Taking shots at electric vehicles at this point seems unfair. After all, to anyone paying attention to the EV space, it’s becoming obvious that the whole space is turning into a financial disaster. Jeffrey Tucker does a good job in this article of laying out some of the reasons why.

What’s not being understood by mainstream commentators is how, once again, this was entirely predictable for years by anyone who understands basic economics and has even just a little bit of pattern recognition skills. Anything that cannot compete for consumer demand in a market system should not be subsidized by government. This is about as basic as it gets. Just about every major automaker, with the exception of Toyota, has bought into this nonsense. Hertz couldn’t help themselves, they had to incinerate large piles of cash to jump into the fray and get burned as well.

I still believe that when the history of this massive financial bubble is written, that crypto and Tesla will be the lead stories about how an entire investment community lost their collective minds chasing bubbles created by conmen.

There is an excellent short book that is very relevant to all this. It’s called “A Short History of Financial Euphoria” and it describes how this same thing has played out many times before.

Getting back to Jeffrey Tucker’s article; here are just a few excerpts:

The cost upfront is much higher.

Financing charges are higher.

They depreciate at a higher rate than internal combustion cars.

The insurance is more expensive, by at least 25 percent.

Repairs are much more expensive, if you can get them done at all, and take longer.

Tires are more expensive and don’t last as long because the car is so heavy.

Refueling is not easy and missteps here can have nightmarish consequences.

They are more likely to catch fire.

Any motor vehicle accident that impacts the battery can lead to repairs higher than the value of the car, that is totaled with so much as a scratch.

To top it all over, there is no longer any financial advantage to the driver. It now costs slightly more to charge under many conditions than to refuel with gasoline.

The novelty of driving one for a day wears off after the first day. At first they seem like the greatest thing that ever happened, like an iPhone with wheels. That’s great but then the problems crop up and people start to realize that they are fine for urban commutes with home chargers and not much else.

They make truly terrible rentals. Obviously, under rental conditions, people have to use charging stations rather than a charger in the garage. That means spending part of your vacation figuring out where to find one.

Not all are superchargers, and if it is a regular charger, you are looking at an overnight wait. If you do find a station with fast chargers, you might have to wait in line. They might not work. You waste hours doing this. And you likely have to reroute your trip even to find a station without any certainty that you will get a spot with a functioning charger.

No one wants to do this. When you rent a car, all you want is a car that goes the distance. And typically car rentals are for going some distance else you would just take a taxi or a Lyft from the airport. You might need to drive several hours. And god forbid that this takes place in cold weather because that can reduce your mileage by half. Your whole trip will be ruined.

Why in the world would anyone want to rent one of these things rather than a gas-powered car? You might be better off with a horse and carriage.