Here Come The Clean, Quiet, Non-Stinky EV's

The night before yesterday, I woke up a few hours earlier than I had planned to. I imagine many other others in my neighborhood may have awoken at the same time, for the same reason: because an extremely loud pickup truck was parked at the curb and revving. Honestly, it was rattling my windows. 

I don't know whether the truck's driver was intentionally altering people's sleep patterns. I don't know whether his truck has been modified to be that loud, or if it has a broken muffler. I suspect the second, because the truck is usually dirty and full of tools and the driver doesn't look well-off enough to have a budget for a fancy, intentionally-noisy exhaust.

Later that day, yesterday, the Ford F-150 Lightning, the first all-electric pickup truck from Detroit, was officially released, and deliveries to paying customers began. And, yesterday, it occurred to me that it's going to be much harder to wake people up with a loud engine, when EV's replace ICE vehicles. 

And they will replace ICE. Not as soon as some of us would like, but a lot sooner than many people think. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, says that he expects Ford to produce about 200,000 F-150 Lightnings in the first 12 months after yesterday launch. He also says that Ford's combined production of all its EV models to be at a rate of around 600,000 per year by the end of 2023, and 2,000,000 by the end of 2026. 

By 2035, or sooner, new ICE vehicles will be somewhat rare. If a pickup truck driver or a motorcyclist wants to wake up his neighbors in the middle of the night, it will be much harder for him to do so. He'll have to find some other way of dealing with his frustration and hostility -- like maybe talking to somebody about how he feels, which might actually help him feel much better.

If he feels bad about waking people up, then the new electric vehicles will be a relief. 

Those who are already used to being in EV's all the time already assure us that they now hate the stink of internal combustion, the stink they hardly noticed before, the stink most of us hardly notice, because it''s always there. 

The noise is also always there. 

It's not as if an electric motor is entirely silent, but an electric vehicle is quiet enough that you can't wake up your neighbors with it. The absence of the stink, of the noise, of the pollution -- startling changes are coming faster than some of you think. In some neighborhoods they're already here.