Fuel Efficient Cars and VW Cheating

The trouble with cars is they are too heavy, so require big inefficient engines to move them around with any speed. The trouble with green cars is they're even heavier, less comfortable, even slower, and require exotic rare earth elements to work so only a few people can actually have them.

When I interviewed at Tesla several years ago I raised the issue of peak lithium and the unfeasability of invading Bolivia just to make enough cars for 2 million people, total. I didn't get the job. A couple years later Tesla was advancing their gigafactory idea and eventually chose Reno for the site, hauling the lithium brines from the only active US mine site (in Nevada) via truck. Brines are not the most compact of substances, and the water in the brine is basically waste product they're hauling, at great expense, several hundred miles via diesel truck. This is better than the 20 thousand miles they were going by sea to china and europe and then japan to become lithium battery packs, but since most of the lithium batteries that will be made at this plant in Reno will be loaded onto shipping containers for China, we won't get the benefit of the lithium here in the first place. And Tesla won't be building many cars. As best as I can tell, Tesla's business model is about collecting Federal funding while making as few cars as possible, and keeping the price at $100K or close to it. There are three of the Tesla S cars in my town, all owned by millionaires that look as smug as Jeremy Clarkson because their vehicle costs as much as a vacation house.

And Prius drivers are so aggressive, mostly due to being very angry drivers behind the wheel of very slow and heavy cars, that there's always one passing you unsafely. This is common enough I was thinking seriously about turning it into a Trope in my next series of novels, about the hypocrisy of Greens and how hateful and destructive Hippies are. My first car was a VW bug. It got 25 mpg. That's not very good. It also had pretty lousy brakes, suspension, and couldn't go faster than 57 mph without dangerously overrevving, and was a road hazard to other cars. The defrost didn't work for the first 20 minutes you were in the car, so it started working around the time you arrived at your destination. This meant you needed a mildew towel to wipe down the windshield, and another mildew towel on the outside, if you wanted to see at the start of your journey. It sucked.

Green cars and the green industry are a scam. They aren't used by everybody because they aren't efficient. If they were efficient, they wouldn't need subsidies or special perks to sell. They would sell because they were efficient. This is why the third world all have either scooters or motorcycles. Those are efficient. They aren't very safe, but life in the third world is short to begin with. I think the northern nations, like mine, are going to drag the last of the oil to us so we can keep driving smug-mobiles as long as we can. Because when the oil is gone, so are the roads and highways and our way of life, with easy travel and smugness? That's all going to end. I expect to live to the end of oil, and possibly beyond that if insulin keeps getting delivered to where I'm living. It is possible to ship medicines around with renewable energy, just at great expense. And people will still move around via bicycle, but it will be mountain bikes with knobby tires, and motorcycles with knobby tires, because we don't have the oil to pave the roads once we've reached that point. And maybe not the natural gas to make the concrete either. It will be mostly gravel roads, and those require even more maintenance but only a fraction of the oil, mostly just diesel fuel to run the bulldozers. That's our future. And its maybe 20 years away. It is somewhat ironic, but the legal attacks on fracking, because fracking is being done stupidly with benzene and diesel fuel contamination, means that the fracking will be done slower, saving the contamination for a time when its foreign invaders from China running the rigs, with bribes and military support, and will contaminate even worse because we won't be able to stop them. The only defense from Chinese frackers is American frackers emptying the oil shale of oil first. So you get some contamination now, or lots of contamination later. Which is the worse evil? I can tell you that China doesn't care other people are human. They've moved past that into institutional psychopathy. They consider EVERYONE competition to be killed when it gets in the way. So if you have nothing they want, you probably won't be killed by them. But if you're in the way when they get here... well, look what they do in Africa. They only build roads to get their mines emptied faster. Then it is left to rot. China is the true Capitalism, the heartless and vicious version we used to have a hundred years ago. China has no enlightenment, and has no use for "human rights". They don't believe in it. They believe in competition, and that competition is the thing you crush to reach your own goals. There is no "fair". No justice. They know better. If you can understand that mindset you can understand why VW cheating is not as big a deal as you'd think, and why the US market crash makes little sense. VW is not America. VW is one company that got caught cheating on "green" cars. Duh. Hippies are evil. It is what they do. Their entire motivation is smugness and superiority.