Tesla offers free public charging to many Tesla owners -- but again, Teslas are even more expensive than other EV's. And that's just one of the problems with owning a Tesla. 

And electricity is much more widely available in the US and Europe than in some poorer regions of the world.

You see the pattern here. It's easy for you to get those famous huge energy savings by owning an EV -- but in most cases, you can only get the FULL savings if you're rich enough not to really need those savings. It's the infamous Tom Petty It's Ab-So-Lute-Lute-Ly Backwards Law of Microeconomics again. Poorer people will still save money buying electricity for their cars instead of gasoline, but generally not as much money. Let's get those 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 idiots raving about giving poor people their own houses with garages with wall outlets in them -- they could talk to Jimmy Carter and some of his associates about that one -- or giving them very cheap or free electricity some other way. Then, those 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 idiots would actually be accomplishing something.