Another Week, Another EV Tale of Woe

by David Blackmon

It’s like there’s something new in EV land’s chronicle of disasters and woe every week. Really, several times every week, but I don’t have the personal bandwidth to write about them all.

This week’s major tale of woe from EV land germinates from a media outlet in the Animal Farm that Justin Trudeau’s Canada has become, but it relates to the US market, and is equally applicable to every other nation on earth that has been foolish enough to adopt completely unachievable EV mandates. The Canadian Press reports that a new crash test study has found what anyone able to reason critically has known for years, which is that the country’s highway guardrails are not strong enough to withstand the force of EVs that weigh 1,000 – 4,000 lbs. more than their gas-powered counterparts.

Oh, you don’t say. Please, tell us more.

Here’s an excerpt from the story in question:

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Electric vehicles that typically weigh more than gasoline-powered cars can easily crash through steel highway guardrails that are not designed to withstand the extra force, raising concerns about the nation’s roadside safety system, according to crash test data released Wednesday by the University of Nebraska.

Electric vehicles typically weigh 20% to 50% more than gas-powered vehicles thanks to batteries that can weigh almost as much as a small gas-powered car. And they have lower centers of gravity. Because of these differences, guardrails can do little to stop electric vehicles from pushing through barriers typically made of steel.

Last fall, engineers at Nebraska’s Midwest Roadside Safety Facility watched as an electric-powered pickup truck hurtled toward a guardrail installed on the facility’s testing ground on the edge of the local municipal airport. The nearly 4-ton (3.6 metric ton) 2022 Rivian R1T tore through the metal guardrail and hardly slowed until hitting a concrete barrier yards away on the other side.

“We knew it was going to be an extremely demanding test of the roadside safety system,” said Cody Stolle with the facility. “The system was not made to handle vehicles greater than 5,000 pounds.”

[End]

Holy moly.

So, what does this mean as a practical matter for the millions of miles of freeways, highways, state roads, county roads and any other road where guardrails are required? Well, it means that, if we really do replace most ICE cars with heavier EVs, all the guardrails will need to be replaced with heavier-duty models, because the ones on the roads today would just be there for show.

Think of how many billion – trillions, even – of dollars doing that will cost over time.

Now, think of this: What’s going to happen when road designers finally start to really press the policymakers about the fact that the roads themselves are not designed to withstand the pressure of these much heavier EVs, and are being torn up and left in need of repair or complete re-paving years sooner than had been anticipated?

This is reality, folks, not supposition. It is absolutely coming to a legislative or transportation commission hearing in your state’s capitol soon.

Think of how many trillions of dollars that absolute reality is going to cost our societies in the decades to come. But we’re not supposed to talk about it right now because the politicians find it all too inconvenient.

But wait, there’s more!

 
You know all those multi-level parking garages that have been built across our modern societies in recent decades? There are hundreds of thousands of them in the US alone. The number worldwide runs into the millions. Many millions of them.

How many of those multi-level concrete parking facilities do you think were built with 8,000 lb. EVs in mind, rather than 5,000 lb. ICE cars? Don’t you imagine the number would approach zero?

Yeah, that’s a thing, too. Now, think how many trillions of dollars reinforcing and replacing all those substandard parking garages is going to cost our society, all in the name of “doing something” about the climate boogeyman.

Now, add all this to the trillions of dollars it is going to cost us to double or triple generation capacity on power grids around the world to accommodate the added load of charging those millions of EVs that have been mandated by Biden, Trudeau, the EU and other psychopath globalist elites over the past 5 years.

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