It’s an unfortunate reality that the political and cultural support for electric cars has made what is a pretty nifty technological innovation nauseating.
There are legitimately cool things about electric cars. The torque, the programmability, the simplicity of not needing a transmission. I can see why someone who has the money would buy one. I could see them buying useful if you lived in a temperate city where you didn’t make long drives.
But electric cars aren’t treated as a normal new thing that you can choose to try or avoid based on your preference. Governments create massive subsidies for them (and even have created bans against normal motors) and people treat them like sacred cows.
People use a remarkable lack of thinking power to avoid the obvious downsides–lithium/other minerals required, battery disposal, issues with charging, instability of power grids, issues with extreme weather, issues in rural settings–and act like anyone with an internal combustion engine is a backwards earth destroyer.
The insane anti-life policies behind the political push to electric vehicles + the douchebag culture of their drivers (both tech bro Tesla owners + older hippy librarian Prius/Bolt drivers) greatly overwhelms any of the coolness of the technology.
I notice the same pattern in cryptocurrency. The potential for cool innovation was swallowed and suppressed by douchebaggery and regulation, and instead of realizing the potential for good, it is co-opted and used to birth something awful.
The beauty of the market is that it creates incentives for entrepreneurs to put technological innovations to use in the most valuable way possible. Because innovation is not necessarily a good thing. It is only when innovation is used to create value for people that it is a good thing.
When people are free to choose what will add the most value to their life we move forward as a society. When people are forced to use technology they don’t need or want to use it destroys rather than creates value.
Leave a Reply