SteinwayTransitCorp
Well-known member
They depreciate faster than a Model S Plaid in Drag Strip mode
Lauren: Look at that really cool Porsche Taycan — I think it's spectacular. Unfortunately, [it's a] $200,000 car [that's] available used for $100,000. So, if you buy one of these vehicles, you're losing about half as soon as you drive off the lot.If you are considering an electric vehicle, a lease would be your smartest move. Walk away at the end of your two- or three-year period.
Paul: Do not buy an electric vehicle. Period.
Lauren: The battery replacement will make you cry. Some of them are as much as $60,000 for a new battery. Lease it, give it back to the dealer. That's your smartest move.
4. The charging infrastructure just isn't there yet
Paul: I just took a trip up to Road America [race track] last weekend. I live in the Chicago suburbs, and I happen to have a Kia EV9. That's what I was driving last week.Lauren: Cool car, by the way. Very, very cool. Expensive, but very cool.
Paul: I had to charge up on Friday night to make sure that I was topped off, and then I drove to Milwaukee, and I did some interviews at the Milwaukee Mile. Then I said, "Hey, you know what, I can't find a level-3 charging station in Elkhart Lake."
[A level-3 charger] you can read a comic book while you're charging; the other ones you better have a copy of a Leo Tolstoy novel with you.
So, I had to drive from Milwaukee to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to find a level-3 charger. Well, that's 35 miles, 40 miles away from where I was going — Road America. So, then I had another two hours while I was charging that vehicle.
Lauren: Who's got two hours? Isn't time money? It is to me.
Paul: When I finally got home, I had 19 miles of range
. It was terrifying because I'm watching that gauge closer than I'm watching the road.
Lauren: [Ask yourself], is there charging available around you? Now, we were just in California driving one of the newest Honda electric cars, and they said, "Oh, there's four superchargers in this northern California town."
So, we went there, and three of them weren't working. One of them was, but there was a Tesla there. If it takes 20 minutes to charge, you should kind of hang around. Nope: 20 minutes later [it was clear] someone had plugged it in and taken off.
The fact is that you're relying on public charging, but you have to still pay for that. And there's a cost to it. And electricity in California especially is the most expensive in the country. And I live in New York, and Paul lives in Illinois, also extremely expensive. So the three of us live in states where it's just crazy expensive for electricity, and it's not going down. Look at your electric bill every month. Now, add in a charging station.
We've all heard, don't put your phone in your ear, right? Don't put your phone in your ear. Even these AirPods, if you put in two, it's causing all kinds of issues. Don't put your phone in your pocket, especially for guys. We've all heard and read about this in a million different places.
But it's okay to sit in a car with alternating current.
So, I actually have one of these gauges that I bring with me. The manufacturers hate when I bring it, so I have to keep it hidden.
Paul: Did you get a tin foil hat?
Lauren: [laughs] If you're sitting in the car while it's charging, you're not just exposing yourself but anyone in the car. So, it's like being in a microwave. It's alternating current, which is the problem.
Actually, you were with me, Paul. We were at one of the vehicle [test] drives at the super fast charger [that] takes 20 minutes. So, I asked the guy, and he said off the record, "Get out of the car and go as far away as you can."
And I said, "Really?"
He said, "We're not going to tell anyone this because I'll lose my job. But get in the car, and park the car, plug it in, and go. Just go get something to eat and walk away."
But they're telling us all in the mainstream, "Oh, you can sit in the car with your kid and your dog and you can play games and make it fun."
No one has addressed the medical side of this. And I fear that at some point, like much of the stuff the government sometimes pushes, [we'll find out it has health risks]. And I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat, you can talk to anyone.
And they went to the village board and the village board said, "Wait a minute. We're talking about you guys building this whole charging farm, and the amount of juice that you're requesting far exceeds the capacity of the entire village." And it wasn't a small village.
We don't have the capacity. We don't have coal plants. We don't have enough new plants to do it.
Lauren: They want to shut those [coal plants] down.
Paul: And it's just antithetical to what they're pitching. It's like nobody thought about this. They just said, "This is a new idea, this is good, we're saving Mother Earth. We've got John Kerry, we've got Al Gore, we've got St. Greta ..."
Lauren: It's bad. It's worse. It kills the air. There's less CO2, but you're breathing in particles of tire.
Paul: [Because an EV] could be 1,500, 2,000 pounds heavier [than a gas powered car]. And so now you've got a whole lot more weight that's playing on those tires.
Lauren: I have a lot of friends who are first responders and they say the biggest thing is when [an EV] catches fire for whatever reason, the problem is that it's a chemical reaction. It's polluting the environment worse than you can imagine.
Not just digging up the raw materials to make the batteries, but if [a battery] catches fire, there's no way to recycle it. It's a nice idea, but the fact is, it'd be like me handing you a birthday cake and saying, "Could you take the eggs out?"
I just read an article that older cars from the '60s and '70s are better for the environment than the new cars because of the impact from what we call in our business "cradle to grave." In other words, from all its raw materials all the way to the finished product and then the end-of-life cycle.
Paul: And secondarily, for a long time states have been very generous with licensing fees for electric vehicles. [Now] they're waking up, and they're saying, "Well, wait a minute, how come that our pothole problems, our repaving problems, all of those things, are costing us more than they ever did before?"
Lauren: Especially on local roads, not necessarily highways. Highways are designed for 18-wheelers.
Paul: The taxpayer is paying that.
Lauren: The state of Texas is charging $400 when you register your car and $200 for every year after that. Every state is starting to charge by the mile.
If you're thinking, "Well, I don't have to pay gas taxes" ... well, if you're not paying gas taxes, then who's going to repair the roads and bridges? That comes out of the general fund. And that's what a lot of states have done, including here in New York.
They gotta come up with the money from some other places to pay for the electricity, to pay for the tax credits on a federal and a state level, and that's you who's paying for that. So, whether you think you're getting it for free, you're actually paying for it. Nothing is free.
Lauren: [Ask yourself], is there charging available around you? Now, we were just in California driving one of the newest Honda electric cars, and they said, "Oh, there's four superchargers in this northern California town."
So, we went there, and three of them weren't working. One of them was, but there was a Tesla there. If it takes 20 minutes to charge, you should kind of hang around. Nope: 20 minutes later [it was clear] someone had plugged it in and taken off.
The fact is that you're relying on public charging, but you have to still pay for that. And there's a cost to it. And electricity in California especially is the most expensive in the country. And I live in New York, and Paul lives in Illinois, also extremely expensive. So the three of us live in states where it's just crazy expensive for electricity, and it's not going down. Look at your electric bill every month. Now, add in a charging station.
5. Charging may pose hidden health risks
Lauren: They always say, "Oh, just sit in your car. It's fine. We have fully reclining seats and big screens and you can play video games," and it all sounds great on the surface.We've all heard, don't put your phone in your ear, right? Don't put your phone in your ear. Even these AirPods, if you put in two, it's causing all kinds of issues. Don't put your phone in your pocket, especially for guys. We've all heard and read about this in a million different places.
But it's okay to sit in a car with alternating current.
So, I actually have one of these gauges that I bring with me. The manufacturers hate when I bring it, so I have to keep it hidden.
Paul: Did you get a tin foil hat?
Lauren: [laughs] If you're sitting in the car while it's charging, you're not just exposing yourself but anyone in the car. So, it's like being in a microwave. It's alternating current, which is the problem.
Actually, you were with me, Paul. We were at one of the vehicle [test] drives at the super fast charger [that] takes 20 minutes. So, I asked the guy, and he said off the record, "Get out of the car and go as far away as you can."
And I said, "Really?"
He said, "We're not going to tell anyone this because I'll lose my job. But get in the car, and park the car, plug it in, and go. Just go get something to eat and walk away."
But they're telling us all in the mainstream, "Oh, you can sit in the car with your kid and your dog and you can play games and make it fun."
No one has addressed the medical side of this. And I fear that at some point, like much of the stuff the government sometimes pushes, [we'll find out it has health risks]. And I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat, you can talk to anyone.
6. The capacity just isn't there yet
Paul: And it's not only the infrastructure, but it's the capacity. I know about a company that — because they had bought into the hype so heavily — wanted to change their trucks to EVs. And it was, I think, a fleet of about 20 or 25 trucks that they had.And they went to the village board and the village board said, "Wait a minute. We're talking about you guys building this whole charging farm, and the amount of juice that you're requesting far exceeds the capacity of the entire village." And it wasn't a small village.
We don't have the capacity. We don't have coal plants. We don't have enough new plants to do it.
Lauren: They want to shut those [coal plants] down.
Paul: And it's just antithetical to what they're pitching. It's like nobody thought about this. They just said, "This is a new idea, this is good, we're saving Mother Earth. We've got John Kerry, we've got Al Gore, we've got St. Greta ..."
7. They're bad for the environment ... and the roads
Paul: When Lauren said the tires are more expensive, there's a secondary problem with the tires as well. And that's particulate pollution.Lauren: It's bad. It's worse. It kills the air. There's less CO2, but you're breathing in particles of tire.
Paul: [Because an EV] could be 1,500, 2,000 pounds heavier [than a gas powered car]. And so now you've got a whole lot more weight that's playing on those tires.
Lauren: I have a lot of friends who are first responders and they say the biggest thing is when [an EV] catches fire for whatever reason, the problem is that it's a chemical reaction. It's polluting the environment worse than you can imagine.
Not just digging up the raw materials to make the batteries, but if [a battery] catches fire, there's no way to recycle it. It's a nice idea, but the fact is, it'd be like me handing you a birthday cake and saying, "Could you take the eggs out?"
I just read an article that older cars from the '60s and '70s are better for the environment than the new cars because of the impact from what we call in our business "cradle to grave." In other words, from all its raw materials all the way to the finished product and then the end-of-life cycle.
Paul: And secondarily, for a long time states have been very generous with licensing fees for electric vehicles. [Now] they're waking up, and they're saying, "Well, wait a minute, how come that our pothole problems, our repaving problems, all of those things, are costing us more than they ever did before?"
Lauren: Especially on local roads, not necessarily highways. Highways are designed for 18-wheelers.
Paul: The taxpayer is paying that.
Lauren: The state of Texas is charging $400 when you register your car and $200 for every year after that. Every state is starting to charge by the mile.
If you're thinking, "Well, I don't have to pay gas taxes" ... well, if you're not paying gas taxes, then who's going to repair the roads and bridges? That comes out of the general fund. And that's what a lot of states have done, including here in New York.
They gotta come up with the money from some other places to pay for the electricity, to pay for the tax credits on a federal and a state level, and that's you who's paying for that. So, whether you think you're getting it for free, you're actually paying for it. Nothing is free.