These articles are thanks to DeplorableLori
The owner of a Hummer electric truck was shocked to learn replacing his tail lights is a rather expensive venture.
“Had a shocker today,” the owner wrote in a Hummer EV Facebook group. “A new passenger side rear light for the Hummer EV; $4,040 just to buy it.”
WATCH: MAN USES GAS GENERATOR IN ELECTRIC VEHICLE TO DRIVE 1,800 MILES
Car review website the Drive confirmed General Motor’s list price for one tail light is $3,045. Without factoring in labor, the list price for a set of tail lights runs for nearly $6,100, a cost equaling more than 5% of the Hummer EV’s MSRP.
“The taillights in the Hummer EV have small microcontrollers installed within them. These chips control unique lighting functions in their respective lights,” the Drive suggested as a reason for the high price. “Additionally, the Hummer EV is a fairly limited-run vehicle thus far, meaning parts are generally more expensive until economies of scale kick in.”
Maintenance expenses, in addition to software mishaps that have left EV drivers stranded , have drawn criticism in relation to the United States’s push toward electric vehicles.
Last week, President Joe Biden announced the awarding of $2.8 billion in new Department of Energy grants for projects meant to boost the transition to electric vehicles.
Electric vehicle owner learns replacing a tail light costs over $4,000 (washingtonexaminer.com)
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A month or two ago I had to replace my car. I bought a 2019 Ford F-150 XL with slightly higher-than-average mileage for its age and an impeccable service record. The truck is in great shape, and, supply chains being what they are in 2022, I paid more than I wanted to for it.
It still cost less than a replacement battery for an electric vehicle.
OK, maybe not every replacement battery for every electric vehicle — but Tim Esterdahl of “Pickup Truck Plus SUV Talk” fame looked into the costs of battery replacements for an F-150 Lightning, which he’d been driving for a week to review, and he found some pretty startling numbers.
There are two possible batteries for the Lightning: the standard, designed to give the driver about 230 miles of range, and the extended range version, which increases that to about 300 miles, Esterdahl said.
Esterdahl is clearly the kind of guy who wants to get the bad news out of the way first, as he showed a screen shot of the price for the extended range battery to start.
It was $35,960.
That’s not a typo; the decimal point is in the right place. If your first thought was, “That’s more than I paid for my whole car!” you’re not alone.
Esterdahl said that was for the battery only, though he estimated that labor to install it would be “fairly inexpensive.”
If that seems high, you could always opt for the standard range battery for a mere $28,556.47. (I bet the dealership would spot you that 47 cents if you asked really nicely.)
For comparison, the Platinum edition of the F-150 Lightning Esterdahl had been driving all week retails around $96,000. Add the cost of a replacement battery to that, and you’re well into six figures.
But “hold on a minute,” Esterdahl said.
“Why are we caught up in this idea that the battery is going to fail? I think I’m hearing that time and time again,” he said. “Hey, did you cellphone battery fail? Did you computer battery just fail?”
“Could a battery just die?” he asked. “Yeah. Could a new Ford F-150 truck engine just die? Yeah. They both could die.”
Esterdahl used Tesla and the Chevrolet Bolt as examples of how batteries can degrade over time, since both of those vehicles have been on the road long enough now to have something of a track record to go by.
Related:
Electric Hummers Are Selling for More Than $100,000 Over List Price as Wait List Tops 77,000
Citing an online report from Autoweek, Esterdahl argued that batteries will degrade at at rate of 2 to 3 percent annually — more often if the owner fast-charges often. Treat the battery poorly and it’ll degrade faster, Esterdahl said, just like any other piece of equipment.
He cited another video blogger who treated his EV’s battery poorly and now gets about 270 miles of range from it instead of the 320 he started with.
Esterdahl also read from Ford’s warranty that the battery in the Lightning would be covered by warranty for the first eight years or 100,000 miles, saying that he expected replacement batteries would be significantly less expensive by then. And because of improvements in technology, that theoretical replacement battery you buy on your own dime in, say, 2030 after your warranty is up, could charge faster, last longer and offer more range.
“You gotta keep all this stuff in perspective,” he said.
Report: Ford Electric Truck Battery Replacement Costs Over $35,000 (westernjournal.com)
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Influential elites are either in denial about the horrifying costs and consequences of Net Zero – witness last Wednesday’s substantial vote against fracking British gas in the House of Commons – or busy scooping up the almost unlimited amounts of money currently on offer for promoting pseudoscience climate scares and investing in impracticable green technologies. Until the lights start to go out and heating fails, they are unlikely to pay much attention to a recent 1,000 page alternative energy investigation undertaken for a Finnish Government agency by Associate Professor Simon Michaux. Referring to the U.K.’s 2050 Net Zero target, Michaux states there is “simply not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target”.
To cite just one example of how un-costed Net Zero is, Michaux notes that “in theory” there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered. It gets much worse. All the new batteries have a useful working life of only 8-10 years, so replacements will need to be regularly produced. “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.
All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium for ion batteries weighting 286.6 million tonnes. But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion tonnes of batteries is also required to provide a four-week back-up for intermittent wind and solar electricity power. Of course, this is simply not available from global mineral reserves, but, states Michaux, it is not clear how the buffer could be delivered with an alternative system.
Michaux sounds a clear warning message. Current expectations are that global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build. It was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit and seemingly unlimited mineral resources. The replacement, he notes, needs to be done when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt and not enough minerals. Most challenging of all, it has to be done within a few decades. Based on his copious calculations, the author is of the opinion that it will not go fully “as planned”.
Last Sunday, Sir David Attenborough concluded six episodes of pseudoscientific green agitprop Frozen Planet II by demanding that the world embrace Net Zero, “no matter how challenging it may be”. Net Zero is a political command-and-control project, the full horror of which is yet to be inflicted on the general population. Michaux is quite clear what it entails: “What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds. This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.”
Of course, a radically different system of government is available in the People’s Republic of China, but here the position on Net Zero is a tad more nuanced. Having lifted about a billion people out of starving poverty in the last 40 years and become the workshop for an increasingly complacent western world – all powered by fossil fuel – the cause does not seem so pressing. Speaking to the Communist Party Congress earlier this week, President Xi Jinping sounded a note of caution and said “prudence” would govern China’s efforts to peak and eventually zero-out carbon emissions. All of this would be in line with the principle of “getting the new before discarding the old”.
Meanwhile, China’s coal production is reported to have reached record levels, while the Congress was told that oil and gas exploration will be expanded as part of measures to ensure “energy security”.
Michaux points out that nearly 85% of world energy comes from fossil fuel. By his calculations, the annual global capacity of non-fossil electrical power will need to quadruple to 37,670.6 TWh. In a recent report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Professor Michael Kelly estimates that the U.K. electricity grid would have to expand by 2.7 times. This will involve adding capacity at eight times the rate it has been added over the last 30 years. If calculations are made for the need to rewire homes, streets, local substations and powerlines to carry the new capacity, the extra cost will be nearly £1 trillion.
In another recent GWPF paper, the energy writer John Constable warned that the European Green Deal seems all but certain to break Europe’s economic and socio-political power, “rendering it a trivial and incapable backwater, reliant on – and subservient to – superior powers”.
History provides us with many examples of weak, or weakened, tribes being overrun by stronger tribes. In the animal kingdom it is known as natural evolution. A 96-year old ‘national treasure’ preaches we have to pay any price to satisfy the new cult of the green god. Better costed and more rational views are available.
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